Don't Mind the Mess

Faster, Smarter, Better

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This post is a compensated editorial partnership with Voices for Healthy Kids, a joint initiative of the American Heart Association and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. 

For the last few weeks, Graham reported that he is the fastest person in his class. He used to be 2nd or 3rd place the first few months in his new school. Now, though, he is the fastest and almost always comes in first. A second grader now, he has dived into a whole new set of obsessions and passions. There is Pokemon card collecting, reading chapter books in bed with a flashlight, his ranking in an online math game, and his position as fastest in his class.

“You’re a fast runner,” I tell him. “I used to be pretty fast, too. And your dad is a runner. So maybe you’ll be a runner when you’re older.”

One of my favorite things about school is getting to see him learn about something and realize he’s good at it. I remember being in Elementary School and feeling like I could do anything.

In Elementary School I ran the anchor leg for the winning relay team. I did the most pull-ups of any kid in the class. I remember feeling strong and confident in my body and what it could do. Left to my own devices I always chose a book. I still do. I didn’t always love PE, but it always broke me out of my own world.

Graham runs a lot. When we get out of the car, he runs to the front door. When I pick him up from afterschool, he is often running around the playground. But he also has that same urge I do to sit and get lost in his head, sometimes for a little while, sometimes much longer.

I am still working on it. When we moved to warmer weather I started going on walks. I follow a trail around a lake for 2 miles. I feel the sunshine, watch the ducks, listen to an audiobook, and remember that my body is here and how it feels when I use it. I have gone years without regular physical activity in my life, happily ignored it and avoided it. But I am old enough now to recognize the difference between how I feel after a day of work at a computer and free time with a book and nothing else vs a day with all those things where I also go outside and use my body. My brain is different, my body is different, the two feel more connected.

I want Graham to develop healthier habits than I did. I want him to find physical things that he is good at, ways to use his body that help him feel like a sharper person. And I know that the best thing for him right now is PE at school. He needs the structure and the coaching and the instructions. He needs someone to tell him what the goal is and how to do it well and what makes you the best. At home, the mornings are short and the evenings are short and we barely get enough time together. In the winter it’s usually dark before we even get to our apartment. PE is what I rely on.

AHA PE Infographic 1But Graham doesn’t get PE every day. And that’s not uncommon at all. Only 4% of Elementary Schools provide daily PE year-round for their students. I care a lot about my kids’ education, of course. But I also want them to get more than just academic skills at school. To me, school is where you go to prepare yourself to live in the adult world, and that includes not just subjects like math and reading, but classrooms full of students to help learn social skills, teachers in the arts to foster creativity and PE to develop good physical habits.

When Graham started school I assumed that all those things just happened. Over the years I talked to teachers, I took positions in the PTA, and I learned a lot about his classroom and his school. I learned so many good things, but I also saw that there is still a lot more we can do for our kids. And that’s true in his new school just like his old one.

Now that we’re here and we’ve gotten settled, it’s time for me to get back in the saddle. I have to get in the weeds and start going to PTA meetings and figure out what I can do to create a better school for my kid and all the other kids he walks in the doors with every day. And PE is part of that.

I’m partnering up with the American Heart Association today to talk about an initiative to get PE in every school for every child. In partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, AHA has started the Voices for Healthy Kids initiative to reach out to parents like me to be more involved in our school and to advocate for physical education. Not only to help improve kids’ physical health and fitness, but to help them learn. Research has shown that increasing PE in schools improved children’s physical fitness and reduces obesity. They also do better on standardized tests! In fact, taking some time away from academics to use on PE didn’t have any drop in test scores at all. Kids do just as well in school with more PE and they’re building a better set of healthy exercise habits. (Want more data? There’s a whole bunch right here.)

So what can you do? Well, you can head over to the Voices for Healthy Kids initiative to get their PE toolkit and join the action team. You can also talk to your school, your school district, and your state representatives about the ESSA (the Every Student Succeeds Act). ESSA requires all states to develop a comprehensive plan to give all students a high-quality education. Voices for Healthy Kids wants PE to be included as a part of that comprehensive plan. ESSA includes PE as part of a “well-rounded curriculum,” but it’s not mandated that it be included. You have to make sure your state puts it in their plan to get the funds in place to help schools create better PE programs for our kids.

When I was in high school, you only had to take a few semesters of PE. You definitely didn’t have it every day, you could go a whole year without it if you wanted. But some of my best memories are from one of my PE classes. It was called Rocky Mountain High and it was the best PE class I ever took. We did problem solving, ropes courses, rock climbing, orienteering, and trust exercises. I was always happy to go, even though I was always exhausted when it was over. By then I’d lost all that physical confidence I’d built up as a kid. For years, no one had been there to show me how to keep that confidence, how to make it part of my life. I wonder sometimes how things might have been different if I’d had that.

For now, I keep going on my walks around the lake. On the weekends the kids come with me, bringing their bikes along. We stop to look at the ducks. We talk about the trees. And I hope that I’m doing at least a little bit to help them keep this confidence and joy in being out and using their bodies. I hope they get connected to feeling spent and happy and satisfied that happens every time we come home and sit down together and put our feet up. I hope I can give them something better.

 

Winter Book Picks

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Ummmm so the first three months of the year have come and gone without a book post. Horrors. Going to squeeze in all my picks from 2017 so far in a slightly longer-than-usual list. As I often do, I’ll go from lightest to heaviest reads. All links are Amazon affiliate links that provide a small commission for this site.

Schadenfreude: A Love Story by Rebecca Schuman grabbed me with its cheeky cover. I have no particular love of Germany or Kafka, which are the book’s true loves, but I still laughed and cringed my way through this memoir or the author’s adventures through Germany and the German language starting with her infatuation with a boy who was really into Kafka. As a lover of personal essays, the format really worked for me. Chapters are very episodic, and Schuman is a writer for Slate so the writing itself will remind you of online humor writing. I tend to prefer memoirs that aren’t built around a really awful upbringing or traumatic event, just ones where I can enjoy seeing someone’s experiences and get to know the writer’s personality and this definitely checks those boxes.

The Wanderers by Meg Howrey. I love space books and movies but I often find them either too genre-y to the detriment of character or insufficiently science-y and mostly built around action. The Wanderers cares about character above all else, but it also felt deeply researched and thoroughly imagined. Basically it passed my tests for literary fiction and science-fiction. It follows three astronauts and their families as they train for the first mission to Mars. It is mostly concerned with what makes an astronaut who they are and how it is to be a person in their orbit. (Yes, that was on purpose.) What happens when three astronauts must share very tight quarters for over a year? What makes a person want to be an astronaut in the first place? If that doesn’t sound quite interesting enough, just read the first chapter. You’ll get a taste of Howrey’s smart take on science, feminine conditioning, corporate-speak, and much more. I think you’ll find you can’t stop reading.

Ill Will by Dan Chaon. Dan Chaon always puts out crime novels to fawning reviews and while I usually like them I haven’t loved one in a deep way until now. Ill Will was a reading experience that left me exhilarated. I listened to the audio, usually on long stretches of several hours while on a road trip, and I was still sad to turn it off when I arrived at my destination. This is a crime novel that moves backwards and forwards in time centered on Dustin, a psychologist in a midwestern city whose new patient is obsessed with conspiracy theories a series of suspicious drownings of young men. Dustin is no stranger to horrible crimes, there is a big one in his past that I don’t want to spoil, but I will say the chapters set in the 80’s do involve the height of the Ritual Satanic Abuse hysteria that once swept the country. When Dustin’s wife dies, he slowly begins to spiral out of control. While this is a suspenseful novel that I couldn’t stop reading, it’s also about how men deal with (or don’t deal with) trauma in their lives and the effects that trauma can have. 

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. I really loved Lee’s debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires, and this is a great follow up. An epic family saga set in Korea and Japan from the 1930’s through the 1980’s, it does what all the good family sagas do and shows you how one person’s choices ricochet down through the generations. This is a big, fat book with plenty of character and plot. It doesn’t feel as long as it is, and while I’m usually not big on historical fiction I dived deep into this one. There is a lot here on the Korean immigrant experience in Japan, something you rarely hear about in the United States, but that will feel familiar to any country that is considering what value immigrants have and what role they play in society. 

Everything Belongs to Us by Yoojin Grace Wuertz. This is one of two books on this list about the upheaval in South Korea that began in the 1970’s with worker and student protests. This is a book about friendship, ideals, and family in times of upheaval. The three friends at the center of this book–Namin, Sunam, and Jisun–all come from different social classes to a top university. Namin comes from nothing and is her family’s last hope, Sunam is middle-class and longs for acceptance from the elite, and Jisun is from a wealthy family with a tyrannical father she longs to escape. They come into each other’s lives and have incredible power to befriend and betray one another. It is not a political novel, but a story about people in highly politically charged times. 

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. Heavy subject matter but it’s in a Young Adult package so it’s a little higher on this list than it otherwise would be. This is perhaps the most hyped YA book of 2017 and I was very nervous about it. But I couldn’t put it down and it’s one of the best YA novels I’ve read in the last few years. Starr lives in a poor Black neighborhood in Chicago but her good grades got her into a fancy prep school in the suburbs. Starr’s life isn’t simple, but she has family and friends she loves and she’s okay until she’s in the car with a friend when he’s killed by police during a traffic stop. The story makes national news and Starr suddenly finds her two worlds colliding while she’s in the midst of her own deep pain. It sounds like an after school special, but in Thomas’s hands it feels real. Starr’s problems aren’t obstacles created to give the book a plot. There’s so much real life and nuance here that will feel real to any kind of reader.

The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen. A collection of short stories from the Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Sympathizer, a recent favorite of mine. If you didn’t love the style of The Sympathizer but appreciated what Nguyen was going for, you should definitely pick up this book. The stories don’t have that book’s plot devices and complex storytelling style, this is spare and simple and focused on presenting you with stories and characters that stay in your head like ghosts. I love a collection where I can’t really choose a favorite story, where you can read several of them in a row because there is something that happens when you put them together that builds a larger tapestry. These stories are generally about Vietnamese refugees in the US and while there is a lot that unites them, they provide a real depth of experience. It’s an impressively done collection.

White Tears by Hari Kunzru. Kunzru is the kind of author where you always want to know what his next thing will be. He’s ambitious and exciting and unexpected. White Tears starts off feeling like a contemporary novel set in Brooklyn with a hint of a ghost story but becomes something very different, veering into full blown phantasmagoric horror by the end. This is a book about music that cares about more than just how music makes you feel or how it came to be. It is at its heart about the appropriation and exploitation of Black blues artists in the US and how ghosts seek their revenge. The main character is an awkward guy named Seth in his early 20’s who is obsessed with music and is actually working in music, focusing on obscure samples, thanks to his rich friend Carter. But one day they choose the wrong record, one that may be haunted, that has a history of obsession and destruction. The kind of book that isn’t like any other you’ve read before.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. While it’s pretty far down on the “heavy stuff” list, this is the lightest book about war and being a refugee that you will ever read and I don’t mean that the book isn’t serious. There is just something so delicate about Hamid’s writing, his narration feels so generous and intimate, that it doesn’t seem so heavy. Saeed and Nadia are normal people who fall in love just as their country is torn apart by war. Their love story feels in many ways like any other, where there is one day after another, even though war changes the course of their courtship, speeding it up and making decisions for them. Eventually this book becomes something else as magical realism enters the story. It reminded me in that way of The Underground Railroad, where the magical realism is not really central to the story, something that is there but not the issue. A really beautiful book and an important one that I just really loved reading.

Difficult Women by Roxane Gay. I don’t know what to say to you if you don’t know Roxane Gay. You have Google, you can figure it out. She is one of my favorite writers and Difficult Women feels like something significant from a writer who has plenty of significant work already. This is a short story collection, the stories were written over a long period, but putting them together does something that makes it larger than the sum of its parts. Put together, it is about the complexity of being a woman in the world. Most of that complexity is about love and sex and wanting. These women and their stories don’t all feel the same, they are different races and classes and sexualities, but there is always some contradiction or complexity there. It is hard to read more than one of these stories at a time and several can be quite brutal, it took me a few weeks to finally finish but it was absolutely worthwhile.

Human Acts by Han Kang. Last year Kang caused a bit of a sensation with her novel The Vegetarian, which was not in any way a normal or simple novel. It’s still hard for me to explain. Human Acts is much more straightforward, which makes it easier to see just how good Kang is. It begins with the Gwangju Uprising in South Korea in 1980, a horrible and violent conflict between protesters and government forces in one town. The novel moves forward decades into the future as Korea continues its conflict and even when peace has settled in but the effects of the brutality still linger. If you have trouble with books that include violence, this will not be an easy one. I started in audio but eventually had to switch to print because it made it a little easier for me to get through the hardest sections, though the audio was gorgeously narrated. While only a few parts of the book detail violent acts, the ones that are there are truly horrible. Kang is looking at some of the biggest questions of the human condition here: why do humans cause pain and how does pain stay with you. 

What were your favorite books from 2017 so far?

This Was My First Protest and I’m Sorry

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I’m proud of us for marching. But we don’t get a cookie for this. There’s no medal. There’s no award. This is a few hours we gave to the work. We came, we stood, we walked. It’s not really all that much. And we should have been there earlier.

Especially white women. We did not show up the way we should have before now. That’s true of the election. It’s also true of all the protests and all the marches of all the people we claim to stand in solidarity with but did not show up for.

I’ve seen discomfort and frustration from white men and women when confronted with signs that people of color brought to the Women’s March calling out white women for their inaction. “It’s supposed to be about coming together,” they say. Yes, that is what it’s about. And coming together on this day requires us to acknowledge all the times we did not come together before. We should have been there. We weren’t. We didn’t come out until it was about us and that is not how it should be. 

I have my reasons for not being more involved in activism before. I suspect many of us do. And while they are reasons they are also excuses. Mine don’t cut it anymore. I should have come to that realization earlier. I was wrong. It’s funny how hard it is for us to acknowledge that, to accept it when we’re called out, to not get defensive and angry. But it’s important to stop putting up walls to protect ourselves, to acknowledge when we’re wrong, when our cultural biases have worked against the people we should be trying to help. And it’s important to say it and resolve to do better.

None of this is to say that we all have to fight every minute of every day. We have to be able to stand on our own feet if we are going to stand for others. But we shouldn’t go celebrate simply because we stood up. Instead we stand up again.

An important part of standing up for others is understanding what they are saying. The Women’s March was full of signs and symbols that actively excluded trans women. We have to understand marginalized communities. It is on us to do that work. Don’t ask members of marginalized communities to explain it to you. Google exists. Use it. There are going to be many times when we realize we are wrong about something. We need to admit it and own it and do better.

For me, one of the most important ways I can listen is on Twitter. Marginalized people are speaking and you can listen. You can also amplify. Hearing their voices every day helps me examine where I stand. One example from yesterday: white women everywhere who had never marched before posted with pride about how there were no arrests at the Women’s March, women of color who had marched many times pointed out that when the protesters are mostly people of color, police are more likely to instigate the kind of tactics that end in arrests. We need to listen when our privilege is called out and acknowledge it. (If you’re wondering how I find them, it’s quite easy. I start with a few people I know of who are more visible or high-profile. I try to read thoughtful articles and essays from marginalized people and if I like what they have to say, I find them and follow. I also look for who other people are mentioning, sharing, and retweeting. Gradually you build a larger and larger group of voices.)

No one is asking us to be everywhere or do everything. We do what we can. But we need to do more. Much more. How we do it will vary, but one thing I’d suggest is making sure at least one organization that specifically works with and supports a marginalized community like people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, POC, immigrants, Muslims, people in poverty, etc. We say we stand for love and empathy, which should mean loving and caring for not just those who are like us. I am also a member of a marginalized community as a queer person and I am going to work harder to connect and build roots in that community, to be a more visible and active member of it.

Protest selfie. #WomensMarch #WomensMarchRaleigh # LGBTQ

A photo posted by Jessica Woodbury (@jessicaesquire) on

I am sorry for waiting so long, too long, to start. I can’t give money yet but I can give time and that’s what I’m focusing on. Time is a pretty precious resource for me and saying I didn’t have any of it was one of my excuses before. But as I often tell people, you have time for what matters to you. So I’m taking a few of the hours I gave myself each month and giving them to the causes that matter to me. 

I’m sorry. I was wrong. I’m going to do better. (Turns out it’s not such a hard thing to say.)

This Year

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This year was the year a lot of things went wrong. But it was also the year Christmas started to work.

When you spend the holidays with a big group of family or friends, little kids aren’t such a big deal. You celebrate the way you always do, you trade off with the kids, and it’s the same as every other year. But when you spend the holidays with just your little family and your family has only one adult, the formula changes. 

At our house we have thrown out most of the holiday trappings. I don’t spend hours working on a big meal, partly because it’s hard to do while also keeping an eye on kids, and mostly because the kids wouldn’t eat any of it anyway. And the traditions I’ve wanted to put in place haven’t always worked, little kids are fickle and everyone has to be treated the same and that just isn’t always going to fly.

But this year! This year we kind of got it. 

I didn’t put in a lot of extra effort this year. Actually the week before Christmas was really awful, a pile-up of bad thing after bad thing. So I came into the weekend with a bare minimum of plans. What I remembered, though, was my previous attempts at starting holiday traditions that crashed and burned because the kids were not interested. So this year we had traditions, but like much of our lives, they were simple and low key.

We bought a real tree this year. We’ve never had one before, and it was definitely a sacrifice this year in particular since the move has money tighter than usual, but it looks great. The kids helped me pick out ornaments and a star for under $30 and a few leftover ornaments from previous years plus gifted ornaments from friends meant we had a real tree decorating this year. 

One tradition I’ve been committed to doing with the kids is one my parents started. If you don’t give allowances and budgets are tight, kids can still give gifts with little money and risk with one simple trip: the dollar store. This one mostly worked, but neither Graham nor Tessa likes being alone. At all. And since secrecy is part of the deal, logistics were a little tricky. But each of them got two dollars to buy a gift for each other and for me. Dollar store gifts mean expectations are low, but the impact was really there this year. They both kept talking about the gifts they’d chosen, I had to tell them about a hundred times, “It’s a secret!” They were just really excited. Graham had me open my present from him before he opened any gifts himself. And while Tessa got me a card with a kitten on it “for a favorite niece,” I’m calling it a win.

Christmas Eve pajamas are always a win. You can take that to the bank.

After we opened pj’s, I decided to do a Christmas Eve dinner that was different and fun, but still the kind of stuff my kids actually like. So I got a bunch of red and green veggies (bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, broccoli, cucumber, celery), cut them up, and served them with a big bowl of ranch (and hummus for me) to eat while we watched Muppet Christmas Carol. The kids were thrilled to eat on the couch and enjoyed the dipping. I was just happy they ate and that it took only a little while to prep.

I stayed up after the kids went to bed to wrap presents and watch White Christmas, a little tradition of mine ever since the divorce. In the past it’s been bittersweet, but this year I was just used to it, it was the thing I always do, so it felt better. I thought about cooking our Christmas breakfast (strawberry muffins, settled upon after a few other efforts that flopped) then but ultimately decided the kids would eat the candy from their stockings in the morning anyway and no one would be wanting breakfast until at least 10. Which was 100% accurate.

I let Christmas Day just be. The kids enjoyed their new things, we went to a movie, we had a normal dinner. What makes my kids happy is routine, safety, comfort, so we had enough of normal with special thrown in to keep everybody happy. 

Christmas was Sunday, the kids were staying until Wednesday, and there would be no reinforcements. No school, no camp, no childcare, just me and them. The holidays are notoriously awful to try and do a big thing with your kids to get out of the house because everyone else had the same idea. So I was trying to think of ways for us to use the time. I planned a few activities.

But in the end, we didn’t do most of them. Because we were fine. Everyone got along. I gave one time out. I didn’t need to yell and only a couple times had to be called in to mediate or separate. Instead we were all just good.

Sure, I let them eat more candy than usual. I let them watch TV. I let them play video games. Because if not Christmas break, when? Everyone was in a good mood. We listened to music. Tessa and I played card games over and over again. Graham gave me regular updates on his video game status. Everyone was just good.

I took family pictures, which was a hilarious undertaking. Turns out my camera doesn’t take a wireless remote and no one carried a wired remote in the store so I had to use a self-timer. I also couldn’t find my tripod so I had to set it on a chair, squat down to make sure it was in the right place, hit the button, jump up, sit back down, pull the kids in close, and hope it turned out. Did that about 20 times. The kids were great sports, though. And I need to do it more often.

family picture

The kids left and I didn’t feel tired or worn out or in need of quiet time. I realized I had days left in me, which is much better than I usually feel, even when everyone has school or I keep the kids for a short time. 

I was on my own for New Year’s Eve but had an invitation to go out and took it. I danced in the year and it felt good.

This year was not an easy one. It was not a good one. There were not personal victories. In many ways I accomplished less than the previous year. But this last week was a reminder that there have been lots of little good things along the way, there have been bright spots in the thick darkness.

I do not have a milestone or accomplishment to present as my 2016 thing. I had hoped to finish the first draft of my novel this year but realized this summer that it wasn’t going to happen and made peace with that. Life gets in the way and that is nothing new. But that manuscript is over 80,000 words and I did most of that work this year. If I was going to pick one thing this year that I’m proud of, it’s that this year I decided to act like a person who is a real writer. I call myself a writer. I think of myself as a writer. And the funny thing about that is that you start to believe it eventually, even if I don’t feel like I have a lot to show for my writing this year. It’s a long process, it’s a tough process, and I’m squeezing it into the small openings in my life and that is okay. 

I am not approaching 2017 with any particular goal (though I would really like to start my 2nd draft by June). I am not going to say that it will definitely be better than last year. If 2016 taught me anything, it’s that thinking you are on an upward swing doesn’t mean anything. Things can turn bad quickly and they can stay that way regardless of how hard you work or how much you deserve. I’m building a life and I just want to keep laying bricks this year. And that will be enough no matter what happens.

Best Books of 2016

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I had a HARD time making a list this year. Usually when I am reading my #1 book of the year I know it while I am in the middle of it and then things just fall into place with the rest of the list. But not this year. This year no #1 ever showed itself. It wasn’t a bad year. I read so many books I really loved. But ultimately this is my list and it comes down to the sticky factor. Did this book stick in my head? Did it stay with me? Did I continue to talk about it for days and weeks and months afterwards?

Yes, this is MY list. It is not a list of the objectively best books. They are the books that did something to me when I read them. They are also the ones I got to this year. (A few that I read this year that were written last year would have made the list, like The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Dragonfish by Vu Tran, and Delicious Foods by James Hannaham.) 

I was not able to select a number one or rank my top 10, but I did manage to  break it into two tiers. Each set is listed alphabetically. (Links are to Amazon, if you purchase through them it helps support the blog. Thanks!)

top 5 books of 2016

Top 5

Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn. A tragedy of Shakespearean power set in the shacks and the gleaming resorts of Jamaica. A gut punch of a debut novel.

The Hike by Drew Magary. This book came out of nowhere and messed with my head in a way I can’t get over. Terrifying, absurd, utterly unique, and constantly unexpected, with the best ending I’ve read in years.

The Trespasser by Tana French. The Sixth Dublin Murder Squad book is the best yet, a straight-up procedural that is so sharp it could cut glass. I want 5 more Conway books.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. You don’t need me to tell you how good this book is. But you really can believe the hype. 

Version Control by Dexter Palmer. A near-future science fiction novel about loving other people vs. loving what you do, complete with creative and creepy technology and worldbuilding.

Top 6-10 Books of 2016

6-10

Arcade by Drew Nellins Smith. A very honest book about sex from a narrator who can’t manage to be honest about anything else. A spare, gutsy novel about having only one foot out of the closet.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. Sprawling and epic in scope, and yet each chapter is such a small and perfect treasure. Generations of one family are divided by slavery and united again.

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren. People are miracles. It turns out, so are trees. Jahren will open up rooms in your heart you did not know were there. A memoir worth the tears I cried reading it.

Sarong Party Girls by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan. What starts as a light, romantic romp becomes a serious examination of whether people can change. If Clueless moved to Singapore and Cher wasn’t such a nice girl.

Shelter by Jung Yun. A man’s life unravels as the parents who victimized him are victimized themselves. Old wounds still feel awfully fresh no matter how hard you run. Dark, suspenseful, and full of heartache.

 

And since 10 is not enough, here’s 11-20.

All the Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

Girls on Fire by Robin Wasserman

The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee

The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam

Sunset City by Melissa Ginsburg

Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake

We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott

 

Honestly, there were a lot of great books this year (as always!) and it was very, very hard to make my list. There are plenty of books not on that list that make my heart hurt. (I’m so sorry, books! I love you!) It was also hard because some of my very favorite books this year were 2015 releases that I read too late. In very strong contention for last year’s top 10 were:

Delicious Foods by James Hannaham

Dragonfish by Vu Tran

Negroland by Margo Jefferson

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

 

And on top of all of those, I read a few backlist titles that just killed it. This was the first year I ever read any Octavia Butler and I feel like I need to seek forgiveness from some literary deity. If you are like me and want to atone, Kindred is a great place to start. Excellent sci-fi, social commentary that makes you shocked it’s 40 years old, and just a rip of a read.

I finally read Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saénz, which I’d heard about for a while but definitely did not prioritize enough. Hands down one of my favorite YA  novels of all time. I cried buckets in the best way.

4 of my top 20 are LGBTQ novels, and it’s possible I read more queer fiction this year than any other. (From backlist I read Redefining Realness, Edinburgh, and The Price of Salt (Carol) along with new releases like Juliet Takes a Breath and If I Was Your Girl.) 

I also re-read the entire Dublin Murder Squad Series from Tana French, which was, I 100% admit, a highlight of the year. I got lost in those books for a few weeks when life was particularly nuts and I needed the escape.

Even though I didn’t get that #1 book that really rocked my world, I got so many stellar reads this year that I can’t complain. 2016 was a good year in reading for me. 

What were your top books of 2016?

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