After college, I spent a year in Singapore going to graduate school for economics. I arrived there through some alchemy of not landing a job and having a family friend in my hometown’s Rotary Club—which happened to sponsor international scholarships for graduate school. I chose Singapore primarily because I built a narrative to convince the scholarship committee that pivoted around wanting to study in an Asian tiger economy. And they spoke English in Singapore. And I thought it made me sound more interesting to want to study in Asia rather than Europe.
Apart from my studies, which were rigorous compared to the standards I was accustomed to from undergrad, in Singapore I found time to see a movie every weekend and consume the entire oeuvre of George Orwell, Hunter S. Thompson, P.J. O’Rourke (back when Republicans were funny), and Tom Robbins. The former was a symptom of the intense heat in Singapore (I lost 10 pounds while living there simply from walking around and sweating), which produced the instinct to cocoon oneself anywhere there was AC. The latter was a symptom that economics wasn’t my calling.*
Reflecting on how I ended up choosing that particular group of authors—Orwell, Thompson, O’Rourke, and Robbins—the connective tissue seems to be some mix of counterculture and humor and politics, all of which adds up given I was twenty-one and living in a hyper-repressed, authoritarian city-state that had recently banned The Economist for daring to publish something critical about its founding father, Lee Kuan Yew. It didn’t take much to feel rebellious in that setting, and reading that particular set of books must have made me feel, enjoyably, like I was being provocative—never mind that reading is inherently a private act.
I was reminded of my Singaporean reading odyssey recently when, thirty years after my stint in grad school there, I had occasion this year to return to Singapore twice for work. This time the reading material that accompanied me was Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Neither was a deliberate choice, but with their respective themes of mental health and homosexuality, both were daring in their time. Singapore, it seems, continues to bring out the unconscious reading rebel in me.
Nostalgia thus triggered, upon return from my latest visit I checked out the audio book of Tom Robbins’ memoir, Tibetan Peach Pie. So far I’ve made it through his childhood in North Carolina and Virginia, which includes a very Robbins-esque foray into joining the literal circus. Despite having not read a certain vice-presidential candidate’s Appalachia memoir, I’m confident Robbins’ is far more entertaining.
My reading year so far has been enlivened by two other artists’ memoirs. First was Scottish poet Don Paterson’s Toy Fights: A Boyhood, in which he writes beautifully and vividly about his childhood. It reminded me of two of my other favorite authors on childhood, Elena Ferrante in My Brilliant Friend and Elizabeth Jane Howard in her Cazalet Chronicle quintet. Despite the fact that Paterson is slightly older than me and grew up in working class Dundee (I grew up in south Florida), I somehow found his memoir completely relatable, as if I had fabricated a whole alternate childhood.
Second was Australian musician Warren Ellis’ Nina Simone’s Gum, which follows the journey of said gum from Ellis’ covert collection of it after a concert in 1999, to a long period of storage wrapped in a towel in a Tower Records bag, to its eventual post-Covid display on a plinth at a museum in Denmark. It illuminates how objects have value in the meaning we create for them, which in this case engendered a chain reaction of enourmous care and attention (read more here). This is not the object fetishization of, say, the luxury watch collector, and helped me explain to myself the meaning we attach to things. There are also some striking reflections on childhood, including an unforgettable surreal vision he and his brother experienced that bookends the story.
Current plans call for my next return visit to Singapore in January of 2025. That gives me a good four months to consider my related reading plans. Whether that’s more nostalgia for youth or immersing myself in a new generation of counterculture, political writers, I’m looking forward to a good book or three to help me kill 30 hours of round-trip flying time.
*Another symptom of my ill fit with a professional life associated with the dismal science was when, during my Singapore grad school year, I went to an interview for an equity analyst position at Goldman Sachs. I recall I was outfitted, sweatily, in a Liz Claiborne navy skirt suit purchased for the occasion, and I was interviewed by a man wearing a blue shirt with French cuffs who asked me what piece of music I would be if I could be any piece of music. In a fit of panic induced by the fact that I had spent the last few months listening on repeat to the then-brand-new Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville (sample song title: Fuck and Run), I chose Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Whether it was on the basis of choosing the most popular music used in advertising or some other poorly answered question, I didn’t get the job. I still find men who wear French cuffs suspect.
For a long time, I’ve resisted the idea of reading books that are part of a series. With so many good books out there, it seemed risky to devote too much of my precious reading time to a single author, much less a single series by a single author. I was suffering from the reader’s version of FOMO.
It hasn’t always been this way. As a child I had no problem devoting myself to the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Ramona Quimby; to chronicles of both Narnia and Sweet Valley High. But not until Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, the first of which came out in 2014, was my impasse with reading a series of books broken for me as an adult. The thing is, there was so much else going on with Cusk’s books—ripping up the conventions of fiction and such—I almost didn’t notice I had become a serial book reader again. It took another author, Elizabeth Jane Howard, to make me fall in love with the multi-volume form again. (Hat tip to Sarah Miller, whose essay about Howard and The Cazalet Chronicle is what got me started on them.)
As I write this, I am lingering in the last pages of the second volume, Marking Time, of Howards’ Cazalet Chronicle, an English family saga that starts on the brink of the Second World War and excels in its depiction of women and children. The third, Confusion, was purchased in a secondhand bookstore in Chicago earlier this year before I had even started on the second—that’s how sure I was I wanted to continue reading these books. My enjoyment of the Cazalet Chronicle has prompted me to plan a year of reading books in series for 2020. This means starting a few new ones as well as returning to some I’ve already begun, often in the middle. Here’s what’s on my list.
First up is returning to Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. I read and loved the first, My Brilliant Friend, which has in common with Howard the strength of its depiction of girls and women in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. The Story of a New Name’s patient wait on my bookshelf is over.
Next I plan to tackle Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy, which a friend recommended during a random conversation in which I professed my adoration of Alan Bennett, who starred in a 1980’s television adaptation. This led me to pick up Manning’s bewitching The Rain Forest, which I read and loved this year. A foreword from a reissue of The BalkanTrilogy that appeared in Rachel Cusk’s 2019 essay collection, Coventry, pushed the series near the top of my 2020 reading list.
Also featured in Coventry is an essay about D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and its sequel Women in Love. I’ve read neither, and if I get an itch for expanding my repertoire of classics, I will turn to these.
I will seek mirth from Nina Stibbe’s Reasons to Be Cheerful, the third in a series I started in the middle in 2018 with the sweet, funny Paradise Lodge. Featuring the adventures of teenager-into-young-adult Lizzie Vogel (I’m sensing a theme here in my tastes), it’s nice to have someone to cheer for. Continuing my theme of six degrees of separation from Alan Bennett, Stibbe also wrote a book, Love, Nina, about the time she spent as the nanny for the editor of the London Review of Books, who happened to be Bennett’s close friend, sometimes publisher, and neighbor.
The podcast of Bennett’s 2019 diary reminded me that Scottish used-bookstore-owner Shaun Bythell has a sequel to his curmudgeonly delightful Diary of a Bookseller. The follow-up, Confessions of a Bookseller is something I’ll save up for when I need some comic relief in 2020 (I’m guessing around election time in November).
Sticking with memoir, I also want to read the first in a planned trio by Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know: On Writing, which is a response to George Orwell’s Why I Write. The second book of this series, The Cost of Living, was one of my favorite books of 2018. Here’s hoping the third of the series comes to fruition in 2020, although if not, I’m also keen to read her 2019 novel, The Man Who Saw Everything, not least because it’s partially set in Berlin.
Back to fiction, I finally plan to take the plunge with Ben Lerner and his 2019 TheTopeka School. In the last month Lerner has been interviewed on most the culture podcasts I enjoy, so I guess the marketing has worked. It’s the third of a series, but a prequel of sorts to the first two, so I don’t feel too bad about starting at the end.
Finally, I’m bad at sticking to plans and there are a few things on my horizon that don’t fall into the category of a book that’s part of a series, including Nell Zink’s 2019 novel, Doxology, Ottessa Moshfegh’s forthcoming novel Death in Her Hands, and Lucy Ellmann’s 2019 Booker Prize nominated Ducks, Newburyport, which at over 1,000 pages may as well be a multi-volume series, albeit written largely as a single sentence.
It’s the time of year for resolutions, but before I go, here’s a quick look back at my favorite books read in 2019 and published in the last decade. Happy new year, and may your 2020 year in reading be filled with new favorites!
Favorite books read in 2019Favorite books published in the 2010s
Book & Bottle pairs books with wine—a surrogate for my fantasy of one day owning a combination bookstore and wine bar.
In retrospect, choosing Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room as the subject for one of a series that pairs books and wine may have been foolish, or at least open to misinterpretation. The novel’s protagonist, Romy Hall, is sentenced to two consecutive life sentences plus six years in prison for killing her stalker, a customer of hers at the Mars Room, a San Francisco strip club from which the novel takes its title. Much of the action takes place in a high-security prison, the fictional Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility in California’s Central Valley, and in highlighting the inhumanity of the place and the circumstances of its inhabitants, Kushner is also making her case for prison reform. That is to say: I could imagine how a person would find it crass to endeavor to pair wine, whose trappings of tastings, vintages, and cellars can be the stuff of the worst kind of middle-class one-upmanship, with a book that makes the point that the bourgeoisie needs to pull its head out of its ass about the evils of the prison industrial complex.
But bear with me here, because in The Mars Room, alcohol, along with food and books, is as plausible an entry point to understanding the world of prison as it is to understanding the more rarefied echelons of society in books like Brideshead Revisited or The Great Gatsby. It’s just that in prison it’s the scarcity of these items that makes them significant. And as with the outside world, they become items people on the inside use to assert their identity and place in the pecking order.
For example, only prisoners with neither money nor visitors eat in the chow hall, where they are allowed ten minutes in enforced silence to do so. The lucky ones dine on microwave hamburgers from vending machines in the visiting area or buy ramen from the canteen. (I appreciate the symmetry here with the fact that “craft” versions of both these foods have become urban restaurant staples in recent years.) Romy has no money, but she learns to uses her prison woodshop responsibility for the CALPIA (California Prison Industry Authority) branding iron to hustle, toasting other prisoners’ bologna sandwiches in exchange for instant coffee.
For more potent drink, necessity is the mother of invention. A recipe for “punch” requires convincing inmates to set aside their psych meds, hiding them in a dab of peanut butter on the roof of the mouth during pill call. The stash of unswallowed pills is then dissolved in iced tea, the results of which culminate in a prison-block party that’s one of the few moments of release for the women in the entire book. As with hamburgers and ramen, I couldn’t help noticing a parallel in my own neighborhood in San Francisco—awash with young people working in tech—where there’s a bar that specializes in punch bowls at $50 a pop. On any given night you can find a group of twenty-something men in hoodies huddled around a picnic table ladling out Southern Hospitality, a punch made of bourbon, peach, lemon, soda, and, yes, iced tea.
Those of us on the outside may have Napa and Sonoma, but Betty LaFrance—former purported Hanes Her Way pantyhose model, current death row inmate convicted of both a hit on her husband and a hit on his hitman—has a different method for making her prison wine. Using a recipe of juice boxes, ketchup packets, and a sock stuffed with bread for the yeast, she distributes her pruno in shampoo bottles via the plumbing system to Romy and her cellmate, Sammy, taking care to ensure their experience is as classy as possible under the circumstances. Even on death row, Betty has a reputation to maintain:
That’s the best hooch at Stanville but you got double-decant it, honey,” Betty shouted to us up the air vent. “Don’t forget to decant. It’s got to breathe.’
Betty sent up a wineglass next, the plastic kind with a screw-on base.
“Where the hell did she this glass?
“The regular way,” Sammy said. “The vault or canoe.”
Women smuggled heroin, tobacco, and cell phones from visiting inside their vaginas and rectums. Betty was smuggling plastic stemware.
Tableware as a symbol of power emerges earlier in the book when Romy recalls an experience that led her to realize she preferred lap dancing to being a paid date, the so-called “girlfriend experience” coveted by many of her colleagues at the strip club.
You start outward, some prick had said to me once about silverware. It wasn’t a thing I’d ever learned, or been taught. He was paying me for the date with him, and in this exchange he felt he didn’t get his money’s worth unless he found small ways to try to humiliate me over the course of the evening.
Romy takes her revenge on her way out of the guy’s hotel room by stealing a bag from Saks Fifth Avenue stuffed with expensive presents for his wife, dumping them in the trash on the way to her car.
Alcohol signifies shifts in hierarchy that favor Romy when, later in the novel, she moves to Los Angeles to try to evade her stalker (not the silverware-police guy). Here she receives unwanted attention from the Guatemalan plumber at her sublet, who invites her to a Mexican restaurant to drink flaming margaritas. When she declines, blaming the headache-inducing properties of the lighter fluid, he re-ups with an offer to go drink white wine, figuring she “was that classy white wine type.” Romy declines, telling him she has to go to work to spare his feelings. Used to being at the wrong end of the power dynamic, she wields her control here with empathy.
***
Like booze, books also play a role in the power dynamics of the prison ecosystem, including the people who work there. Besides Romy, one of the novel’s most developed characters is Gordon Hauser, who has given up on his pursuit of a doctorate in English literature and ended up teaching in the prison system, where despite his better judgement he’s developed a habit of falling for his students.
If his students could learn to think well, to enjoy reading books, some part of them would be uncaged. That was what Gordon Hauser told himself, and what he told them, too.
Gordon sends Romy books from Amazon, which puts her in the ranks of prisoners who receive packages and, by extension, means they have family and friends supporting them from outside. But more than status, the distraction of the content is welcome given the prison library’s catalog is limited to the Bible.
Gordon’s first earnest attempt to select books for Romy falls flat. My Ántonia, To Kill a Mockingbird, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings are books she’s already read, but at least she’s able to trade them for the prison luxuries of shampoo and conditioner. His subsequent choices for her, including Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up, Charles Bukowski’s Factotum, and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son are better. Even though Romy is grooming Gordon to try to help her with her young son, Jackson, she genuinely enjoys his GED-prep class (despite having already graduated from high school) and the books. Later, when Gordon leaves the prison to go to graduate school in social work, Romy reflects on him:
Hauser was earnest and gentle. He would have made a good father. I had no way to get in touch with him to tell him so, and the joke had been on me, even as I thought I was using and manipulating him.
Her attempt to get Gordon to intercede on Jackson’s behalf had fallen flat, but not before she’d gotten him to smuggle her a pair of wire cutters. I don’t think it spoils the ending of a book set in prison to note that the wire cutters ultimately do more to uncage Romy than the books.
***
What wine then to pair with reading The Mars Room? One night while I was reading the book, I went to dinner and ordered a glass of Côtes du Rhône. I like Côtes du Rhône, which probably has something to do with the fact that I learned how to pronounce it early in my wine-drinking days—unlike Châteauneuf-du-Pape or Condrieu, the former of which I only learned how to say when the Beastie Boys featured it in a song lyric and the latter of which I still haven’t mastered. Full of the euphoria of one glass of wine and not too much food, I left the restaurant with the conviction that another glass was just what I needed to accompany the reading I had planned for the rest of my evening. I headed to a wine store and, sticking with a theme, selected a $24 bottle of Côtes du Rhône called Il Fait Soif.
As I paid, the clerk complimented my jacket, a purple velvet Gap blazer circa 2006 with one shoulder faded from having been stored in a closet with a west-facing window. She then complimented my choice of wine, pointing out it was “natural” as if to give me credit for selecting something farmed organically, a fact that wasn’t even mentioned on the bottle. Her undeserved compliments were transparently part of her job, and we were both willing participants in the charade surrounding a retail transaction in which the clerk’s role is to make you feel good about your purchase. My status as a customer at a semi-fancy shop secured my right to be fêted, however fleetingly.
It was an example of the subtle experience of privilege that happens to me multiple times a day, only this time I noticed it because it reminded me of the opposite of most of Romy’s interactions in life. In particular, it stood out in contrast to Romy’s denigration by the “square from Silicon Valley,” who paid her for a date that included an etiquette lesson on which piece of cutlery to use. He’s the kind of guy who would have rules about what wine goes with what dish, who would have memorized particular vintages to sound impressive when ordering, who most certainly would have corrected Romy if she mispronounced the name of a wine. He would not have appreciated the casual recommendation on the vintner’s website to drink Il Fait Soif “when feeling thirsty!”
The wine itself is a blend of 80% Grenache and 20% Syrah and drinks easy. Google later informed me that its name, Il Fait Soif, translates as “it’s thirsty work,” and that the winemakers are a woman, Michèle Aubèry-Lauren, and her son, whose name is on the bottle as the producer. I could spin some awkward logic out the translated name and the female stewardship of the wine to justify it as my choice to pair with The Mars Room, but it’s really just the lack of affectation about both the wine and its marketing that make it a good fit. Romy decidedly has flaws, but you’re still rooting for her throughout, including when she’s trashing Silicon Valley Square’s expensive gifts for his wife. Il Fait Soif is a metaphorical middle finger to such perpetrators of pretension.
I’m not sure if I’ll muster the will to write a Christmas letter this year, mostly because my will has been sapped by much of 2017 on both the personal and political fronts. As the saying goes, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say it at all.
There is, however, one thing about which I have only nice things to say, and that’s all the lovely books I’ve read this year. Sure, I’ve read far less in 2017 than 2016, a fact I attribute directly to the draining of my attention and energy by the personage currently occupying our White House. But I’m grateful to my bones for the knowledge and enjoyment provided by every single one of those I did manage to get through, so I’ll turn my festive cheer their way.
Let’s keep up the positive vibe with a shout out for Nina Stibbe’s Paradise Lodge. I first read Stibbe’s charming collection of letters, Love, Nina, about her time as nanny to the editor of the London Review of Books, and it turns out she’s a terrific novelist too. Paradise Lodge is the second novel in a series about the Vogel family, but you needn’t have read the first—I didn’t—to enjoy this one. The protagonist, teenager Lizzie Vogel, who works at a decaying but somehow still charming nursing home while trying to finish school, is so deftly drawn that I loved every minute I spent with her. Also, I don’t think it spoils things to say it has a happy ending. I suspect people might need one of those just about now. (I’m not sure why the cheery yellow cover of Paradise Lodge doesn’t appear in the photo above, but I hope it’s because I gave my copy to someone else to enjoy.)
Now that I’ve sweetened you up, I’m going to go ahead and hit you with Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus, a post-apocalyptic—by which I mean a totally believable, especially after this year’s fire season, twenty-first century version of the dust bowl—novel about a couple fleeing California with a neglected baby they’ve kidnapped, who ends up an unlikely messiah figure. The writing is stunning and cinematic, and someone better make a film out of it so I can bluster about how the book was better.
Two other novels I enjoyed this year were Rachel Cusk’s Transit, mostly because I’m deeply drawn to her detached protagonist Faye, and Robin Sloan’s Sourdough, which has a much more conventional (read: likable) protagonist in the form of Lois. If you work in tech and like food, I think you’ll like Sloan’s story, which includes gentle send-ups of both those cultures. I also got to see him read at Mrs. Dalloway’s (more on this special store below) after I read the book, and it was fun to hear him talk about writing it. I like that he’s a developer and a writer.
My favorite novel of the year was Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I bought this a few years back at a literature festival in England (not sure why it was there since McCullers is long dead), and randomly picked it up to read earlier this year. I subsequently gathered she’s famous in some corners of the literary world, but why McCullers is not as well-known as Harper Lee is beyond me. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the nihilist version of To Kill a Mockingbird, and it’s brilliant. The novel is populated by an ensemble cast, but the young female character of Mick Kelly slayed me. I once worked with a guy who had named his daughter Scout after Atticus Finch’s daughter in To Kill a Mockingbird. I don’t have kids, which means the highest honor I can bestow a character in a book is to name a pet after him or her. Let’s just say there’s a cat called Mick Kelly in my future and leave it at that.
Now for the non-fiction portion of my reading list, starting with three books of author’s diaries: Alan Bennett’s Keeping On Keeping On, David Sedaris’s Theft By Finding, and Joan Didion’s South and West. I wrote an essay about them here, so I won’t say more except that if you like these authors I also think you’ll like these books. Robert Moor’s On Trails: An Exploration is a terrific book that reminded me I like science and is a great example of how to riff on a theme in non-fiction. This book is so much more than a story about someone who hiked the Appalachian Trail. Finally, Will Schwalbe’s Books for Living is a lovely book for anyone who adores books, with the bonus that each essay is the perfect length for a bath. If you’re still looking for a gift for someone, you could do worse than this book packaged up with a nice bottle of bubble bath.
A few of the books I read this year don’t show up in the pictures in this post because I checked them out from the library. I’ve spent much of 2017 in Berkeley, and one of the benefits has been access to two remarkable libraries—the downtown Deco and Craftsman extravaganza just a block from my office and the mock-Tudor Claremont branch, complete with a gas fireplace and comfortable chairs. Three cheers for libraries and all their card-carrying members.
The other delight of Berkeley is its terrific independent bookstores, including Moe’s Books on Telegraph; Revolution Books, where I made a point of shopping after alt-right bullies decided to intimidate the staff; Pegasus Books, from whom I buy the Weekend FT (mostly for its terrific Books section) each Saturday, plus whatever else they tempt me with, whether a cute greeting card or a little tin of “impeachmints”; Issues on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, quite possibly the most wonderful newsstand left in America; and best of all, the gem of my neighborhood, Mrs. Dalloway’s. This is a beautiful bookstore with a helpful staff and a sparkling roster of author events, and I thank them for making the neighborhood feel, well, like a neighborhood.
For all my trepidation and uncertainty about 2018, one consolation remains: it will come with more great books. Happy reading!
Bought but not read in 2017. Something to look forward to in the year ahead!
Better English language bookstores in Berlin than my California hometown mean I actually read a few real live paper books in 2015
Weekend newspapers and the literary internet have been brimming with best books of 2015 lists, which got me thinking about my favorite reads of the year. I’m not one of those people (who are those people?) who can keep up with the flood of good stuff being written so not all of these were published in 2015, even if that’s the year I got around to reading them.
1. The First Bad Manby Miranda July was my favorite book of the year: fresh, startling, gross, and very very funny. I didn’t think I’d find a more original female protagonist than Tiffany in Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper, then I made the acquaintance of Cheryl, star of The First Bad Man. Goodreads review here.
2. The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink is a lightning-paced whirl of a flawed but addictive novel from a writer championed into prominence by the much-maligned Jonathan Franzen. Just read it. Or, if you must know more, read my longer Goodreads review here.
3. Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys by Viv Albertine is a memoir by the first lady of punk you’ve never heard of. She hung with Sid Vicious and received fashion advice from Vivienne Westwood, but if that’s not enough to get you interested it turns out this is a rather moving tome on living a creative life. I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic right after I read this—which I also enjoyed—and was struck by how much Albertine’s memoir is a gritty, real-life demonstration of the principles Gilbert espouses. Goodreads review here.
4. Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life by Nina Stibbe is admittedly a niche read, but if you happen to be an Anglophile who’s a fan of Alan Bennett and London Review of Books (nevermind that the one time you actually read LRB a piece by Will Self made you want to stab your eyes out with pencils) and generally impressed by some vague concept of north London intellectuals, you won’t be able to resist Nina’s Stibbe’s real-life letters to her sister during her time as a nanny for LRB editor Mary-Kay Wilmers. A Nick Hornby-penned adaptation is coming to BBC One TV screens in 2016.
Books 5., 6., and 7. are The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks,A Place In My Country by Ian Walthew, and The Snow Geese by William Fiennes, which I guess means I have a thing for British male writers waxing lyrical about nature and the concept of home. Rebanks and Walthew also offer local insight into two iconic British landscapes, the Lake District and the Cotswolds, respectively, that most of us only know as visitors. Goodreads reviews here and here.
8. Outline by Rachel Cusk proves I also have a thing for solitary woman protagonists. Evocative of Joan Didion’s best fiction. Goodreads review here.
9. Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit is a book of feminist essays described by a Twitter friend as a gateway drug for Solnit. She must have been right because I’m now reading Wanderlust.
10. Redeployment by Phil Klay, the lauded book of short stories by an Iraq war veteran and required reading for Americans. Goodreads review here.
Since it’s a Top 10 list I’ll stop here with a quick mention of two other books I enjoyed: Sarah Hepola’s drinking memoir, Blackout, and a collection of essays by writers without children, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed, edited by Meghan Daum. Oh and We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, who also happens to have an essay in the previously mentioned collection from Meghan Daum.
Here’s to a 2016 full of good books— may your nightstand runneth over.
