Year in Reading, Part III
from friends and supporters of book(ish)
As you can see from Part I and Part II of the book(ish) Year in Reading series, lots of my friends are book people, and I love them dearly. I also love that I probably won’t read half of these books mentioned, but some of you might, and that connection point is worth the effort. As I say in the about page, there are many ways to read and think and feel, and book(ish) is a space to honor that. I invite guests to contribute because I like hearing how others experience the world and books and the world through books.
It may seem weird to say, but I’m heartened by the fact that, according to a new study, “46 percent [of 1,500 Americans surveyed] finished zero books last year.” Andrew Van Dam, writing for The Washington Post, says, “Those of us who read more than 50 books are the true one-percenters: people who read more books than 99 percent of their fellow Americans.” Why am I heartened by this? It’s a healthy reminder that my world is one tiny sliver of a slice of the pie. Book people tend to get pretty fussy about their reading. We need our cozy chairs and good light. We need space to gaze at the french flaps and fan the deckle edges, to run our fingers along the spines and stick our noses in the cracks to huff the delectable inks, solvents, and bleaching agents. We need time. We always need more time. But let’s take the broader view: we are rare birds. Much of the world is otherwise occupied. Hence? Let’s not be snobs. Love what you love. Find joy where you find joy, like my friends clearly did with the books they read in 2023. Without further ado, here’s the third and final installment of the inaugural book(ish) Year in Reading. Thanks for being here.
-Josh
I've kept a Google doc of all the books I've read since 2011—a regrettably "pizza-less" adult version of Book-It. The list runs the gamut from fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, books that are not easily classified as "read" (instructional books, text-heavy artbooks, etc.) to a smattering of studs and duds from a much-missed bookclub. Looking over the list, 2023 included a mixture of murder, mushrooms, queer history and drawing.
A few notables...
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake
I first read about the "Wood Wide Web" and the work of biologist Merlin Sheldrake in Robert MacFarlane's excellent Underland. I'm not normally drawn to popular science titles, but Sheldrake—incidentally not a denizen of Middle Earth—writes about the strange universe of fungi in an accessible way.
Gay Bar: Why We Went Out by Jeremy Atherton Lin
This was an impulse buy at the lovely Avant Garden Bookstore in Anoka. I loved this book. It's part memoir, part queer cultural history, part elegy. I blushed while reading certain passages. I laughed. I might have cried?
Tana French:
I was late to the Tana French phenomenon. I bought a copy of In the Woods to read on an international flight. By the time we landed, I was almost three-quarters of the way through and Googling nearby bookstores to get her second novel, The Likeness. French's books are not whodunits in the traditional sense. They're character-driven mysteries set in Ireland, primarily in Dublin, featuring gritty plots that are offset by a dream-like quality that occasionally hints at something otherworldly. Her stories are immersive and sensory. They're teal-gray and misty. They smell like stale beer, cigarette smoke, and fresh grass. I inhale them.
Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang
I started teaching drawing this past semester and have been reading through a stack of books on drawing basics and design principles. I came across this title in a library art section—a classic I'd never heard of. Step by step, the author arranges cut-paper shapes to tell the story of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Describing her decision-making process, the author brilliantly explains how we interpret shapes in context. Why are jagged lines anxiety-provoking? Why are diagonals dynamic? When is red a warning, and when is it loving? Brian Selznik described it as "The Shrunk and White of visual literacy." I agree.
—Sam Kalda, illustrator & artist (St. Paul, MN)
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I don't know about 2023, friends. Seems like everyone I've talked to has complicated feelings about the past year, and even more complicated feelings about the fact that there's another year ahead of us. Last year, I pushed myself to read more and differently than I ever have and I think maybe it was a defense against all of the difficult things I and we and you and everyone endured. Maybe that's not totally healthy, but I'll talk about it in therapy, not in book(ish). Here's what I want to share with book(ish) readers: I work at a children's bookstore, where we put together annual lists of bookseller favorites, so when Josh reached out about my year in reading, I'd already completed the assignment. My 2023 list is here. However, this year I also made a small zine based on my list. I've been giving physical copies to friends and they're available at the bookstore if you live in Minneapolis, but book(ish) subscribers can find a PDF of the zine below. The PDF includes an additional page of books that I left off of my list because they don't really fit at the store. I had fun making it and I hope you enjoy it. As a note, yes I read 151 books in 2023, not counting picture books, and I don't think I'll ever do that again. In 2024, I'm committed to not finishing more books and reading more slowly. And making more ephemera like this zine.
—Timothy Otte, poet & critic (Minneapolis, MN)
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Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
This ruined me for days! All I wanted to do was talk about it with people. Machado does a brilliant job discussing the subtle ways women move through and experience the world. Thought provoking in the best way. I’ll revisit this book again and again.
Fourth Wing and Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros
If you like A Court of Thorns and Roses, buckle up! This series includes dragons, epic battles, and romance. Pure entertainment from start to finish.
The Family Firm by Emily Oster
The Family Firm is a data-driven book on parenting that is realistic and not shaming. The book is especially great is you have school-aged kids or if you are looking to build routine. Spend your time worrying about the right things instead of getting caught up in the minutiae.
—Dahlia Brue, proprietor of Idun (St. Paul, MN)
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Before going in for back surgery this year, my coworkers teased they had no idea how I’d survive the convalescence. They know me as a type-A, tenacious person who likes when work runs at 100 mph, which is probably true, but little did they know I was eager to clock-out on sick leave, rack out on the couch and tear into a stack of books. I read a lot this year, almost double years past. I got hooked seeing my stats on the Goodreads app (which I hadn’t logged into forever). Here are a few that I found new and exciting.
Swim Home to the Vanished by Brendan Shay Basham
An anthropology of loss, grief and transformation packaged in an odyssey-like tale.
The Seep by China Porter
An alien invasion story of love, loss, and free will set in what should be an ambrosial world thanks to “the seep,” until the sublime becomes an anti-utopia, inner-dystopia.
Those We Thought We Knew by David Joy
Brings southern gothic into the 21st century when an Appalachian town confronts systemic, generational racism in a poignant and relevant way.
The Militia House by John Milas
A haunted but insidiously allegorical house of horrors somewhere in Afghanistan, juxtaposes the banality of a combat deployment with the surreal.
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
This was some of the finest prose I tasted this year and it came from a chef/punk stuck on an Italian aristocratic mountain top retreat trying to survive a world cascading towards the apocalypse. Spoiler alert: she’s a heroic anti-heroine.
Open Throat by Henry Hoke
Probably the biggest surprise and my top read of the year - don’t let the first-person anthropomorphic feline scare you away – this is the most thoughtful of thoughts from a violent, witty, anxious, starving, dehydrated, quintessence of a cat (mountain lion or cougar?) living in the Hollywood hills; instant cult classic.
—Samuel Chamberlain, writer & forest ranger (Salida, Colorado)
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Needing escape, I returned this year to a couple long-time favorites – Perdido Street Station and The Scar by China Mieville. Thrown back into Mieville’s sprawling, hallucinatory imagination, I became instantly drenched again in his water-world of Bas Lag, one he fills to the brim with robust characters, thoroughly alien races, and beautifully rendered otherworldly powers. The two books chronicle separate adventures, though Mieville unifies them with astute observations about the superpowers populating his world, painting a societal landscape with glimmering similarities to our own.
A forbidden tryst between races, child-sized moth creatures that feed upon one’s cognition, a robotic sentience Frankensteined together in an abandoned scrap yard, a pirate floatilla, massive sea creatures called up from the depths by mathematically wrought thunder storms – these books have it all. Please treat yourself to a display of creativity paralleled only by the other greats whose genre-twisting, mind-bending, mood altering stories bring us to other realms. Should you like Murakami, Le Guin, or Vandemeer, Mieville will be for you.
—Miles Mendenhall, artist (Minneapolis, MN)
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A huge thank you to all the Year in Reading contributors. Now that your TBR lists are stacked, channel that energy toward a local, independent bookstore, shop online at Bookshop, or start a Libro.fm subscription if you are able, and, as always, give lots of love to your local library. I’m excited for some fresh weirdnesses in 2024. Stay tuned for fun surprises, less worrying, and, of course, personal takes on books from yours truly and occasional guests. If you like what I’m doing here, would you share this newsletter with a single person? I’d be grateful. Take care.
Love that zine that Timothy made! And oh, small world - I have been following Dahlia Brue and her shop for aaaaaaaages on social media now and LOVE everything she shares