Reading Pleasures of 2022
by Gwynne Garfinkle
2022 was a rough year for me (although it started with the release of my debut novel!), but books were a welcome respite. Here are some of my favorites of the year.
Fiction / Poetry
Elif Batuman, The Idiot and Either/Or. Selin, the Harvard undergrad protagonist of these novels, is as perceptive about languages and literature as she is naive about relationships. (There were times when I wanted to punch Ivan, the elusive Hungarian student who is the object of her obsession.) In Either/Or, Selin grapples with compulsory heterosexuality, though she doesn't yet have the words for the concept. Set in the 1990s, these books are autobiographical fiction of a wildly episodic nature, but I devoured every page. I hope there will be a third volume.
Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. This novel explores creative collaboration, friendship, and disability. Sam Masur and Sadie Green play video games together as kids and design them as adults. They advance each other artistically and let each other down. As much as I wanted to shake them for their inability to communicate with each other, I loved these characters, as well as kind, gorgeous Marx Watanabe, the third member of their team, who loves them both. I even enjoyed reading about their video games, though I have never been a gamer.
Sonya Taaffe, As the Tide Came Flowing In. This chapbook contains poetry and prose that focuses on oceanic themes. All of it is gorgeous (which will come as no surprise to Taaffe's readers), but I particularly loved the collection's eponymous novelette, about a woman visited by her drowned sailor husband.
Melissa Broder, The Pisces. A woman, at loose ends after breaking up with her long-time boyfriend, winds up in a passionate affair with a merman. Haunting, funny and explicit, the book goes a lot darker than I'd expected (even aside from the disturbing animal neglect/abuse plot thread), but I couldn't stop thinking about it.
Alyssa Songsiridej, Little Rabbit. A young queer woman finds her footing as a writer and in a sub/dom relationship with an older, more successful male choreographer. This new pairing disrupts her longtime friendship with her roommate, also a young writer, who lets loose with jibes about straight privilege as she tries to reassert the status quo. A beautifully nuanced take on power relationships and the older man/younger woman trope.
Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly. Witchcraft is real in this novel, in which women must marry by age thirty or submit to monitoring by the state. Josephine Thomas's mother, rumored to be a witch, vanished when Jo was a teenager. Now, fourteen years later, as she attempts to fulfil her mother's last request, Jo finds she must acknowledge her own powers, even as that puts her, as a Black woman, in especial danger of being tried as a witch.
Nonfiction
Annie Ernaux, Happening. Nobel-Prize winner Ernaux's harrowing and all-too-relevant account of her illegal (and nearly fatal) abortion as a young woman in 1963 France.
Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion. This brief memoir explores Ernaux's obsessive affair with a married man from Eastern Europe. Her more recent volume, Getting Lost, deals with the same relationship in exhaustive detail (and reveals her lover to be a Soviet diplomat), but I found the earlier book more incisive.
Michelle Tea, Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility. The engaging and refreshingly queer tale of Tea's quest, at age forty, to bear a child.
Julie Phillips, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem. Phillips explores how woman artists balance--or don't--pregnancy and motherhood with creative work. Among those she discusses are Alice Neel, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Audre Lorde, Shirley Jackson, and Angela Carter.
Audiobooks
I listened to a lot of audiobooks this year, some of them books I'd never read before, others already favorites of mine. Some of them made me boggle at the narrators' inexplicable mispronunciations. Others, like the following, were delightful and moving.
Charlie Jane Anders, Never Say You Can't Survive: How To Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories. This is one of the most inspiring and useful books on writing fiction I've ever read, and Anders narrates the audio version with verve and humor (plus, outstanding enunciation!).
Ira Levin, Rosemary's Baby. When I found out Mia Farrow had narrated an audiobook of Rosemary's Baby, I had to give it a listen during Spooky Season. Farrow gives a bravura performance (though I longed to hear Ruth Gordon's voice for Minnie Castevet's dialogue).
Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House. Machado's narration lends new depth to this kaleidoscopic exploration of an abusive lesbian relationship.
John Doe, with Tom DeSavia and Friends, Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk. This collection of tales from the glory days of Los Angeles punk is even more riveting in audio format, with narration by the likes of Doe and Exene (X), Jane Wiedlin and Charlotte Caffey (The Go-Go's), Dave Alvin (The Blasters), Teresa Covarrubias (The Brat), and Robert Lopez (The Zeros, El Vez).
Gwynne Garfinkle lives in Los Angeles. She is the author of a novel, Can't Find My Way Home (2022), and a collection of short fiction and poetry, People Change (2018), both available from Aqueduct Press. Her work has appeared in such publications as Other Covenants: Alternate Histories of the Jewish People, Fantasy, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, The Deadlands, Apex, Not One of Us, and The Cascadia Subduction Zone.
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