I started the year with A Cruelty Special to Our Species.It filled my January with painful recollection and the comfort of sleeping with a knife under your pillow. 

Then it was on to How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. I carried the book everywhere, reading it whenever I could. I read about Alexander Chee’s beloved roses and his summer spent in Mexico when he was a young boy. I marked the margins with exclamations of agreement and tiny checkmarks of awe. I read it in a waiting room while doctors injected my mother with dye and timed how long it took to get from one end of her to the other. I placed tarot cards and tried to find answers.

I read The White Book too quickly, marking my progress with a blue and purple SpaceMaker bookmark circa 1997. I tried to love the constant whiteness, but instead found it muddled and confusing. It’s possible I never fully got my mind to settle into its rhythms. I found it relentless in its ideas, but absent of any solid shore for the multiple waves of whiteness to crash themselves against. I finished it and set it aside. Maybe someday I will come back to it and find that it has more to say to me then than now.

Homie shot through me like a bird on fire. I reveled in the language, so full of passion and love. It felt like standing in a rainstorm with arms outstretched and head tilted up to the heavens, basking. 

Mary Ruefle made me gasp, as she always does, and I read Duncewith a fervor that ended with the desire to carry my own pair of little scissors, to snip small pieces of the world.

I read three brilliant comics. Frogcatcher imagined death, Gutsinstilled confidence within the young girl still living inside me, and They Called Us Enemy validated my family history by making space for the story of the Japanese American internment. When I went to C2E2 this year, I brought my copy of the book along and shyly asked George Takei to sign it. He spoke to me about his time in the camps, and I told him about my grandparents and their time spent in the camps, as well. He was warm and kind and reflective of all the generous obasans and okasansthat I have met over the years.

Reading The Water Cure was like diving into the deep end of a swimming pool just to feel the weight of your body as its carried by the ebb and flow of the water all around you. It was like being given a tiny hammer before getting encased in glass. 

The Virgin Suicides was the last book I read before the business of lockdown. I finished it right on the cusp of the panic. The Lisbon sisters succeeded in all of their dying right as I made the transition to staying inside. The world outside my window fluctuated between thawing and snowcapped, and I thought longingly about Lux’s red lantern, Cecelia’s white wedding dress. I marked my progress with a temporary tattoo of a dead starling colored neon yellow, and I draped plastic beaded children’s bracelets on my arms.

Ghost Wall did not live up to its hype for me. I wanted to love it, but the story fell flat. So much mossy buildup to an ending that felt both unearned and over far too quickly. Perhaps what I’m saying is that I wanted her to be given up to the bog and to stay there. To sink into the murk and muck for a little while. I wanted her to get swallowed like the woods seemed to swallow them all. Or maybe, I wanted her to sneak away through the bog and come out the other side cleansed and ready to guiltlessly purchase an ice cream cone at the corner store on the side of the road.

Recollections of my Nonexistence was a whirlwind of underlining. I traveled hard with Rebecca as she took me through the story of her life. I found confidence in some words and validation in others, so that when I transitioned into reading WeatherI was high on the power of female self-expression. Weather was like reading a fictional Ongoingness– which I read too, for the fourth or fifth time, but only later in the year – in that it charged forward with succinct statements that seemed to contain the entire universe in their three to four sentences.

I took a brief rest to re-read two books from my favorite children’s mystery series from when I was young, Sammy Keyes, and I was reminded of just how much I love that spunky girl. I ate Double Dynamos with her on street corners and spray painted my high-tops bright green. Together, we became the monster from the marsh, and I floated joyously along with her as we put our noses into places they didn’t belong, as we asked too many questions.

I devoured two books by Ottessa Moshfegh. My Year of Rest and Relaxation was the first. To read it I had to wait on the walkway leading up to my mother’s house while she scoured through boxes of books kept in my old bedroom searching for my copy. I would have done the digging myself, but we were still so new to the virus, still so unsure of what being close to one another might mean. She found it and delivered it to me by setting it on the ground between us before backing up quickly, a book exchange that felt more like the delivery of a ransom. I wanted to read MYORAR because when else do you read a book about perpetual sleep than in the midst of a hibernation? I hated the main character but charged through the pages desperately hoping for a meaning. I found one, I think, at the end, amongst the wakefulness.

Death in Her Hands was different. It felt murkier, more like wading your way out of heavy, velvet curtains. Or maybe it was a spiral into madness, into the mind. A paranoia so crisp and real that it almost seemed believable. I wanted my own cabin, my own dog to quietly live with amongst the woods. I wanted a darkness suit that I could put on and slip away with at any moment. In the end it reminded me of a reimagined slasher film. Instead of a summer camp, there was a Girl Scouts cabin. Instead of a young, beautiful final girl, there was a batty old woman so full of paranoia there wasn’t any need for an actual Shape. 

I tried to lighten things up with The Catalog of Unabashed Gratitudebut instead found myself weeping over insects and injustice and fruit trees. These poems vibrated with life. They were like holding a magnifying glass to the sun. 

Trick Mirror was like talking to a high-school friend. Jia Tolentino spoke my language of pop culture and dichotomies. Her whip smart writing left me clambering up my own ladder of self-expectation. I walked away afraid of the internet, afraid of social media, afraid of my own fear of all these things. And then I responded to this fear by scouring the internet for even more writing by Tolentino. I contemplated getting a New Yorkersubscription and sticking with it for more than just the tote bag. 

And then of course,Citizen. A book read during a moment of great societal reckoning. I do not have much to say other than it should be required reading for us all. We cannot insight change unless we are constantly pushed up against the very real reality of what it means to be Black and living in America. Citizen is that firm, necessary, wonderful push.

In July I embarked on the challenge to read all of the 2020 International Booker shortlist. I started with The Englightenment of the Greengage Treebecause it was the one I knew the least about. Reading it was like being drunk on summer wine, a book so filled with poetry and magic and ghosts and death that often times I felt short of breath as I turned the pages. It filled me with a desire to reach beyond this world so that I might brush hands with ghosts. It was so full of flowers, trees, literature, fire, and the ache of being an adolescent in the summertime. It transcended itself and the shackles that tried to hold its characters down so that in the end they ascended into a beautiful, whirling, celestial conclusion.

I took a breath between Booker titles to read Nina Mingya Powles’ book of poems, Magnolia. It was validating and sharp and funny. I found myself nodding along with her revelations. I, too, will spike your drink with MSG. 

The Adventures of China Iron was not for me. Brilliant in its retelling and its subversions, I found the tone of the entire book to be too cheeky for my taste. This is not the fault of the book itself. It is a beautiful book with beautiful ideas and descriptions of the Argentinian pampas. I felt most enraptured in the last 30 pages or so when Josephine and Liz have finally found their home amongst the Indians, but ultimately the book overall, did not move me in the same way as Greengage Tree did. 

I read Philip Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth with my father. We called each other every other day to measure our progress. We talked about Lyra and Pan and whether or not we thought they would ever find each other. We have loved these characters for a very long time. To return to their world is always like coming home. 

I continued my International Booker trend with The Discomfort of Evening, but August was filled with the buzz of moving from one home to another, so I did not finish it before the announcement. When it won, I vowed to read the rest, and I did. It is a book that I will vividly remember and a book that I will never read again. The language was visceral and raw – reading it was like being covered in frost – but the gratuitous reliance on shock to pull the reader through the pages felt unnecessary. Still, it was bold in its delivery, and for that alone, it deserved to win.

And now it is September, a month I tend to spend winding up for the start of fall. I am trying to finish the rest of the International Bookers because I do not like to leave things unfinished, and I have been wrapped up in the associative world of Eula Biss in her newest book, Having and Being Had. The regular Booker shortlist has been announced and I’m contemplating giving those a go before November, but I am also eagerly awaiting the National Book Award announcements. There is something satisfying about making your way down a list. I’m looking forward to reading in the fall in a new house. I’m looking forward to seeing this unfamiliar light fall across my stacks of books in new ways.