I hate having to pick favorites. I’m far too greedy. You mean to say I have to exclude something?! What if I want it later?! No, no, no, I am a maximalist by nature. So, although I’m regularly asked for recommendations, it’s wretched work to make a brief and pithy list of my favorite books, and I have no intention of trying. On December 31st, I posted screenshots on my Instagram of the iPhone note I’ve been keeping all year to remember what I’ve read: ninety-two books in small print over three stories. The only curation I did was to exclude periodicals, books and papers read for academic research and those books I started but didn’t like enough to finish. This means that, in essence, my recommendation list comprised nearly 100 entries. Keeping this in mind, the list that follows is remarkably pared down, I think.
What follows is not a list of all my favorite reads of the year, but rather some of the books from which I drew inspiration – human and artistic – grouped around some thematic strands. In this way, I avoid the pressure of having to choose the “best” across categories. These are [some of] the books that made me want to sing, to write, to read further, to move my body, to love people, to think. They lit up my imagination and my sense of my own existence.
Unsurprisingly, I gravitated towards books about finding, shaping and asserting a self in the world over and over. Books about constructing a narrative. Books about connecting or reconnecting with others, with a culture, with the past. Also unsurprisingly, many of these explored the intersection between inner life and creating and consuming art, literature, philosophy. The following, incomplete list comprises essay collections, fiction, memoir, poetry; often, they are something in between those categories.
Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance (2021), Hanif Abdurraqib : personal essays through a poetic and careful dissection of Black performances in American history
A History of My Brief Body (2020), Billy-Ray Belcourt : essays – part memoir, part academic dissertation – about being an Indigenous and queer person, and especially a body, within the violent environment created by historical and ongoing colonialism
Assembly (2021), Natasha Brown : a short novel of denial – the protagonist’s self-denial as a Black woman in order to rise in wealth and rank, her seeming denial of the gravity of her cancer, the denial of the privileged world that never fully accepts her and her denial to keep playing a crushing game
Autobiography of Red (1998), Anne Carson : a “novel in verse” that poignantly explores coming of age (and coming out), with a soupçon of Classical academia
Deluge (2020), Leila Chatti : a collection of poems exploring trauma, the body, womanhood, illness and cultural identity
Une femme (1988), Annie Ernaux : a memoir in which the author grieves the loss of her mother by writing the woman’s biography – a study of generational divides, class and gender
10:04 (2014), Ben Lerner : the second of Lerner’s autofiction trilogy, which explores the author’s relation to time, mortality and creating a legacy – both through a body of work and a child
In the Dream House: A Memoir (2019), Carmen Machado : a memoir in the form of a series of micro-chapters on domestic abuse, trauma and reclaiming a personal narrative through the genre tropes of horror and fairytales
Thick: And Other Essays (2019), Tressie McMillan Cottom : essays on race, economics, culture, beauty, womanhood that avoid facile conclusions, at once witty, painful, academic – a collection that is “thick”
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020), Cathy Park Hong : essays on the complicated limbo of being Asian in the United States
Detransition, Baby (2021), Torrey Peters : a novel that delves into the fluid and blurry lines of gender, sexuality and family – what do we owe to ourselves and others?
Lote (2020), Shola von Reinhold : a novel that imagines a buried Black, queer presence in 20th century art; a call for a decadent and complex self, a self that dares to exist boldly in a world that wants to erase it
Blueberries: Essays Concerning Understanding (2020), Ellena Savage : personal essays on womanhood, concretizing and complicating personal histories, thinking and making art, whose cover and contents ask, “What kind of body makes a memoir?”
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (2020), Jenn Shapland : at once a memoir of the author’s queer identity and an exploration of McCullers’ that explores what gets memorialized and what gets elided in a life
Artful (2012) and How to be both (2014), Ali Smith : two explorations (the first in the form of four lectures, the second a novel in two narratives) of mourning and identity through literature and art – the common cultural fingerprints that link us to a time and place and the people we love
Liminal (2018), Jordan Tannahill : an autofictional novel about personal history through a lens of mourning, with themes of queerness, identity, art and philosophy
A Short Residence in Sweden (1796), Mary Wollstonecraft : the 18th-century feminist’s letters to the lover scorning her – a Scandinavian travelogue, break-up memoir and polemic on the worth of experience and the inner lives of women
Nightbitch (2021), Rachel Yoder : a novel about figuring out how to be an artist, a mother, a woman and an animal