Early & Alone #26: A Year in Reading, 2018

If you know anything about me, you know I love reading. I love reading way more than I love dating, or really anything else. Reading is both my escape from and my entry into the wider world. It’s a way to be distracted from my daily life while being anchored to my sense of self.

I’ve long loved reading The Millions series, “A Year in Reading,” in which different writers sum up their year by recounting what they read. Most years, I’ve summed up the my favorite books of the year, either on my blog or in this newsletter, and this year is no exception, although I’d like to take a more holistic “year in reading” approach rather than just listing my favorites. I won’t attempt to list or talk at length about the over 50 books I read this year, but will try to document the books and events that captured the year for me.

It seems somehow appropriate that 2018 was bookended for me with reading Jesmyn Ward. 2018 was punctuated by heartbreak, mostly due to Donald Trump’s toxic presidency, with incidents ranging from the separation of immigrant children from their families at the border to the continued tragic pattern of killing innocent people of color. I began the year with Salvage the Bones, Ward’s haunting novel about a poor family braving the destruction of a brutal hurricane on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. It was a weird way to start the year, but Ward’s writing is enough to elevate any discomfort into something worthwhile and necessary.

In January, I was just beginning to walk again following getting hit by a car--it was a frustrating time, punctuated by attempts to get around the icy city of Boston in a walking cast, returning to the office for the first time in months while also starting a new position, and learning how to be in the world again. Given all of this, I indulged in Emma Straub’s The Vacationers, a fluffy novel about a family vacationing on an island off the coast of Spain--the perfect antidote for winter in Boston.

In 2018, I finally read Mary Gaitskill’s classic story collection, Bad Behavior, which I loved, perhaps unsurprisingly. This dovetailed nicely into Elena Ferrante’s upsetting and intense Days of Abandonment, a slim novel I’d purchased the year before on a trip to Powell’s, in Portland, where my ex-husband now lives with his new wife and baby, and our old dog. I chose it to accompany me on my first trip to Ohio, where I was going for work to meet many of the people I’d be working with as part of my new position. Unsurprisingly, Ferrante is a master of capturing all of the pain and rage and humiliation of being abandoned by the one you love, though I like to think I managed to hold things together a little better than Ferrante’s heroine (though, granted, I did not have two small children to contend with).

As the snow continued to fall in Boston, I picked up Alexis M. Smith’s charming and compact Glaciers, a quirky novel that follows Isabel through her work restoring damaged library books to her crush on a coworker in IT--it’s really charming and lovely, a nice surprise.

In February, I had the opportunity to see Zadie Smith speak in promotion of her book of essays, Feel Free. She is really one of the most inspiring and sharp thinkers and cultural commentators around--and that doesn’t even take her novels into account. She’s also annoyingly beautiful and stylish and cool, but you should still read her essays if you haven’t already.

In April, I attended the Muse & the Marketplace writing conference for the first time and was able to get my hands on a copy of Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel a few days before it officially released. I’ve long been a fan of Chee on Twitter but it was this beautiful collection of essays, as well as the session he led during the conference on self-investigation in writing, that cemented my admiration of him as one of our preeminent contemporary writers.

Another quirky favorite I read this year was Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary, a New York Review of Books reissue of a novel from the 1970s featuring two eccentric recluses who both happen to take an interest in sea turtles, whom they rescue and set free together. It’s both sad and hopeful, which is my favorite kind of book.

When I finally took my vacation to Puerto Rico, in May, I brought along Min Jin Lee’s epic family saga, Pachinko, as well as Ariel Levy’s memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply. I was reading Pachinko when my sister and I took an excursion to Guilligan’s Island, an isolated beach destination where we were planning to sunbathe and snorkel, but instead, got soaked in a torrential downpour. My paperback copy was waterlogged for the rest of the trip, but I still loved the story. Incidentally, I briefly met Lee while at a Catapult writing event in New York in July, and she was every bit as lovely and generous as her writing. She also gave the keynote at the Muse & the Marketplace back in April, and her words about writing and shame? Every single person in that ballroom was wiping away tears.

As spring bled into summer, I gave audiobooks a try, streaming Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World on my phone as I walked around the city. Turns out, I am most definitely not an audiobook person--I missed the words on the page, and resented being stuck with this guy’s whiney voice for hours and hours and hours. Clearly, I also didn’t enjoy the book itself, and so if I’d read it in print or on my Kindle, I would have at least been able to skim--not so easy with an audiobook. (I would have given up but it was a book club book, so I soldiered on.)

I pulled a few books off my shelves that I’d been meaning to read for years--George Saunders’ Pastoralia, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, and Aleksander Hemon’s memoir Book of My Lives. I didn’t love any of them.

In June, during another trip to Ohio for work, I read Lisa Ko’s The Leavers  while curled up on the armchair in the corner of my hotel room--a setting that felt apt for the sterile apartments and nail salons where the beginning of the novel takes place. Unfortunately, the story itself, about an immigrant woman who disappears one afternoon and her son’s quest to figure out what happened to her, felt all too apt as well, as immigrant children were torn from their parents at the border.

On the Fourth of July, sitting by the pool at my roommate’s sister’s condo as the heat shimmered around us, I read Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, a work of autobiographical fiction about a woman questioning whether or not she should have children--as a single, childless woman in her late 30s, this one resonated with me a great deal.

At the end of July, I read Mary Karr’s memoir Lit, sitting on the beach on a weekend dog-sitting in Hull, drinking up Karr’s writing and life wisdom like water. Then, on a trip to New York to attend a Catapult writing weekend, I read Joan Wickersham’s innovative Suicide Index, an attempt to make sense of her father’s suicide. It was a somewhat lonely and strange weekend and I felt like I was drawing even more attention to myself reading a book about suicide alone at various bars, but I was also working on an essay involving a suicide, so it felt right. It’s also a wonderful book.

In August, I finally tackled Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, a 720-page gut-punch of a novel. Though it’s not exactly vacation reading, I hefted it along with me for a mid-week trip to the Berkshires with a friend, reading it out on the deck in the mornings and one afternoon by a lake positively clogged with children. Something about the dichotomy really worked for me.

Later in the month, mostly spurred by the cover, I checked out Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend from the library and just loved it. Though on the surface it’s about a single woman who adopts a friend’s dog after his sudden death, it’s also about writing and friendship and grieving. It went on to win the National Book Award, so I feel like I have pretty great taste.

Whew. This is getting really long and I’m only doing the highlights! Sorry, everyone.

On September 22, the day I got married, I went and got my hair done and then wandered around Boston for a bit. I was lonely and sad, as I tend to be on that day (or really any day that I’m wandering around Boston alone, to be honest), and so I went to Trident Booksellers to see how the store looked following its recent remodel after a fire. I decided to treat myself to a book while I was there, and was drawn to Glynnis MacNicol’s No One Tells You This, a memoir in which the author dissects what it’s like to be single and childless at 40--spoiler alert: it’s not the sad, lonely story you think it is. Though I feel like this book was written for me, and others like me, I was also a little afraid I wasn’t going to like it. Those fears were unfounded--I devoured this book and never wanted it to end. I also found myself wanting MacNicol’s life--and realizing that in many ways, I already have it. It was an empowering reminder.

In the fall, I reread two classic favorites, both for book club--A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and The Bell Jar, both of which held up. I also borrowed An American Marriage from my sister after she read it for her book club and found that I couldn’t put it down--totally and completely enthralling and heartbreaking.

I also finally read Anthony Bourdain’s classic memoir, Kitchen Confidential, which I waited for from the library for months following his incredibly tragic suicide. I can’t say I loved it, but it was entertaining and I did learn a lot about the restaurant industry.

In November, for my week-long writing retreat in Hull, I packed several books--Olivia Laing’s Crudo (which I really wanted to like but hated), Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story--a classic for writers of nonfiction that I’d avoided reading in grad school and found that still didn’t work for me when I tried reading it again in that cozy house by the sea, and Michelle Tea’s Modern Tarot, which I used to start teaching myself to read the Tarot (loved it).

Over Thanksgiving, I read Bel Canto, another classic I thought I’d love and instead found tedious and overwrought, and finished Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, a bedraggled copy of which I’d kept on my nightstand for months, reading a few pages at a time before bed until I finally finished. It was...fine.

In December, in keeping with my trend of reading incredibly heavy books during a time of light (for some, anyway), I rounded out the year with Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Just Mercy, and Sing, Unburied, Sing.

The first was another book club pick, a rollercoaster of a book, full of feel-good moments and the darkest of darkness. It’s beloved by many but because I’m me...I was meh about it. Just Mercy was another book full of ups and downs--there were some points where I was crying and some I was smiling--that book elicited emotions from me I don’t normally have when I’m reading. It’s incredibly difficult to read but that’s what makes it necessary, I think. And, as promised, my Jesmyn Ward book end, Sing, Unburied, Sing. I found this book every bit as heartbreakingly beautiful as Salvage the Bones, but I think I liked the story better in Sing--it’s part ghost story, part modern fairy tale, part family epic. Ward won the National Book Award for both novels--she’s truly a genius.

In total, I’ve read 57 books this year, which is a lot for me! There were lots of hits and probably more misses, but as usual, reading brought me more happiness than a lot of other things I’ve done.

Since I went on for way too long, I’ll keep my recommendations section brief!

What I’m Reading: Lauren Groff’s Florida. So good.

What I’m Watching: Kind of in a TV rut, but over the last few days, I’ve watched Home Alone, Dirty Dancing, Forrest Gump, and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and every single one remains a masterpiece.

What I’m Listening To: Some Twitter meme yesterday said that the last song you listened to would be your theme song for 2019 and mine was Lucy Dacus, “Strange Torpedo” and it feels fitting and is a great song, so there you go.

What I’m Wearing: A lot of oversized turtleneck sweaters and leggings as pants.

What I’m Eating: This isn’t groundbreaking, but it felt like it to me--putting cinnamon in my coffee has made my mornings so much brighter!