The Year in Reading

I read 51 books last year. That makes it a little difficult to pick favorites, but I noticed some thematic highlights.

Short Stories for Bad Times

I only read two short fiction collections this year, but luckily for me they were both bangers.

Good Night, Sleep Tight – Brian Evenson

If Brian Evenson has a new collection out, I read it. He always hits that weird fiction / literary fiction sweet spot for me. Predictably, I loved it.

Liberation Day – George Saunders

Favorites from this collection were “Liberation Day”, “Ghoul”, and “Elliot Spencer”.

It’s So Over

I read a lot of science fiction about pre- and post-apocalyptic Earth. Let’s say it’s for research.

After World – Debbie Urbanski

Excellent and refreshingly experimental, but you may need to be in the right headspace to read it. Post-apocalyptic fiction at its bleakest.

Hum – Helen Philips

Motherhood, climate and economic anxiety, surveillance culture, and AI. If you read it and like it, check out Philips’ The Need.

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang – Kate Wilhelm

A 1970s classic I’d never read, this in some ways is less a post-apocalyptic novel and more of a meditation on identity, individualism, and family structure. Also, clones with hive mind psychic powers.

Terrible Worlds (Ironclads, Firewalkers, and Ogres) – Adrian Tchaitovsky

I thoroughly enjoyed all three of these novellas, but Firewalkers was probably my favorite.

We’re So Back

Let literary fiction be weird!

Headshot – Rita Bullwinkel

Skittering, off-putting prose that tells a series of stories through a girls’ boxing championship. I loved it.

Y/N – Esther Yi

Engages intimately with the particular derangements of fan culture. “Y/N”, short for “your name”, originated as a device in fan fiction that invites the reader to insert themselves into the narrative. In this case, our “Y/N” is a distinctive character who draws us into her dream-like pursuit of Moon, the unobtainable object of her affection.

I Who Have Never Known Men – Jacqueline Harpman

Short, strange, and devastating.

The Empusium – Olga Tokarczuk

Olga does it again! This book does absolutely wild things with perspective and narration that had me reeling.

Books About Books

This started as a project to finally read certain 1990s classics, and I ended up ambling along this theme all year.

The Name of the Rose – Umberto Ecco

Amazed that this was a bestseller given how esoteric it is. Proof that if you write something attuned to your very particular special interests (monasteries, labyrinths, medieval religious schisms), you will succeed.

If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler – Italo Calvino

It’s a classic for a reason. Incredible opening in which the book instructs you how to properly read it. The overarching plot is ultimately a little goofy, but the genre shifts in the stories-within-the-story were technically impressive.

Possession: A Romance – A.S. Byatt

Were you an English major? Do I have a book for you.

Fingersmith – Sarah Waters

For the Dickens enthusiasts, pornography historians, and sapphics. I’d previously watched a film adaptation of this, and was worried that knowing most of the major plot twists in advance would dampen my enjoyment of reading the novel. It didn’t.

The Night Ocean – Paul LaFarge

H.P. Lovecraft, histories true and false, and relationships that go spectacularly wrong.

The Year in Writing, By the Numbers

4 short stories completed
3 edited for submission / 1 set aside
1 new story in progress
~42,000 words of notes and sketches across two competing novel concepts

17 submissions
9 form rejections
2 personal rejections
1 withdrawal
1 acceptance (thanks, Electric Spec!)
3 pending

Goals for 2026

My goal for 2026 is not to do more, but to slow down and engage more deeply. Some of this involves creating little personalized curricula for myself, to wander and explore through my reading. I want to spend less time on chasing contemporary titles and instead dig deep with older work and classics, ranging from Le Guin and Hammett to Dostoevsky and Melville. I kicked off my 2026 reading with The Brothers Karamazov and a book of Harlan Ellison stories, and it’s a pleasure to engage with voices from different times.

I’m also getting a small in-person writing group going again, my first in years, and I’m looking forward to that community and accountability.

I write fiction (for fun, for myself, for you), and I also spend a lot of time writing a particular kind of expository text in my professional life (for money). I am writing much of the day, most days. Over the years, in my professional writing, I have become my own kind of large language model. My brain contains vast reservoirs of the things I have written before, and when I approach a new project I know that there are certain structures I will turn to again and again. I am writing in the codified voice of an institution, not as myself.

With fiction, however, what draws me as a reader and a writer is distinctive voice. I love reading works in translation partially for this reason, because of what the act of translation does to language. As a writer, I often start with a more straightforward draft, and then try to figure out where I can push things off-kilter, whether through language, dialogue, or perspective. The study Unnatural Voices by Brian Richardson is a great introduction to different techniques in making narrative voice weird.

But even outside of more experimental fiction, what makes stories memorable is often a strong voice. Let’s look at one of the all-time greats, Shirley Jackson, and the opening to We Have Always Lived in The Castle.

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

In classic Jackson fashion, there is a lot going on in this opening. While the prose is clear and straightforward, it’s immediately apparent that our narrator, Merricat Blackwood, is neither of those things. She jumps without transition from subject to subject, transmitting a list of facts with very particular asides (but I have had to be content with what I had), and ends with the surprising punch of “Everyone else in my family is dead.” If she is talking to us, the readers, she does not care about our comfort or understanding. This opening is our introduction to Merricat, and sets up in miniature everything we eventually learn about her over the course of the novel.

Unlike fictional AI, the current iterations of large language models don’t have particularly interesting voices. Their writing lacks a sense of surprise, of turn or sting. They move repeatedly to the same structures and rhythms, even when their metaphors collapse into incoherence. The result is prose not so much invisible as forgettable, a kind of emphatic corporate speech that slides away from the mind as soon as it is read. It all sounds the same.

I have a short, horror-ish story I’m shopping around right now that’s about this kind of algorithmic sameification. My story is about doubling, but also about machine-assisted refinement towards a single amalgamation. I have tried to make the narration as alien and off-putting as I possibly can.

Additional Reading

If you’re looking for fresh narrative voices beyond the algorithm, may I recommend seeking out small press publications? You can start with LitHub’s 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025.

I have some author notes on the recently published “Salvage” up on the Electric Spec blog.

One of the things I didn’t dig into in those notes is that this is my first publication in about a decade. Yes, a decade. It’s not that I wasn’t writing at all during that time, but a combination of increasing professional demands, early parenthood, and a lack of clear creative goals meant I ended up with a lot of half-finished drafts that never went anywhere. “Salvage” helped break me out of that slump. By looking more closely at a genre I’ve always loved as a reader, I was able to challenge myself to explore my writing weaknesses (plotting, action) and bring a sense of play and pleasure back to my practice.

I liked writing “Salvage” so much that I wrote a sequel novelette with some of the same characters. Then I wrote a goofy novella about rival wizard apprentices in a locked room murder mystery. I began to write and write. Returning to the kinds of stories that made me into the voracious reader I am today reminded me why I started doing this in the first place.

My current short project has tilted back towards the slipstream gray area I’ve more commonly worked in, but I now feel more confident drawing from a constellation of commercial, experimental, and literary influences without worrying about where my stories fit. They’ll find their place eventually.

I’m pleased to announce that a new story of mine called “Salvage” is in the latest issue of Electric Spec.

“Salvage” is something new for me – an attempt to write a more traditional science fiction story with actual plot (!) and action (!!) while still keeping it weird.

It’s about prison labor and uneasy solidarities. I’m thrilled that Electric Spec is taking a chance on it, and it was a pleasure to work with their editorial team. Later this week, I’ll also be sharing some author notes for their blog.

Maybe it’s in the blood. My late grandfather was a hobbyist street photographer with a keen eye, and some of his work clusters in frames throughout the homes of my extended family. One hangs above my kitchen table.

But I have no desire to make photographs, and I am not very good at it. My snapshots, taken casually on a very old iPhone, always seem to be wan copies of bright moments. Faded and flat, even when newly captured.

My favorite type of photography, by contrast, creates a feeling of hyperreality. It transports me to somewhere else, a vivid place beyond the possibilities of my own two eyes.

The eye is also a camera. A camera is also an eye.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a lunchtime talk on 21st century photography drawn from The New York Public Library’s quietly extraordinary photography collection.

One of the things I like about photography is that sometimes I see a photograph and I think I would like to write something that affects someone like that photograph affects me. I see a photograph and a story opens inside me. Unlike moving images, which can sometimes insidiously influence our dialogue and pacing, a photograph does not distort narrative voice because a photograph is silent. You look at it. Sometimes something in there looks back.

Here are a few I particularly liked:

Aljana Moons 3 – Alexis Peskine

From The Belongings of the Air – Musuk Nolte

From Manon Lanjouère Les Particules project, which creates cyanotypes of plastic waste found in the ocean in the manner of Anna Atkins’ pioneering documentation of ocean plants and algae.

Other Viewing and Reading

Evgenia Arbugaeva

An Arctic photographer, and one of my forever favorites.

Alessandra Sanguinetti

The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams is so good.

“White Dialogues” – Bennet Sims

This story, which engages with the captured ghosts of film, is one I think about a lot.

One of my 2025 resolutions was to see more exhibitions. For many years, especially when I worked in the museum field, regular visits to NYC’s many cultural institutions were simply part of the rhythm of my life. For me, a good exhibition has the same effect as travel – it transports me and leaves me changed, my brain reset and buzzing.

During the pandemic, and the intensity of early parenthood, I got out of that habit. I’m trying to reestablish it. Part of that processes has been going to check out small cultural institutions, many of which offer free or pay-what-you wish admission, like the Museum of Chinese in America. These smaller museums, some of which evolved from community archives or private clubs, offer distinctive insights not just into the subjects they focus on, but also into the history of New York City and collecting/exhibiting more broadly.

One place I’d had on my list was The Grolier Club, a bibliophile society that’s been around since 1884. I went with a friend last month to see Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books.

A digital version of the exhibition is online, but it doesn’t really compare to the pleasure of seeing all those intricately crafted unreal books in person. The exhibition has already left The Grolier Club, but if you’re on the opposite coast it’s currently at The Book Club of California in San Francisco.

This exhibition was particularly fun for me as an immersive piece of metafiction: everything from Le Club Fortsas, the society who supposedly assembled the collection, to the books themselves and many of their authors, are fictional, but each didactic panel and label is written completely straight. The result is a pleasant uncanniness. As a viewer I knew the books were unreal and unwritten, and I enjoyed many of the little literary jokes in the exhibition text and design, but they felt real. It’s a playful exhibition that invites the viewer to join in the play, to enter a world of pretend that is often closed to adults.

Exhibitions are a form of storytelling in their own right, and I find them to be a rich and underutilized source of inspiration. I’m a particular fan of MoMA’s architecture exhibitions, which tend not be as overrun with tourists as the rest of the museum. Favorites over the last few years include Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 and Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism. Architectural renderings are themselves a kind of speculative fiction, and I ended up buying the catalogue for Emerging Ecologies entirely for its architecture of the fantastic.

Imaginary Books, meanwhile, created its own reading list. The exhibition inspired me to finally read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Afterward, I began to write something new – a short story about a traveling scribe who discovers that some unreal marginalia are very real indeed.

It’s still technically January, so I’m not too late for a 2024 recap, am I?

The Year in Reading

This year saw a big dip in my reading rate, mostly because early in the calendar year I started writing in earnest again and it turns out that as a parent and full time worker I only have so much free time. While moving steadily away from social media and doom scrolling did free up a significant amount of time and even more mental bandwidth, the hours in the day are still finite. With reading and writing, however, I find each activity feeds the other. Some reading highlights below.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Cage of Souls is a book I keep thinking about even though it was the first book I read last year. Powerful Gene Wolfe vibes, but with an appealingly flawed and unreliable narrator.

I’d been putting off reading Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi for ages. A new Clarke book appears only once in a while, and I’d been saving it for a special occassion. Finally went ahead and read it and oh boy was that a treat for me.

Some really good, wildly different re-reads this year for research purposes. I went back to Lily King’s excellent Euphoria both to pull apart the mindset of “explorers” and to think about how to write romance that doesn’t suck. I also returned, as I do periodically, to dear Mikhail Bulgakov for Heart of a Dog as I work my way back into a project that I can only describe as Bulgakovian biopunk noir. 

I do really enjoy tracking my reading, but should this be the year I switch to Storygraph? Goodreads is not a great platform, but all my mutuals are there.

2025 Goals: I’d like to stretch myself to read more nonfiction, as I find nonfiction and documentaries often seed my fiction writing. I’d also like to work my way through at least one chunky classic.

The Year in Writing

I don’t actually track “pages” in any real way, so I’ll just report out on projects.

One short story completed, currently submitting.

Two thirds of a science fiction adventure novel, theoretically the first of three, which may or may not ever see the light of day. My goal is to finish it this year – it’s been an excellent exercise in pushing myself to do something other than short fiction and I’m appreciating both the fun and the challenge of building something bigger over a long period of time.

One horror-adjacent experimental flash fiction story that came to me in a late night fugue state after reading this excellent article by Mia Sato about an influencer lawsuit and thinking a lot about social media this year. Currently editing.

2025 Goals: Finish the first draft of my adventure novel, and finish and begin submitting at least one more short story.

It made me think of the artist Ben Grosser’s Stuck in the Scroll project, for which he created an automated monitor for himself that loudly proclaims whenever he’s using TikTok, both in his home and to everyone viewing the project online at any given time. Grosser has done a lot of interesting projects that engage with subverting social media, particularly Minus, but he describes TikTok as the first platform that broke him as he tried to break it down.

This past winter, I started writing seriously again. Since then, I’ve written tens of thousands of words. I finished a new short story and have started submitting it. I completed a rough draft of my first ever attempt at a novella – why not? I’m two thirds of the way through the first draft of a novel, which I’ve also mapped out as the first in a series of three books.

I have no idea if any of these projects will see the light of day, but I am powerfully happy to be working in earnest again. While there are probably many factors to this abrupt surge in creative output, chief among them bringing a greater sense of play into my practice, I do believe that part of it has been my intentional disengagement from my phone. There is a lot of noise out there, and by making my immediate media environment quieter I can better hear myself think.

I’m not anti-internet. I’m still quietly active on an ancient account on Tumblr, the only social media site that seems unable to monetize itself, and thus remains a strange, anonymized space of aesthetic posts, niche interests, and indie artists and writers who really like answering world-building asks. A platform that is simultaneously dying and undead, left only to weirdos and scavengers, it still allows for a truly chronological feed that you can obsessively curate for yourself, creating a narrow stream of ideas and information that can be consumed in reviving little sips. When it finally collapses, so too will my small window to vintage interior design book scans, 1970s science fiction covers, and Dadaist text posts.

I really don’t know what the solution is, when I’m overwhelmed with nostalgia for the wild online ecosystems of my youth. Most new platforms seem to be only clones of existing structures, either new tendrils or protrusions of beasts like Meta, or launched by independent strivers to quickly wither and collapse without regular infusions of venture capital. I just like to read, and write, and look at things. Where to do that? There is a feeling of sliding backward, not into a void, but in time. Rather than advancing, I’m returning to some pre-digital age where I get art books and DVDs from the library, go to museums, and sometimes just stare into the middle distance and do nothing at all.

Other Reading and Watching

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

Ben Grosser Interview with Caitlin Dewey

Faces Places (2017)

I watched this documentary recently for the first time, and was really moved by Varda’s engagement with attention and gaze. Who do we pay attention to, and what do we elevate? What does it mean to see and be seen?

But after parenthood, my free time became sharply constrained. To be alone with my thoughts, to stare at nothing and think while waiting in line at the grocery store or riding the subway, became a rare treat. I wanted to be bored. I wanted to watch my own thoughts percolate and recapture the creativity that boredom had engendered – to draft stories in my head, to conceptualize a jellyfish ship, a genetically modified police state, a detective in a post-scarcity world.

I still haven’t deleted my Instagram account, but I have the application settings arranged so that it can only connect via WiFi rather than cell data, which means I can’t scroll when out and about. Instead, I log in for about 20-30 minutes once every few months or so to respond to messages and catch up on photos. I find myself less anxious. I feel like my brain has more space to slosh around. I am drawn to check it less and less.

I’m not a complete luddite. I have group texts. I call people on the phone. I Facetime for hours at a time to talk about books and cooking. And, I’ve returned to carrying a book with me wherever I go.

I’m not going to lie – I miss things. I miss the life changes and milestones from family and friends that I care about, but with whom for whatever reason I never translated into a texting relationship. I went to the west coast last summer for a wedding of my dear friends K. and Z., and had moments of complete emotional dislocation when I realized how much of other people’s lives I had missed. But, it was also glorious to hear everyone’s stories, to meet new people with no prior knowledge of their lives, to learn in the moment where they were and where they had been and what they cared about.

And I do miss the internet, the version of it that existed when I was growing up – highly personal Geocities sites that forced me to learn HTML to create them for myself, niche forums, chatrooms, blogs. Blogs! I’m convinced that the whole Substack newsletter revival is just the result of a primal collective yearning for blogs. Places to visit and return from, rather than an endless, mediated scroll of throwaway content and ads.

So, I decided to revive this space, which was, originally, a blog. 

While cleaning up this website, I was struck by the number of dead links. Not just to things I thought were interesting at the time (I preserved the old “Hey, Internet” series from my early twenties), but to pieces of my actual work. A creative nonfiction piece I wrote for The Billfold, a series of author interviews I conducted with the now defunct literary journal Unstuck – these are gone and essentially irretrievable. If I’d put those things here, on the website that I own, I’d still have these bits and pieces of my very real labor. Instead, they’re lost to the mercies of changing online ecosystems and shuttered journals.

I’ve become painfully aware that platforms come and go. My most active remaining social media presence, on Goodreads, could disappear at any time according to the whims of Amazon. And why am I creating content for these corporations, for free? Why don’t I instead go back to a space I own, and make it my own?

So here I am, preparing to once again post like I used to during those halcyon days of Blogger dot com. I anticipate this will be a highly unoptimized series of personal posts about things I’m reading, watching, and thinking as I attempt to return to a regular practice of low stakes writing. If you’d like to be updated when that happens, you can subscribe below.

Exactly a year after the last time, I’m joining the The Disagreement again for their third anniversary. I’ll be reading a brand new piece about extinct megafauna alongside Erin Swan, Elizabeth Clark Wessel, and Ron Kolm.

The Disagreement presents: “It’s like being told you’re obsolete.”