a year in reading

It was a weird reading year for me. Not to keep bringing up how I got hit by a truck, but that very much did happen, and it turns out that can affect your ability to read. There were about six weeks where I didn’t read anything at all—a length of time without books that quite genuinely might not have happened since I learned to read. The accident, combined with a new job and a time-intensive volunteer gig, meant the books I did read felt monumental, especially if they were good.

For the rest of the year I’ll be re-reading the Lord of the Rings and the Peter Wimsey mysteries, and this biography of the Inklings that I read while I was on the World Race and promptly forgot every single thing about except that I liked it. These are the books I loved most out of a weird year. 

Fiction

Uranians: Stories by Theodore McCombs

The stories collected here are in some ways wildly different from each other: set across centuries, in contemporary-ish middle schools or on spaceships or in climate disaster-ravaged San Francisco. The thread that ties them together is their concern with queer history—the construction of queer identities across time—and how that might continue in the future. I have a pretty low tolerance for sci-fi, but I tore through this book and thought about it all year. The novella set on the space ship was my favorite (what if you had a messy gay breakup in space and no one could leave??). 

The Prospects by K.T. Hoffman

GAY. TRANS. BASEBALL. ROMANCE. While I wasn’t reading I was mostly watching baseball or listening to podcasts while knitting. I heard about this debut romance novel from the author’s interview on Gender Reveal—the evolution of the novel into its published form is fascinating! And the book is simply so fun, so steamy, and—do not say I didn’t warn you—for the real baseball freaks. 

Blackouts by Justin Torres

Many of the books I loved this year were deconstructing the form of the novel, the form of the queer history, or both—Blackouts is autofiction without the boring, moping-around-a-major-city bits, a novel obsessed with the gaps in the archives where queer lives hide, an ode to a dying man that surprised me in its loveliness and eroticism. I read it for a queer book club I’m a part of, and it was the book that jolted me back into reading again: I read it in an afternoon and wanted more. The physical object of the book seems important to my experience, but a friend listened to it on audio and said that the narrator was very good. 

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

A novel structured as the biography of the artist only known as X by her widow, set in an alternate version of the U.S. where the South successfully seceded in the 1940s and set up a Christo-fascist dictatorship. The premise sounds like a lot, and I spent the first third of the book trying to decide if the counterfactual worked—but then I decided it did, and the story of X and CM’s relationship, and CM’s excavation of X’s past, enthralled me. The final betrayal made me gasp and take a lap around the room.

Non-fiction 

Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People by Tiya Miles

My priest chose this, a spiritual autobiography of Harriet Tubman, for our church’s book club in December. Harriet Tubman is one of those American history figures that I’ve always thought I understood from a distance (self-emancipation, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, you get it). But Miles chose to place Tubman in contexts that surprised me: both her ecological context, on Maryland’s eastern shore, and her literary context. Miles reads Tubman’s testimonies of faith alongside other Black women who escaped slavery and became preachers. Harriet’s power to escape and lead others along is thus, Miles argues, appropriately read as her collaborating with God, with nature, and with her community. I really think every American ought to read this book, and I don’t usually feel that about, well, any book. 

A Chance Meeting: American Encounters by Rachel Cohen

The correct way to read this is in a rocking chair on the front porch of a house in the mountains while your friends are puttering around near you and cool rain falls—at least, this is how I read it. Cohen’s looping narrative of literary friendship spans decades and reveals unexpected connections between people I mentally classify into different eras. She is a generous biographer: the vignettes are warm even to famously prickly people, and I found myself racing through this. 

Saint Augustine by Rebecca West

If you don’t know literally anything about Saint Augustine, don’t start here. But knowing even a little bit makes this a bonkers read: West sets out to do a pseudo-feminist, Freudian analysis of Augustine in the guise of a short biography, and it becomes clear about halfway through that the venerable saint doesn’t impress her much (not to mention her plain vitriol for his mother, Monnica). Some lines were so irreverent and biting I laughed out loud. This feels like a book that couldn’t get published now because where is the public desire for a gossipy, bitchy takedown of a church father? I did not have time to read this in November but devoured it anyway!

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing

Listen, it was so hellishly hot in North Carolina this summer. I simply had to think about polar expeditions. And almost everyone lives in this one! (Not the dogs, though.) You’ve probably already bought a book about World War 2 for your dad for Christmas, but if you need to run out to Barnes and Noble real quick, they almost certainly have this in stock. 

All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess by Becca Rothfeld

[insert that one Gordan Ramsey meme here] Finally! Some good fucking criticism! I love Rothfeld’s nonfiction criticism in the Washington Post, so picked this up as soon as I could. In the last few years I’ve been craving excess as an antidote to the winnowing away of the common good in American life, which is part of what Rothfeld is getting at here. She wants more good food, more good sex (and more out of sex than some current allegedly feminist writers think we can have), more novels that are the opposite of “wan little husks of autofiction.”* Even where I wasn’t convinced, I enjoyed following Rothfeld’s arguments to their conclusions. 

*from a Joyce Carole Oates tweet, thank you JCO, poster of all time

Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality by Lyta Gold

Gold traces the underlying logics of the ongoing book bans by the right, as well as the critical moves by liberals and leftists that inadvertently support fascist logic. If this sounds like it might be a bit dry, do not fear—Gold is very funny, and has a vision for where we, as readers and as citizens, go from here. Because I do think fiction matters, I was glad to have someone lay out so clearly the stakes of the current argument over books (from both the left and right) without sacrificing style and humor.