Fifteen Books I Loved This Year

This year I tried to do something a little different reading books in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and YA each month. I fell short, of course, reading 35 all told, but I read more poetry this year than ever before, and honestly, this was an amazing year for nonfiction. So many great books. Anyway, these are my favorites this year.

Young Adult

P.S. I Still Love You and Always and Forever, Lara Jean by Jenny Han

My students were reading these last year, so I picked up To All the Boys I Ever Loved before the Netflix adaptation came out and I loved it. I have a soft spot for YA romance and really appreciate having this multiracial (Korean-white) family and all of the ways race and feminism play subtle roles in these books. She has a way of sneaking in the loss of a mother, father-as-real-person, slut-shaming, and sex double standards into a light, fun read. The ending was satisfying although I really wanted to see Lara Jean visit Korea, and head off to college where she realizes she’s always only dated white boys. 

All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely

I read this in one sitting on the flight from Detroit to Los Angeles and loved the dual narration. Jason Reynolds captures the POV of a young boy badly beaten by a police officer, and Brendan Kiely writes the POV of a classmate, a white “All-American Boy” being raised by his mother after his father is killed in Afghanistan. The alternating perspectives allow for lots of entry-points and takeaways on police brutality, Black Lives Matter, activism, and standing up as an ally. 

Poetry

Bone Confetti by Muriel Leung

These poems are haunting and lovely and make me rethink grief and mourning. Her use of various poetic styles create an aesthetic uniquely her own.

The Tradition by Jericho Brown

Brown’s sacred use of language makes me want to revise every sentence I’ve ever written. I love his new form: the duplex. The repetition and contradictions within them seem to set every poem up for profound paradox. 

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen

These highly conversational poems that are both lighthearted and heavy. Chen reminds me what it is like to live and love in a world with so much pain and uncertainty, possibility and heartbreak.

--> Nonfiction

Heavy by Kiese Laymon

This memoir captures with love and truth, the lies and complexities of relationships in such a raw and tender way. The beginnings and ends of this book truly sliced me open and made me feel like I have to do better for Kiese and for all of my students who are living with the trauma of this county pulsing through their veins.

How To Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee

These essays cover so much territory and the later ones really engage me as a reader, writer, activist, and human being. The final essay with its questions about the end of the world and the point of writing will stay with me for a long time. A compelling voice from many points of intersection, it hints at what I'd wanted from my MFA experience. 

Know My Name by Chanel Miller

I remember reading Jane Doe’s victim impact statement. I sat at the dining room table as my kids played around me on a spring Saturday when I was solo parenting. I couldn’t stop reading, even though I had to stop to catch my breath and wipe away the tears. To read Chanel’s story years later, of surviving and of standing up for all of those who are touched by sexual violence and the ways victims are again victimized during exams, and by our courts is required reading. 

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang

Wang illuminates Schizoaffective Disorder diagnosis by showing just how measured and even and sanely she writes. She challenges the reader’s understanding of schizophrenia and balances a line between showing how well she’s living with the disorder while at the same time revealing how life-altering a diagnosis of one of the schizophrenias can be. She forces me to rethink all I know about psychosis and reality, and how I keep my feet rooted in reality/sanity.

Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot

I had just finished listening to the Thunder Bay podcast when I started reading this, so I was already thinking about indigenous lives and the ways we ignore their stories. I love Mailhot’s honest POV, her perspective being hospitalized, and the way she captures mental illness and the struggle for sanity, and health, and love, dignity, and healing.


Fiction

Sula by Toni Morrison

I revisted this book on audio to soak in the voice of our lost literary giant. I first read this book in college when I was reading everything Toni Morrison had written, and I remembered a little about the friendship between the two girls, Nell and Sula, and about National Suicide Day, but had forgotten or blocked other parts. It is a haunting book and I wonder if I will hold on to their stories this time or if, again, it will be to hard to hold on to their sadness.

Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin

I had to read this after hearing Alexander Chee lecture on it at Antioch’s winter residency. The shifting narration carries with it such a wide scope of this family, its struggles, and the generational traumas buried in the secrets we all hold.  

GRAPHIC

 They Called Us the Enemy by George Takei

This graphic novel does such a good job personalizing and positioning the Japanese Incarceration during World War II. The images are clear-eyed and capture both the injustice and childhood innocence of Takei’s story. There are so many points of intersection with my own father’s experience, but also see divergences that made Takei’s experience very different the Nakadas.

Good Talk by Mira Jacobs

This books beautifully captures Mira Jacobs' East Indian American experiences through the questions of her young, brown son during tough political times. She weaves in her family’s story, her search for love (arranged marriage, love marriage, or American marriage?) and how her view of the world changes as she becomes a wife and the mother of a curious, smart, sensitive boy. Such an honest depiction of what so many women and women of color, and mothers go through when asked tough questions by the little ones in our lives.