That's A Wrap

2022 in books, etc.

I was trying to articulate what it is I love about this season last night, the room grayscaled by cloud cover and city lights. It’s something about beginnings and endings, a brief period to believe in an order of things, a narrative of the years, of a life. As though there is a linearity to the events that exist in time, as it often feels there should be, and not just time itself. And besides that, I like to reflect on the past, I like to figure out what I want in the future, I like to locate myself somewhere between these poles, moving ramblingly toward growth.

It was a good year. I had begun to think, in the mess of years before this one, that perhaps I had reached the age at which time becomes measureless and average, a blur of regular days with a few exceptional cups of memorable coffee. But this was a good year.

In January I started Book 2 of My Struggle and weighed down my purse with it for a few weeks. I felt that I finally understood Knausgaard in a way I hadn’t quite before; I was taken by his precise details, the dedication with which he records the minutiae of his days, his struggle to reconcile a creative life with a domestic one. (“So the question is: What do you choose? Movement, which is close to life, or the area beyond movement, which is where art is located, but also, in a certain sense, death?”)

There was snow and I got into doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. Sometimes I would text Dylan, who was then just a coworker for whom I harbored a secret forbidden crush, for help. I remember reading The Shape of a Pocket by John Berger at the coffee shop with the built-in stoops lining the back wall, and Abigail Thomas’ Safekeeping, which was a book I felt I didn’t necessarily need to finish to learn from, but I did anyway, lying on my stomach at the foot of my bed.

I read Renata Adler’s Speedboat after hearing people talk about it forever and felt greatly moved and confused by it. The novel was like a poem that doesn’t make logical sense in its movements but somehow has an undeniable emotional resonance. There was a belated holiday party at a bar in Clinton Hill. I wore a tight black skirt. I somehow spent only $30. I showed all my friends the sentence I had posted on Twitter: “There are some days when everyone I see is lunatic.” It got one like.

I read some poetry, though not a lot, beginning with S. Brook Corfman’s My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites, a book I discovered through Elisa Gabbert’s annual reading list, and later, from that same list, I read Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Gluck.

Things began happening at a faster clip—I went to Koreatown for karaoke, I began spending more time with Dylan, I kept forgetting that the train I took to Halle’s place wasn’t the train I could take back if it was past a certain hour. I remembered and was still not sure how to get home.

I read most of Pure Color at a crowded bar, waiting for Dylan to get off work, feeling stupid for sitting alone among the good-natured chatter of the end of the day. I wanted someone to ask what I was reading and when someone did I was annoyed.

I wanted to copy down every word of Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz, a writer I’d had high on my list since finding out that Kate Zambreno was working on a book about him. There was desperation, certainly, but there was also playfulness. He reminded me of David Berman—that sense of urgency and deep, impossible feeling paired with a surprising lightness—to touch without landing. This must be taken seriously; this must not ever be taken too seriously. “I feel like I am half stationary and half seated on a weird carnival ride, being flipped up and down and all around, but really it is nothing more than going through the paces of each day.”

I began checking out books at the library. I got carried away in the dim shelves, the grayed pages. It seemed like every time I went, it was raining. Once I carried my books home in a tubular plastic bag meant for umbrellas, a whole roll of them at the library entrance. I read two César Aira novellas—Artforum and The Seamstress and the Wind—and a play by Sarah Ruhl. I thought about how plays perform what all literature attempts, and complicates—just some people talking to each other.

I read Sleepless Nights—unparalleled! Taught me how meandering and yet precise a single sentence can be—and Moyra Davey’s Index Cards, both works that meant a great deal to me. Davey’s collaborative, heavily researched essays, how emotion and intellect swim together here; the somewhat strange sense of Hardwick trusting herself, trusting the reader—that she means what she says, that her point is coming across.

I hate doing these end of year posts; on the other hand, I love doing these end of year posts. Maybe it’s that this kind of self-reflection in a public space feels both self-indulgent and at the same time dishonest. Such vague gestures and momentary details. I’m going to be taking a break from this blog (as though I haven’t already started doing so) in the new year, which is partly a result of the sudden inescapability of an audience. My readership is, of course, quite small and mostly made up of people my mom harassed into subscribing, but nonetheless I have felt lately, when I sit down to write to all of you, that you really are there on the other side of this. This fills me with gratitude; I feel very lucky and glad to have you here. But I also feel self-conscious, nervous. Afraid to say the wrong thing, afraid to say too much. This is not conducive to good or honest writing, I think. Perhaps the best reader is the imagined one.

On my birthday I hauled two cakes back and forth across the East River and hid them under the bar at a fancy dinner. Halle took a picture of me and I thought: there I am. I felt in focus and forward motion for the first time in a while. There were things, of course. But then I was on a frayed booth in a dive bar and Allie was going to buy plastic forks for the cakes.

I read more poems and it was spring. Surrounded by Friends by Matthew Rohrer, Jack Underwood’s A Year in the New Life and Happiness, The Hurting Kind by Ada Limon. I felt bored by them and wondered what was wrong with me that I no longer cared about poetry. Or I couldn’t make myself feel moved by it. Did I no longer care about poetry?

I read The Berlin Stories by Robert Walser and failed to read the other Walser book I brought home from the library. At the DMV in downtown Brooklyn I read Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World by Sasha Fletcher and found it beautiful and annoying and grasping.

My favorite books of the year include Elif Batuman’s The Idiot and Either/Or, both of which exemplify a genre I like to describe as “a person just walking around thinking about things,” which happens to be my favorite genre. How to imbue everything ordinary with a miniature epiphany, how to think on the page as much as one thinks while out there walking, living, moving are two questions I often asked myself.

There were things I did besides reading, and for the first time in a while it felt like my very own nonfictional life measured up to the happenings of characters in novels. Less the desire, this year, to abandon the regular rhythms of ordinary plotlessness for a more definite narrative. I made chocolate torte, carrot cake, spiced caramel icing, bread puddings of various flavors. I made drinks; I made breakfast. I got sick and better and sick and feared I would not get better and then I got better. I wrote less than I meant to, always. I wrote a book, or the beginnings, hopefully, of one. I went to the beach so many times. I ate oysters and played pool.

In July I flew home to Idaho and read Love’s Work by Gillian Rose, which was good but not as good as the sentence I read online that inspired me to buy the book: “However satisfying writing is—that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control—it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and the agony of loving.” In Idaho I read Jordan Castro’s The Novelist, and on the flight home I read Annie Ernaux’s Exteriors, a very small book to convince of the power of description. It is a feeling to just say how things are.

On night, back home in New York, I met my boyfriend at a nearby bar, and sitting right next to him was the poet Morgan Parker. Walking home, he told me he’d knocked over her drink. I bought her most recent book of poems and thought of being very young in Idaho and scouring the internet for her work, and then of being a little older in California and watching her read and talk and laugh in a little room a few blocks from my apartment in Oakland.

Caren Beilin’s Revenge of the Scapegoat was one of the best and most unique books I read this year, or ever. Her sentences are wild and funny and gorgeous; her plotlines are the same. Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan, The Importance of Being Icleand by Eileen Myles, and Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina by Dara Barrois/Dixon are three books I read quickly toward the end of summer when I realized I was getting further from my goal of 50 books a year. I only got to 39. I had other stuff to do.

Elisa Gabbert’s Normal Distance was one of my favorite poetry books of the year—surprising and funny, profound without trying too hard or coming to a grand conclusion. I read several of these poems to Dylan. I wasn’t sure he liked them all that much. He listened to me go on and on.

I finally walked the fifteen minutes to the bookstore on Vanderbilt and bought a stack of books: Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch, Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai, Chelsea Martin’s Tell Me I’m an Artist. I loved all of these novels, and carried them around with me that night in my bag, as I often did this year, while I tried to figure out which bar to sit in, which restaurant to order takeout from, as I also often did this year.

My roommate recommended Sommer Browning’s Good Actors, which I was skeptical of but ended up loving—I find funny poetry so often so much more interesting than the somber stuff. I read Rings of Saturn over the course of several months, picking it up when I had a quiet space and a good focused brain, which happens less frequently than I’d like to admit. On the train I skimmed through Ban et Banlieu by Bhanu Kapil. I should have given it more time, but I found it difficult to try again. And the train dropped me off at my station in Manhattan, and the whole city was fast, not waiting for me, but there.

In November I went to Europe with my friends and we drank wine and ate a lot of cheese. I finished John Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos on the plane home. This, along with the last two books I read this year—Happening by Annie Ernaux, about her illegal abortion in 1960s France, and The Life of the Mind by Christina Smallwood—were some of my favorites, all three of which, in different ways, investigate the intersection between the intellect and the body, theory versus experience. How intellectualize the embodied experience; how to bring embodiment, emotion, real and messy and human flailing to the intellect.

I didn’t mean to cut this short (not that it’s short) but I also wanted to send it out before the year is over, and it’s now 10:31 on the last day of the year and I’m late for work. Life, art, etc. Who has the time?? Thank you very much for reading. I hope the 2023 brings warmth and brightness to you and yours.