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. 

Publishing Round-Up for 2019

The year is coming to a close, and it has been a busy one. With the publication of I Tried completing the Through Eyes Like Mine Trilogy, I'm ready to shift my focus to other writing projects. This is where my words found homes over the past year:

On the other end of our UTLA strike, Cultural Weekly published "Lessons from the Picket Lines" about my experience as a teacher and mother during our work stoppage and demand for the schools our communities deserve.

I attended AWP this winter. I'd avoided this conference for writers and writing programs ever since my MFA, but I wrote about my first AWP experience in "Attending the AWP You Want to Create" for Breathe and Push at Women Who Submit.

I was honored to have my essay, "Threatened Abortion" selected for the Santa Fe Writers Project's Abortion Ban Special Issue. I encourage you to check out this essay, but also the other important stories in this issue. This essay was first published for Breathe and Push at Women Who Submit.

My first fiction found it's way into the world this year. These two shorts from Rice Paper Superheroes appeared in *82 Review and What Are Birds journal respectively: "Andy's Alliance" "A Family Photo"

Other essays published this year were part of the Breathe and Push column for Women Who Submit:

"Tsuru for Solidarity" describes the activism occurring in the Japanese American community this year to protest family separation and injustice in camps at the border.

"Stay Cool and Keep Writing" provides resources for writers in resistance during another difficult summer of injustice.

"When Just Breathing is Enough" is about breathing during stressful times.

"Taking Attendance" captures a Women Who Submit workshop with Rocio Carlos and Rachel McLeod.

"5 Ways for Writers to Celebrate" finished off the year for Breathe and Push.

*edited for accuracy*

Folks, I left a couple of essays off! Two more essays for Breathe and Push made their way into the world for Women Who Submit. Jeesh. How could I forget writing about SAD and the end of the strike?

"Writing Through the Storm" captures the post-strike exhaustion teachers in LA felt this past winter.

"Getting Through Winter" describes my own struggles with seasonal affective disorder.


Despite lots of poetry submissions, no poetry publications this year :(, but there's always 2020.

I Tried: A Playlist 1990-1992

Here is the second playlist for the high school memoir: I Tried.

The first playlist is all new wave (with a little L'Trimm thrown in), but there are surprisingly few mentions of music during my junior and senior years in high school. Much of my soundtrack from those years was choir with lots of a cappella.

Two of those songs are from the a cappella group Mint Juleps and the girls in swing choir that year actually recorded them. I don't think we sounded so great... but here are those songs.

"Your Love Keeps Lifting Me Higher"

This second one is Mint Juleps "Don't Let Your Heart."

I also remember loving this song and album during my last years in Bend: Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me."

This moment didn't make the book either, but I have this distinct memory of watching A Room With A View and this song and this kiss take me right back to all that I hoped I would find in life and love.

This is the song we sang in choir our senior year. It's a French madrigal that I remember simply calling "Mon Coeur." It's pretty beautiful and this is what we sang in the pool room at the Hearst Castle.

I guess I'll end this short playlist with our class song: Alphaville's "Forever Young." We made a good choice, MVHS Class of 1992.

I Tried is available now! You can get in touch with me directly, order from an online retailer or your local independent book seller.

I Tried: 1988- 1990 Playlist

My freshman year, I was still listening to the music that defined middle school: George Michael and INXS. But as the 80s came to a close, the music shifted too, and these are a few of the songs from those days.

Scene: these are two of the songs I remember listening to with Dayna during those years. When In Rome's "Promises" and Love and Rockets' "So Alive."

Scene: the DJ mix tapes: Depeche Mode's "Shake the Disease" and "Enjoy the Silence," Jane's Addiction's "Classic Girl," and Church's "Under the Milky Way."

Scene: Marney and Gretchen's Air Band hit: L'Trimm's "Cars that Go Boom."

Scene: REM's GREEN is the soundtrack to my early driving days, particularly "Hairshirt," "You are the Everything," and "Night Swimming."

I Tried: Tales of an Emerging High School Feminist

I Tried: Tales of an Emerging High School Feminist is here.

The Nakadas in 1988 and 1992.
I Tried tells of the days in-between. 

Today, on my oldest brother's birthday, the third book in the Through Eyes Like Mine series is ready for the world. It has gone through so many revisions. I wrote it in present tense, changed it to past, and then changed it back again. I drafted poems and worked them in. I took them all out. I created a preface and an afterword. I took them both out. I drafted notes for my past self before each school year. I cut them out.

The manuscript sat with agents, and then with a small press. They passed, but asked for revisions. I revised. They asked to see it again. They passed.

I'm not passing. It is here, in its simplest, most distilled form. It matches the style of Through Eyes Like Mine and Overdue Apologies, even though our narrator is clearly growing up. It has been read by dear friends from high school: Loretta, Sarah, Val, Holly, Dayna, Jamie, Jason and Matt, and by family. Other friends and family passed on reading it. That's okay. It is a book, and it is done. It is about what happens to a girl in high school. It is about what happened to me as I prepared to fly into the world. 

Within the pages of I Tried are: "Picture Day" which first appeared in Compose, "Geometry" published in Lady Liberty Lit, and "Open Gym" from East Jasmine Review. 

For your listening pleasure, the soundtrack for this book includes songs by The Smiths, The Smitheereens, The Cure, Jane's Addiction, The Church, REM and Depeche Mode. I'll post a playlist like the ones for the first books in the coming weeks. 

Until then, enjoy I Tried, and please know, I did my best.