My Year in Reading

Tl;dr - I actually read some books in 2020

January

I took the train from Salt Lake to San Francisco for a stint with my husband. His job is there (here) and our home is in SLC and if you’ve read this newsletter for a while, you know that’s been interesting. We’d just seen each other at the Christmas break, but by January 18 I was lonely again.

It’s an eighteen-hour journey on the California Zephyr. It departs Salt Lake just before midnight and carries you through the west desert, through the salt flats, through eastern Nevada. The sun starts to come up right around Fallon, NV, an area first populated during the California gold rush and incorporated in 1908.

I’d booked myself a “Superliner roomette,” which sounds a lot fancier and bigger than it is, but it gives you a private space for staring out the window and failing to sleep. On this trip, I listened to the audio of Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow. As you probably know, it tells in devastating detail the events that led to the explosion of the #MeToo movement. Farrow is an exciting writer and good storyteller, and “does voices” on the audio. It was simultaneously a crushing book and good read.

Also in January, I had lunch with fellow author Stephanie Kuehn. I told her a little bit about a novel I’d been working on for a while and hoped to finish in 2020. She remarked that it sounded like a forthcoming book that was getting a lot of buzz. My heart sank. I circled back around to this in July.

February

Way back in 2007, when most people didn’t have iPhones and we blogged on LiveJournal and were about to elect Obama, I was in a cohort of 2007 debut YA authors called Class of 2k7. This has been repeated by debut groups since, but props to Greg Fishbone for coming up with the whole idea.

One of the people in that group was Varian Johnson who, like me, was writing YA realism. I liked him from the get-go. Classy, smart, kind, generous. In February, I finally picked up The Parker Inheritance, one of his middle grade novels I’d had on my list since its release.

I remember that when I finished it, I was sitting in a camp chair in the downstairs of my in-laws’ house where we were living. I loved this book. As a writer, I was impressed with the craft, daunted by the scope, and in awe of what he pulled off. As a reader…well this is best expressed in what I wrote to Varian :

Most of all, I loved how this story was brimming with love. Unsentimental love, complicated love, enduring love, friendship love, love for community, romantic love, family love, self love. The overwhelming feeling I am left with at the end is how permeated with love it is, and that can only come from an author who has that love for what he's doing and the world he's creating. 

In the second half of the month, my husband and I went to Los Angeles. It was a train trip again, this time on the Coast Starlight. It’s about nine hours from San Jose to L.A. No private roomette this time. We were seated on the west side of the train and the tracks run along parts of the CA coast you would never get to see in a car; the views were stunning. We got to stay at the Los Angeles Athletic Club and wear monogrammed robes. We had a couple of great dinners out with my agent and his husband. We rode the metro to the Santa Monica Pier. We went to see Uncut Gems at the Alamo Drafthouse. The normal stuff of being a person out and about in the world; our last stop in the Before Times.

March & April

I flew from California to Utah on March 1. There was a buzz building about this virus. I remember being very conscious at the airport of washing and sanitizing my hands, not wanting to be too close to people. The flight was short but emotionally uncomfortable. Was I being paranoid? I wasn’t sure. I made a shopping list on the plane and on March 2, I stocked up on food, medicine, and paper goods, and I waited.

Around the third week of March, the real lockdowns began. My husband’s school got set up for distance learning, and he came to Salt Lake. Once again, the train. We felt more comfortable with a train roomette for a long trip than a plane for a short trip. Amtrak had hand sanitizer, masks, and the crew delivered food right to passengers.

The eastbound train gets to Salt Lake in the wee hours. Three a.m., four a.m., depending on how late it is. I sat in my car and watched a taxi driver spray down his cab to sanitize it. My husband slept on the couch for the first five days home, and we slept foot-to-head for a few nights after that.

During this time, I could barely read anything but the news and twitter. I rebooted my This Creative Life podcast in an effort to feel like I was contributing something. Also, I had a book of my own to think about:

Goodbye from Nowhere came out to little fanfare. It was hard to work up my own enthusiasm, let alone expect anyone else to, though it is and remains one of my proudest accomplishments as a writer. I wanted to write about a big, messy family. I wanted to write about a boy. I wanted to write about co-dependence––the lowkey kind a lot of us deal with in ourselves and others but maybe don’t call it that. I did, and I look forward to the day (the paperback release, maybe) when I can talk about it a little more.

Meanwhile, as a reader, I was drawn to badly written psychological thrillers on Kindle Unlimited. I read a manuscript for a friend. I think it was somewhere in this time that we had a good run of audiobooks. We’d listen to them through the night, to get our minds off the most anxious midnight thoughts.

These included The Library Book by Susan Orlean, a re-listen of Katherine Graham’s memoirs, and a couple of great P.D. James Adam Dalgliesh mysteries. We especially fell in love with the reader of some new editions of the James books, Penelope Dellaporta. (What a name!)

I wouldn’t say the James books were actually helping us sleep. The prose and dialog were too good and the stories too well structured to ignore. But they were getting us through the nights during the beginning of the uncertainty that came to define the year.

May

In May, I started to accept the new reality. Also, we officially adopted a cat, and if you’ve got a cat on your lap you are practically forced to read. I went for The Group by Mary McCarthy, a twentieth-century classic that was on the bestseller list for a couple of years in the 1960s.

I liked it a lot, maybe more for its look at life for young white women of a certain class in the 1930s than for the story per se. This book got me thinking about how older books cycle in and out of become the cool thing to read in certain circles. When I was in my thirties, a lot of my writing peers were discovering Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, from 1962. I liked that one, too. Herman Wouk’s 1955 novel Marjorie Morningstar is another one that comes to mind.

Fiction isn’t history, of course, but it also is. These novels are full of great details about the clothes, restaurant menus, birth control devices, social and sexual mores, and expectations of both the time they were written and the time they’re set.

June

Deeper into the new normal, we supported our local indie movie theater by paying for and watching some movies through their service. One such movie was Shirley, a fiction about the author Shirley Jackson. My main takeaway from the movie was that it made me want to read Jackson’s 1951 novel Hangsaman, and so I did.

I always wanted to like Jackson’s work more than I have. I’m more of a Patricia Highsmith type. But Hangsaman was an exception. It’s a strange, unsettling story about a college girl’s “descent into madness,” to steal a phrase from its wiki page. This “madness” is basically all caused by men, including her father. It also connects back to Catch and Kill, and a couple of my other reads this year. (Also, the writing in this book breaks so many workshop “rules”…you love to see it.)

July

In July, we filled the minivan with kitchen necessities, clothes, books, our work stuff, and the cat, and drove back to California. It was a miserable, miserable drive. Nevada is about 500 miles wide, and about 100 degrees in July. We sedated the cat but not enough. We pushed through to do it all in one, and I’m a little embarrassed to report that what got us through was Mary Trump’s memoir about her Uncle Don, and how he got that way. It’s really something.

The next day, I collapsed into a migrained heap on an inflatable mattress in one of two bare rooms inside a school we’d live in for the rest of the year and beyond. After recovering from the drive, we made it homelike and were reminded that wherever we’re together is home enough for us.

Remember my lunch with Steph back in January? The book she told me about that sounded like mine in progress was My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell. My library ebook hold came in and I read it on the inflatable mattress. Was it really like mine? No, though I can see why Steph made the comparison. I found Russell’s telling of Vanessa’s story all-too-believable, and for the most part well-wrought. It wrestles with some compelling questions that have few simple answers, ones I’ve asked myself in my own Adventures in Toxic Men.

August

We celebrated our 30th anniversary with Thai takeout, eaten at the card table we have here that functions as dining table, work table, and cat perch. My husband’s school year started back up and he began distance teaching from an empty classroom across the hall. I got an alarmingly short hair cut outdoors on a windy day. The cat adjusted to the new digs and I worked on a big rewrite of my middle grade novel. (Don’t worry, this isn’t the project that sounded like My Dark Vanessa.)

I read various fiction and nonfiction, including The Margot Affair by Senaë Lemoine, which I wrote about in a previous newsletter. Mostly I was focused on getting into a writing routine here, and finishing my own book.

September

I turned in my book on Labor Day. It had been due in May, but I told my editor that I wanted to do the second draft on my own and save us both time down the line––I knew what that draft needed and set to it.

Our area was beset by fires; a strange and terrible time. We hardly bore the worst of it compared to neighboring counties, but it seemed like there would never be an unsmoky again and I despaired of everything.

Late in the month, I drove to Utah for a short check-in on things there. I experienced the usual inner conflict between my love of life in Utah and my love of life in CA, but also realized that it’s life in CA that has the stronger pull now. What will it all mean? I would love to answer that question but there are still too many unknowns to make a declaration.

I worked on client manuscripts and also finally got to read Thoughts and Prayers, by my friend and co-faculty at SPU, Bryan Bliss. It’s made of three novellas that make a single arc about kids recovering from the trauma of a shooting, and it’s beautifully written, his best work yet. It got me thinking about trauma and the ways we’re all going through something right now and the trauma that will remain.

Oh, I had another book come out. Courageous Creativity was a joyful labor of love, in which I give advice that I still need to take myself, every day.

October & November

The winds blew and the smoke cleared. I turned 50. I drove back to California. I read Peter Rock’s Night Swimmers and contemplated my own memories and what I might make of them through writing. I read Nina LaCour’s Watch Over Me and thought about the retellings I’d like to do, and also my own history with Mendocino county. I’ve written about both of these books in previous newsletters.

Post turning 50, I dialed back my social media use greatly and changed the way I take in information generally. Almost immediately, some semblance of calm had a chance to settle in. Time is still a mystery. Things that happened two weeks ago feel like ancient history and at the same time, deadlines speed toward me.

I read Luster, by Raven Leilani, and marveled at her sentences, laughed at her sardonic humor, and cringed mightily at her narrator’s choices. I also thought about my choices when I was in my early twenties, and cringed at those, too. Is “choices” even the right word for modern humans at that age? So much of the time, we’re still riding the afterburn of family dysfunction and childhood trauma and barely know who we are, let alone what’s good for us.

Thanks to my fall news and social media diet, I was able to listen to my body a bit more. I had a video visit with my doctor, and remarked to her how casual it seemed, how strange to not have the assistant asking so many questions, weighing and measuring and entering data. It was like zooming with my sister. At the end of that visit, I had a carpal tunnel syndrome dx, a rec for online physical therapy, some ergonomic recommendations, and a lab order to test for celiac, among other things. It turns out type 1 diabetics have it at about a six-times greater frequency than the general population as these autoimmune things tend to cluster.

As I waited on results, I recorded a podcast episode with Christian McMay Heidicker, author of the Newbery Honor Book Scary Stories for Young Foxes, and we talked about detoxing from substances and people and thought patterns. Also writing.

My celiac screen came back negative but my doctor suggested going gluten free for at least two months, anyway. Cringe. I am on day four of this and sorry to say I feel much better. Time will tell. (If you are GF, feel free to leave me your tips.)

December

I know it’s not even here yet, but my grand reading finale for the year is Herman Wouk’s Youngblood Hawke. I’ve already started and am enjoying it immensely, but it’s near 800 pages and I’m fairly confident it will take me the month so I’m ready to call it.

Also, I know how December is going to go. Our county just went to threat level purple again, and I won’t be going anywhere or seeing anyone indoors for some time. I’ll finish my revision. I’ll cook and eat and read and write and watch and walk. And, of course, do laundry. There is always laundry.

As for the year in reading, there were other highlights, too. Like Tomboyland and Intimations, Liar and Spy, Christy Harrison’s Anti-Diet, Kyle Chayka’s The Longing for Less. There were also dozens more books I bought this year but haven’t yet read. I am well set up for 2021.

You can find my 2020 list of all these books and more, but not the ones I’m most embarrassed about, at Bookshop.org. Some of them might make good holiday gifts. Courageous Creativity, for example, is a nice gift book for the young creative in your life. Tomboyland would be a great pick for the creative nonfiction lover you know. Anti-Diet could be your 2021 manifesto. The Parker Inheritance might give you hope for humanity.

If inspired, talk to me in the comments or via email about your favorite or most memorable reads of this year.