Early & Alone #14: The Chain Reader Chronicles, 2017
As a person who loves lists, year’s end has always inspired the urge to catalog and tally, to quantify my experiences from the past chunk of arbitrary time. Growing up, I’d tune in to the top 100 videos on MTV countdown and listen to the top 95 on my favorite radio station, 95.5 WBRU (RIP). As an adult, I’ve taken to indexing my own experiences instead of just listening to the opinions of others. Most reliably, this manifests in a list of my favorite books I’ve read during a given year.
On the last day of 2016, I sat alone in a basement apartment in Portsmouth, New Hampshire as snow swirled outside, balancing my laptop on my legs in bed, and updated my blog with a list of what I’d read and loved that year. It turned out to be my last entry. I also mapped out my resolutions for 2017. In fact, striking out to spend New Year’s alone was a big part of my resolutions--2017 was going to be my year of growth. 2016 had been punctuated by stagnation and restlessness. Everything felt the same.
In many ways, 2017 was a year of growth. As we all know, though, 2017 was a fucking hard year. What I should have known when I chose growth as my guiding principle for the year was that the only way to grow is to be challenged. I got a new job, lost it, and got another one. I went to Cuba. I started this newsletter and published an essay in one of my favorite publications, where it was accepted on the first try. I got hit by a car and broke my first bones and learned a lot about the love I have in my life. I protested and rallied and organized and donated and despaired and hoped.
And, like every other year of my life, I read. Reading is the most constant form of escape and identity I know. I remember a conversation once, so long ago now, when I was a college junior studying abroad in Florence, with two guys when we were walking down the street. For some reason, we were talking about love, and if we’d ever felt it. Both guys had serious girlfriends, and as they talked about them, I jokingly said my true love was books. But, of course, it wasn’t a joke--it was the closest thing to truth I could have known when I was 20.
So. According to Goodreads, I have read 50 books this year. Here are the 10 I enjoyed most, in the order I read them.
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
I read most of this one, fittingly, on a train to Washington, D.C., in a snowstorm, because my flight to AWP had been cancelled that morning before the first flake fell. (I’m still annoyed). It’s an upsetting, important book, terrible in its beauty. Cora, and the horrors she bears, will stick with you.
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin
I loved this book of short stories because they are closely linked to Berlin’s own dramatic life, so the line between fiction and truth is appealingly blurred. The stories span everywhere from a luxury resort in South America to an enclave of homeless alcoholics in California.
All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg
Jami Attenberg is one of my favorite social media personalities, literally brightening my days with her pics of Sid, her puggle, and her neighborhood in New Orleans. When I met her during a reading for this book, I told her Sid is my surrogate for Chief, which helps me more than I can say. All Grown Up tells the story of Andrea, a woman trying to navigate life in Brooklyn, facing her failed art, her complicated relationship with her mother, her past, and her brother’s child’s sickness. And, oh yeah, she’s single. I read this in almost one sitting on a plane to Portland, both laughing and crying.
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Not only is George Saunders an alarmingly good writer, he’s an extraordinary human. It’s this humanity that gives his writing such a luminous quality, and Lincoln in the Bardo is no exception. It’s a strange book, and I’m not sure if I would have picked up what was going on as quickly as I did if I hadn’t attended a reading where he assembled a cast of readers from Harvard Book Store to act out some scenes. The whole book takes place in a graveyard and follows President Lincoln as he mourns the death of Willy, his 12-year-old son. It’s creepy and weird, but Saunders elevates it into a story of tragedy and grief and ultimately, the beauty of life.
Shrill by Lindy West
I’d read a few of these essays as well as a lot of other writing by Lindy West before I got this book for my birthday from my roommate. Lindy West, if you don’t know, is freaking hilarious, and she’s whip smart, and she has important things to say. I was definitely expecting to laugh as I read this (I was right) but I wasn’t expecting to also cry. She writes with such tenderness about her late father, and her relationship with her husband--it’s lovely. Her writing about the realities of being a woman, specifically a fat woman, is essential reading.
The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
Full disclosure: I went to grad school with Alexandria and we have some friends in common, though I don’t actually know her all that well. More than supporting a fellow Emerson alum and Boston writer, I was really interested in the concept of her book, a memoir braided with investigative journalism into the murder of a little boy in Louisiana and the life of his killer. It’s an upsetting book, but I found myself turning the pages ravenously, consuming it in its entirety one summer Sunday.
Commonwealth by Ann Patchett
Weirdly, though I’ve read Ann Patchett’s nonfiction before (her memoir Truth & Beauty, which I reread this year for the third time, is one of my all-time favorites), I’d never read her fiction. I loved just about every page of Commonwealth. The characters, the scene-setting, the seamless traveling back and forth through time--I loved it all. I guess it’s time to go into the Patchett backlist!
On Immunity by Eula Biss
In a weird twist of fate, this is the book I’d just started when I got hit by a car (12 weeks ago today!). I read it in waves during my recovery and though the subject matter (a deep dive into the history of vaccinations and illness) seemed dry, Biss made it fascinating and relatable. She weaved her own experiences with illness and motherhood into her investigation, and it was doubly interesting for me to read as my body was going through its own healing process and I was spending a lot of time in hospitals and doctor’s offices. It got me thinking about bodies and their relationship to each other, our responsibility to be healthy not just for ourselves, but for everyone around us.
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
I was apprehensive about this one because I really disliked Everything I Never Told You, Ng’s first novel. But my sister brought me a copy after she read it and I kept hearing great things, so I gave it a shot. I’m glad that I did because I found Little Fires Everywhere to be a far more compelling and complex story of motherhood, families, and class than EINTY.
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti
A friend recommended this book to me and another friend sent me a copy, so I really had no excuse, though the premise didn’t entirely appeal to me when I first read the description. Samuel Hawley is an outlaw, a criminal, but he’s also a single father to his daughter Loo. The book is structured around alternating chapters: one set that Loo narrates as a teenager from her mother’s hometown in coastal New England, and the other set are flashbacks detailing how Hawley received each of the twelve bullet scars which adorn his body. I really liked this one.
What were your favorite books this year?