“There are moments when history and memory seem like mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened.” – Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that many people have opinions about books, even (especially?) people who have strong negative opinions about those books. I, for one, always believed that there was a canon of literature I should have read earlier in my life and, given those previous failures, the best I could do now was to get cracking on that canon. So in 2017 I read books I “should have” read—that “should” sort of loosely defined to allow me to read outside Western lit, to read more women and more people of color. It was a good exercise, tackling those Should books, but by year’s end I was surprised at how much fantasy I’d managed to read—me, who loved Louise Erdrich and Margaret Atwood and lots of Very Serious Literary Writers.
When 2018 began, I was reading for the most part because I needed to fill time. To kill time, really, while I was enduring a commute often seemed tempted to kill me. The endless hours on the train were a good excuse to fill up my brain with books, whether I enjoyed those books or not. But then my life changed and I got a new job with a much shorter commute. Voilà—no more time to kill.
Still, I’m a writer and it’s my job to read carefully for craft. Faced with fewer hours for reading (what did I think I was going to do with all this free time no longer spent commuting?), I hunkered down with the classics. And I hated them. Me, who loved discovering Emma last year—I hated Persuasion. I found Wuthering Heights preposterous and immaterial. While I rediscovered Jacob’s Room and fell in love all over again with Virginia Woolf, I also discovered N. K. Jemisin (this could be a whole post about how much I love her work now) and devoured Louise Erdrich’s new book, a decidedly sci-fi departure from her usual fare. I still relished literary fiction like Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth, but I let go of the pretense, the Shoulds. I read for joy. I still read for craft (read N. K. Jemisin!), but the more I read for pleasure (not fun—I was still, and am always, reading for craft), the more I found myself trying to carve out time—not to kill it, but to fill it with more life. In reading this way my heart was broken open by surprises, by the possibilities of fiction. Yes, I read essays and memoir and (exactly one book of) poetry this year, but the novels taught me about the perils of history, the foibles of memory, and the freedom afforded by slipping into someone else’s narrative. As Mary Chapin Carpenter wrote:
“And I don’t want to be a stranger,
And I don’t want to be alone.
But sometimes I just want to be somewhere else
Untethered and known
When I am far from home.”
You get a different perspective on the Shoulds and Can Never Bes when you get out of your comfort zone and find the place you were meant to be.
- All Men Are Liars, Alberto Manguel
- The Rules of Magic, Alice Hoffman *
- White Houses, Amy Bloom
- The Air We Breathe, Andrea Barrett *
- Commonwealth, Ann Patchett *
- Keep Smiling Through, Ann Rinaldi
- A Small Fortune, Audrey Braun
- Fences, August Wilson
- High Tide in Tucson, Barbara Kingsolver *
- Here We Go Again, Betty White
- In Good Company, Carol Burnett
- Romantic Outlaws, Charlotte Gordon
- The Underground Railroad, Coleson Whitehead
- The Book of Life, Deborah Harkness
- The Days When Birds Come Back, Deborah Reed
- From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E. L. Konigsburg
- Starvation Mode, Elissa Washuta
- Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert
- Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
- Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
- Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie *
- The Promise of Failure, John McNally *
- The Crofter and the Laird, John McPhee *
- Cat Diary: Yon & Mu, Junji Ito
- We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler *
- Radium Girls, Kate Moore *
- A People’s History of Chicago, Kevin Coval
- A Man Without A Country, Kurt Vonnegut
- Nat Turner, Kyle Baker
- Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery
- Anne of Avonlea, L. M. Montgomery
- Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich
- A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L’Engle
- A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Madeleine L’Engle
- Many Waters, Madeleine L’Engle
- The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood
- Upstream, Mary Oliver
- Daily Rituals, Mason Currey
- Letter to My Daughter, Maya Angelou *
- The Final Solution, Michael Chabon
- Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton
- Warlight, Michael Ondaatje
- Ghost Wife, Michelle Dicinowski
- The Fifth Season, N. K. Jemisin *
- The Obelisk Gate, N. K. Jemisin *
- A Lab of One’s Own, Patricia Fara
- An Unkindness of Ghosts, Rivers Solomon
- Motherhood, Sheila Heti
- America Again, Stephen Colbert
- Eats of Eden, Tabitha Blankenbiller *
- The Best We Could Do, Thi Bui *
- Assignment: Rescue, Varian Fry
- Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf *
- Pie and Whiskey
* books I loved
Grey Sea & Sky 