Author: Sarah Werner

I’m not sure what to say about this year’s life as a reader. Looking back at my list, the books from the first half of the year seem so long ago—I could’ve sworn I read Mohsin Hamed’s Exit West a couple of years ago (was it even out then?) and haven’t I always been worrying about Julie Buntin’s Marlena? It’s partly that those books stuck into me and wound themselves around me in ways that feel like I’ve been carrying them forever. But it’s also this year. This year is too long. There’s too much in it. We all joke about this—the Tuesday afternoon tweets saying “I can’t believe it’s Friday already!” But it’s not really a joke. There’s the Friday afternoon news dumps, the revelations day after day about some shocking, previously unthinkable thing happening, the radical cracking of what so many people (wrongly) thought were the safe foundations…

This was not a good year for reading for me. I read a lot, but it was almost every time hard to settle on a book to read, to find something that fit my mood even though I didn’t know what my mood was, to choose a book that wasn’t too heavy to get through but wasn’t too frivolous. What a luxury it is to be able to set aside time to read, when other people are facing the horrors of not being able to get into this country to be reunited with their families or to be safe from persecution and poverty and illness, when others are here but cannot leave and are scared to open their doors for fear of being dragged away from their homes, when others are reliving sexual assault and harassment and humiliation from yesterday or decades ago. But what a necessity it is to…