David Davis

Joan Crawford sits on the arm of a couch reading a book...in wedge heels!~Joan Crawford sits on the arm of a couch reading a book...in wedge heels!~

Between work, this newsletter, my novels, my lover and friends and hobbies—being alone, yoga, running, sex and violence, dancing—I’m a busy girl. Every December, I resolve to spend less time on Twitter and more in bed (alone) with a book, and every December I look back on the past year with not a little regret.

This December, I’ll allow myself some rationalization: for the most part, the books I read this year were challenging, enriching, diverting, and beautiful. A few are still in process (Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran, Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris, and The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy). Some were began but never finished for reasons outside my control (Sam Delany’s About Writing was lost to summer depression, and anyway it had to go back to the library), others because they were not at all pleasurable to read (Jordan Castro’s The Novelist, Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac). I even discovered, to my heartbreak, a Manuel Puig that I not only didn’t adore, but couldn’t stomach: his first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth.

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I don’t include near-misses and abandoned ships in my final count, but if the point of these end-of-the-year lists is to peek over the shoulder of our parasocialites, they give a fuller sense of how I read, if you’re curious about that: messily, sporadically, furiously, judgmentally (if not always critically). Jade says that when I’m obsessed with a book I spend a week or two talking endlessly about how its author is Just like me!, whether or not they are and whether or not their work resembles mine; I think this sensation is the closest I get to feeling seen, and delight in knowing that this recognition has very little to do with the liberalism’s CVified identity politics. That’s the power of literature, baby! If an artist is doing their job, I fall in love with both of us.

Anyway, here’s what I read this year. Wish me luck for a more readerly 2023!

Cataracts, John Berger

In the Cut, Susanna Moore

Heat and Dust, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, Da’Shaun L. Harrison

Tell Me I’m Worthless, Alison Rumfitt

Pig Earth, John Berger

Candy Darling: Memoirs of an Andy Warhol Superstar, Candy Darling

Palmares, Gayl Jones

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alex Chee

Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism, Amber Jamilla Musser

The Continuous Katherine Mortonhoe, D.G. Compton