My Favourite Things I Read This Year

Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay, Christopher Benfey

I stumbled across this book when searching "Black Mountain" in a library catalogue, and I think it should have received more attention. I'm not quite sure what to call the book, genre-wise; it moves between family history, travelogue, and study of pottery, weaving these subjects together in a way that feels entirely fresh, conveying their interest in a way that rarely happens with researched material, elevating them beyond what one might expect after reading any summary of content. It's an excellent lesson in structure for non-fiction.

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Ross Gay

I'm not sure how to do poetry collections justice without just quoting them extensively. It's maybe better for me to link to Ross Gay's reading of 'Spoon' than to attempt to write out my own feelings on this collection, which I read at the Bread Loaf library.

Trophic Cascade, Camille T. Dungy

I read this collection, too, in the Bread Loaf library, and I've been thinking about it ever since. I am planning to reread this soon. Here is a link to 'Frequently Asked Questions: 9.'

Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard

We read and discussed 'Weasel' and 'Total Eclipse' at Bread Loaf and I read the rest of this collection upon returning to New York. Annie Dillard considered 'Total Eclipse' to be the best thing that she ever wrote; it's brilliant. I think this entire collection is great, and it only seems to improve as I think about it, take it apart, play with those phrases she uses. So.

Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture, Lisa Robertson

I felt simultaneous pangs of happiness and envy upon discovering this collection; these are precisely the sort of essays that I'm interested in writing, using words to expand the sense of possibility in cities after the industrial age. Robertson's sentences demand and reward attention and in so doing open up new ways of looking at everyday life and the modern world.

A Manual for Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin

I felt that these stories were often flawless, technically brilliant and tightly controlled in a way that balanced perfectly the vulnerability and heartache of the characters they described. I was particularly impressed by these, I think, because they are far from my own writing in their subjects and their frankness.  

  

Torpor, Chris Kraus

I Love Dick is good, but this is better.

Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler

I feel as if I ate this book rather than read it. It is a book about appetite that provokes appetite. I would like to write a book that is a modernist building in the same way that this book is an oyster with red wine. I've since read everything else by Danler that I can find, which is mostly nonfiction; I think her essays are actually even better than this novel, but I've consumed nothing else this year as easily, quickly, greedily as I devoured Sweetbitter. It felt like a drunken fog.

The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson
I'm terribly impressed by the softness and slowness of this book. It's so incredibly subtle and gradual and it's hard to pinpoint precisely what's happening until the book has, mirroring the central character's own actions, worked its way into your life, disrupting it.

On Being Blue, William H. Gass

I expected this to be a pensive lyric essay (a bit like Maggie Nelson's Bluets, which is also good), and I was surprised to find it so funny. It's actually largely about "blue"in the sense of risqué or profane, which I hadn't realised before starting it. I can't remember the last time I read a book that made me laugh happily to the degree that this one did.

Dept of Speculation, Jenny Offill 

I read this book because of this quotation:
My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.
The entire book lives up to these sentences, and there is more discussion of art monsters.

Other Books I Thought Were Great: On Trails: An Exploration, Robert Moor; Women in Clothes, Sheila Heti, Leanne Shapton and Heidi Julavits; Young Man with a Horn, Dorothy Baker; Flaneuse: Women Walk the City, Lauren Elkin; The Wallcreeper and Mislaid, Nell Zink; Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney.

'A Season's Romance,' Elizabeth Hardwick

All of Hardwick's writing is wonderful, and I can't say that this particular story is necessarily better than the others in The New York Stories (which is where I read it). It does have an eerie resemblance to my own life and the lives of many of my friends, though, despite being originally published in 1956; it follows an art historian trying to find a job after finishing her PhD and it sharply considers the ways in which ambition shapes choices, both before and after graduate school, and ends with a somewhat haunting ambivalence.

'Big Man,' Lauren Berlant
This piece isn't easy to read, but I feel it rewards the effort. I was, when I read this, very tired of pieces which intellectualised Trump's election, often sacrificing affective awareness of disruption and abnormality for the sake of analysis and explanation. Berlant's writing is certainly intellectual, but it is creatively intellectual in a way that directs attention toward, rather than away from, the trauma. I find, also, the ideas of flailing and fierce nostalgia are helpful elsewhere, not simply around the US's political situation.