sadreads #8: 2020 vision
Hi!
This is a recap of almost everything I read this year, with some commentary. There are a few books I didn't finish, and I haven't included those.
It was a weird year for reading; my brain was garbage from anxiety from January to April, and then I had my daughter and it was garbage from sleeplessness, hormones, AND anxiety. But I read more than I thought I would; shoutout to the library app on my e-reader. I wish I could say I'm a purist who only reads actual books, but I absolutely cannot say that! For one thing, an e-reader is way easier to hold while nursing. You gotta do what you gotta do.
What was the best thing you read in 2020?
I hope the new year, that arbitrary prescribed doorway into the future, finds you comfortable.
<3
Niina
January
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
I wanted to start the year on a reread; I’d read this Morrison novel in high school, and remembered shockingly little about it except for the fact that I had loved it and that Milkman, the main character, got his nickname from his mother breastfeeding him until age six. The whole legend of the Flying Africans, which the novel is built around, had fled my mind, as had Guitar’s rage. But we love Toni Morrison for a reason; the reason is her absolute storytelling control. Banger to start the year.
“The calculated violence of a shark grew in her, and like every witch that ever rode a broom straight through the night to a ceremonial infanticide as thrilled by the black wind as by the rod between her legs; like every fed-up-to-the-teeth bride who worried about the consistency of the grits she threw at her husband as well as the potency of the lye she had stirred into them; and like every queen and every courtesan who was struck by the beauty of her emerald ring as she tipped its poison into the old red wine, Hagar was energized by the details of her mission.”
Excavation, Wendy C. Ortiz
This book is a memoir of the author’s sketchy relationship with her high school English teacher. Ortiz’s descriptions of place are striking, as is her ability to distill the simultaneously small and huge worldview of someone very young who has to keep a secret.
“The adults in my life had the power: my parents, Jeff. The girl I was —good, bad, neither or both, saw the discrete openings, the loopholes I could manipulate, and did what she could with them. It was the best I could do.”
Romance or The End, Elaine Kahn
Kahn's poems boast a compelling combination of ruthlessness and style; she knows she is being scrutinized, and relishes in it.
“I have heard it said
that love
turns people
soft
but I have
never been
more
brutal”
Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener
I’ve spent the last eight years or so working various soft-skill jobs at tech companies, earning less money and equity than my colleagues who code, listening to platitudes, participating in mystifying morale-building rituals, staring out the window at the snow that falls like fat feathers over some unlikable part of Manhattan and then looking down only to see that I’ve somehow consumed an entire desk salad without even realizing I was eating. This book is correct and so very good.
“I understood my blind faith in ambitious, aggressive, arrogant young men from America’s soft suburbs as a personal pathology, but it wasn’t personal at all. It had become a global affliction.”
Optic Nerve, Maria Gainza
I wrote about this one in a past letter.
"Isn't all artwork—or all decent art—a mirror? Might a great painting not even reformulate the question what is it about to what am I about? Isn't theory also in some sense always autobiography?”
February
Outline, Rachel Cusk
My first foray into Cusk. I didn’t love this book, but I admired it. The narrator’s blase tone did not do much for me, but the observations were on point. This may have felt a little tiring to me after Optic Nerve, because it was very much in the same vein.
“He began to ask me questions, as thought he had learned to remind himself to do so, and I wondered what or who had taught him that lesson, which many people never learn.”
Topics of Conversation, Miranda Popkey
This book recounts several important conversations in the narrator’s life. It moves forward in time rapidly. In retrospect, this book is also very much in lineage with the Cusk and the Gainza. But I liked it! It was stylish, but the character developed, and had revelations!
“Of course every confidence is a kind of manipulation. Or calculation. I trust you with this. Or maybe it’s I want you to think that I trust you with this.”
March
Sketchtasy, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
I wrote about this one before, too.
“The most disturbing thing is that there’s no allowance for rage as a healing option.”
Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
I wrote about this one, too, but in writing about it, I slipped into autobiography. So please relish this passage about children’s capacity for darkness with me.
“How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.
Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice cream cones, and lost lollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.
We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting a lollipop or toy bear’s worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skulls for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.”
Falsehood, Emily Brandt
The second of very few poetry collections I read this year. I’ve known Brandt for a long while, as one of the editors of the magnificent No, Dear, and as a neighbor, and as a poet. She is a sharp, cool writer investigating the subjects of gender and power.
“The only way left for a girl to be radical in America
is to camp in the woods for decades until she is ready to die
then build her own funeral pyre
surrounded by stones and light it well.
You are the genius of the ash heap and everyone
else in the woods, all of the scavengers, will mourn.”
April
Moonflower, Nightshade, all the Hours of the Day, JD Scott
I love when a friend is a good writer and I get to stan in a warm and genuine way. Scott's collection of magical, queer, YA-adjacent-but-not-YA stories is atmospheric and playful; I love these weird stories. Go ahead and read this one about a muscle-queen Jesus going off to be crucified. The last line is chef's kiss.
Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney
McSweeney and I had similar losses a year apart. This book is a dyad of connected works of poetry, one written during her pregnancy and the other during a period of postpartum grief. McSweeney, however, is an absolutely bonkers writer who would never write some kind of insulting grief book. This collection is full of hallucinatory mourning and divination, and unlike anything I’ve ever read. Read some of McSweeney’s poems from Arachne here.
“I’m going to tell you something so bad that when you hear it you’re gonna know it’s true.
Like all the worst stories
It comes from the heart
& it goes there too.”
Twenty Days of Turin, Giorgio di Maria
Taylor Moore recommended this 1975 novel, which is a short, prescient, Lovecraftian story about a man investigating deadly paranormal events that occurred over twenty nights in the city of Torino some years before his visit. The events are connected to an odd social experiment in the form of a library where any participant could leave any writings they want to, and, for a fee, interact with the writing or writers. It’s like an internet of sorts, so of course people on it behave the way people behave on the real internet: the writers and readers are desperate and lonely, and their subject matter is lurid and dark and addicting. It was a weird fucking book to read during my insomnia hours at 38 weeks pregnant, right as pandemic panic was rising like bile in the throat of New York City. The city of Torino is arguably its most realized character, the way New York is for so many people. Would recommend?
"I don't think the Library could've come to life if it hadn't found an accepting climate, a moral willingness to latch on to… We'll skip over the widespread tendency of many citizens to confide their worries in newspaper agony aunts and talk radio hosts… It's certain that from those media, things passed into a slimy subsoil, a drainage basin where anyone could tip anything they wanted, ask the gunk they kept inside themselves. Have you ever seen something spawned from a garbage dump?"
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
At this point I was fully leaning into pandemic mode. This book was a respite because it wasn’t told in a deliberately obscuring way; I enjoyed the straightforward storytelling of the pandemic very much. It reminded me of reading Severance by Ling Ma.
"The disorientation of meeting one's sagging contemporaries, memories of a younger face crashing into the reality of jowls, under-eye pouches, unexpected lines, and then the terrible realization that one probably looks just as old as they do. Do you remember when we were young and gorgeous? Clark wanted to ask. Do you remember when everything seemed limitless?"
May
Big Little Lies, Liane Moriarty
The baby was born, and she wouldn’t sleep at all, so one of us had to be awake at all times to hold her so she wouldn’t, like, fall into the couch cushions. So when I was trying to stay awake so badly, I read Liane Moriarty, on the recommendation of Emily Gould. Maybe you’ve watched the series (I haven’t) but this book is about a murder that happens at a trivia night for a primary school on an Australian beach. Each of the characters has their own complication; my brain was so scrambled that I gasped when I got to the plot twist. If you need desperately stay awake, this is an excellent book that I would highly recommend.
"The teacher's dimples quivered in her cheeks, as if she were trying to put them away for a more appropriate time."
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
Speaking of plot twists! I watched the movie ages ago, so I knew the premise of this book, but reading Ishiguro is always such a delight. This near-future dystopia is centered around British school children, which is my very favorite topic (I would rewatch Skins if I had any time alone; I tried to make my husband watch it but he wasn’t impressed). I love this book.
"So you're waiting, even if you don't quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realize that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, why don't hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shift at the very thought of you--of how you were verify into this world and why--and who dread the idea of your hand brushing again theirs. The first time you glimpse yourself though the eyes of a person like that, it's a cold moment. It's like walking past a mirror you've walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange."
What Alice Forgot, Liane Moriarty
Ok, I went back to suckle on the teat of dramatic, rich Australian moms. Big Little Lies was unfortunately better than this book, but there are commonalities: someone is always baking muffins, for example, and there’s a delightful coffee shop owner who welcomes you when you’re really in a jam. The sister in this book has pregnancy trauma, and she is the one I found the most relatable. This quote is from her thoughts; it’s the only one I wrote down from this book.
“I can hardly bear to think of ourselves hugging and crying and making giggly phone calls, like we were in some inane sitcom. We actually discussed names. Names! I want to shout back through the years at myself, 'Just because you're pregnant doesn't mean you get a baby, idiots!'"
My Dark Vanessa, Kate Elizabeth Russell
There was a controversy surrounding this book and its overlap with Wendy Ortiz’s memoir. It’s another story of a young person groomed by an old sociopath who thinks he deserves to be loved. I see the many similarities, down to the crappy teacher sharing the same books with his student. But I also see the depressing familiarity of the narrative. Are there new stories to tell? I don’t know. I’m writing fiction about a young person who has a dubious relationship with an older, more powerful person. We are going around the sun again. Thousands of us are are plugging the USB drive into the computer, and saving.
"Slowly guided into the fire--why is everyone so scared to admit how good that can feel? To be groomed is to be loved and handled like a precious, delicate thing."
June
Boys of Alabama, Genevieve Hudson
This book also made me think of my friend JD's collection; I think they are kindred spirits. It's a novel about a young German boy who moves to Alabama and has to find his way in Southern masculinity, while also being kind of magical. The characters in it were very warm and alive, and the descriptions of the South could only have been written by someone who has deeply experienced it. I don't want to be like "you don't get the South unless you lived there" but it's sort of true. This book is breakneck Southern gothic with deep feelings. I did not take any notes while I read, somehow.
The Farm, Joanne Ramos
One day my husband and I were walking in Greenpoint and we passed this book by on the stoop. He recognized it and it got us talking about Ina May Gaskin’s midwifery farm in Tennessee. This book is fiction, and it was actually delightful, or at least as delightful as a book about women being paid to be surrogates on a baby farm could be. I really enjoyed reading it while the baby was super small and I felt like a milk animal with another being permanently stuck to my organism.
"Mae's never understood why people -- privileged people especially, like Reagan and Katie -- insist that there's something shameful about desiring money. No immigrant ever apologized for wanting a nicer life."
Leaving Atocha Station, Ben Lerner
Literally no idea why I picked this up, but I kind of liked it. I spent some time in Madrid on a study abroad in 2004, meandering around and pretending to be very knowledgeable about the world, so I felt like I recognized the setting, which always gives me a certain amount of joy. The narrator’s substance abuse and constant self-inquiry exhausted me, but I liked what he had to say about poetry and about translation and the blank space between language and our comprehension of language.
"It was much easier for me to read a poem in Spanish than Spanish prose because all the unknowing and hesitation and failure involved in the attempt to experience the poem was familiar, it was what invested any poem with a negative power, it's failure to move me moved me, at least a little."
July
The Leftovers, Tom Perrotta
I had watched and loved the television adaptation, and wanted to see what the book was like. Reading it left me wondering how the book would’ve been if it had been written by a prose stylist; the concept (2% of the world’s population disappears, and everyone else remains in a state of shock and grief) is impeccable, but Perrotta, as a pop fiction writer, lets plot drive his storytelling. When I watched the TV series, I felt that it was very stylish and atmospheric, and much of that influenced my reading, but I don’t know how much of it was earned. Also, we were deep into the pandemic and this book was very pandemic-like in atmosphere. It made me want to rewatch the series, which I did. It was fun to see the differences, and where the adaptation went off the rails (ie, Kevin was the town’s mayor in the book, and not a conflicted small-town cop).
"Laurie was gazing at him with a tender, unwavering expression, the kind of look people give you in the funeral home when the deceased is a member of your family and they want to acknowledge your pain."
A Burning, Megha Majumdar
This book tells the story of an act of terrorism on a train, and the reverberations, political and personal, of its effect. The story is told by three characters in the outskirts of Kolkata: the accused, a poor young woman in the wrong place at the wrong time; her physical education teacher from school; and a hijra (a term for a gender presentation that includes transfeminine and intersex people) named Lovely. The novel is about government failure, and the incentivization of marginalized people to pit themselves against one another; in this way, though it’s set in India, it’s certainly about the USA too. The three voices are very distinct and memorable.
"In this life, everybody is knowing how to give me shame. So I am learning how to reflect shame back on them also."
August
I have no notes from August; it's possible I didn't read. I genuinely do not remember.
September
The Queen of the Night, Alexander Chee
I don’t know why it took me this long to pick up this deeply pleasurable book about an opera singer and her legendary transcontinental life. Chee’s attention to detail, particularly when it comes to describing clothes, is singular. It was the perfect bit of escapism to read something so long and baroque and lush as I sat at home in a full-sweat outfit that slowly filled with my own sloughed-off skin cells. I wanted to write about this, but then I gave up and just enjoyed the reading experience.
"The women I met then dressed as if choosing weapons; their balls, parties, and the salons and ateliers of the city, outfitters for a vast assassins' guild too decorated by half. A girl could enter this world as a grisette, taking in laundry, and in a week or two, be at Worth for a gown; two weeks more, leave at dawn in the carriage of an Austrian industrialist, having been stolen from the bed of the Emperor just to be protected from the Empress."
Astrid Lindgren: The Woman Behind Pippi Longstocking, Jens Andersen
I am actually writing about Lindgren (not sure for whom yet) because her biography is so endlessly fascinating. Without giving away the farm, I want to say that certain pivotal events in her life influenced her ideas about children’s literature. She had a baby at a young age with an old dirtbag; this changed the trajectory of her career.
"‘Every so often I long absolutely convulsively to be a child again, but then other times I think things are getting better every day I’m closer to the grave,” she wrote to her old Vimmerby friend in December 1928.”
October
Luster, Raven Leilani
I loved this book. The narrator is an artist and a burnout, educated but failing, teetering on the edge of broke at all times. The voice was singularly funny and I laughed out loud many times, occasionally in dark recognition. But the thing that really won me over was that though she’s hard on herself, and ruthless, she’s also tender in her characterization of characters who might not deserve tenderness. This made me truly believe she was an artist.
“During my interview with CVS, I try to be convincing in my assurance that pointing young adults in the direction of Plan B has always been part of my five-year plan. But after the interview, I go to the parking lot to drink some cough syrup and notice one of the managers watching me from his car.”
Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber
A book-length exploration of the concept of “bullshit jobs” and what it means that we feel we have to work them, based on a 2013 essay. I enjoyed discussing this for a book club at work. Has working in tech radicalized me? I genuinely don’t know.
"We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy our bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement."
The Brothers Lionheart, Astrid Lindgren
Part of my research. A weird children’s novel about two young boys who die and go to the afterlife and then die again; I loved this book as a kid.
"Jonathan knew that I was soon going to die. I think everyone knew except for me."
November
Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, Anahid Nersessian
This book was sent to me as a review copy; it’s out in March. It’s criticism with a personal angle, and what I find exceptionally interesting in it is Nersessian’s unpacking of trigger warnings, trauma, and the canon. Highly recommend if you enjoy reading criticism.
“Like many kids who don’t look like their classmates, who cart around odd names and are told, loudly and sternly, by the teacher that when they choose construction paper on which to draw a self-portrait they had better not choose white, since anyone can see their skin is much darker than that, I figured out early that WASPs couldn’t be trusted with their own culture.”
December
Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson
Another work book club pick. When I moved to the US, as a child, I thought America’s history of racism had nothing to do with me since I was a newcomer. I’ve spent my adult life unpacking this misconception.
“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things."
Bandit, Molly Brodak
I wrote about this one in my last letter.
“Growing up as a voracious reader I found stories of pain and redemption on every library shelf I visited. Pain! Apparently pain, I learned, can be traded in. It is some kind of money, in these stories, traded in for love, or admiration, or credibility, or wisdom. In books and movies and poems and plays, this sort of redemption is only fair to the reader, after all, who is forced to endure along with the hero or sufferer. Sufferers deserve rewards. And it’s so reassuring, the story of redemption."
The Freezer Door, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
My only repeat author this year. I love Sycamore’s style, which hops from topic to topic but always circles back around. This book is about queerness and sex and the desire for meaningful relationships and belonging, and also about how capitalism ruins everything; it also made me think a lot about feminist spaces and the ways in which they tend to, in my experience, self-destruct.
“Every time I shave, I get the same shaving cut. It's like it's lying there dormant, waiting for the blade. I don't understand when I chop my finger instead of the onion. I don't understand why nothing heals.”