Pleasures of Reading
by Holly Wade Matter
Since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, I have kept myself sane (if not my house clean or my yard tidy) by all-day reading. The term “voracious reader” is rather a cliché, but that’s what I have been, reading a novel every day or two and seldom remembering what I’ve read.
Project Gutenberg started off as my go-to. Now I’m hitting the e-books at the Seattle Public Library. Despite my reading amnesia, some books have stood out as exceptional.
For novels:
Armadale by Wilkie Collins
The Enchanted Castle by E. Nesbit
The Forstye Saga by John Galsworthy
My Antonia by Willa Cather
For nonfiction:
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves for Arkansas and Texas
For short fiction, Talk Like a Man by Nisi Shawl
New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, edited by Nisi Shawl
The Adventure of the Naked Guide by Cynthia Ward.
I hope that 2021 will include reading simply for pleasure.
Holly Wade Matter's debut novel, Damned Pretty Things, was released last month by Aqueduct Press. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Century, and the Bending the Landscape anthology series. She is a graduate of the University of Washington and of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. She has twice been awarded literary funding from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and in 1998 she received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Seattle with her husband Brad and two house rabbits.
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