2017 In Review
2017 has been a banner year in reading for me – a year of blog beginnings, of schlepping suitcases full of novels from one city to another, and of reading everywhere from San Francisco to Santa Fe to the Seine.
It was also the first time I set myself a reading goal – 25 books – and I vaulted past it. I finished 47 books this year, which according to Goodreads amounts to 14,649 pages of prose. Honestly, though, I’m a bit of a cheater – I counted both Pete Souza’s Obama and Leslie Geddes-Brown’s Books Do Furnish A Room, even though the written content of each is largely limited to photo captions!
Not all 47 books stole my heart – I felt let down by much of Joan Didion’s South and West, lost interest midway through Rick Moody’s Hotels of North America, and rolled my eyes at the trite platitudes of Paul Jankowski’s Speak American Too. However, by and large, this was a year of stop-me-in-my-tracks, can’t-stop-even-to-sleep, tell-all-my-friends-about-it reading. Below, I’ve awarded senior superlatives to five of my favorites:
Most relatable / Too Much and Not the Mood / Durga Chew-Bose
Too Much and Not the Mood is a collection of highly stylized essays, letters, and thoughts about identity, named for a line in one of Virginia Woolf’s diaries. While reading this, I often felt like Chew-Bose – who happens to be my age, Canadian-born, and Brooklyn-dwelling – could see straight into me (and sometimes, right through me). Chew-Bose’s effort isn’t perfect – the writing is uneven and the first essay far too long for something so formless – yet I was completely compelled by it. This is the book that singlehandedly revived my nasty habit of dog-earing pages and writing in margins – there were so many passages that I didn’t want to forget. More than anyone I’ve read in years, Chew-Bose shows why specificity in writing is so powerful. Take, for example, her many characterizations of ‘nook people:’
“Nook people are those who need solitude, but also the sound of someone puttering in the next room. Someone working on his project, down the hall and behind a door left ajar. We look away from our screen and hear him turning a page or readjusting his posture, and isn’t it time for lunch? Resurfacing is nonpareil. And splitting a sandwich with someone you’ve said maybe two words to all morning is idyllic. A brief belief that life picks up after a few bites of toasted rye.
Nook people love signing with a heavy pen; don’t mind waiting in the car; love sitting on a stack of banquet chairs in an empty banquet hall, feet dangling; appreciate the surprising density of a beaded curtain; the weight of a pile of denim.
Nook people are pacified by tucking their hands into the warm seam of two thighs; are rarely sure how they got good at anything; confront despair with a strong drink or by giving up for months.”
Consider me both a nook person and a Chew-Bose fan – I can’t wait to see what she writes next.
Most absorbing / Americanah / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
There have been a few happy times in my life – early dates with my husband, my first trip to New York, backpacking in Europe – when I was conscious, even in the moment, that I was having some sort of peak experience. Americanah was – and I swear I’m not being hyperbolic here – the literary equivalent of that feeling. I was so into this book, so totally absorbed, that I resented anything that came between me and my time reading. I read Americanah everywhere – covertly at my desk between meetings, one-handed while blow-drying my hair in the mornings, on subways so crowded I had to hold the book inches from my face. I was completely engrossed in every stolen moment I spent with the two main characters, Ifemelu and Obinze.
Americanah works beautifully on several levels. It’s a love story – a story of missed connections, of compulsions, and of deferred happiness. It’s a story about place, full of clever commentary about ways of being in Nigeria versus America. It’s also a story about knowing, honoring, and stretching yourself. But what makes it so skillful is that all of those stories serve as vehicles for Adichie’s commentary on a huge variety of challenging topics, from nationalism to politics to race. I’m smarter, happier, and a more skilled covert desk reader because of Americanah.
Most timely / The Handmaid’s Tale / Margaret Atwood
I read The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time this year, and it appears I’m not alone – the book has been crowned the most-read book of 2017. It took 32 years, a Hulu adaptation, and a Trump presidency for Atwood’s masterpiece to find a mammoth audience. But I’m so glad it did. Only a dystopia this bleak could make this depressing year feel comparatively sunny.
Most moving / Hunger / Roxane Gay
I saw Roxane Gay speak on a panel about body image at the Albertine Festival earlier this year, and I felt a strong compulsion to rush the stage at the end of the event. I’m not exactly sure why – maybe to tell her something? To thank her? To repay her for all she’s taught and told me? After years of rabidly reading everything Gay writes – her fiction, her stories, her journalism (I practically have a Google alert out on the woman. What can I say?), I feel somehow in her debt.
That feeling deepened when I read Hunger, Gay’s memoir about living in what she calls an “unruly” body. Gay writes with searing power about being gang-raped at 12 and about how she later began eating and eating, building a protective cage of weight around her. She also writes about the consequences of that cage – of being judged, harassed, dismissed, ignored, and pitied by the world at large. It’s heartbreaking, but also clear-eyed, often funny, and incredibly insightful. Below are some of my favorite passages:
“This is what most girls are taught — that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.
When you’re overweight, your body becomes a matter of public record in many respects. Your body is constantly and prominently on display. People project assumed narratives onto your body and are not at all interested in the truth of your body, whatever that truth might be. Fat, much like skin color, is something you cannot hide, no matter how dark the clothing you wear, or how diligently you avoid horizontal stripes.”
Most inspiring / My Life in France / Julia Child
When Child moved to France at age 36, she was the ultimate fish out of water – she towered over Gallic gals, spoke no French, and knew nobody apart from her husband Paul. Yet she immersed herself guilelessly in France’s markets, shops, butchers, and bakers – ultimately becoming the woman who translated that entire country’s incredible food culture to Americans. Reading about Child’s travails and triumphs in My Life in France (while I was in France myself!) is what inspired me to turn my love of reading and roaming into something tangible. If Julia could crack Le Cordon Bleu, surely I can bring my love of reading, travel, and the intersection of the two to life online.