I read, I write. This is what I do. Earlier this year, I dropped my hours at McNally Jackson down to part-time in order to do these things more. Ten months later, I left McNally Jackson altogether to take a job at BOMB Magazine. A few weeks ago, I came out with a little book that isn’t included in this list, but is called Things I Told My Mother. Thank you, in advance, if you choose to seek it out. […]
The Best Books I Read in 2013 My fellow passengers on a flight to LA last month must have thought I was insane. Reading Meaty, Samantha Irby’s TMI-filled collection of essays (a recent Emily Books selection), I found myself one minute crying over a young Irby being smacked by her alcoholic dad because she’d washed a cast iron pan with soap; the next I was laughing out loud at her mediations on the indignities of sex between real, flawed humans […]
When I was a teenager, I read the longest, most complex books I could find. I spent months trying to decode Finnegans Wake, slogging through In Search of Lost Time, finding Tristram Shandy hysterical, looking up all the references in Gravity’s Rainbow, and marking the margins of my copy of The Waves with so many notes that it became its own kind of illuminated text. In 1995, I remember going to the bookstore the second it opened on the day […]
I have been thinking that the books I love the most are ones that possess somehow a tenderness as well as something else, something like grotesqueness. So many texts I read this year circled around trauma and love and loss, but in surprising and original and unsentimental ways. I read so many violently gorgeous books this year, some are ones I kept on hearing about for years, like three beautiful books of obsessive circlings, Lydia Davis’ The End of the […]
This year I’m being careful to call this post “The best books I read” as opposed to simply “the best books” because, as in any year, I didn’t read every major title that came out. I can’t say that the few titles on my list are the best books that came out this year, because there are so many that I didn’t read. And in fact many of those that I skipped were the most hyped, award-winning, ballyhooed books that […]
This was a strange year for me and music. There were albums aplenty that I enjoyed, but I’m also a little frustrated to look back at this list. It feels…maybe too comfortable, in a way? Two returns to form by artists whose music I’ve enjoyed for ages. (Three, if you count the Forgetters album.) I’ve had more daring top ten lists; this reads like what it is: the favorite albums of someone raised on punk rock with a fondness for […]
Reading is a major part of my life, both for work and for pleasure. I read constantly; while walking down a crowded sidewalk in Brooklyn, while squished against the door on a packed F train, while walking from the subway to Community Bookstore, and yes, even while crossing the street. You know you’re finally a New Yorker when you try to maximize your reading time, reading every available moment that isn’t spent working or socializing or writing or, you know, […]
I’ve been into listmaking since I was a wee tyke, and well into adulthood I have been an often embarrassing chronicler and tabulator of favorite films and albums, ladies kissed, top 50 athlete mustaches, and all-time finest sandwiches (“purchased” and “self-made” their own separate Excel tabs).