This year it was a struggle to find that match, to meet with a book each on our terms. My needs from reading were all over the map—did I want escapism? something to help me process life? Who did I want to be in charge, my brain or the book or both? There were books I devoured even though I didn’t particularly like them. There were books I wanted to read that I just couldn’t bring myself to continue. I wept, I laughed, it was the best of times, the worst of times.

I read the first two books of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavansdatter trilogy this year. Written in the 1920s and set in 14th-century Norway, there wasn’t anything obvious that called to me about them, except that they’d been on my list since I read a review of the Tiina Nunally translations, and I’d just finished reading the Steerswoman books and needed something that was in an alternate world to sink into. The first one, The Wreath, pulled me in and didn’t let me go, even though I wanted to shake Kristin continually. A few months later, The Wife did the same, this time with more wanting to shake Kristin. And then in September I tried to get on with The Cross and I just couldn’t. There was so much to keep track of, the ins and outs of feudal politics in a country I had absolutely no knowledge about, and by this point Kristin’s life seemed to her and to me so hopeless, so without any of the joys the earlier books brought, and it was all too much. 

Tommy Orange’s There There was a different story. I loved it. I read it deeply. And then. And then it was too hard to read about Native American experiences of genocide and survival while also struggling with experiencing Jews as both the subjects and perpetrators of genocide. What does it mean to be an urban Indian, far from the reservations on which Indian life is seen to be based? What does it mean to be an American Jew, far from the biblical lands we were exiled from? What’s identity and nationality and the ongoing horror of feeling separated from your community because you know they are so deeply in the wrong but also mixed in with that an anger and sorrow because you know how and why they feel the way they do, but you don’t know how to broach that distance nor how to convey to outsiders the thousands of years of trauma we tell ourselves? As the book bore down closer and closer on the violence that was being planned, I slowed my reading down to a crawl and then paused and now I don’t know when I’ll pick it up again.

My tale of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is different yet again. The playfulness of that book! The layers on layers and twists on twists, all about reading books and writing books and making books—how could I not love that? Plus, I was reading it along with my book club. But oh! It was a busy summer and then I got Covid and you know what’s hard to do when your brain hurts and is in a fog? Read a book that you actually have to keep track of. I loved it and I wanted to understand it. And so I put it down until it’s been too long now to remember enough to be able to pick it up again. Will I do so in the future? I hope so. On the other hand, life is long and books are never ending and if all I have is a taste of this marvel, that could be enough.

Is it rude to leave you only with the reading failures? Here’s what worked for me this year:

Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds reimagines the origins of the United States and oh, how I mourned what the seventeenth century did to us all.

Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series imagines a whole new reality that is about knowledge making and what’s the line between magic and technology and I loved it. But I’m going to tell you something now, though, because I didn’t know and I was not prepared and I was wrecked: the series just stops. The last book isn’t the end of the quest, but just the last book written. It’s an abrupt ending I wasn’t at all prepared for and I did not like being kicked out of that world.

Barbara Pym is still everything. Quartet in Autumn is hard hard hard. But even lesser Pym is still great and I am looking forward to many rereadings of them for a long time. What does she imagine? That the small details of unmarried women are vast and tragic and comic. 

Mary Renault’s The Charioteer imagines a world in which gay men are worthy of love, self love and partnered love. To write that world at a time when it was so viciously denied? What a gift, then and now.

May we all know how to give voice to the futures that seem impossible so that we can act them into being.

Part of this feeling comes from the year’s circumstances. I went to New Zealand in late January, spending three weeks of summer in the middle of winter, and seeing a bit of a place I knew nothing about and that looks so little like most landscapes I know. My oldest spent the summer in California on an internship, the first time in which he’s not lived with me for at least a few months in a year and the startling realization that he might never live with me again. My youngest went off to college, something that I grieved for in advance only to discover that living by myself is actually glorious. And then right at the start of 5784, there was October 7 and its long bloody terrible aftermath, still ongoing without any clear end in sight and with the full-body apocalyptic horror of shouting helplessly at my own communities. And what’s in store for us in the United States in 2024? It looks a lot like repeating mistakes we should have learned from and more horror and dread.

There’s hope in all this if we look, too. That hope is in the ways people have stepped up to care for each other, in how set-in-stone beliefs are maybe slowly shifting. It’s in the joy of seeing my kids grow and become full, caring, active members of the world. The present is so unsettled that the future is even more visibly in flux, and we have a chance to use this moment to build something new. Will we? Maybe? Maybe not? But the promise is in the act of building, not in the having built. We practice, we strive, we look for our prophets, we get up every day and work. It’s hope. It’s tikkun olam. 

the full list

head over to Bookwyrm to see the full list of my 2023 books; I promise it’s not my handwritten scrawl! (to see my reviews, you’ll have to click on the book, and then scroll down to find mine)

The most astonishing book I read this year was Moby-Dick. I picked it up, decades after first having read tidbits of it for comps in grad school, largely because my youngest had read parts of it in high school and because we were headed to New Zealand. I did not expect the sheer shaggy weird excess of it. Yeah, there’s a plot about revenge and destruction. But it’s also about trying to capture the uncapturable by writing a book nearly as massive and detailed as whales themselves. It took me close to eight months to read it, not because it’s actually that long, but because I read it so slowly, usually at night before falling asleep, letting it wash over me. Such destruction humans wrought, all those people devouring whales to light their homes and make their engines go and all the industry that led us to where we are now, having gobbled up so much of our world’s natural bounty that we’re killing the planet. It was a peek back to a moment when we could have done things differently, and Melville felt on the side of whales in this, in the horror of whale bloodshed. He was also on the side of whiteness, without a doubt, but also so excessively so that my 80s lit training makes me want to say that his insistence on the horror of whiteness and yet the superiority of white people comes out in the strangled ways in which he can’t quite articulate why racially white is good. (Please don’t make me be a lit scholar about this; I’m not a 19th-centuryist, I don’t want to be, I just want to read.) Melville was a horrible person in so many ways. And this book is a piece of genius that I can’t quite hold in my mind.

I read other astonishing books both during and after that one. Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet was pure beautiful grief. You know what’s coming and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, just like there’s nothing the characters can do to stop it. It wrecked me. (I tried her Marriage Portrait after this, but I hated it with a passion. It viscerally made me angry when I realized how she was going to get out of the plot she’d created, and I’m still angry now when I think about how she invented someone she could then destroy so that her rich heroine could live ever after. Fuck that.)

And then there were the time travel books. Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility was explicitly about the circles of time and how past and present and future all shift. What’s real? What makes things real? Station Eleven continues to be one of my favorite books, and the ways in which it and Glass Hotel and Sea work together is subtle and important and delightful. There’s grief and loss and yet also there’s hope and a future to build for in all of them.

Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book has more grief and less future in it, and so much pandemic trauma. I’d read the others in the Oxford Time Travel series and so knew what to expect, but also I read this one completely unprepared for the levels of loss in it. I couldn’t stop thinking about how traumatized they all must be, having gone through so much death and fear, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about us today. When are we going to pause to reckon with our pandemic trauma? How are we ever going to heal from the traumas happening in Palestine and Israel? Doomsday Book focuses on faith as the answer and on creating families of choice and need. Is that enough? I don’t believe in a God that swoops down and rescues us, and it’s clear Willis doesn’t either. But my faith as a Reconstructionist Jew teaches me that we can be godly—when we care for each other, we are the holiness that we seek.

Here’s to a future in which we actually choose life, in which we remember our obligation to save a life—not only to not kill but to make possible for everyone to have the chance to flourish, to find the holiness that is in all of us. Our governments might be failing us (they are failing us), but we don’t have to fail each other. 

Happy new year.

It’s been a pretty good reading year for me. I read slowly (so slowly) and just barely hit my goal of 50 books for the year. I don’t usually set a goal for myself, but BookWyrm prompts you to, and I thought an actual goal would help me remember that I do love reading books more than I love watching tv or staring into space, and so more of my evenings have been occupied with reading than the year before.² And I’m glad about that.

I read my usual combination of dross and gold. I also discovered the joys of listening to a book while falling asleep. It takes the right sort of book—one that doesn’t revolve around plot twists or one that you’ve read before and it’s okay to drift in and out of. The biggest problem is finding a good reader in my library’s offerings. I loved listening to Northanger Abbey, but the reader has a very scratchy voice that at bedtime is just not a good fit. I’m listening now to Maria Dhavani Headley’s new translation of Beowulf, and the reader (J. D. Jackson) is great but also, the drama of the poem is not conducive to sleep or to missing the details. On the plus side, I don’t know that I would have sat down and read it, and being able to listen is in many many ways the perfect way to meet the poem.

These are a handful of unputdownable books from this year that continue to talk to me long after I finished reading them:

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland was a slow read for me because I kept stopping to absorb it. I loved it. I hadn’t read any McCullers when I read Shapland’s book, and that didn’t stop me from following Shapland’s use of her to make sense of her own life. If you’re interested in closeted queerness, in archives, in how we see and don’t see the past, you might also love this book. For me, the biggest thing was that it crystalized something I’d been struggling with this year: Why are we devoting precious resources to all these old books and old documents that are my professional life? When the world is burning, when people are fleeing wars, when there’s a witch hunt going on demonizing trans and queer people, how can we justify pouring more carbon-burning energy into studying old books? But when I was at the low point of struggling with this question, I happened to read this book, and it helped shift my thinking away from my training as a literary scholar and book history (the important thing is the book!) to a view that centers people. People, like Shapland, find themselves in old books and documents, and what is of value is not only learning new things about books/history, but learning about who we are today. For some of you this might seem obvious, but it goes against all the training I had to center the past and value what we learn about these textual objects. But making this shift has helped me rediscover the joys and potentials of putting people together with books, and I am infinitely grateful for that realization.

After Shapland, I of course had to read some Carson McCullers, and I went with The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. That really was a slow read. I interspersed so many other, easier, books while reading this one. It took a lot out of me. It’s filled with so much loneliness! There’s so much love and light and squandered life and searching for your people and yourself in it—I just loved it and I’m glad I read it. My description probably doesn’t make you want to read it, but if you haven’t already, it’s well worth trying it.

Richard Powers’s The Overstory made me think differently about time and about trees. I don’t know how to put that into words, but putting human lives and our short-term thinking alongside the long long lives of trees made me question all sorts of priorities. I’m so tired of valuing tiny human needs over planetary ones. I don’t mean important human needs like love and shelter and autonomy, but tiny ones like more more more stuff and where’s my profit and what’s the easiest way to get from point A to point B? What would it mean instead if we thought not only in terms of generations of people, but in generations of trees?

Honorée Fannone Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W. E. B. DuBois is as amazing as all the reviews led me to believe it would be, but also even more so. I hadn’t expected it to be so much about historiography, and I loved it for that. I’ve been thinking a lot recently—thanks to so much good writing on the topic—about the potential traumas of doing and facilitating historical research. And the accounts in Love Songs of what it feels like not to be trusted to read the records of your own past, and the pain of reading those records, and the difficulty of getting dominant voices to listen to the multitude of ways that histories are told instead of focusing solely on those written records that were selected to be preserved . . . . All of that is to say, this book is powerful.

I think the book that might stay with me the longest is Lauren Groff’s Matrix. I hadn’t particularly been drawn by the reviews that I’d read of it, but I was so wrong. The book is incandescent. Yes, medieval nuns might not be your thing. But this isn’t really a book about Marie and her abbey. It’s a book about how women make a place for themselves in the world when they are told they have no place in it, about the strength of love and community in all of its messiness. I was so sad when it was done. I was absolutely not ready to leave Marie. I am fully expecting to return to this book again and again.

I read other things this year that I loved—more Arkady Martine, more Becky Chambers, more Tamsyn Muir. Kate Beaton’s Ducks is a work of art. Cat Sebastian is always fun, but her recent Kitt Webb and Marian Hayes combo are not only good queer romances, they’re also deeply satisfying in their radical anti-nobility beliefs. Oh, and I reread Persuasion and remembered how much I love it. It’s the best Jane Austen, and I’m not just saying that because I’m old and second chances are everything.

That’s it. That was my year in reading, or at least, my perception of it now, from the end of it. At some point it’d be a fun exercise to try to think through the last five years or so of reading just from memory, to see which books really have stuck with me. I might have misjudged a lot of my immediate reactions. But that’s the beauty of books, I think. We read them in one moment, and then they continue to stay with us and shift shape for years to come, whether we reread them or not. They are the best time-travelers, and I am grateful each time I encounter a book for the writers who share them with us.

notes

So how does reading fit into all this? For me, it meant that I read a lot less—barely 50 books, well under my peak of 100+ and under what I think of as my typical rate in the 70s or 80s. This is partly because I just didn’t want to read. I was restless. I wanted to escape but also I was tired of escaping. I also, to be honest, spent a lot of time self-medicating myself through pandemic anxieties and loneliness, and so I wasn’t always in a condition to really dive into reading.

But I also read some really great things. I joined a librarianish book club and although I haven’t always managed to read our monthly selections, I have read book-related books that I might not have otherwise, and I have vastly enjoyed the company. So for the first time, I’m including some workish/non-fiction in my reading round-up, which shouldn’t be taken as a sign that I haven’t read any work-related books in the past handful of years, but that this is the first year in which the category of reading-that-is-exciting-and-enjoyable-and-potentially-bibliography-related-but-fun-even-if-not is a real one. I keep meaning to write a post about my thinking around feminist bibliography and how that connects to mutual aid and other pandemic lessons, and I maybe actually will. But in the meantime, this is the first year in ages for me to really feel sparks of excitement when reading things about book history and I am really happy about that.

But the main point of this reading list is to keep track of my fiction reading, since that’s what I tend to lose track of. It’s weird, that fiction can be such a blur for me. Not all of it—the ones that hit stay, if not in all their details, in some larger picture that makes sense of why it made an impact. But there’s so much of what I read that just mushes together. I don’t read for self-improvement, I don’t read because I need to keep up with the discourse, I don’t read because I think I should. I read because I want to lose myself in a book. Sometimes I only need a book to occupy me during the minutes I’m reading. Sometimes I crave a book that will pull at my brain and heart while I’m not reading it. Sometimes I don’t know which book will be which until time has passed. Add to that my habit of sometimes reading so fast I can’t retain what I’ve read more than a short period of time, and sometimes I can’t actually remember what a book was or what I thought of it if I don’t have it written down. And I have PhD in English that, as I tell my kids, gives me a license to make up new words and, I guess, to feel okay about how I read, because all forms of reading are what you make of them, and if you want to scold people for never reading when what you mean is they don’t read the same works you do, then I am here to tell you that you’re full of it.

Anyway.

Here’s what comes to mind from my year of reading in this year of fear and hope and disappointment and ennui:

Arkady Martine. I read her first book, A Memory Called Empire, over the summer and am just now starting the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace. I had seen a bunch of recommendations for Memory but brain farts made it hard to feel ready to pick up. But!!!! For someone who thinks of herself as a reader and who thinks about allusions and literary echoes and who also is interested in archives and memory-keeping, this really hit the spot. Not to mention the details around how empires are built and maintained and and and and. What I’m saying is that if you’re interested in these sorts of things, this is a series that explores those questions and their intersections with identity and community and love.

Dean Spade. I got really into mutual aid this year. Not just as an idea, but as an ethical and daily practice that I’m trying to shift into. You might have seen me post on social media about a group that I’m part of and how it’s fundamentally changed my sense of how we can be in the world. (The Consistent Money-Moving Project! It’s based on the premise that a small, steady, pool of money can make a significant difference to people’s lives; you can follow us on instagram and someday on our website, when we get around to focusing on that instead of redistributing money.) I hadn’t really thought about mutual aid before the pandemic. I knew about it from the Black Panthers and the various Occupies. But as a way about thinking how we are responsible to and for each other and how we can make our own just worlds? That was new to me. (And for real, it has had a big impact on how I’m thinking about FemBib, and that post really is actually coming.)

Becky Chambers. I got so many recommendations to try the Wayfarers series and this year I jumped in. I’ve only read the first two—my SFF child devoured the entire series as soon as I told him to try the first—but I am pretty sure that I will continue to love them. The one that really sticks with me is the second in the series, A Closed and Common Orbit, which is about artificial intelligence and bodies and what makes a body your housing and what makes a family your family and a home a home. Could you get more important questions?

Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology is about the same things but from the direction of a series of lectures by a materials engineer and feminist and pacificist. I don’t remember why I thought if I read this that it would me think about feminist bibliography, but it did. (My guess is that this is due to Deb Chachra and I am really looking forward to her book on infrastructure.) It also helped me understand why the science fiction books I’m drawn to are the ones that speak to me. I’m not really interested in toys, but if there are new technologies that help us imagine new communities that get us one step closer to a reparative and equitable world? I’m there.

Kelsey McKinney’s God Spare the Girls is not about what might come to mind when we talk about technology, but it is about systems of faith and gender and how a young woman negotiates the chasm that is widening between how she thinks the world is and how she is recognizing it and herself to be. Gentle and fierce, more complicated than it initials presents as, and compassionate even as it judges—it’s a book I keep recommending.

And Stephen Graham Jones‘s The Only Good Indians is a genre I don’t usually read (I love a murder mystery; I hate horror) but it pulled me through the scare and gore (it actually felt usually like gore in service of the story) and the result was a story about community and history and destruction and the power of stepping outside settler frameworks and categories to reclaim the past and redress wrongs.

Catch me on a different day and my choices might change. But when I close my eyes and remember 2021, these are the ones that float to the top. And when I imagine what the world of 2021 will have created, what I hope is that these lessons about communities and reparations and equity are the ones we will prioritize.

Here’s to building a future that we are excited about.

I’ve written before about the value of reading whatever it is that strikes your fancy in the moment that you need to read:

I don’t need to have everything I read be important or moving or revealing. Sometimes I just read to pass the time. I’m a big believer in reading whatever and however you want. There is joy and value in reading, regardless of what you’re reading. It shouldn’t be a vitamin that you take out of obligation to be healthier or more morally upstanding. It should be everything from the desserts you reward yourself with to savory treats to substantive fiber and calories that give you the energy and health to get through the day. What book is your perfect cocktail that you sink into? Which book is the steak that you ingest slowly and deliberately? Where’s the book that is the cotton candy that evaporates the moment you touch it leaving you sweet and sticky and mystified that it disappeared so soon?

from last year’s reading review, “reading for endings”: https://sarahwerner.net/blog/2019/12/reading-for-endings/

But it was extra hard this year to figure out what it was that I wanted to read in the moment of reading. I, probably like many of you, had no room to wrestle with the serious in my reading life when my waking life was so consumed with death and racial injustice and missing my friends and loneliness and the horrors of my government. But equally so, how could I read fluff when my daily life was so not about fluff? That didn’t feel right, either. I need to process and I needed rich language and I needed to wrestle with life.

I’ve also written before about how reading is tied up in my sense of who I am and reading fiction is part of how I make sense of the world. When my father died and I lost my ability to read, it threw me into a tailspin—that story is the tale of “being a reader, again and still” as well as the rediscovery of myself as a reader—and I have been patient with myself since then but also always wary that I will once more lose that ability to sink into a book when I need it. I think having been through the ups and downs of reading and trauma before made it a bit easier to process what this year has done and is doing to who I am as a reader.

Looking back on what I read this year a handful of things jump out at me. One is that this is the year I discovered Elly Griffith’s series about Ruth Galloway, a prickly forensic archaeologist at a uni in East Anglia who of course ends up being repeatedly pulled into helping investigate local murders when the police force needs her assistance in determining the dates of the dead bodies they find. I love Ruth. These books became comfort reading for me in part because of Ruth and in part because I learn a lot about the past of that corner of Britain in reading them.

Some of the other books that stuck with me offered comfort in a different sort of way. I don’t think comfort is the first adjective, or maybe even any adjective, that most readers would use to describe the first two books in Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb trilogy. But there’s something about how the group of adversaries in Gideon the Ninth—especially Gideon and Harrow—come to work together that does offer a kind of comfort at a time when it feels like we are all fighting against each other in a race for resources. The comfort offered by Harrow the Ninth is of an entirely different sort. It’s the comfort of watching someone suffer through mourning and working—very badly—through how to live with loss. That hardly sounds like comfort, but if someone you’ve loved deeply has died, Harrow’s struggles will resonate in ways that might be cathartic.

Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is also about loss, although it doesn’t feel like that at first. If you haven’t read it yet, I’m not going to say anything more about the plot, because you need to live through its meandering and unraveling. But the ending made me weep in its nuances. Would I have felt the same if I hadn’t read it in the middle of a deeply circumscribed life? I don’t know. Probably, maybe, yes. She is such a gifted world builder and writer that I think she would have brought me there regardless.

The main character of Anna Burns’s Milkman also lives in a deeply circumscribed world, albeit one vastly different from Piranesi’s and my pandemic one. I was never a young woman in the Troubles, but I was a young woman caught in a cesspool of expectations, and Burns captures that element of growing up so well and draws from that all the rest of the ways in which the narrator is trapped mercilessly by things she wants to escape but cannot that I found it claustrophobic to read. That isn’t to dissuade you from reading it. Rather, it’s a recommendation. Read it slowly, take breaks if you need to. But I found it exactly as amazing as all of the awards for it said it was.

I’d put off reading Emily St John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel because I was worried it wouldn’t live up to Station Eleven, which continues to be one of my favorite novels. And I was worried both that I couldn’t stomach something about pandemics and the end of the world and that it wouldn’t be about that world. But it is marvelous, a novel that is adjacent to the world of Station Eleven, a rewriting of that novel that expands it and dwells on the multiplicities of stories and layering of narratives. It felt like a novel about possibilities, even when the choices that were taken were sometimes ones that led to sadness.

All year I’ve been thinking about Sandra Newman’s The Heavens, which was one of my favorites when it came out. (My quick thoughts on it are in last year’s post.) I haven’t finished it yet and I’m dreading it a bit, now that I know how it ends. I don’t think I’m going to find anything comforting in this reread, but I wasn’t expecting to. I didn’t find it a comforting book the first time. It felt deeply sad to me, full of a desire to save the world but enmeshed in a vision that we make worse everything we touch. Poor Kate, to be unable to save the world, to be the only person who remembers how good things used to be, to be the only one who grasps the possibility of a better life. But maybe at least she got to see that vision?

The one bright thing for me this year has been the young people I know who do see that possibility for a better world and who have been building mutual support communities to get there. Can they wrest the world to a better place? Maybe. There have been dramatic changes this year. They’ve not all been bad. I don’t think reading makes us better people, and I don’t think reading will save us. But I do think that reading can help us imagine other futures and other pasts and maybe that will help us move out of this hellscape into something better.

I also stopped recording my reading in list form while reading and instead used my instagram account with the hashtag #cursorybookreviews along with just the briefest of comments.¹ When I started thinking about what I read this year, I discovered that, true to form, I could hardly remember what was this year and what wasn’t. But my ability to remember plots and other details was even shakier this year without a list. I tried to remember what stood out without referring to records and just couldn’t. Ali Smith, Madeline ffitch, Sandra Newman.

That’s okay. I don’t need to remember everything I read. I don’t need to have everything I read be important or moving or revealing. Sometimes I just read to pass the time. I’m a big believer in reading whatever and however you want. There is joy and value in reading, regardless of what you’re reading. It shouldn’t be a vitamin that you take out of obligation to be healthier or more morally upstanding. It should be everything from the desserts you reward yourself with to savory treats to substantive fiber and calories that give you the energy and health to get through the day. What book is your perfect cocktail that you sink into? Which book is the steak that you ingest slowly and deliberately? Where’s the book that is the cotton candy that evaporates the moment you touch it leaving you sweet and sticky and mystified that it disappeared so soon?

There are definitely books I read this year that have stayed with me, even without having to consult a list. Sandra Newman’s The Heavens is astonishing—a meditation on past and present, healing and harming, volition and loss. (Plus I loved the Elizabethan London and characters that make up one of the plot strands, which is pretty rare for me.) I’m looking forward to rereading it and seeing how it shifts now that I’ve been through its trajectory once. Don’t read it if you’re looking for a happy ending. Do read it if you love gorgeous language and complex lives.

I discovered Madeline Miller, first Circe and then The Song of Achilles. They are definitely not a series but they are two sides of a problem—how does fate define you and how do you live when you think you have no choice? I really liked Circe, but I fell in love with The Song of Achilles. I also could barely read it, especially as it progresses. You know what’s coming, Achilles and Patroclus know what’s coming, and no one can stop it. I had to put it down to breathe and then pick it up again because I couldn’t resist it. I wept through the end while I was on an airplane and I want to recommend it to everyone.

I had a similar experience with Madeline ffitch’s Stay and Fight. “Yes! Full of fury and love” was what I wrote for #cursorybookreviews, and it’s still the best way I have of describing it. There are so many bad choices being made by all of the characters, bad choices because they have no other choices or because they’re desperately trying to find their way out of world that tells them they can’t be. I loved it even as I was screaming at it.

I read some delicious lighter stuff this year, too. Alyssa Cole’s Reluctant Royals series is fun (and serious too; romances aren’t simple fluff). Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon series are great mysteries, especially if you like National Parks. It’s a good thing we (still, despite that fucker-in-charge) have so many parks, because I don’t want this series to ever end; there are 19 so far, and I’ve only read the first four. Sara Gran’s Claire de Witt series is not exactly light and not exactly a mystery series. They are fabulous and mysterious and full of epistemological wrestling.

It’s only now, looking back to see what stuck with me, that I realize how much I was and am thinking about endings. The mysteries that solve things tidily, even as the lead characters can’t solve their own lives. The novels about fate and resistance and change. These are themes that are written about so often—how do we make and change our lives?—so it obviously says something more about me and my moment than it does about the current state of books.

2019 been an exhausting year for me. It wasn’t as rough as 2018, but it’s been a year that took me through separation and divorce and disruption and discovery. January was miserable, April shifted into better terrain, and August starting bringing joy. I don’t know what will be coming next and yet I am not afraid of who I will be.

There are no tidy endings in my life. Everything is messy and everything is great. At the same time, the world is a disaster and we are descending into a man-made hell of ecological nightmares and white supremacy. I still look for the helpers and I find them. Sometimes the books I read help me do that, and sometimes they make room for me to rest and breathe. I hope you all have books that help you span the breadth of what we need to do in our collective lives.

notes

But it’s also this year. This year is too long. There’s too much in it. We all joke about this—the Tuesday afternoon tweets saying “I can’t believe it’s Friday already!” But it’s not really a joke. There’s the Friday afternoon news dumps, the revelations day after day about some shocking, previously unthinkable thing happening, the radical cracking of what so many people (wrongly) thought were the safe foundations of democracy and global community. I literally had to google when the mass shooting happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida because it seemed unfathomable it was this year. (It was this year. It was Valentine’s Day 2018. The March for Our Lives was this year. All those teenagers trying to lead us into a better future, marching and working and crying and talking—all of that was this year.)

It was a too-long year for me personally, too. I started off the year exhausted and unsettled and that just got worse and worse until it all broke at the end of the summer and I figured out how to take steps to make my life into something that will feel stronger. I look at February and it feels like a lifetime ago; July was me and not-me. I spent the late summer and fall dealing with memories of sexual assault, I spent days marching and crying and tweeting all of this to the world. I made the decision to live with my emotions more out in the open, which is the opposite of my lifetime of it’s-all-totally-fine instincts. It’s not all totally fine. It’s not okay and we shouldn’t be pretending it is. And so I try to put that into action, and it means both that I have shed so many burdens but that I am also feeling raw and exposed and not entirely sure of how my emotions work.

My reading this year was all about this turmoil. Like last year, it was hard to know what to read almost every time I started a new book. I thought briefly that I could do a lot of reading 20th-century classics I’d missed—and I longed to be reading those and got a lot of recommendations of what to read, but then in August my brain broke and I could only read easy things. Only what’s easy? If it’s easy for you, is it easy for me? At a friend’s suggestion I read Connie Willis’s All Clear books but while I couldn’t stop reading them, they also made me worry endlessly and weep in anxiety: would everything turn out okay? would everyone get to where they belong? what is home anyway?

I was prone to weeping while reading this year. I almost couldn’t see the words on the page making my way through Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing; I hope you’re already read it. If not, I highly recommend doing so, just beware. Jenny Offil’s Dept of Speculation is another about the struggle of making a family—an entirely different struggle than that Ward’s characters face, but equally powerfully written and tear-inducing. I didn’t cry during Lydia Kiesling’s The Golden State, which has the most realistic depiction I’ve read of the push-pull of attachment-claustrophobia of mothering a small child, but I’m not sure why. Maybe my tears had dried up by that point?

Some of the strongest books for me were ones in which, by sheer force of will, the lead character pulls herself out of the disabling troubles from her horrible past and into a healthier future. Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black seems so innocuous at first, but don’t be fooled; it will gut-punch you. I went back and read Denise Mina’s Garnethill trilogy again because I wanted to see another way of handling that pattern. Both are hard to read and both end in a place that make you think healing and good things are possible and that we have the strength within us to do what we need to do.

A less traumatic version of this narrative is Heather Abel’s The Optimistic Decade. Remember Reagan and fears about nuclear arms and, if you were an ardent lefty, the despair of trying to figure out how to make people listen to you when they were so hellbent on not? Add in a teenage girl who is trying to figure out how to grow up and you’ve got a narrative about how to find optimism and activism in times when they seem impossible to reconcile with the world around you.

If I have a hope for 2019, for me and for all of us, it’s that: may we find the strength that is inside of us and bring it to the work so badly needed of repairing the world.

What a luxury it is to be able to set aside time to read, when other people are facing the horrors of not being able to get into this country to be reunited with their families or to be safe from persecution and poverty and illness, when others are here but cannot leave and are scared to open their doors for fear of being dragged away from their homes, when others are reliving sexual assault and harassment and humiliation from yesterday or decades ago.

But what a necessity it is to find the time to read, when that’s how you find yourself in this world, when that’s how to understand the stories other people have to tell, when that’s where you explore how you feel and what can be.

Reading might sometimes be a retreat, but it’s not a moving backwards away from the battle, but an oasis for refueling for the next day.

So what did I read this year? Lots and lots of books by women (87% of the novels I read were written by women), not enough books by writers of color (only 20%). I read way more Afro-futurism than I have before (Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Nalo Hopkinson) and I did a lot more rereading that I usually do (Station Eleven again, Song of Solomon, Tana French, Tony Hillerman).

I discovered two authors who were new to me and proceeded to devour everything they’ve written. Denise Mina writes astonishingly good mysteries that are in part about who dunnit, but are mostly about being a working class woman in Glasgow trying to make your way in the world. I started with the Alex Morrow series (which focuses on a detective, but isn’t very police proceduralish), then moved back to the Paddy Meehan books (set in the 80s with a young woman striving to become a journalist and is great for newspaper culture), then ended up with her first books, the Garnethill trilogy. When I was trying to choose which books to highlight as the ones that really stuck with me this year, I decided I couldn’t really do all of Mina’s books, so it’s the Garnethill ones that I settled on. There’s some aspects of them that feel a bit weaker in some ways, but the characters are so very present and the themes of recovering from abuse and balancing between revenge and cure are powerful. Mina’s most recent book is excellent, too, and you might at first glance think it’s weirdly (for her) a book focused on men, but you’d be wrong; her female characters might figure in what the men think is the background but what she and we know is central to life.

The other new-to-me author was Ann Leckie, and the first book in her Radch trilogy, Ancillary Justice is blow-you-out-the-world good. Sci-fi opera, kind of, but really an investigation of gender and what makes a person a person and the relationship between humans and technology and revenge and justice. My 16yo son had been recommending it to me for ages, and when I started it in July, I found it initially so confusing in such a compelling way that I couldn’t put it down. And when it went on sale in late November, I bought it and reread it, and then the 2nd and 3rd without a pause, and they were just as good the second time around. Her most recent one, Provenance, was also great, if in a lighter style than the earlier ones; the focus on manipulating the history of objects from the past to give present owners legitimacy is particularly enticing for those of us in the cultural heritage fields.

I don’t know why I hadn’t read Mary McCarthy’s The Group before (or any of her other novels) but I’m so glad I finally did. It was hard at first—these women and their tiny little constricted lives!—and then it became increasingly clear that the story of the book was the nature of realizing that constriction and trying to move out of it. And another new-to-me-and-not-to-everyone-else was Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. Why did I not read this earlier? It’s powerful and lyrical and so very intense in the layers of pain and love and aching for family.

Three others that have stuck with me, and I expect will continue to do so, were all focused on the interplay of past and present in African-American lives. In Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the lead character moves back and forth in time; in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (which I read in grad school and reread along with my 16yo), the lead moves across land to try to recover his family history; in James McBride’s A Song Yet Sung, the mysterious young woman at the center of the story’s movement is an escaped slave who hears and shapes the future.

I didn’t consciously choose most of these books to talk to me about the world I’m struggling with today, but they are the books I read that have hit me the hardest—they are the books I couldn’t bear to put down and couldn’t leave behind when they ended.

The full, annotated list of what I read is here, and I’m already onto starting my 2018 list. Here’s to the luxury and necessity of reading—

Shouldn’t that be obvious? It’s not reading that saves you, but the doors that reading can open and your willingness to walk through them. If you only read books that reinforce what you already believe, you won’t learn anything new. If you only read books to pass the time between being awake and being asleep, you won’t engage with new ideas. If you only read because you think you’re supposed to, if you’re only reading to better yourself, you’re missing the entire world of ideas and emotions and beliefs that reading can open.

I read a lot of books this year, topping 100 novels, which is more than I’ve read in recent years. Part of this is a continuing rediscovery of my love of reading, part of this is being part of a community of readers. There was also a long stretch where I was struggling with migraines and couldn’t work at my computer or iPad but could read on my Kindle. I read a lot of different kinds of books, and certainly some random stuff, but I also had some deliberate strategies for finding things to read.

I made a conscious decision this year to read books written by women, in large part because the depiction of women in many mysteries and thrillers written by men just piss me off. ((For me, a big exception to this rule is Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series, which I’m slowly working through in order and have neared my pace to a crawl because I’m coming up to the moment where I’m caught up with what’s been written. It can be sad when you have to wait for a new book instead of having the comfort that there’s already one waiting for you when you’re ready for it.)) I also made a conscious decision, part way through the year, to read more books written by black authors. Race so often drops out of white-authored novels, or even worse, comes up in horrifying stereotypes. But we—I—live in a world in which only some people are white and many people are not. Why would I want to read novels that don’t represent the fullness of all lives? ((If you’re curious, of the 102 books I read in 2016, 72 were books by women and 31 by men; 20 books were by authors who are not white, and 3 by white authors featuring protagonists of color, which is not the same thing, but these 3 were books that engaged with race in ways that I thought were sincere and felt real. Let’s not talk about Lionel Shriver (who isn’t on my list this year); instead, read Underground Airlines, Steeplejack, and There But For The as examples of how a white author’s willingness to understand other cultures can pay off in rich explorations.))

So what stood out for me this year? Octavia Butler, for starts. I’d never read any of her books, so dove into the Xenogenesis series and was floored. They creeped me out in the best way, making me think about what it meant to be human and how much sexual desires control social ties. I’m now part-way through the Patternist books and am having the same combination of fascination and discomfort. Like isn’t the right word for my relationship to these books, but that’s why I keep reading them.

I loved Wolf Hall without reservation. I’d resisted reading Hilary Mantel’s books for years, even as my spouse and friends raved and they racked up awards. I think I just didn’t want to read about Thomas Cromwell, thankyouverymuch. But I was wrong and I’m so glad I read this book. I didn’t love Bring Up The Bodies as much, in part because what I loved about Wolf Hall was the meandering mixture of present and past; the drive of the plot in Bodies got in the way of that. Even after I finished reading them I continued to wander around in Mantel’s world. ((Funny/not-funny story: last year, when my husband was in the hospital after an accident and being monitored for a brain injury, the nurse routinely asked him every hour if he knew where he was and when it was and who I was. He always knew what year it was and who I was. But he could rarely figure out where he was, and one time he answered that he was in Wolf Hall. I am super grateful he didn’t think I was Anne Boleyn, and that he’s now fully recovered.))

I stumbled across Ali Smith’s There But For The and was amazed by it. I knew and loved her How To Be Both, but now that I’ve read another of her books, I’m delighted to have an author I can savor and that there are some older books I haven’t yet read and new books to come. The themes of Ali Smith’s book—race and London and white liberalism and growing up and making community—are also those of Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (albeit in a less fabulist version). As with all of Zadie Smith’s books, this one was beautifully crafted and made me think about them long after I’d stopped reading.

Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad is everything all the accolades say it is. I also reread his The Intuitionist this year and still think it’s my favorite of his. Both made me think about the history and present of how slavery and segregation have shaped our country and the powerful efforts of blacks to write their own identity and to create a better future. But—and this is unfair that they both came out the same year and they get addressed alongside each other—what really made me think about how our present world is shaped by our not-yet-past-history of slavery was Ben Winters’s Underground Airlines. If you’re tempted to think of the institution of slavery as having ended, read this. His imagining of modern slavery is a depiction of the big-scale economics of cheap labor and bypassing civil rights that is our world today.

And Tana French! Two of the books that I read this year that continue to haunt me are hers: The Secret Place and The Trespasser. Both of them are so intimately and deeply about girlhood and womanhood and the ways in which we make secret places for ourselves and we find ourselves trespassers in the larger male-dominated culture. Trespasser, in particular, with its depiction of Antoinette Conway’s difficulties in making her way in a male murder squad made me think again about Hillary Clinton and how being judged constantly can warp your own sense of self. (Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels cover the same territory in a very different way; they fall into the categories both of things I came late to and books I don’t particularly like but can’t stop thinking about.)

Almost all of these books I’ve mentioned here address the same problem: How hard it is to be yourself in a world that doesn’t automatically make room for you.

Books did save me this year. They made a space for me to enter into and imagine conversations and debates and find emotions and comforts that I wouldn’t have otherwise. I hope you read that way, too. Read for comfort, read for community, read for learning about yourself and other people and discovery and empathy and ideas that make you uncomfortable.

Here’s my full annotated list of what I read this past year; there’s a lot there that I loved that I didn’t mention in this quick take, and there are some books I hated, too. (Never be afraid to stop reading books you don’t like; you don’t owe them anything and life is too short.)

I hope you read some good books in 2016, that you will read more books in 2017, and that you will do everything you need to that helps you live in our world and that makes this a better place.

I’ve really been pretty fortunate, given that I could easily not have access to anything I need (more on that after the break). But it’s a bit of a hodge-podge and there are still things I don’t have access to. So for the curious, here’s a list of what resources I use and how/if I have access to them. The specifics of the list come from my particular research interests (at the moment, early modern printing practices), but the general strategies and obstacles should resonate well beyond my particular niche.

One point before I get started. This issue came up for me because I chose to go to work for myself. But the difficulties in accessing resources is also true for faculty at many schools that can’t afford expensive databases and journals. Staff at independent libraries and museums often don’t have much access, either. ((I used to at the Folger via its affiliation with Amherst; I don’t know what the Newberry or Huntington folks do.)) And did you know that lots of program officers at grant-funding agencies don’t have access to these things? It’s true! I’m not sure how pressing it is for journalists to research book history, but lots of journalists report on subjects for which it is necessary to draw on academic research, and they, too, don’t have access. It’s a wide-spread issue, and there is not, at the moment, great ways of handling it. But this is an informative post, not a ranting post, so let’s get on with it.

Success!

Some things are open access:

English Short Title Catalogue: The ESTC is an open-access catalog of (basically) works printed in English or in the British Isles and North America between 1473 and 1800. It’s hosted by the British Library and it’s essential for working in the early modern period and I refer to it more often than I can count. update: ESTC is starting to link to more open-access digitizations of books, in addition to the EEBO and ECCO links it already provides.

Universal Short Title Catalogue: The USTC is an open-access catalog of works printed in Europe up to 1600 (the beta site is expanding access through 1700). It’s hosted by the University of St Andrews, and it’s a super catalog, and I love it also because it links to digitizations of works, where possible, often open-access ones.

RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage: This just recently became an open-access journal and praise be, because it’s the place to go for lots of the questions facing special collections libraries today.

There are a fair number of open-access images of early printed texts available online; see my list but also my caveat about what a drag it is trying to find things this way.

update: I forgot to mention that institutional repositories are a great help to me. I rarely start there, but if I don’t have access to a journal, I will sometimes google the title and find that the article’s author has deposited it in their IR. Do you have access to an institutional or disciplinary repository? Have you negotiated contracts that allow you to deposit your work? Please do those things. It really, truly helps.

My alumna affiliations pay off:

JSTOR and Project Muse: These are huge collections of journals, and many of the ones I need are online through these sites. I get access to these through my alumna affiliations with Bryn Mawr College and the University of Pennsylvania. What specific journals you can read depends on the package a school has; I tend to connect through Penn, since they generally have a larger collection. A few years ago, JSTOR really started pushing alum packages, so it’s always worth checking with your school(s). It’s also possible to get individual access (there’s the free Register & Read, with limited journal participation, and the more expansive and expensive JPASS, although a lot of scholarly societies offer discounted subscriptions).

There are a bunch of other resources I have access to through Penn, including a huge number of Adam Matthew databases, like Colonial America, Eighteenth Century Journals, and Shakespeare in Performance. This is amazing to me, because I when I checked what I had access to last year, Adam Matthew was not an option. Fingers crossed it sticks around!

I joined some societies specifically to get access to stuff:

Early English Books Online: EEBO is a collection of digitized microfilms of works printed in English or in the British Isles and North America between 1473 and 1700. It’s a database published by ProQuest and only available through paid library subscriptions. But if you’re a member of the Renaissance Society of America, you can get access to EEBO. RSA memberships are on a sliding scale, starting at $35 for annual income less than $12,000. ((They’ve just announced this, so the new membership scale might not be on their site yet.)) It’s a super reasonable price, I think. I couldn’t function without EEBO, so I’m super grateful that RSA provides this. Earlier this year, when it looked like that agreement had fallen apart, I panicked. Please, please, never let that agreement end. Please. (A note here: I am only really interested in facsimile images of works, not in the transcriptions that the Text Creation Partnership provides, so yes, I know about the release of the first batch of TCP texts and no, that is not helpful to me.)

The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society: A long-running important journal of book history that’s part of the Oxford Journals suite and not available through JSTOR (although post-2006 issues are on Project Muse). But I joined The Bibliographical Society ($65 a year), and so get full access to the current and past issues that way.

Hi, public library!

Oxford English Dictionary: The OED is the best dictionary when you need the long history of definitions for a word. I was so incredibly excited when I realized I got online access through Montgomery County Public Libraries.

The MoCo libraries also have access to a few other resources, including the Gale Literature Resource Center, which includes the great Bracken and Silver collection of stationer biographies, The British Literary Book Trade, 1475-1700.

I could shell out more dough

The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America would be available to me if I joined BSA for $65, but I haven’t yet. update Feb 2017: Weirdly, I can get access to PBSA through JSTOR, it just doesn’t appear in their list of journals. But if I search for an article in the journal, I can get to the entire run of 1912-2015 that way. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: The DNB has individual subscriptions for $29.95 a month or $295 a year. I love the DNB but I don’t need it enough to pay that.

World Shakespeare Bibliography: I still sometimes do Shakespeare research, but it’s generally not my focus at the moment, so I’m not paying $88 (though as a member of Shakespeare Association of America, I’d get a discount).

update Feb 2017: There are other libraries that offer access to some databases through a membership, including the Boston Athanaeum (not cheap) and apparently the Wellcome Library (free!), which astonishingly offers off-site access to a huge number of databases.

Books, books, books. You know what’s amazing about being at a university? You can check out books from your library. And almost always, if your uni doesn’t have what you want, they get it for you through interlibrary loan. I do not have a research library from which I can borrow books or that can procure what I need. What this means is that sometimes I buy books, but hardly ever from academic publishers that price their books for library purchasing (hi, Cambridge UP and your $99 hardbacks). I buy used books (some of what I want isn’t in print anyway). When in dire need, I have a choice of libraries that I can schlep to and sit in their reading rooms. I’m ridiculously lucky that the Folger is within commuting distance and that they are a library that specializes in most of the early printing information I need, and I can often find the more digital stuff is often at the University of Maryland or at the Library of Congress. (I could pay an annual fee to borrow books from UMd as a “community researcher,” but it hasn’t been necessary.) If I lived in, say, western Maryland, I’d have a much harder time.

Gnashing of teeth

Not everything works out. There are some resources that I used to use or that I would like to use that I can’t.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online: ECCO is like EEBO, but for the 18th century (and, honestly, with more annoying digitization practices, like omitting blank pages from their imaging) (also, I’m not sure why it’s not hyphenated–doesn’t “eighteenth century” modify “collections” and therefore should be “eighteenth-century”?–but that’s how they do it). As far as I know, Gale doesn’t offer individual subscriptions. (Again: I’m really only interested in facsimiles not in transcriptions.)

Early European Books: EEB is like EEBO but for European books and with actual decent images, not digitized microfilm. (It hasn’t reached the stage of including all print that EEBO claims to have, but it’s striving for that.) ProQuest doesn’t offer individual subscriptions so I’m SOL.

I beg.

Like many scholars, even those who are full-time faculty, I have to ask for help in getting copies of things I need to read. I tend to shy away from tweeting out calls for help, usually targeting smaller groups of friends in the field I’m working in. I’m often able to get a copy of what I need that way, but it’s not practical for large-scale research.

My take-away

I really am lucky. I’m lucky because thanks to RSA I have access to the single most important thing I need at a really low cost. I’m lucky because I went to well-resourced schools for my BA and PhD. (I just checked: a Maryland alum doesn’t get off-site access to any library resources.) I’m lucky because I live in a place that has research libraries. I’m lucky because I know lots and lots of scholars and they are willing to help.

If I worked on, say, 20th-century manuscripts, and lived in western Maryland, and had gone to a state university for my PhD, and was just starting out in my scholarly career, I wouldn’t be able to work as an independent researcher at all.