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Probably the most important thing I read this year were three words at the end of my best friend's novel. Works Not Cited, she had written, and then a list of books and show and movies and stories that had shaped the mind that made the book. It's hard to explain why this was so revelatory except that it was-- that it was something my mind had been swimmingly dimly towards, and then all of a sudden there it was, neatly and literally expressed. A way of saying: Here are all of the things that shaped the space around this book, the external pressures that dictated the internal situation I'd be in when I wrote it down.
It was particularly relevant because the two books I've been working on this year are about books in a way that the first two weren't. They were about stories-- SONG a myth, GRACE a conspiracy, and also the tabloids-- but they weren't about literary traditions the way LOOK and book #4 will be. LOOK is about Bluebeard, and also The Secret Garden and Peter Pan. The fourth book is about Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital and Judy Blume's Summer Sisters, and, from a long, long time ago, Katherine Patterson's Jacob Have I Loved. It's about the idea that there are two types of girls: the beauty and the heroine. I've written about this before. It is a persistent obsession.
We don't tend to talk about YA this way, as a literary tradition. This is in part because YA is a new term, and also a not-very-well-defined one. On my friend Sarah's (excellent) podcast people often mention Twilight as a touchstone or a turning point in their reading and writing, but they talk less about the kinds of stories that buried themselves in their subconscious too early for language, so inextricable from us we barely have words for them.
The conversation among YA authors tends to be about readers: it imagines the effects the book will have on people and in the world going forward. Much more rarely are we allowed to say that we are writing for writing's sake. The revelation of this year was that I don't write books for teenagers, or even for my teenage self. I write books for the books I read when I was younger and more malleable, in the hopes of exerting pressure on their stories the way those stories exerted such delicious and unbearable pressure on me.
Speaking of Sarah, her debut novel comes out early next year. I've read it; it's very good. All of the books my friends published this year were very good, and I'm not just saying that because they're my friends-- I don't think I could be that close with people whose writing I didn't respect, honestly. Adrienne Celt's Invitation to a Bonfire is so sexy, and so is Brandy Colbert's Finding Yvonne (in very different ways). Amy Spalding's The Summer of Jordi Perez is a sparkling rom-com and Robyn Schneider's Invisible Ghosts made me cry entirely against my will. Aminah Mae Safi's Not the Girls You're Looking For is wily and intense and-- is it weird if I say muscular? There's real force in the book, is what I mean, which is no surprise if you've met Aminah. (Much less so if you've lifted weights with her, which I did most weeks this year.) Katie Cotugno's Fireworks and Somaiya Daud's Mirage are both romantic, although, again, in incredibly different ways. I almost forgot Maurene Goo's The Way You Make Me Feel because I read it last year, but it came out this year, and I liked it so much I wrote about it in The Paris Review.
Not by my friends, but much-beloved all the same: Emergency Contact by Mary HK Choi (read if you want to feel with your whole body that you're in the middle of an absolutely dizzying heart palp of a crush) and Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor (read if you want to be delighted and terrified by kids and magic). I know a lot of people had problems with Shelia Heti's Motherhood, but I enjoyed it, especially in conjunction with Francesca Lia Block's The Thorn Necklace in terms of writing about creativity and children. (And Meaghan O'Connell's And Now We Have Everything of course!)
The book I recommended most frequently and ardently to people this year, bar none, was No One Tells You This by Glynnis MacNicol.
I read Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver on a writing retreat in Big Bear with my mother, drifting around in a hammock chair and drinking cold beer on long hot afternoons. I've been a huge fan of Novik's for a few years now, and this book is her best yet: complicated and sprawling and layered and immensely gorgeous, and so fundamentally, quietly Jewish I didn't know what to do with it except love it until I cried.
Also I read H is for Hawk this year and guys, did you know, it's very, very good.