Stuff I read in 2019
At the beginning of this year I set a goal of reading a book a week, which I failed at for the second year in a row. I also set a bunch of other goals for my reading that I basically ignored. I did still read some books! I also created an elaborate tagging system in my Pocket app and tried to save and categorize every article I read this year, so I noted some of my favorites below. Without further adieu, here’s the stuff I read…
Books I really liked
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
I borrowed this book from my best friend and then underlined so much that I insisted on keeping it and gave her a fresh new copy.
- An amazing sight, someone you’re infatuated with trying to fish something out of a jeans pocket.
- I read Ivan’s messages over and over, thinking about what they meant. I felt ashamed, but why? Why was it more honorable to reread and interpret a novel like Lost Illusions than to reread and interpret some email from Ivan? Was it because Ivan wasn’t as good a writer as Balzac? (But I thought Ivan was a good writer.) Was it because Balzac’s novels had been read and analyzed by hundreds of professors, so that reading and interpreting Balzac was like participating in a conversation with all these professors, and was therefore a higher and more meaningful activity than reading an email only I could see? But the fact that the email had been written specifically to me, in response to things I had said, made it literally a conversation, in the way that Balzac’s novels — written for a general audience, ultimately in order to turn a profit for the printing industry — were not; and so wasn’t what I was doing in a way more authentic, and more human?
- The previous winter, I had had gloves. I couldn’t remember what had happened to them. They were different from the gloves of two years ago.
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
There is no better way to cause conflict at a dinner party, board meeting, family reunion, holiday gathering, religious ceremony, etc than posing the question of, is A Little Life a good book or a bad book?
Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
- There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
- I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden (probably my tenth reread)
This will forever be my favorite book of all time.
- Have you ever felt really close to someone? So close that you can’t understand why you and the other person have two separate bodies, two separate skins?
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
- Perfectly rated book of essays
- Ecstasy’s magic is strongest at the beginning; it dissipates through repetition. I’ve become careful about using it — I’m afraid that the high will blunt my tilt toward unprovoked happiness, which might already be disappearing. I’m afraid that the low that sometimes comes after will leave a permanent trace. But, still, each time, it can feel like divinity. Your world realigns in a juddering oceanic shimmer. You understand that you can give the best of yourself to everyone you love without feeling depleted. This is what it feels like to be a child of Jesus, in a dark chapel, with stained-glass diamonds floating on the skin of all the people kneeling around you. This is what it feels like to be twenty-two, nearly naked, your hair blowing in the wind as the pink twilight expands into permanence, your body still holding the warmth of the day. You were made to be here. The nature of a revelation is that you don’t have to re-experience it. In the seventies, researchers believed that MDMA treatment could be discrete and limited — that once you got the message, as they put it, you could hang up the phone. You would be better for having listened. You would be changed.
They don’t say this about religion, but they should.
Everything else
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
- A classic
When Katie Met Cassidy by Camille Perri
- Lesbians deserve trashy novels too!!
The Leavers by Lisa Ko
Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney
Rat Bohemia by Sarah Schulman
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
- This book is twisted
Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
- Loved the beginning of this book and then was bored
High School by Tegan Quin and Sara Quin
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Once More We Saw Stars by Jaysen Greene
The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson
Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan
- Underrated book of essays
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib
- Overrated book of essays
All About Love by bell hooks
Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism by Kristen R. Ghodsee
- I was really excited for this and then it wasn’t very good
Astro Poets by Alex Dimitrov and Dorothea Lasky
Females by Andrea Long Chu
Articles
These are some of my favorite articles I read this year. Some are from 2019 and some aren’t.
The philosopher Gillian Rose wrote a line I think about a lot. In her book Love’s Work, she says, “There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.” It is a very beautiful way of articulating a hideous truth: that we do not consent to be hurt or abandoned by those we love, and that the most we can hope for is they do it kindly. Your ex couldn’t even give you that. What he did to you was awful; he is cowardly and he is cruel. But what happened isn’t simply unjust, it points to something much more frightening — that love itself exists outside the framework of justice. There is no court at which to plead your case, no authority who can grant you recompense.
Prison abolition goes mainstream, in a very good way.
Gilmore told them that in the unusual event that someone in Spain thinks he is going to solve a problem by killing another person, the response is that the person loses seven years of his life to think about what he has done, and to figure out how to live when released. “What this policy tells me,” she said, “is that where life is precious, life is precious.” Which is to say, she went on, in Spain people have decided that life has enough value that they are not going to behave in a punitive and violent and life-annihilating way toward people who hurt people. “And what this demonstrates is that for people trying to solve their everyday problems, behaving in a violent and life-annihilating way is not a solution.”
I just have one more thing to say: You don’t have to love yourself before someone else can. That’s bullshit. But you do probably have to be able to admit what you really feel at your core, because otherwise, the person you’re with won’t really feel free to do the same. I had thought that telling Tor how I really felt — not just about my aging body, but my aging mind, the extent to which I felt defeated and sad about life, the disappointment I had that felt permanent — he would go in search of sunnier skies. But he didn’t. I guess this was actually just all so interesting he just wanted to hear more.
This piece from 2015 is the actual best thing Taffy Brodesser-Akner has written
For Taylor Swift to pretend that her entire music career is not a tool of passive aggression toward those who had wronged her is like me pretending I’m not carbon-based: too easy to disprove, laughable at its very suggestion.
Don’t get me wrong — I say all this with utter admiration. Taylor’s career is, in fact, the perfected realization of every writer’s narrowest dream: To get back at those who had wronged us, sharply and loudly, and then to be able to cry innocent that our intentions were anything other than poetic and pure. Most of us can only achieve this with small asides. Taylor not only publicly dates and publicly breaks up, but she then releases an achingly specific song about the relationship — and that song has an unforgettable hook — all the while swearing she won’t talk about relationships that are over. Yes, date Taylor Swift, and not only will she shit on you on her album, but the song will become a single, then a hit, and then you will hear yourself shat upon by an army of young women at Staples Center. And then she’ll deny that she was ever doing anything other than righteously manifesting her art. It’s diabolical, and for a lifelong passive-aggressive like me, it’s made her my hero.
Your child is a tiny paper flag on top of a giant mountain with seemingly infinite layers of soil and rock beneath it. You’re staring at the flag, but the mountain is the real problem. The mountain is all you. The mountain was formed decades before the flag even existed. You have to dig through the mountain to understand where you are. You have to dig through the soil and hit the gravel layers and then blast through the granite. None of these things are related to your child at all.
Before, it was beautiful, questionable-decision juice. Now, they were threatening to make it almost an urban legend.
Cis women hate when trans women envy them, perhaps because they cannot imagine that they are in possession of anything worth envying. We have this, at least, in common: two kinds of women, with two kinds of self-loathing, locked in adjacent rooms, each pressing her ear up against the wall to listen for the other’s presence, fearing a rival but terrified to be alone. For my part, cousin: I don’t want what you have, I want the way in which you don’t have it. I don’t envy your plenitude; I envy your void. Now I’ve got the hole to prove it. I would give anything to hate myself the way you do, assuming it’s different from the way I hate myself — which, who knows. The thing about vaginas is you can never get a good look at them.
After I read this I sent it to everyone I had texted in the past 24 hours.
So perhaps it was only fitting that at age 64, Jerry found himself contemplating that most alluring of puzzles: the lottery. He was recently retired by then, living with Marge in a tiny town called Evart and wondering what to do with his time. After stopping in one morning at a convenience store he knew well, he picked up a brochure for a brand-new state lottery game. Studying the flyer later at his kitchen table, Jerry saw that it listed the odds of winning certain amounts of money by picking certain combinations of numbers.
That’s when it hit him. Right there, in the numbers on the page, he noticed a flaw — a strange and surprising pattern, like the cereal-box code, written into the fundamental machinery of the game. A loophole that would eventually make Jerry and Marge millionaires, spark an investigation by a Boston Globe Spotlight reporter, unleash a statewide political scandal and expose more than a few hypocrisies at the heart of America’s favorite form of legalized gambling.
Because I’m a person of faith, I tend to believe that things are divinely ordained, even when that means that they’re divinely ordained in a painful or grotesque way. That’s hard to believe sometimes, but it is what I believe. And I think when you recognize that you will die if you keep doing a thing… for me, part of struggling with anxiety and depression is having a low regard for your life as a concept and then not caring what happens to it or where it goes … And I quit smoking because I realized I could lose my voice, and it was like an ultimatum was forced to me. Like, what if you could never sing again? What if you woke up one day and you could never do the only thing that makes sense to you? And I didn’t want to even play around with that.
So let me tell you what happens when I press play on this Solange song, “Almeda.” The calluses strip themselves from my feet. That icy spot that I always slip on, the one on the threshold of my apartment door? It behaves. Last night I went to bed with a zit. This morning when I woke up it was nearly gone. Bradley Cooper released a longer cut of A Star Is Born. The yee-haw agenda is rising, and winning. I want to get married so I can play “Almeda” at my wedding. When I die, play “Almeda” at my funeral. I’m turning this in late to my editor because I’m playing “Almeda” too loud in my room. When I Get Home has other true gems — “Sound of Rain,” “Down With the Clique” — but “Almeda” plays with a special alchemy of everything that feels banal, but special. Brown skin, black braids, brown liquor — sip, sip, sip.
I like to joke that, as someone who is always right, the last thing I want is to be agreed with. [Laughs] I think the true narcissist probably wants to be hated in order to know that she’s superior. I absolutely do court disagreement in that sense. But what I like even better are arguments that bring about a shift in terms along an axis that wasn’t previously evident. So it’s not just that other people are wrong; it’s that their wrongness exists within a system of evaluation which itself is irrelevant. Telling other people their views are irrelevant is far more satisfying than telling them that their views are wrong. In order to tell someone that they’re wrong, you implicitly agree with them about the terms on which you think they’re wrong.
At 27, I’ve settled into a comfortable coexistence with my suicidality. We’ve made peace, or at least a temporary accord negotiated by therapy and medication. It’s still hard sometimes, but not as hard as you might think. What makes it harder is being unable to talk about it freely: the weightiness of the confession, the impossibility of explaining that it both is and isn’t as serious as it sounds. I don’t always want to be alive. Yes, I mean it. No, you shouldn’t be afraid for me. No, I’m not in danger of killing myself right now. Yes, I really mean it.
“I’m not doing anything more sexual, or more absurd, than straight women pop stars,” she says. “I know I’m very absurd, but my sexuality is not any more crazy than Britney walking around with a snake on her neck singing ‘I’m a Slave 4 U.’ It’s like, I’m not doing anything that crazy, you’re just not used to seeing a strap onstage.”
She notes that these women had more artistic intention in their work than most audiences at the time gave them credit for. “So many pop women were being femme tops, but we didn’t give them the agency,” she says insistently. “Christina is such a femme top, it’s crazy. And Mariah has always been so adamant about how she’s a songwriter and a producer, and no one will fucking give her credit.”
