Year In Reading: Anne K. Yoder
The result is the novelistic love child of David Lynch’s third season of Twin Peaks and David Bowie’s concept album Outside; it’s truly just as strange and wonderful and hallucinatory.
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The Millions Top 10
A Year in Reading: Nick Moran
Milk piqued my interest because at the time my daughter was five months old. When people notice one blue car on the road, they see every blue car on the road. When I opened my fridge every few hours, I primed myself for distraction.
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A Year in Reading: Kaulie Lewis
Appropriate, then, that the book is as much about stripping-away, about mourning, preserving, and letting go, as it is about travel; it’s full of characters caught by some mysterious force and thrown out of their patterns and routines, a freshly relatable experience.
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Year in Reading: Hannah Gersen
There was a moment when I was convinced that I was going to spend the rest of 2020 reading Ripley novels.
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A Year in Reading: Zoë Ruiz
“We Are Too Big for This House” inspired me to rethink form, how to work with time and space within a narrative, and interweave art criticism into a story. It’s a poem I’ll return to again and again.
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A Year in Reading: Claire Cameron
This is one tiny slice of what the pandemic has taken, a bet, a glance, working from intuition, spontaneous laughter with a stranger, feeling close to someone I’ll never see again. I miss the chance to navigate other people and places in the old world, one that was less controlled and contained.
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A Year in Reading: Shruti Swamy
I read that one doubled-masked on BART, the train bearing me back to the city. It was a bright, gold day, late summer, and from the windows of the train the view of the white container cranes standing at attention beside the glistening bay—a view I have always loved—remained unchanged, it seemed to me.
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SPONSORS
Year in Reading: Jennifer Acker
I first read The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard in college in a fiction workshop taught by Anita Shreve, who once, with the best of intentions, lectured our class on the “banality” of the subjects we chose to write about, and who, when her most recent novel was selected by the Oprah book club shortly after our class ended, never, to my knowledge, returned to the classroom again.
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A Year in Reading: Destiny O. Birdsong
In a year when I too am coming to terms with my body’s history and limits, its future and fearless strengths, each of these pieces gave me space to mourn and laugh, to honor and to plan.
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