I said I’d read less in 2019.

135 books later, I guess I lied. I read compulsively to stave off so much else.

(My brand for this particular annual post is “Verbose,” so scroll down if you want to skip My Feelings and get straight into the lists: Top prose releases of 2019; Best books I read in 2019 that come out in 2020; My favorite books that I read for the first time this year (published before 2019); Best poetry I read this year; and Some of my favorite book-world moments of 2019. All titles have links to order from Tattered Cover.)

This year I was more aware of my age than I’ve ever been — constantly too old and too young. My mailbox and Instagram feed filled up with wedding invitations and baby announcements. People I’ve known forever had bare hands one day and rings the next, but my best friend was quitting her job to go become an artist in residence at an art and ecology center for ceramicists in Northern California. She moved away from her partner and the neighborhood in LA that I’d long imagined I’d eventually return to, even when visits showed me it no longer fit. My partner bought us plane tickets to Japan on a whim to celebrate her 30th birthday; she quit a corporate job and got a scholarship to a summer woodworking program at a school of craft in North Carolina. My former partner went on tours with Kacey Musgraves and Maggie Rogers and Empress Of and still hit a painful rock bottom. One world spun dizzyingly with color while another had three friends pregnant and domesticating. I got to know my new teenage stepbrothers as one started learning to drive. Their dad asked me often for advice on parenting them, and I thought often of how much I don’t know. One of my closest friends in Denver ghosted me, and I can say with absolute honesty that I have no idea why. Whatever the pictures say, and in whichever direction they’re pointing, almost every single person that I love spent most of the year unhappy.

Me too. From my new apartment in the middle-ish of the country, I felt the poignance of my coastal friends and their gender fuckery and their art and their youth and how far away it all is. The Angeleno in me resented the desk and the appointments. Simultaneously, the generations of Western Slope roots revived a brutal desire to stick a stake in the ground somewhere. I spent much of the year in sulky conversations about Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” as it applies to queer marriage: finally in grief over the limits that queerness places on a life’s ease. From any angle, half of me flapped in aspiration against whatever trap held down the other half. I started querying a manuscript I’ve been working on for some years, and I read incessantly to avoid feeling the heaviness of months of radio silence and the things splitting me down the middle.

I started 2019 as a 24-year-old book buyer, just two months into a new job ordering university press and small press books for Tattered Cover in Denver. Halfway through the year, my department restructured and a wonderful colleague left, and I became the head adult buyer, selecting all of the new titles for four stores. Tattered Cover has an incredible legacy — it’s one of the largest independent bookstores in the country and has now been open just shy of 50 years. But it also, and separately, has a legacy in my life. As a kid, I went to the old Cherry Creek Tattered Cover with my dad more weekends than I can count. I ate with my family at The Fourth Story restaurant on the top floor of the store, which seemed to my child mind to be about the size of the North Pole. My dad read Stephen King paperbacks and whatever was new from Carl Hiaasen; I read anything I could get my hands on.

When I moved back to Denver in January of 2018, it was to be a year-long stopover on the way to study palliative care at a medical school in Portland (mostly because when my dad was dying in 2014, there was nothing at all palliating about his care, and the suffering that we both incurred as a result is something I still haven’t quite forgiven). Coming off a stint at Book Soup in West Hollywood, I started working as a part time bookseller at Tattered Cover, — mostly because my dad always dreamed of bookselling here when he retired, and he never got the chance.

It’s strange to exist in a work life I built on a foundation of nostalgia and lamentation that I twisted into some idea of “legacy” (mostly because I don’t have my dad’s casualness in the least, but I do have a daughter’s drive to impress). When — a few weeks after I stepped onto the floor of the downtown Tattered Cover — I decided not to go to Portland, I lost track of whatever through line I’d been riding and started hamster-wheeling toward some version of “achievement” I imagined my dad would be proud of. After ten months of part-time bookselling, I became a buyer.

Since I moved all of my books and sticky notes into my new office in the basement of TC’s Colfax location, I’ve been self-conscious about my age most days. (I’ve wondered this year often if whatever ambition feels natural to me exists more because I’m supposed to learn patience and slowing down from it than because I’m supposed to continue the fast-paced upward mobility that it has often inspired.) (Maybe I just wonder this as an excuse to avoid saying: I’m good at my job but terrified of my own fraudulence; and also, is this just the definition of Raised and Conditioned a Woman™?)

I stopped wearing my hair in pigtails on top of my head and stopped bringing my Nalgene covered in stickers to work. I brought a copper bottle instead, a low bun. I wore the oversized wool blazers that I got from the thrift years ago in celebration of the beginning of a new era of Hip Dyke-ness. I don’t know that I want to look older — I’m decidedly [or theoretically] opposed to my own self-consciousness, but maybe I’d like to look agender or at least outside of the version of “women in their twenties” that existed in the 20-teens and now 2020s.

Still, a coworker steps into my doorway to joke that it would take more than two of me to add up to his age. At a rooftop publishing event in New York, an author in his 50s, drink in one hand, touches my arm and asks to take me lingerie shopping three times in one conversation. I laugh because I’m 25 and still imagine that his editor will step in to say something, but the second man instead hands me his business card so we can “set something up” and says nothing else. I stay another hour, take a second drink and down it in the bathroom, and then walk back to my hotel in the rain. Back in Denver, female coworkers touch my waist and comment on my weight, ask if I’m eating enough. I cherish these women, but I hold back tears as I wonder if they would say the same to a man in my position or someone a decade or two older.

At work, 25 sometimes feels like a lead x-ray vest, so I start treating it as such — joking about my age offensively to proffer it the opportunity to protect me from something more nefarious. Mostly, the sales reps that I sit with each week to buy books for the store are wonderful and seem to think me capable, my age irrelevant. Mostly, perhaps, it’s only internally an issue. I find myself reading compulsively to avoid the self-doubt my mind offers in spades and because 25 seems to mean that if ever there is a time when I am anything other than a step ahead, it will be because I am unprepared, a child, girlish, as opposed to busy or a human. I should have opinions about publishing trends, what’s happening on literary Twitter, and whatever galley everyone is reading and posting on #bookstagram, but when I share them with conviction, I fear the single wrong word that could uncover the kid underneath. The one who’s still not sure who let her sit in the big girl chair and where her dad is.

None of this is fact; I know that whatever doubt lives in me reeks with the unoriginality of imposter syndrome, while anyone else’s doubt in my ability — if they have doubt — is not really worth my time investigating. I have a lot still to learn and a lot already to offer. My boss has been the greatest salve by far to my questions of self-worth. Also young but with some ten years more experience than I have, Bethany enters every room with a sense of absolute purpose and right to hold space; but she’s also the most likely person that I know to assert that she doesn’t know something and ask for clarification or an explanation. Working under her feels like a daily lesson in forgetting whatever shame I’ve been lugging around by the wagon-full. Perhaps our proximity will allow 2020 to become the year that I finally do read less and write more.

I thought often in the past year about how much the obsessive effort to keep up could actually mean, anyway. 2018 and ’19 seem like the years that publishing melded with the 24-hour news cycle. Working as a book buyer felt often like dressing for the weather in Denver: order a couple hundred of a title this week because you have to have it, return a couple hundred books next week because there’s a newer hotter drop-in title; put on a parka because it’s snowing one minute, strip to a t-shirt because it’s 75 the next. Nonetheless, I am grateful for the many titles this year that felt a lot more like art than compulsory artifacts of consumption or academic capital paid toward tickets to a certain circle of Twitter discourse.

Each of the books below ran counter to whatever dearth of self-worth made the last year heavy and reminded me of the transcendent power of the thing we in the book business are here to uplift.

Top prose releases of the year, in order of publication:

1. Hollywood’s Eve by Lili Anolik (January 2019, Scribner) A lot of my favorite books are about women famous for their art (Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein, Violence Girl by Alice Bag, almost all of the prose Patti Smith has ever written, 2019’s Little Weirds by Jenny Slate, and on and on) but honestly, give me a bio about a woman famous for being “in the scene,” and I’m just really not mad about it. I will die on the hill of people being interesting because they’re from Los Angeles and its weighty, flossy “all that” (not to be confused with Didion’s “all that” of New York, to which she was able to offer an unsentimental adieu). No one will accuse me of being unsentimental about LA, and falling into Anolik’s breezy and criss-crossing narrative gave unfettered access to a certain LA essentialism (which, of course, is only defined by having nothing at all to set in stone). Most reviews (especially The New York Times, yikes), staked claims that Anolik does very little with this book, but I feel strongly that she captured Babitz’s slow-days-fast-company, windows-down Los Angeles; and she did it pleasantly enough that I would read this side-by-side with Babitz’s own Eve’s Hollywood and not feel a bit overcooked.
2. The White Book by Han Kang (February 2019, Hogarth) I knew Han Kang of course for The Vegetarian and then for Human Acts. She knows how to wring violence silently out of language better than any other author I’ve read, and in this latest novella, she wraps the words first in white cotton and lace. This book is loosely about the color white, and inevitably conjures for me Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Yves Klein and the collection of back issues of CABINET magazine with the column on individual colors that I dream of one day lining up end to end and crying over. I love prose that’s about color because of the ways that a particular shade can direct the character and style of a piece of writing. Reading this autobiographical novel, which Kang created while at a residency program in Warsaw, felt like reading a confession and a haunting and an impossible sisterly love that she dug up from an internal marsh and then blanketed and suffocated in the purity of snow. There is a story here, but for me, this book is sublimely experiential, and the narrative is auxiliary.
3. The Night Swimmers by Peter Rock (March 2019, SOHO Press)
   It’s night; a young boy and an older woman swim a long distance across a part of Lake Michigan, parallel and in the same direction but many yards apart and never touching. Without speaking, they have agreed to do this the next night, and the next, and the next; and miles disappear even as they start from and return to the same dock each night. I continue to obsess over the success of this novel because of the way that it announces (if only in sideways, fractured glimpses) the sexuality in this. Peter Rock’s magic somehow-iteration of Samantha Hunt’s The Seas meets Lidia Yuknavitch’s Chronology of Water stuck in my head because of the ambiguity of a body of water and the glint off of two bodies dragging themselves through and over and under it. This book is an invitation into the erotic love affair that anyone can develop with the unknown and the unseen in the depths of blue, and it reads just like insomnia.
4. Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett (June 2019, Tin House) I made myself laugh at least seven times this year by imagining handing this totally fun neon green book with a pink flamingo on the cover to a customer asking for a beach read (it’s about a family taxidermy shop in Florida where the dad dies and then the mom freaks out and starts posing all of the giant stuffed animals in complicated sex positions in the window displays, while the daughter, Jessa-Lynn, tries to keep everyone’s collective shit together). This book is grotesque and hot and completely gutting and totally transparent all the way through. Kristen Arnett created a character in Jessa that’s painfully easy to relate to: one who pushes away tenderness in the wake of tragedy, one who defines her queerness by her ability to embody the mask of masculinity that she learned from her father, and one who can’t tell the difference between obsession and love and care. I have a [yes, admittedly niche] love for books that get into the nitty gritty of taxidermy as a proxy for humanness and grief: representing the meticulous curation of pieces of ourselves to appear more alive than the ones that actually live and the posing of our dead to have more conviction in false immortality than they ever did in true mortality (shout out to Anna Journey’s brilliant essay collection An Arrangement of Skin, as always), and Arnett’s novel does this with humor and heartbreak. I couldn’t put it down — I was so invested in the road kill and sticky Florida skin and (thank God) the lesbians. [Side note: bless 2019 for being a year that publishing finally gave the people what they wanted in the form of multidimensional queer ladies who don’t die or disappear or turn straight in the end.]
5. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (June 2019, Penguin Press) Sometimes I do this thing where I take books away from myself before they’re over when I love them too much. I want to stretch them out. I’ve done it with people too, taking myself away in case loving will lead to ending… afraid I’ll lose any semblance of luster to them on a second glance. You never get to read a book for the first time again. I read Ocean Vuong’s debut novel up to the second-to-last page and then stopped. I read it again and stopped again. If I didn’t finish, I hadn’t read it — that’s what I was saying to myself. All of the tumbling and hurting in it could still be new (funny, sort of, for a book so dedicated to the brevity of a feeling). On the third read, I finally took in the last page. At this point, I don’t have much else to say about this book: it’s a book of a lifetime. I’ve presented it at nine different book talks this year and made it Tattered Cover’s Book of the Month in June. In December, staff voted for it to be our Book of the Year. I’m still reeling that it fell off of the shortlist for the National Book Award. One thing I have left to say is that before it was a novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” was a poem, which started on page 43 of a collection called Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Don’t let the novel come into your life without also seeking out the poetry that it came from. Also, these two interviews (!!).
6. Stay and Fight by Madeline ffitch (July 2019, FSG) I am so emotional about the nuance and complication of the queer stories of 2019. My own queerness was raised on the open relationships and college activism of Los Angeles and supplemented with the bombastic sexuality of The L Word reruns (which, I think, feels complicated now that I work a 9–5 in Colorado and do not live in a co-op house that hosts parties whose decor includes a full wall of dildos). There are a lot of stories right now about [sometimes radical] queer family building, which feel inventive perhaps but rarely hopeful to me. I fell in love, though, with Madeline ffitch’s novel because it’s the first book I’ve ever read that gives all of its attention to queer family lasting. Stay and Fight can only be described as harrowing for the way that it toes the line between a family tearing apart and a family knotting itself so tightly together that individuals no longer quite have edges. I’ve never read a book that made me so acutely aware of how thin the line between the two is. Set in rural Appalachia and rooted in a survivalist mentality, this is the novel that will remind you of every reason under the sun to stay and fight, and why that, too, can be revolutionary. I loved it madly.
7. The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter (July 2019, Two Dollar Radio)
   This book is PERFECT. It’s all of the little pieces I’ve loved about my favorite books of recent years combined into one masterpiece. Sarah Rose Etter has the gruesome meat metaphors of Sam Munson’s Dog Symphony. She conducts the horribly embodied understandings of femininity that I remember from Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest. Her character’s love affair and the romancing of the things that harm her are Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf. Her division of bodies and experiments with the line between life and death remind of Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre. Her telling of seclusion in the faraway draws up the horror of Carmen Maria Machado’s short stories along the sides of roads or a lake. The fact that Sarah Rose Etter has done all of these things in one book makes her not only one of the most ambitious writers I’ve read in recent memory but also the most original. Her novel reminds me of so many things in the way that the color of the sky at a particular time reminds me of something else: “it’s almost like…. but not quite.” And therefore it’s something else entirely. This book is gruesome, neurotic, diseased, dismembered, held in the fetal position, and absolutely, absolutely brilliant.
8. When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back by Naja Marie Aidt (September 2019, Coffee House Press) As early readers offered first thoughts and critiques on my manuscript at the beginning of 2019, I found myself spending a great deal of time considering narrative of memory and the fallibility and potential harm in its reconstruction. Naja Marie Aidt’s heartbreaking memoir traces the lead up to and fallout of a terrible accident that killed her 25 year old son. In it, she goes round and round in tightening and widening loops, repeating the events that led to his death and the time that followed. Nataliya Deleva said it best when she wrote that “the narrative constructs meaning through repetition, borrowed fragments, flashbacks…” (This entire review is so smart and has a lot to say about memory; I highly recommend it.) Aidt’s mania and repeated cycles likely mimic her son Carl’s reality in the moments before his death; he suffered a psychotic break after taking psilocybin mushrooms and threw himself from a fifth floor window. In reading, I immediately projected onto Aidt’s story my college residence hall at USC, where a freshman fell from the sixth floor in 2010 after taking ecstasy at a rave near campus. Jackson Roddy is two years older than I am and went to high school down the street from where I did before he moved across the country and into the dorm that would make me miserable and nearly kill him. So much projection — I know — and onto someone else’s horror story. I wonder though, if my great love for literary nonfiction exists because in its inability to capture subjective truth, it allows for an insertion of the self that expands beyond the potential for the same in fiction. Aidt made me want to write and to remember more than any other author did this year.
9. Exquisite Mariposa by Fiona Alison Duncan (October 2019, Soft Skull Press) Well, well. My LA love story: living rooms divided into bedrooms by hanging sheets; energy healers prescribing gay poetry; a man jacking off while driving a mini-van. Class consciousness as something like performance art. Kundalini. Being twenty-whatever. The Real. Fiona Alison Duncan writes: “I love Los Angeles… Nowhere have I felt so happy to have stereotypes confirmed.” This Koreatown come-as-you-are novel is the best contemporary telling of LA that I’ve read — and Los Angeles is (let’s not beat around the bush) the love of my life. One cancelled reality TV show contract about a group of friends sharing an apartment becomes the curving around Highway 1 story of life in the framework of the performance industry that Eve Babitz and Joan Didion and everyone holding a cigarette between their sun-stretched lips told before social media existed. Here, Instagram handles replace names and “art” is always in quotation marks. Duncan clearly loves to hate and hates to love Los Angeles, and there’s just no truer way to understand the City of Angels. Only regret: reading this on a tiny remote island in Greece… what was I thinking? Pick a roaring and trashy location if you choose to pick this one up.
10. In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (November 2019, Graywolf) I faked my way into a sold out event in 2018 for Carmen’s last book by wearing my Tattered Cover lanyard and acting like I knew what was going on (and thank god for that rare moment of authoritative taking-of-space that doesn’t come with caveats or doubts). This author impressed me most when she opted not to read anything from Her Body and Other Parties because, as she said, “I’m a better writer than I was when I wrote the stories in that book.” (Also thank god I was already sitting down when she said that.) Carmen Maria Machado is a power house to me, and perhaps that’s why her new memoir of being badly abused in a queer relationship struck in the exact way that hitting your funny bone on the corner of a table does. It could happen to her, too. I’m embarrassed to write that in the tone of revelation — it’s a thing that has been theoretically true to me always, but which needed Machado’s voice to be tangibly so. This will be the first year in a handful that a friend hasn’t called me in secret because a partner has a gun, and he’s ready to use it in her direction. Still, a friend came home for the holidays last month and reported that her cousin died this summer. Abuse and violence have scratched my family every which way, and still we don’t talk about it much. When I was 20 and coming out, I was ready to buy into the queer utopia my new friends were selling. In the years since, I’ve had the chance to learn that my buy-in would break my heart more than reality ever could. In her book, Machado bravely exposes the reality that the narrative which poses queerness as utopian is damaging to queers ourselves. She points to a gaping hole in the canon of domestic abuse, but she doesn’t aim to fill that hole. Instead, she lovingly opens up space for others to explore their own histories and add and add and add nuance to our collective understanding. In the Dream House is written in the second person, as a conversation between the powerful, assured version of a self and the version that loses track of self-worth in the wake of abuse. Both exist side by side throughout, with no judgment placed on either. For me, there was no way to finish this book and not immediately clutch it in both hands, refusing to let go. Machado’s brilliance resides in the fact that she is absolutely always writing in a way that expands possibility about what language and books can do. And as she says in her dedication, “If you need this book, it is for you.”
11. Little Weirds by Jenny Slate (November 2019, Little, Brown) Jenny Slate is such a fuckin weirdo; I’m obsessed with her. Because I’m also a complete torrential weirdo and maybe everyone is also totally bananas, and we just don’t tell each other the things that we do in private or think in our private secret brain holes. But Jenny Slate does. And that is why I love her. I listened to this book on audio from Libro.fm (a very awesome and not shitty audiobook source that is not Audible and not owned by Amazon, the Devil), and Jenny reads it! And her voice is a miraculous weird jewel. Some of her weirds: a dream dog arriving to be a spiritual guide! A vagina singing very sad songs! Magic! Flowers! Slate is over-the-moon obsessed with nature and animals and how perfectly impossible our world can be. I got lighter with every single page of this book until I floated away to happy weird heaven, where Jenny Slate was doing a live performance of her Very Very Good film, Obvious Child, and also little snippets from her comedy special, Stage Fright.
12. On Swift Horses by Shannon Pufahl (November 2019, Riverhead), with a tangent on gatekeeping and fandom. In a conference room at the Penguin Random House offices in New York, Cal Morgan talked me into reading this book. The vibe of the whole thing was strange and sort of feral— ten or twelve booksellers from across the country (most of whom came to their jobs because they write something on the side) hearing from top editors at Riverhead, Knopf, and Random House about their processes and their favorite books of the season. Robin Desser (who edits Anne Carson and Patti Smith) presented the novel Say Say Say by Lila Savage. Ben Greenberg (editor of Questlove, Jimmy Fallon, and Lin-Manuel Miranda) talked about working with Jia Tolentino and about her collection, Trick Mirror, which would become a sensation. Cal (who’s worked often with Lidia Yuknavitch and Roxane Gay) presented Shannon Pufahl’s debut. The room was hungry, and I imagine the editors knew it. Booksellers right and left tried to edge into conversation whatever writing project they have going, and the pieces of me raised in Los Angeles eye-rolled hard. I learned well and early in the sound booths of LA music venues to keep my mouth shut and be regular while my ex pushed faders for bands, or in the green rooms my friends shared with people too famous to make sense in three-dimensions to me. They belonged on the covers of records and on billboards. I learned to find the unabashed neediness of fandom to be one of the most shameful things. Still, I sat in that room overlooking Broadway and wondered about the mutually-beneficial creative potential that could exist if we all started from a place of greater equilibrium. I wondered what conversations could look like if editors didn’t have to guard themselves from an onslaught of pitches at every turn and if the people selling books were able to imagine that writing them was within their grasp — that their ticket wasn’t in a glass tower far away. When Cal got up to talk about On Swift Horses, everything in me was crying out for the story that he told about meeting Shannon for that first cup of coffee. I was intrigued by his telling about their introduction through a friend and the initial sense of obligation that led to immense admiration. I liked the transparency. I liked that she grew up in rural Kansas. It’s not so common for me to pick up a lead novel from a big house or imprint (I’m trying). I gravitate toward the gruesome use of language in Argentine novels coming from Coffee House Press and New Directions. I like the severity of Lisa Dillman’s and Heather Cleary’s translations. A touch of oulipo. Something strange. Complete nonsense, plotlessness, unreliability. And yet: I loved this book. On the surface, it’s a novel centered on gambling: horses, cards, horses again. Below the surface, though, it’s about the ways that we gamble with ourselves — and what’s addictive in that. With sublime dexterity and perfect subtlety, Shannon explores the pieces of her two characters — a newlywed and her brother-in-law — that they hide, the pieces that they trade and bury, the pieces that become their masks. On Swift Horses is the queer underbelly story of the American West that I didn’t know I was dying for; I’d follow it into its own dance halls and horse races in a heartbeat. Thank you Cal, and thank you Shannon!

2020 has glowed in my mind for months, and often because of how many books I’ve read recently that will finally see the world in this new year.

Best books I read in 2019 that come out in 2020, in publication order (you can preorder any of these!):

1. Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey (January, Knopf) January’s Book of the Month at Tattered Cover! This small but mighty debut is told over the course of 20 years in the conversations that one unnamed narrator has. Mostly, these are conversations amongst women — a group of mothers in Fresno getting wine drunk while their babies sleep in the next room, divulging how they wound up single and pregnant; a family trip to Italy that falls into a sensual interaction between the narrator and her friend’s mother; a near-evil back and forth between the narrator and a friend who treats her terribly as they walk through an art exhibit on female pain, inspired by the real work of artist Sophie Calle. Although Popkey focuses on the ways that women express their desires and pain to each other, she occasionally veers off into other types of interaction: the narrator role-plays with a man she picked up in a hotel bar, coaching him to become a character she could hate more than any other. I loved this book for being the first I’ve read in recent memory that delves into the chasm our world creates in women: between wanting to take all of our power back and wanting to give up control completely and hand the reins to someone — anyone — else. Popkey gets at the tiredness involved in walking through the world as a woman, and she’s willing to explore the submission that it can create — the wanting to be dominated just so that you can take a break from working so hard and using so much will-power all of the time. This book doesn’t have any answers, but it has an awful lot of all the right questions.
2. Uncanny Valley by Anna Weiner (January, MCD) With this memoir, Anna Weiner had me laughing and groaning out loud in equal measure. Uncanny Valley is really a collection of her observations (so precise and detailed that her attention feels almost uncanny itself) as she shifts her life from the New York publishing scene to San Francisco tech at the beginning of the startup boom. A line early in this book jokes about working in the publishing industry and not being able to afford hardcover books, and honestly, that really did me in. Hours and hours of my 2019 were filled up with conversations about wages and wage gaps within book world. I made a point of talking about money right and left because discomfort with those conversations is one thing that will absolutely keep booksellers at minimum wage for the rest of our lives. I don’t blame independent bookstores, and I don’t blame my store. But we are all living and working in an industry whose business model has not kept up in the least with current cultural practices and values and with the cost of living. As minimum wage increases, we have no way to pass that cost on to customers; prices are printed on books. Raising the prices of books will be similarly unhelpful when Amazon is still able to sell books at a severely discounted rate (and actually at a loss for them). I love Anna Wiener for her willingness to approach some of these issues — even as her book’s focus is on the tech world, operating (perhaps misguidedly) at the opposite end of the spectrum. She’s as cutting as the sharpest knife but never for the sake of her own superiority; rather she includes herself in every comment and critique and invites the reader into her mind to experience alongside her the intense pull of all of the things that she seems to both hate to love and love to hate. This book has insight that I found impossible to shake and which I carry everywhere since reading — as I scroll Twitter, check my work email, and watch a steady stream of Lyfts driving down 13th on a Friday.
3. Half Broke by Ginger Gaffney (February, Norton) February’s Book of the Month at Tattered Cover! Sitting in a panel on literature of the West where too many white men were talking too loudly and watching Ginger slowly lean forward and growl into her mic, “I hate cowboys,” was a highlight of my week. Talking to her later, and hearing that she self-edited at the last minute away from “I fucking hate cowboys” was a highlight of my year. Her memoir Half Broke touches so intently on what it is to be human and what is animal in us. While she works as a horse trainer on an alternative prison ranch in New Mexico, she is really living into her notion that honesty and accountability are far more present in the ways that we move through the world than anything we could ever say out loud. She is there to show the creatures inhabiting the land to be mirrors for any and all human behavior — in devastating and in utterly redemptive ways. She reminds me of my grandma Ginny with her Subaru full of old quilts for her Airedale terriers, John Wayne and Free. Ginger reminds me of Ginny, who knew every dog’s name at the dog park we went to every day after school when I was a kid. The animals melted off some of the roughness she had most of the time, which I came to know well in the AA meetings at York Street where my divorced grandparents held court in violently loving friendship. I thank Ginger a million times over for showing me a history that looks a little bit familiar and for writing down what she’s taught and what what she’s learned. This world would be better if we all had more of Ginger’s voice in our heads. **Ginger will be at Tattered Cover Colfax for an event on Tuesday, February 11th at 7pm.
4. Verge by Lidia Yuknavitch (February, Riverhead) To no one’s surprise, Lidia Yuknavitch has created a perfectly-oriented collection with Verge. The individual stories carry both a folktale feeling and a specific darkness that she has a gift in writing, but she situates the whole collection so that light hits it in all the right places. Lidia has never shied away from taking readers back into whatever gave us nightmares as children (indeed, this collection often feels like Grimm’s Fairy Tales for adults). Simultaneously, though, no one will be able to read this book without doubting the fierceness of its author’s illuminating hope. She takes you right to the cliff and convinces you that something you can’t see will hold the back of your shirt while you lean to peer over its edge. I’m so looking forward to finally meeting Lidia, whose Chronology of Water changed my relationship to myself and my body and has been in my top four or five favorite books for years. Thanks to her editor, Cal Morgan, who helped land Denver on her tour! **I’ll be hosting Lidia for an event at Tattered Cover Colfax on Monday, February 10th at 7pm.
5. Weather by Jenny Offill (February, Knopf) I picked up Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation at a used book shop in Park Slope to go with a bagel this May. I thought I’d spend the day reading in Prospect Park, but I instead called a friend and spent literal hours scraping off excess cream cheese and napping in the grass. I thought I wouldn’t let myself read Weather until I finished the book everyone’s been raving about for years, but Speculation is still unread on my shelf, and I’m obsessed with this new little book of horrors. When we look back at the canon of disaster lit that emerged post-2016 election, I hope that Weather will be at the front of all of our minds. Written in the structure and with the language of madness, Offill’s new novel captures perfectly the heartburn feeling of rising and cresting panic. As Lizzie works increasingly hard to reach out and quell the mundane and outlandish fears of those around her, the reader is privy to what’s breaking down inside of Lizzie herself. There is nothing comforting about this book — except perhaps that its topsy-turvy motion mimics exactly that of the political and environmental worlds we’re living in, so it’s incredibly easy to slip right into the ride.
6. Thin Places by Jordan Kisner (March, FSG) In the middle of a damp afternoon in New York this summer, my boss Bethany and I met Colin Dickerman and Jenna Johnson of FSG for drinks in an empty restaurant-bar with old wood floors that had just opened. Their warmth and ease made those couple hours some of my favorites from my time at Book Expo this year. Colin mentioned as we were leaving that he had an essay collection forthcoming that he knew I needed to read, and back in Denver I found a bound manuscript in the mail. Bless you Colin for seeing me well enough in that dark bar to pick out one of my new favorite books and my favorite essay collection I’ve ever read! In Thin Places, Jordan Kisner announces herself humbly as a master of her genre, with essays that exude brilliance individually and then perhaps even more so as a carefully ordered collection. Her “thin places” are the spaces where “the barrier between the physical world and the spiritual world wears thin and becomes porous. Invisible things, like music or love or dead people or God, might become visible there.” There’s no way to walk away from her collection without feeling as if you live in a thin place — as if you might never have to leave it. Reading her feels like listening to that guitar part in a favorite song when all other sound falls away and then, suddenly, your body falls away, and your self spreads to take up the entirety of a room. Kisner writes about OCD and the boundaries of selfhood, about a New York artist using empty space as a feminine medium, about a Martha Washington pageant obsessed with lineage held on the Laredo, Texas and Nuevo Laredo border. She writes of young Christians clubbing and converting during summers spent in Montauk, of forensic pathologists in Ohio quietly defending the dead who can no longer speak for themselves. She writes along tightropes, but in the world of her mind, these spaces widen to become comfortably navigable pathways. In a world that seeks to erase the spaces between, this may be the most important book you read in 2020.
7. The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel (March, Knopf), with a second tangent on fandom and conflating the art with the artist. April’s Book of the Month at Tattered Cover! I read this in a fervent pile of hours one Saturday, getting up only twice all day: once for more hot water, once to move my car across the street. After I read this book, I felt like my body had been turned into a projector, and I watched The Glass Hotel play, on repeat, on the ceiling of my bedroom for days when I tried to sleep. It’s a novel about a Ponzi scheme and an arrangement between a man and a much younger woman; it’s about money — how it toys with or subsumes identity. But it’s also about water and glass and the lens of a camera: what we can see through these things that exists on the other side and what of ourselves reflects back to us from their surfaces. Then it’s about how or if we can tell the difference between the two. I’ve not ever loved a character like I loved Vincent, the young woman protagonist of The Glass Hotel, and I tell this to Emily over the beginnings of dinner at Tables in Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood, where she will order peppermint tea and then peppermint tea, and then peppermint tea. Mostly I read nonfiction and fall in love with the minds of women writers. Never would I say I love the characters represented on their pages, for fear of creating an autodidactic intoxication not invited by the writers themselves. I’m wary of conflating the artist with her art, especially where personal narrative has been utilized as medium. Musician Lucy Dacus’ article “Notice Me!: How Fandom Endangers Female Musicians” gave voice to so much of the eggshell-walking contemplation of the past four or five years, where I’ve brushed elbows with a huge number of people whose art carries huge meaning for my life. I should not love Lucy, who I do not know. I should not love Miya Folick, who makes my very favorite music, even as I eat dinner with one of her closest friends, who croons “I love Miya, don’t you loooove Miya?” For Miya’s sake, I do not. At this point, many of my college friends make some of my favorite art, which feels complicated. As some friendships fall off into acquaintanceships, my general like for a demo from 2014 turns into obsession with an album from 2019. Can I say I love its creator? Can I say I know her or them at all? Fiction has been a place of loosening the reins of this internal dialogue. I shouldn’t love Emily St. John Mandel, who I hardly know. But Emily made Vincent and gave me permission to love her — that seems different. Vincent is a ticket to a certain unabashed longing. At dinner, Emily also allowed my supposition that Vincent is queer. The piece in me that craves an unbreakable link to the art I love warms. (Then I become bored with loving characters for their queerness. I want to understand my fascination with Vincent for reasons beyond what I’ve projected onto her.) (And also I wonder of course if we can love any character for more that whatever we project onto them… I will painfully love Vincent for all of the ways that she looks like me or all of the places where her skin loosens, so I can slip into it and move her eyes as I would; force her to see as I do.) The Glass Hotel is, like so many of my favorite books, the story of a woman who can’t quite sort the difference between the morbid ecstasy of love and that of art and that of the sound of being underwater. And that of selfhood. And that of the color blue. And that of individuality. It belongs next to the stack I lovingly call my Blue Books (also my most cherished books): The Seas, Chronology of Water, Bluets, The Night Swimmers, and even, in some ways, Joan Didion’s Blue Nights. I love it immensely.
8. Luster by Raven Leilani (August, FSG) Thank you to Jenna Johnson, who, like Colin, listened closely to me in New York and understands what I want to read. Jenna has been personally sending me books I’ve loved for the past six months. Reading Luster is a spiraling dance with no deviation from the feverish pace Raven Leilani sets. It chases the thoughts of a young woman living in New York and scraping by on hot instant message sex with strangers and the paintings she makes in her tiny Brooklyn apartment. When she winds up living in the home of an older man who she’s sleeping with and his wife and adopted child, Luster turns into a dizzying snapshot of the complication in desire and the love of parents. This book wraps you up in a hundred silvery ribbons of quick language and then flings you outward, holding you by one hand as you recover from the spinning just long enough to swing back in. It will make you gluttonous for more from a hilarious and unforgiving new writer.

One sentence(ish) on each of my favorite books that I read for the first time this year, published before 2019:

Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt (Mariner Books, 2017) Samantha Hunt is trying to kill me with perfect fiction. After I read The Seas a zillion times last year, I swore I couldn’t read this because it would let me down… it didn’t.
Educated by Tara Westover (Random House, 2018) I never thought I’d overcome the hype, but w o w; this is one of the best [non-scientific] explorations of the influence of violence or trauma on memory and perspective, and I truly cannot get it out of my head.
The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch (Harper, 2016) Yuknavitch’s usual mastery of violence and projection, love and sexuality, but I read this one on a plane! Which was gnarly as hell.
Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit (Penguin Books, 2014) This travelogue-ish follow-up to A Field Guide to Getting Lost was a perfect read for the apocalyptic day in Greece this summer when we sat alone on a tiny inlet beach as it filled with smoke from the brush fire cresting on the ridge above us. Solnit had thoughts on rotting apricots and Frankenstein to spare.
True Stories: Sixth Edition by Sophie Calle (Actes Sud, 2018; First Edition from Steidl, 2010) A tiny photo book/visual memoir originally published in 1994, this perfect collection represents the best of artistic strangeness and obsession.

I read less poetry this year than I have in any year of recent memory, but here are some titles that took my breath away.

1. I read Soft Science by Franny Choi in manuscript form early this year and fell in love. The collection asks on repeat through a series of Turing-test-inspired poems: which of our machine behaviors draw us closer and closer to personhood and which yank us indelibly away from it? After Choi drags us uncomfortably through heavy wilting fruit, vaginas, cyborg parts, a squid leg, and squashes of all kinds, it’s still impossible to tell if we are people infiltrated by the computational or cyborgs striving only to be human. UGH FRANNY. (Alice James Books, April 2019)
2. Homie by Danez Smith has words more full of fireworks that anything else and uses their glow to light up all of the mundanities and the extremes of friendship. Hope is the doctrine of this book, and it’s redemptive as hell. (Graywolf, coming 2020)
3. I re-read a long-time favorite, Anna Journey’s Vulgar Remedies when I was in Greece this summer. The way she writes about love and the erotic through a lens of the grotesque (but a grotesque that’s perhaps misunderstood rather than terrifying) makes me never want to read anything else again. (LSU Press, August 2013)
4. The early chapbook When the Only Light is Fire by Saeed Jones was the first book I read in 2019 because I was so anticipating his memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives, which came out in October and ultimately won a Kirkus Prize. Honestly, I think I’ll always love Jones as a poet above anything else; I preferred the chapbook to the memoir. His collection Prelude to Bruise from 2014 is also perfect in every way. (Sibling Rivalry Press, October 2011)
5. Controversial opinion: A Fortune for Your Disaster is the Hanif Abdurraqib book to write home about this year. (Yes, his incredible homage to A Tribe Called Quest, Go Ahead in the Rain was stellar. BUT.) The way that the voice in this collection crushes his own heroes and stories of heroism to get a little closer to a world where truth is good enough to conquer hopelessness is just beyond beyond. (Tin House, September 2019)
6. water / tongue by Mai C. Doan drew me in because of its structural approach to discomfiting a reader and linear understanding. The collection centers the death from suicide of the author’s grandmother and aims to unwind suffering of the future through the suffering of the past. (Omnidawn, April 2019)

Some of my favorite moments of 2019 in book world:

This year started with me re-falling so deeply in love with the craft of writing and in such an all-consuming way that I had to actually take Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive away from myself to calm down. I then dove into an internet blackhole on audio documentarians and dug up an old tape recorder to preserve the sound of some especially raspy leaves, but did not ever finish Luiselli’s book over the next 11 months because, honestly, its woven aural perfection was so good it kind of hurt. (This is why it didn’t make the list.)

This year was the first that anyone read my manuscript in its entirety. A mixed-genre memoir that looks at the relationships between grief and mortality and sex and queerness through the story of my dad’s death, this book has been a heavy one to carry around alone for the past few years. I sent it first to my wonderful screenwriter friend Becca, also a queer person and member of what we call the Dead Dads Club. Her comments were incredibly useful and so warm. A few other folks very close to my heart have given me reads that reminded me that a story that’s well-worn to me can still shake another’s understanding. I’m especially grateful to my Consortium rep Dory Dutton who asked to read the book and then called me after she had to say, “I really feel like we’re friends now.” Me too, Dory! Thank you to everyone who asks after the book and who has spent time with it. You are my heart’s heroes.

In June I randomly met someone in New York who I would grow to cherish as a sort of genie (or maybe a friend?). Richard Nash has given me a lot this year professionally, but one of the greatest gifts personally was his recommending Zazen by Vanessa Veselka. This is very strange book and unapologetic book, which came to represent to me the radical possibilities within a world of publishing gatekeeping that often feels like a bit of a bummer. Richard’s interest in my path in life reminded me at a low point that what I do can matter.

Also in NY, I met three editors whose work I’ve cherished for some time and whose humanity I’ve come to know and love in the past months. Thank you Cal Morgan, Jenna Johnson, and Colin Dickerman for the work you do and for welcoming me into literary community with you this year. It’s been such a delight to be seen and known, bit by bit!

My partner and I took a long weekend trip in the fall to a friend’s hillside cabin in Breckenridge, where we mostly sat in separate rooms, and I spent a lot of time scribbling on notecards and lying on the floor staring at the ceiling. I read a copy of Exposure by Olivia Sudjic that I found in London last year and an ARC of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland (coming Feb 2020 from Tin House!) while sitting at a desk that looked out on the changing leaves and in a bathtub surrounded in royal blue tile. These two books pushed some pieces around in my brain-pan and gave me the beginnings of a new writing project about fame as an archival space, which I imagine will take up much of my 2020 and beyond.

In October, I went to the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association trade show in a snow storm and sat for a couple hours with Michelle Malonzo of Changing Hands Bookstore in Arizona, talking about books and our parents. I sat with Kane Klipka of Tattered Cover between sessions and talked about the places where the professional and the personal are not so separate, especially in an art industry. At the end of the three days, I met On Swift Horses (see above) author Shannon Pufahl for beers at a brewery across the street. The conversation we had has been fueling me for months because it reminded me in a lonely year that incredible connection is possible at any time, and it can come out of the blue. I’m so grateful for the friendship.

Three friends asked me to read manuscripts of their books this year, and it was such a treat! Zack Anderson’s poems in Wolf Jewel are whole cowboy weather systems moving through that indiscriminately pick up old and new words as they go. I met Zack at Tattered and have missed talking to him about books nearly every day since he left for a PhD program in Georgia. Jaime Zuckerman and I met on the side of a hill in Norway in early 2018, when she was in the midst of her MFA back in Boston, and we clicked immediately. Reading her experimental and terrifying Field Notes from the Apocalypse this year added so much wonderful thickness to a friendship that’s stretched across distance, and I can’t wait for the day soon when it finds its perfect home for publication. (P.S. Jaime — I owe you an email! Soon.) Amy Meyerson has created with The Imperfects (coming in May) a tangled family mystery itching to satisfy and up-level everyone who fell in love with her debut, Bookshop of Yesterdays, from 2018. I met Amy briefly at Tattered Cover in LoDo when she was passing through Denver and then quickly found myself laughing with her over Aperol drinks at a bar in Los Angeles. It’s been a major delight to come to know and befriend her at such a time of growth and transformation in her life.

In October, I hosted Leslie Jamison for an event and got to tell a packed room full of people the story of my high school best friend Madison gifting me The Empathy Exams years ago. Introducing Leslie was a pleasure because it meant an afternoon spent reflecting on why I appreciate her as a writer and then having the opportunity to say to her (and to 50 people who likely feel the same way) that it’s because she’s willing to write herself into a new understanding and use one book to correct the misalignments of another that came before. She’s willing to say, “This is where I was wrong.” She is generous and thoughtful, and it was a night of a lot of hugs and also some jokes about pastries.

In LA over Halloween, Maggie Nelson sat with me and reminded me of the power in dividing up my attention and concern less, choosing to care about fewer things. (I was obviously mad and annoyed for a full week, which was funny but also sort of heartbreaking.) I’m working on taking her advice and setting down some weight. On the same trip, I walked the LA River in the morning and read Uncanny Valley while walking Elysian Park at dusk, until it got too dark to see the pages or the path. I sat on Anna Journey’s couch in Marina Del Rey for hours and ate banana bread and felt the grace of a professor-student relationship turned to friendship.

This decade closed with a blazing Janis Joplin biography. On December 13th, my dad’s birthday, I made a list of the things he’s missed in the past five years that I wish I could share with him, and Holly George-Warren’s Janis made the list. Thank you, book world, for that.