My goal for the year is to read at least two books per month. But, I’ve read three in the last couple weeks that are all likely to be near the top of my personal year end list.
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Joan Didion: The Year of Magical Thinking. A great novel about Didion’s husband’s sudden cardiac arrest and her own subsequent unraveling in the year to follow. Incredibly personal and beautiful but presented like an investigative report by one of America’s great journalists
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Percival Everrett: Erasure (adapted into the film American Fiction). A brilliant black author and literature professor named Theolonius Ellison is allergic to selling books. Fed up with the exploitive and stereotypical novels about slavery and gang violence, Ellison writes his own satyrical middle finger to the publishing industry called My Pafology under a pseudonym. To his surprise, it’s taken seriously and starts garnering critical acclaim and far more attention than any of his own novels. The movie, while enjoyable and with great performances, lacks the same jagged edge as the novel, which is very, very funny.
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Tove Ditlevsen: Copenhagen Trilogy: I admittedly have about a quarter of this one left to finish, but it’s great! A memoir of a famed Danish author’s life beginning in poverty in the early 1900s, her resolute determination to be a poet, and eventual battles with addiction. The writing is immaculate, and living in Europe in the early 1900s sounds fucking terrible! People used to really hate children. And that Hitler seems like a bad egg.
Some other novels I loved this year included Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night and Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo.
How about y’all?
