2018 in Review
2018 in Review
2018 in Review
Above: The ingredients in preparation for an hallacas assembly line. Hallacas are a Venezuelan Christmas dish, similar in concept to a tamale.
Friends,
Welcome to 2019. I don’t know what to say about 2018. Let’s look forward to a new year?
The world of 2018 was exhausting. In my own life, I published almost nothing but wrote a lot more than in 2017. I got a lot of joy from the writing and artistic work of other people, though, and I want to spotlight+share the cream of the crop with you.
THE BOOK RECS
I read around 100 books in 2018 and gave 19 of them a five-star rating on Goodreads . That sounds high, but have to keep in mind that choosing what to read is a very curated experience. I have so many people I trust to turn me on to good books that it’s easy to only read high quality stuff. I’ve broken down my favorites below.
Published in 2018: I read a dozen books published in 2018, and of those, my favorite was absolutely Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know , which I’ve recommended in this newsletter before. It’s a memoir about adoption, focused on both the emotional expectations of adoptees and the complications of interracial adoption. In my 2016 round-up, I picked one of Chung’s articles about interacting with her family around race and Trump as a favorite as well. This connects closely to my other favorite among 2018 books, Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race , which is a great condensed guide to race in America writ large. While most people who would pick it up would be familiar with the content, the book lays it out in a very direct way, with super helpful conversation-style formatting that gives you a starting point for conversations around the topic.
“Genre”/non-realism lit: Hate the term, but non-realistic books are a small subset of my reading, so I’m clumping it all together. NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy (sci-fi and fantasy with heaps of slavery allegory and generational trauma) really blew me away. I read Ironheart #1, Ms. Marvel vol. 1, Miles Morales as Spider-Man vol 1., and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Panther run, and all of them were great but TNC’s was my favorite.
Books I thought about a whole lot: Han Kang’s Human Acts (brutal, difficult novel about student uprising in 1980ish South Korea), and Robert Gipe’s Trampoline (semi-YA novel about a young girl coming of age amid opiate/environmental crisis Appalachia). Solanin by Inio Asano is a graphic novel about the uncertainty of the time in life just after college and it’s probably the book I read this year that I’ve thought about the most.
Older books I wish I had gotten to sooner: James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is massive but so worth it. Plus, young James Agee looked like a more attractive James Franco so. Other choice here would be Audre Lorde’s Zami , a “biomythnography” that’s just a really great, complex but not forlorn memoir that really embodies the word intersectional.
Translation: Besides Human Acts and Solanin , mentioned above. From Taiwan, Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre , a short epistolary novel about the intensity and desperation of young love. Also from Taiwan, My Kid Sister by Chang Ta-chun is a funny coming-of-age novella about a young writer. From South Korea, I’ll Be Right There by Kyung-Sook Shin is a slow and wistful novel that includes a loving portrait of a literature seminar so how could I not love it? And from Mexico, Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth is about an auctioneer who collects the teeth of famous people and that’s really all you need to know.
Looking forward to in 2019: Linda Holmes has been a constant, wonderful presence during my long commutes in her role as the host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour . Her first novel, Evvie Drake Starts Over , is coming out next year. So is a new Lena Andersson translation, Acts of Infidelity. Andersson’s last translated novel, Willful Disregard , was one of my absolute favorite books of the last few years. I can’t wait to read my friend Morgan Giles ’s first book-length translation, Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri. You can read Morgan’s previous work in the excellent short story collection The Book of Tokyo from Comma Press. Finally, my mentor and friend Jennifer DuBois is gracing the world with a new novel: The Spectators , coming in April.
I loved a lot of other books this year and would love to recommend some more specifically if you’re looking for one!
THE REST OF IT
Television and film: Great British Bake Off continues to give me hope, life, and tranquility. Rewatching Cowboy Bebop has been satisfying for similar reasons — comfort food. Last year one of my highest recommended books was Samin Nosrat’s cookbook Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat , this year I strongly encourage you to watch the Netflix miniseries of the same name, though it’s more of a celebration of food as opposed to instructional like the book. The Good Place is an excellent sitcom for when you run out of Brooklyn Nine-Nine episodes. The best films I saw were Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse which is the best translation from comic to big screen I’ve ever seen, Black Panther which deserved all the praise it got, and Annihilation which did unbelievably good things with atmosphere and creepiness. I have not seen Incredibles 2 yet!
Articles: “ Death of an English Major ” by Gary Taylor. “ Having the Wrong Conversations about Hate Activity ” by Anonymous. “ I Went To A Conference Full Of Conservatives Who Hated My Guts — And Told Me So ” by Scaachi Koul. “ Anthony Bourdain and the Power of Telling the Truth ” by Helen Rosner. “ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Comes to Terms with Global Fame ” by Larissa MacFarquhar.
Music: Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer (see: “ I Like That ”). The Persona 5 soundtrack (see: “ Night Rain ”). Bomba Estéreo (see: “ Soy Yo ”).
Games: Persona 5 , Horizon: Zero Dawn , and God of War were not only the three best games I played this year but would all also easily fit into my top ten for this decade. Highly recommend.
The internet: I know it’s just a new form of advertising but Steak-umm and MoonPie ’s Twitter accounts are something to behold. Also, Gritty .
Food: Fermented giardiniera . Taiwanese beef noodle soup . Sweet potato miso pie . Crunchy rice Samin style . Crunchy rice Maangchi style . Broth broth broth broth… oh, and hot apple cider.
The book clips: I’ll end this year’s note with another collection of lines I loved from my reading.
- “What I mean is that everyday life frequently puts people in a position where they have no choice but to tell a small untruth. I don’t like to do it, but sometimes that’s how things go. And so, I became a writer.” - Wild Kids
- “Beep. Due to the overwhelming volume of calls to the Supplement Group, all of our staff members are currently suffering from laryngitis. We offer you the following recorded message instead. Beep. A crocodile is a human with reptile characteristics, not a reptile with human characteristics. Beep.” - Notes of a Crocodile
- “Out of the bum, low potatoes on my left one of the Ricketts boys stood up fast and grinning and shouted Hello, grinning with joy all over his face, and sure I had come to see them. The other boy and one of the little girls stood up waving and grinned. I waved and smiled and put on the brakes. They floundered out fast through the plants and ran up to the car close to me at the window, feet on the running-board and quick bodies clamped close against the hot flank of the car, panting with the grinning look of dogs, their eyes looking straight, hard, and happy into mine. (Jesus, what could I ever do for you that would be enough.)” - Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
- “In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again: and in him, once more, and of each of us, our terrific responsibility towards human life; towards the utmost idea of goodness, of the horror of error, and of God.” -Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , again.
- “My collection was gone, every single item. I first felt tremendous relief. Then, a little sadness. Then disbelief, and anger. Then, again, a deeper form of sadness and relief fused together, almost a weightlessness. The following days were confusing and difficult, and I’d rather not speak about them. I attended group therapy. I watched Formula 1. I considered Catholicism. I was lost like a swallow in Antarctica, as Napoleon says.” - The Story of My Teeth
- “The chair faced a chest freezer where he kept his food, and on top of that a small television. (‘We all thought it was a black-and-white set, but when he died, my aunt cleaned the screen and we discovered it had been a color TV all along. He smoked two cartons a week.’)” - Victuals
- “Fear men. Flee them. Give them nothing. They mean you ill. Their voices smack of honey and their words set off string music in the chambers of your heart. But mark my words: they will cut you down, chop you up, cook you over fire, eat only the pieces that suit them, and throw the best of you into the weeds for other beasts to rend and gnaw.” - Trampoline
- “Their chief interest is in commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, ‘doing business.’ Naturally they don’t eschew such simpler pleasures as love-making, sea-bathing, going to the pictures. But, very sensibly, they reserve these pastimes for Saturday afternoons and Sundays and employ the rest of the week in making money, as much as possible.” -The Plague
- “He could not have found a better way of reaching her than by making sense. And, since there were infinite possibilities to Paul Ivory’s utmost candour, could even have had this in mind. For Paul, sincerity was something to fall back on when other methods flagged.” - The Transit of Venus
- A long scene from I’ll Be Right There involving a literature lecture and St. Christopher, which I transcribed into Medium here .
What’s going to be different about 2019, for you? Are you doing the resolution thing, or just hitting reboot from last year? No matter what, it’s enough.
-g