Monika

Fiction: Will & Testament by Vigdis Hjorth

Fully obsessed with this book. Couldn’t stop talking about it for months. I had to look up when I read it because it feels like it’s always been a part of me. Thank you Bryan by way of Emily Gould for making me aware of this book. I’m obsessed with its anti-subtlety, its crispness, its anger.

Non-fiction: Into That Darkness by Gita Sereny

I forgot where I heard about this book. Someone mentioned it in a newsletter or a review and I don’t know why but then I had to read it. And then I had to keep reading it. Truly one of the most transformative non-fiction books I have ever read in my entire life.  It repulsed me and it made me cry and it broke my brain and heart.

Poetry: Anodyne by Khadijah Queen

I normally eschew listing clients in my year-end lists, but I only had one book of poems come out this year so I feel comfortable and confident mentioning Anodyne as my favorite poetry book of 2020. Khadijah’s the kind of poet whose work you think about way after you read it. I haven’t stopped thinking about I’m So Fine for years, and I anticipate Anodyne taking up space in my head for a long time too. It’s just so quietly disquieting, and the title might be one of the most apt I’ve ever heard of.

Jeesoo

“A person has the right to feel in many different ways. Writing can be more than good.” Ariana Reines 

If you, too, are a person who is interested in writing that is many things at once, I present to you the following recommendations:

Sophie Robinson’s Rabbit

Monica McClure’s Tender Data 

Jade Sharma’s Problems 

The trio above remind me that there are no real rules for writing. You should write what you want and do it with a lot of heart.

Alex

Fiction: The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante

I resisted these books for so long, feeling like they couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. But I read My Brilliant Friend for work in early March, and thank god. I got my copy at Unnameable Books, and there was this little card inside that had a terrifying drawing of a girl with very sharp teeth on it, and the name ALEX was written above the girl’s head. A child had clearly drawn it and probably the child’s parent was using it as a bookmark. This was like, March 5th, and I remember going to lunch with Monika and telling her about the card and feeling terrified. And then a week and a half later, I was like, the little ALEX card brought this plague upon us all. By that point I was already on The Story of a New Name, and over the rest of the spring I worked my way through books three and four, and I used the scary ALEX card as a bookmark the whole time. I thought initially I’d be escaping into these books, but they don’t really provide any sense of escape, which felt right. I bought a digital copy of the first book in Italian and now I can say a bunch of Italian phrases from it. I lost the ALEX bookmark. I’m going to read these books every three or four years for the rest of my life, probably. 

Non-fiction: Women in Clothes by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton

My deeply stylish friend Sarah lent me this book. It feels like peeking through a keyhole at glamorous women lunching, but also like the women on the other side of the keyhole are my friends. It’s really fun to see thoughts and quotes and anecdotes from people I kind of know--I’ll be reading and stop to be like, oh my god, that’s this woman I’ve followed on twitter for five years talking about her most precious sweater! It’s made me feel a lot less lonely. 

Poetry: Moods by Rachel B. Glaser

First of all, greatest cover of any book of all time. I love how Rachel writes about being in a body, how she writes about being a friend. A lot of these poems are about what it is to be perceived and what it is to act as if you’re always being perceived--by yourself, by god, by animals, by roommates, by people at parties. And, not to filter my whole year in reading through the lens of Covid--but also, how can we not--but these poems let me step into that sweet, anxious feeling I always dreaded but now miss of worrying about how I must seem to other people. 

Becca

Fiction: Much earlier in the year, before everything went haywire, I read Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, which was recently released in English by Europa. Much has been made in recent years of whether or not autofiction exists/is good/etc, and I would say that B/E answers several of these questions in the affirmative. It follows a Japanese woman named Natsuko through two different eras in her life, one when she is a struggling young lonely writer, and one when she is a successful well regarded lonely writer. Though it does have a small dose of ‘writers on writing,’ it has much higher doses of super interesting issues about fertility and parenthood that I frankly haven’t heard written about anywhere, regarding the parental ego and anti-natalism. Though the narrator herself is not anti-natalist, and pursues pregnancy through sperm donation, she meets characters who have strong moral views all over the map, and I just loved reading these conflicting and fascinating views, told through the lens of a complicated narrator. 

I like a novel that combines great style with interesting moral arguments, and I don’t find them very often, so Breasts and Eggs holds a special place in my year for hitting that combination so perfectly. 

Non-fiction: Okay, per usual I read a lot of bougie experimental non-fiction because that’s a lot of what I read in general. But I’m going to go off and talk about a book that I’m listening to as an audiobook and absolutely floored by. It is a memoir...but not what our ilk would typically recommend….okay I’ll just say it. Open Book by Jessica Simpson. 

I think this book is actually changing my life. Traveling back to the late nineties/early 2000’s and hearing in Jessica’s own words and incredibly charming voice what it was like to not only be coming of age at that time (I was not yet coming of age, I was like ten) but to be thrust into a really toxic and abusive entertainment culture is so enlightening, tragic, and worth examining now, a couple decades out. It’s inspired me to write and analyze more about the culture of entertainment and celebrity of the past twenty years, and to remember how important that type of analysis is. The amount that she shares about how much her managers were pressuring her to lose weight alone is worthy of a fucking thesis! She discusses the dissolution of her marriage to Nick Lachey in a way that is so frank and honest about the challenges of relationships, and her vulnerability comes through in a way that I rarely see in memoirs even by the most honest of writers. And I def can’t talk about the book or write this without saying, it’s really fascinating to hear her talk about her public perception as a dumb blonde, and hear not just how smart she is, but how she analyzes that public perception in the past twenty years. I could have done without some of the god stuff, but you know, I get it, to each our own! 

Poems: I don’t read as much poetry as I should, but I did take a poetry class with Elaine Kahn on the recommendation of Rachel Rabbit White during quarantine, and I picked up a few books to prepare and get my head in the right space. Definitely the one that changed my approach the most and really opened my mind to an accessible kind of poetry for me was Baby, I Don’t Care by Chelsey Minnis. I just loved the loose and funny style, the images, the cadence, and it definitely inspired me while writing the first poems I’ve ever worked on. 

Thea

Fiction: Severance by Ling Ma.  There’s something uncanny about reading apocalyptic speculative fiction and then it actually happens.  I read this back in January and could not put it down.  I grew up reading my dad’s sci-fi books in the vein of Contagion so I know a virus-zombie apocalypse.  But this has so much weight because it focuses on the far more interesting aspects of what happens when the world crumbles around a person.  Come for the gore and stay for the nostalgia and heart.

Non-fiction:  The Celestial Art: Essays on Astrological Magic edited by Austin Coppock and Daniel A. Schulke.  I read a lot for all of my astro courses but this is the one that crosses into the literary realm.  The essay on what those mages were doing in seventeenth century England or the Sabians of Haran is a satisfying reminder that people have been trying to bring down magic from the cosmos for a long time.  I read it when things start to get too mundane and I want a little alchemy

Poetry: The Tradition by Jericho Brown.  I followed Brown on Twitter before I read The Tradition and I’m sure I was the one millionth person to buy the book.  It can be intimidating to read work that wins a pulitzer and so I was uncertain if this would be marred by my own expectations.  But, this is an album with no skips.  In a year where the discourse on Blackness was dominated by cable news talking heads and co-opted in so many ways it felt really good to have Jericho’s poetry.

Yash

Non-fiction: Maybe it’s cheating to pick a book I worked on, but encountering Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers was monumentally important for me this year. It does all the things with voice and genre that I’ve wanted to see, and I’ve returned to it repeatedly over the year when I needed to restart my reading engine. It exemplifies what I love about memoir hybrid criticism: it shows us both ourselves and the constituent components and inspirations from which those selves were built, both forest and trees. To pull off this feat with so humor and vehemence and clarity is Shapland’s remarkable strength. 

Poetry: In anticipation of her next book, I’ve been returning to Carlina Duan’s I Wore My Blackest Hair. Carlina’s poems are formally dazzling, her turns of phrase are crystalline, but it’s her flair for imagery and description which makes reading her poems feel like standing alone in a museum in front of a gigantic painting. 

Fiction: I read so much good fiction this year that trying to choose is a little overwhelming; I realize that this is the opposite of a problem. So, quick, mods are asleep, I’m going to recommend Salt, Slow for beautiful and bizarre short fiction that feels like a middle school sleepover with Daisy Johnson and Kelly Link, Boys of Alabama for a luminous queer Southern Gothic coming of age story, and Plain Bad Heroines, a sapphic joyride through horror and metafiction that I fell headfirst in love with after hearing Andrea Lawlor and Emily Danforth in conversation. 

Bryan Woods

Fiction:

Poetry:

Non-fiction: Reading was impossible for me last year, and not only because my brain was broken. Every single minute of every waking hour of the year, starting on March 11, was planned, fought for, negotiated against, and calendared. Every minute that was not spent focusing on work was spent telling my son no, stop that, sit still, listen to your teacher, don’t hold that, get that out of your mouth, you’re supposed to be on mute. Virtual Pre-K passed into an impossible summer of chaos, and then into Virtual Kindergarten. One afternoon in the spring during a 45 minute “lego center” session between work meetings, while listening to Sufjan Stevens, I broke down into tears that turned to sobs. I scared my son. He hates Sufjan Stevens now. The next afternoon, when it came time for “lego center”, I put Sufjan Stevens back on and sobbed again while we assembled our little Pokemon characters. It became a little phase I had, for a week or two, until it also got old and it no longer moved me. I had many phases like that. We moved on. Most of my reading has always happened during my time on the train commuting. I learned a few years ago that if I follow a strict no-phone rule on the subway, I can easily read a book a week, without needing to work reading into my time at home. Without my commute, I wasn’t surprised that my reading stopped completely. Maybe I don’t like reading as much as I thought I did. In October, noticing that a whole year was about to pass without me reading a single book, I decided to buy Claudia Rankine’s latest, Just Us: An American Conversation. This was the third time I purchased a Claudia Rankine book in hopes of pulling myself out of a reading rut. For two or three nights, it worked. I raced through the first 80% of the book, and my phone filled with photos of the pages that moved me. I felt a bit like myself again. I texted my friends things like “books are good lol.” And then, on October 14, my son was hit by a car while out with his babysitter. I was a 3 minute drive from the scene of the accident when we got the call. We knew he had been hit by a car and that we needed to come immediately, but for those three minutes, we didn’t know if he was still alive. I drove 50 miles per hour on the residential streets, drove my car over a curb once I got stuck in traffic, and ditched it, perched halfway over the sidewalk. I sprinted to where the block was cordoned off, to where the police and ambulance had already taken over, and ran straight to my son, who was scream-crying in a voice I hadn’t heard since the moment he was pushed from the womb. I remembered holding his tiny wet body in my arms while I worked to cut the umbilical cord, laughing out loud as I looked at him because his face had the same shape as his mother’s and I recognized him immediately. I helped the paramedics strap my son into the gurney, and he was so scared, but it was quickly becoming clear that he was fine. Or at least he would be fine. But it took a few weeks for the shock to wear off and for me to admit it. This year had been terrible in so many ways, so riddled with constant suffering and death, but for now my son was safe. Or at least he was safe for now, this time. But here’s the thing. Even though I learned to accept his safety, even as the days passed and I stopped grabbing my son’s face each time he passed me in our narrow little hallway to thank him for being safe, my brain never healed. I don’t know how long it will take to come back, but for now my brain is broken, and Just Us is still sitting closed on my nightstand, and my bookmark is still pressed between pages 280 and 281.