Well, this is a lot longer than I’d expected. I’m going to echo a lot of my peers in noting that 2014 was a pretty fantastic year for books. Whether imaginative forays into altered landscapes or incisive takes on the state of America circa right now, there was plenty of work out there that knocked me off my feet. Here are some thoughts on some of the books that impressed me the most this year, done in hopefully-not-too-arbitrary pairings. At […]
For the past year or so I’ve been making a point of reading books reflecting experiences very different from my own. How noble of me, right? I imagined that would mean reading mostly serious non-fiction, which I happen to like. My pea brain hadn’t considered the possibility that the (frankly enormous) category of “books reflecting experiences very different than my own” could include a laugh-out-loud funny novel, in this case, Adam, by Ariel Schrag.
I’m not going to review much this year, I said to myself last December, and I guess I really meant it. Having so few deadlines, I didn’t move quickly or in any one direction, and I sometimes didn’t finish things. But what I finished, I devoured. I read and reread The Pedestrians by Rachel Zucker, Rome by Dorothea Lasky, and The Second Sex by Michael Robbins, all odd, funny, and thrilling (yes, thrilling) collections that everyone should read, from poets […]
List/Award Culture is such a strange thing. We’re all sitting around waiting to hear our names called and we’re all putting our blood and sweat into what we do. This is not a list as much as a celebration of people/things that I enjoyed by people I know or wish I knew. As far as I am concerned, anyone who can keep their ass in the chair long enough to create a thing and then put that thing out in […]
I felt the need to go back and revisit some of the books on this list I’ve been compiling since January 1st to see how these titles stood up since I spent the first six months of 2014 reading for work, and the second-half mostly for pleasure. What I came away with was the realization that I couldn’t think of another year where new literature brought me so much joy as much as 2014 did. Sure, I was reading a lot […]
I read a lot this year—reading is what’s constant in all jobs I work—and one book that really shook my shoulders was Alice Notley’s Coming After. It’s quietly brilliant criticism—essays and lectures; Sunday clothes—and an early archive of poets Notley knew and loved and felt deserved more critical attention. It’s also a glitched dirge—Notley writes about her husband Ted’s death but life after it too, and not much about herself as a widow. I loved this book because it’s in […]
I went into 2013 knowing that a new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album was on the way, and the prospect of Push the Sky Away — featuring Barry Adamson back with the Bad Seeds for the first time since the 80s, but without Mick Harvey — was an intriguing one. Like past Nick Cave-related albums, it’s so hard for me to not be biased since I’m such a huge fan of his work, and the work of the […]
Reading about science, economics, and history in order to get out of our bubble. It became important for me in 2013 to read things that weren’t about Brooklyn, American literature, booze, grub, hair, or the fifty-five TV shows you just have to be watching. I get through non-fiction quicker than novels, because I’m not tearing it apart while I read it. So I took to the stars and the soil whenever possible. Livescience, Orion, The New Yorker, Cosmos, Discover, Outside, […]