When I was in graduate school, one of the things I missed most about life outside of student-hood was reading for pleasure. Between my courses and my teaching position, I spent a great deal of my time reading, and rarely had the mental energy to pick up a book outside of that, just for entertainment. Upon moving to New York City in September of 2017, I had two immediate goals: to find a steady job that would support my musical endeavors, and to read more. I promptly joined a friend’s book club and through it found a full-time job in a bookstore – somehow managing to achieve one goal and make the second unavoidably reachable – within two weeks of my arrival.
Maybe it’s because I was missing the organization of grad school, or maybe I am just a deeply obsessive reader, but for whatever reason, I decided to keep a list of every book I read. It’s been very cathartic, and proves useful when I am asked for recommendations. The list is in a little notebook which has plenty of pages left to fill, but I feel compelled to digitize it as well. I have included quotations that I found particularly striking – I write them on the pages opposite the list itself. So, without further elaboration, here is a chronological list of every book (and a few short stories) I have read since I moved to NYC:
[2017: September–December]
The Girls – Emma Cline
A Streetcar Named Desire – Tennessee Williams
The New Jim Crow* – Michelle Alexander
My Brilliant Friend – Elena Ferrante
Night Shift – Ron Kolm
How I Became A Nun – César Aira
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body* – Roxane Gay
Witches, Sluts, Feminists – Kirsten J. Solée
Heather: The Totality – Matthew Weiner
Timequake – Kurt Vonnegut
“I define a saint as a person who behaves decently in an indecent society.”
A Monster Calls – Patrick Ness
Gratitude – Oliver Sacks
I Love Dick – Chris Kraus
“To be in love with someone means believing that to be in someone else’s presence is the only means of being, completely, yourself.”
“Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill – getting larger ’cause you’re entering another person’s language, cadence, heart, and mind.”
We Have Always Lived in the Castle* – Shirley Jackson
The Hate U Give* – Angie Thomas
Life Among the Savages* – Shirley Jackson
Notes of a Crocodile – Qiu Miaojin
[2018]
World of Wakanda – Roxane Gay with Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin
“To oppose something is to maintain it.”
Two Boys Kissing – David Levithan
Not One Day – Anne Garretta
“But we have learned that this world is traitorous and that the surest way to preserve what we cherish is to devalue it overtly so that no one would think to take it, to flaunt it so that no one can expose it for what it is or steal it.”
Heating/Cooling* – Beth Ann Feeley
There, There* – Tommy Orange
The Purity Myth* – Jessica Valenti
“What’s the difference between venerating women for being fuckable and putting them on a purity pedestal? In both cases, women’s worth is contingent upon their ability to please men and to shape their sexual identities around what men want.”
Quoting bell hooks:
“For me forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”
The Vegetarian – Han Kang
Annie John – Jamaica Kincaid
“Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of my other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.”
Jane: A Murder – Maggie Nelson
The Red Parts – Maggie Nelson
Future Sex – Emily Witt
His Own Where* – June Jordan
Kindred – Octavia Butler
Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights* – Katha Pollitt
On Imagination – Mary Ruefle
A Little White Shadow – Mary Ruefle
Heavens on Earth – Carmen Boullosa
A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle
One Plus One – Jojo Moyes
Redefining Realness – Janet Mock
The Wild Iris* – Louise Glück
Giovanni’s Room* – James Baldwin
Not That Bad* – ed. Roxane Gay
We Were Feminists Once* – Andi Zeisler
Priestdaddy* – Patricia Lockwood
An Untamed State – Roxane Gay
Difficult Women – Roxane Gay
The Argonauts* – Maggie Nelson
George* – Alex Gino
Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows – Balli Kaur Jaswal
Citizen* – Claudia Rankine
Boy Erased – Garrard Conley
Maud Martha* – Gwendolyn Brooks
Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools* – Monique J. Morris
If Beale Street Could Talk* – James Baldwin
“I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they are making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.”
The Testament of Mary – Colm Toíbin
Beautiful Losers – Leonard Cohen
Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black – Cookie Mueller
The Guest Cat – Tikashi Hiraide
Coyote Doggirl – Lisa Hanawalt
Adele – Leila Slimani
The Tree – John Fowles
“It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result.”
“There is a spiritual corollary to the way we are currently deforesting and denaturing our planet. In the end what we most defoliate and deprive is ourselves. We might as soon start collecting up the world’s poetry, every line and every copy, to burn it in a final pyre; and think we should lead richer and happier lives thereafter.”
The Witches – Roald Dahl
Call Them by Their True Names* – Rebecca Solnit
“I sometimes wonder when I’m at a mass march, like the January 2017 Women’s March, whether the reason it matters is because some unknown young person is going to find her purpose in life that will only be evident to the rest of us when she changes the world in twenty years, when she becomes a great liberator.
Sonny’s Blues* – James Baldwin
Blood Child – Octavia Butler
Reckless Daughter* – David Yaffe
Autobiography of Red* – Anne Carson
You Have the Right to Remain Fat – Vergie Tovar
Ultraluminous – Katherine Faw
Friday Black* – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
[2019]
Zami* – Audre Lorde
Sex Object* – Jessica Valenti
Educated – Tara Westover*
Girl Made of Stars – Ashley Herring Blake
I’m Just a Person – Tig Notaro
Another Brooklyn – Jacqueline Woodson
Currently reading: The Warmth of Other Suns – Isabel Wilkerson
*Favorite. I know I have a lot of favorites; the books that I marked here are ones that I would read again, and recommend to just about anyone.
