my year in books

read/goal:50/50

top 10:

1. How Much of These Hills is Gold, C. Pam Zhang: In my opinion, a contemporary classic. Weaves Chinese myth with stories of the American Gold Rush. Beautiful prose and valuable takeaways re: family, truth, and gender.
2. A Little Devil in America: Notes on Black Performance, Hanif Abdurraqib: Essay upon essay of mind-plowing poetics and storytelling. Hanif’s version of Baldwin’s Devil Finds Work. A wide swath of topics from blackface to spades to magic.
3. Writers & Lovers, Lily King: Came to me at the exact right (or wrong?) time, just when my father passed away. A keenly-observed novel about grief and persona that is something like if SweetbittermetNormal People.
4. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee: Inspired me to get over myself and just start writing again. The essay on roses absolutely floored me.
5. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman: Hard to stomach, but necessary. Foundational for the way I am thinking about neo-slave narratives and speculative historical fiction.
6. Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, Kristen Radtke: The minute I read this, I added it to the syllabus for my class on women in isolation. Part graphic novel, part longform essay, part research paper, and wholly extraordinary.
7. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening, Jennifer Lynn Stoever: This one’s just for me. The burning core at the center of my reading list and the inspiration and model for my scholarship.
8. The Street, Ann Petry: Read it because of the book above, but an absolute banger of a book. Devastating ending. Would be extraordinary taught alongside Native Son.
9. The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin: This book has everything. Polyamory. Earth-bending. An alien creature frozen inside a giant piece of rock in the middle of the ocean. Love this woman, love seeing Blackness-as-default in sci-fi novels.
10. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel: You read it in high school for a good reason. A true exemplar of the genre and a fascinating way to teach non-chronological storytelling.

rest below the cut

1. Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes
2. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, V.E. Schwab
3. Brothers & Keepers, John Edgar Wideman
4. Bunk: The True Story of Hoaxes, Hucksters, Humbug, Plagiarists, Forgeries, and Phonies, Kevin Young
5. Ninth House, Leigh Bardugo
6. House of Earth and Blood, Sarah J. Maas
7. Children of Virtue and Vengeance, Tomi Adeyemi
8. Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, Mary Ann Doane
9. An American Sunrise, Joy Harjo
10. Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing, Ben Blatt
11. Rule of Wolves, Leigh Bardugo
12. The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan
13. Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology, Brian Hochman
14. The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin
15. The Stone Sky, N.K. Jemisin
16. People We Meet on Vacation, Emily Henry
17. The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice & Virtue, Mackenzi Lee
18. The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
19. Legendborn, Tracy Deonn
20. Josh & Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating, Christina Lauren
21. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
22. The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music, Nina Sun Eidsheim
23. One Last Stop, Casey McQuiston
24. One to Watch, Kate Stayman-London
25. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth Freeman
26. Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
27. Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema, Amy Lawrence
28. An Extraordinary Union, Alyssa Cole
29. It Ends With Us, Colleen Hoover
30. Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
31. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Safiya Noble
32. Listening in: Radio and the American Imagination, Susan J. Douglass
33. How to Fail at Flirting, Denise Williams
34. The Flat-Share, Beth O'Leary
35. Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-1952, Michele Hilmes
36. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud
37. The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
38. The Love Hypothesis, Ali Hazelwood
39. The Road Trip, Beth O'Leary
40. We Ride Upon Sticks, Quan Barry