In 2019 I succeeded in my yearly goal of reading more books than the year before, partly because I decided to include books of more than 200 pages that I read to the big kid. I still read a small enough number that they are pretty much all great.
Books by Friends. Since moving in 2017 my book organization system has been in chaos with the exception of my “Books by Friends” section. I love having this section and I could easily have read nothing but this category all year, so I definitely need to read more books, since I definitely don’t need fewer amazing friends who write books.
Jo Scutts, The Extra Woman. Jo’s great book from a few years ago about Marjorie Hillis, author of Live Alone and Like It and the cultural history of single women, magazines, publishing and more.
Briallen Hopper, Hard to Love. I discovered Briallen’s writing with her amazing essay/takedown of a book about “Spinsters” which really appeared to be a book about temporarily unmarried young strivers. (On rereading it in this collection my heart sang again when she cries in despair “Has she even read The Bostonians?”) There are new essays in the collection too, including one that is part about Moby Dick and everything you always wanted to know about the Yale sperm bank but were afraid to ask.
Carrie Conners, Luscious Struggle. My colleague, friend and writing group partner published her first book of poems this year. They deal with work and family history and remind me of some of my Philip Levine poems, especially this one:
Jenny Brown, Birth Strike. On why the birth rate is going down across the world, what the powers that be might do about it, and how we can use it to our advantage. What every feminist book should be but too few are: historically astute, genuinely challenging to our preconceptions, grounded in evidence, free of cant, informed by communal struggle and experience in the movement casually and effortlessly brilliant.
Carley Moore, The Not Wives. There’s another Big Occupy Novel out there this year, which I didn’t read, but I did read this one, which is funny, smart, sexy and should have gotten more attention.
Books I Wrote about:
Bill Mullen, James Baldwin: Living in Fire. A great short biography focused on Baldwin as a writer on the left; I wrote about it here.
Ann Snitow, The Feminism of Uncertainty. Ann, who used to host the Dissent parties and edited an invaluable collection of memoirs from feminist activists of the 60s/70s, gave me this collection of her essays from across many decades at one of those parties. I reread it when I wrote an obituary for her this year. As I wrote there, despite bearing her name alone, this collection is really an anthology as well, a result of the collective intellectual labor of that moment. Having also reread a bunch of Dworkin for another piece this year, I was stuck by the contrast between that mode of “I am the only truth-teller” polemic and the equally sharp writing that comes from the impulse towards solidarity and giving the disputes of comrades a good-faith reading.
Poetry:
Laura Eve Engel Things that Go. Gorgeous meditation on the story of Job. I wasn’t sure how to describe what I loved about it but this great Jewish Currents piece does a good job.
Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day. When my colleague and close work friend had a milestone birthday recently, I included in my birthday wish to her a thanks for introducing me to Mayer. A life without Mayer isn’t worth living, she wrote back. But I only read this, her masterpiece, a book long poem recounting a day, “Ulysses for a small down mom” this year: “We’re allowed to crowd love in/Like a significant myth/resting still on paper./I remember being bitten by a spider/It was like feeling what they call/the life of the mind . . .
Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy. I’ve written before about how, when in grief, so many texts become texts about grief, texts that teach how to lose and how to measure loss, and a few become master teachers. This book was one of them.
Books I Taught:
Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform. Taylor is one of the most interesting, far reaching writers of the flourishing of writers and thinkers in the New New Left, or however many News the current movement has. (and filmmaker and brain behind the astoundingly successful Debt Collective) This book on the history of the internet and how the future of it could be different is a great contribution to that, and though it didn’t quite work for my students it was fun to get them thinking about the fact that the internet has a history, and I learned a lot from asking them to chart their internet histories.
Jessica Bruder, Nomadland Probably the best nonfiction book I read this year, about the subculture of workers who lost their homes in the 2008 crises working out of their vans, doing seasonal work and staffing Amazon fulfillment centers. After assigning it I worried about how my students, mostly young and non-white, would respond to the stories of these mostly older, white nomads (as a section of the book explains, living in a vehicle while Black has predictable consequences), but its blending of narrative, information and history (and the Great Recession is definitely history to college students) works better than in most narrative non-fiction.
Books about Teaching:
Lynda Barry, Syllabus. A record of what happened when the brilliant comic artist became a teacher, taught a class called “the Impossible Mind” and gave her students pseudonyms based on sections of the brain, among other things. An smarter, deeper, endlessly regenerative guide for artists, writers and teachers alike, also helpful for throwing at artists and writers who think their crappy uninspired teaching is ok since it can’t be taught anyways.
John Warner Why They Can’t Write. Warner is a brilliant blogger at Inside Higher Ed and this is a great distillation of how formulas, over testing, and over surveillance get in the way of students having a real experience with writing. I wish he had engaged a little more with those strains of pedagogy that have embraced things similar to what he’s stating, which he presents as a kind of haphazard thing he’s stumbled across, but that’s really a quibble. One of a very few books I would recommend to all college instructors who use writing in any form.
Essays & Memoir:
Nguyen, Viet Thanh (ed) The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. I read this anthology for a seminar and it has some of the problems a lot of thematic anthologies have: too little politics, too much confidence that narratives can “humanize” a situation. As my colleague pointed out, there’s a kind of striver mentality to the project: the folks included mostly have in common that they’ve won lots of awards. But the anthology introduced me to two great authors, Dina Nayeri, whose essay (later a book) “The Ungrateful Refugee” is as necessary as the title would suggest, and Porochista Khakpour whose “13 Ways of Being an Immigrant” helped my Creative Non-Fiction class more than anything I’ve taught recently.
Mark Doty, Heaven’s Coast. One of the most beautiful books I read this year, Doty’s memoir tells the story of the death of his partner during the height of the AIDS epidemic. My reaction to it made me uneasy, because he writes so beautifully about people who seemed so lovely that you felt yourself not taking in the horror – some old thoughts about sympathy, aesthetics and pathos I’m still working out
Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave. Fascinating memoir by our new poet laureate about, among other things, the renaissance in Native art of the movement era.
Tressie McMilliam Cotton, Thick. In a very different way from Nomadland, a great example of how our current moment of crisis is creating space for really original, deeply informed serious political work that crosses boundaries of genre and audience. The essay on maternal mortality and the cost of not “performing competency” is especially devastating.
Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times. After Trump got elected I noticed a lot of people on the train reading Arendt, and I remember discuss why to another mom on a particularly chaotic playdate. But I was especially drawn to this one because of the title, taken from Brecht, which played into my feeling that one cure for my Trump-fueled insomnia was to read about others who have been through dark times, and also because the collection of bibliographical essays is my favorite genre. I’m not sure how many parallels I came to, but I did especially love the pieces on Brecht, Kafka, Benjamin and Luxenborg, as well as one on Pope John XXIII, whose title suggested the great surprise one had at finding “a Christian on St. Peter’s throne” – a phrase that made me smile at the similarly unlikely possibility of having a mensch in the White House.
Novels:
Mike Gold, Jews Without Money. My friend Benjamin has been saying for years that I’m a bad Jew and a bad commie for not having read this book. (Ok, he really just said, you need to read it, but a girl can read between the lines.) He hounded both me and J so this was I think the only book we both read this year. I found it riveting – one of the most powerful New York novels and immigrant novels I’ve ever read, how it showed the constraints of lives of people who rarely leave their neighborhood, the hunger of need – Black Boy might be the closest comparison. Probably because of Gold’s party-line communism, even people who like the novel seem to need to qualify that it’s didactic or “blunt” but I didn’t find it to be that way at all. There’s a scene where the family takes a rare day trip to the park and the dystopian subway journey to a city park where the mother briefly lets down her weary day to day and gushes over the mushrooms of her childhood. Maybe a younger me would have called this sentimental, but I think life is blunt and tragic and beautiful and that a book can be unabashedly political, with a party line even, and still be those things, and this one is.
Curtis Sittenfeld, Sisterland. I enjoyed American Wife a lot and this one is equally readable but thinner too – and I really, really don’t like when authors use “college dropout” to mean “kooky fuckup” like this one does.
Tom Perrotta The Leftovers. Perotta reminds me a little of Sittenfeld – both really strong on pulling off high-concept stories, plots and characters without a lot of self-conscious “literary stuff” (which I don’t always think is a bad thing!), well suited to film & TV (Sittenfeld’s book should all have been made into films or shows by now as many of Perotta’s, including this one, have). A book about the rapture that seems to want to be an allegory about 9/11 would seem to have a lot of hurdles for me, but, as often happens when I think I’m do an “escape” reading, it turned out to be a book about grief, and a very good one at that.
Books I Read With/To the (Big) Kid
C.S. Lewis The Complete Narnia Series. Big Kid LOVED these. What to say? When I mention my hesitation about reading these, most people said, “Oh, yeah, they are Christian allegories, but will the kid get that?” Thing is, though, they’re not Christian allegories just in the dying Lion is Christ part everyone remembers, there’s also the whole Islam is from the Devil who tells you Christ-Lion is wrong thing, not to mention the savage brown people who keep slaves, and the girl who doesn’t get to go to Lion heaven because she likes stockings and is therefore basically a dumb slut and everything else recounted here, though I’d stipulate the whole “not really imaginative” thing is pretty subjective and Dawn Treader was both the least racist and the most fun. But yes, I read them to him anyways (with quite a lot of censorship). Parenting is complicated.
Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz. Weirder and more different from the movie than I’d remembered, less racist and sexist than most classics, and well paced – definitely a good candidate for a classic to read to kids.
Brian Jaques. Redwall: Mossflower. E. is obsessed with this series about battling woodland creatures. I think I can tell it’s good for this kind of book. They are very very long and there are like 4593 of them. So this is one of the reasons I wanted to add books I read to E. to this list. Will I read they other 4592 in 2020? Stay tuned?
Previous year end lists: