I wanted to look back on my reading journey this past year and share some of the books I love. I started off 2023 reading I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, a dystopian novel in translation. It has some of my favorite quotes on memory:
Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering? That is another question that will remain unanswered: I feel as though I am made of nothing else.
I finished the year reading Take Care of Your Self: The Art and Cultures of Care and Liberation by Sundus Abdul Hadi. Abdul Hadi shares her journey of care through communal artistic practices. One example she focuses on is her curating an art exhibit, and how it built communities of care for herself and her fellow artists. The exhibit included workshops and interacting with visual and performing art.
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Looking back at 2023 I read a lot of incredible nonfiction and poetry.
I’m going to be honest and say most of the fiction I read in 2023 wasn’t as exciting for me until I read Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa from his short story collection, Palestine’s Children. I’m a character-driven fiction reader. Give me all the emotional and spiritual depths, all their contradictions, their detailed thoughts, and agonies. Returning to Haifa brought the complexities of colonization, estrangement, and exile. Kanafani writes about a Palestinian couple and their relationship to home, to Haifa, and the infant son they were forced to leave behind. I highly recommend reading the entire short-story collection.
My Top Nonfiction Books This Year:
His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice - Toluse Olorunnipa & Robert Samuels
Olorunnipa and Samuels did an incredible job detailing George Floyd’s life starting with his great-great grandfather in North Carolina to Floyd growing up in Houston, Texas, and his eventual move to Minneapolis. We are able to see a greater picture of what led to George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis Police. The authors detail the structural racism shaping many aspects of George Floyds life such as land theft leading to major economic losses, segregation, red-lining, and educational disparities. They wrote about George Floyd’s life with complexity and care. His Name is George Floyd reshaped my understanding of the summer of 2020.
The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War – Jeff Sharlet
I try to read books about conspiracy theories, white supremacist groups, or anything along this path to gain knowledge. I want to understand what is happening in the United States currently and in the future. In The Undertow, Jeff Sharlet travels across the U.S. visiting different churches and homes to understand how people view the United States and anticipate its eventual separation.
This book of stories of difficult people doing terrible things is a register also of grief and its distortions, how loss sometimes curdles into fury and hate, or denial, or delusion.
Solito – Javier Zamora
My friend said she was reading Solito and I decided to read it with her so we could talk about it and I’m so glad I did. Javier Zamora narrates his journey from El Salvador to the United States when he was nine years old. The majority of the book is written through his childhood self, including images, beliefs, and comprehension of traumatic events. There is great difficulty writing from this perspective. Javier Zamora shows how hard it is to migrate, sharing both the love and work of others along the way to keep him safe before reaching his parents.
Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth - Elizabeth Williamson
I was at the library browsing the most recent non-fiction titles and this book was on display. I sat down to read it until my ride was ready to pick me up and ended up taking it home to finish. It was not an easy read, but I got a greater understanding of what happened after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook. There are details I never thought about and I learned how horrific the act of the shooting was and how it impacted the parents years later. Elizabeth Williamson introduces us to multiple parents whose children were killed at Sandy Hook and how they were targeted by radio-show host, Alex Jones. She starts the book with the morning of the shooting, continues by recounting the conspiracies spread by Alex Jones, and his eventual need to pay millions of dollars to the parents. What stays with me is the repetition of events, like a curatorial effect, that happens after each school mass shooting in the United States.
Other Notable Nonfiction Books I Read this Year:
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being – Christina Sharpe
“She (Christina’s Mother) was attuned not only to our individual circumstances but also to those circumstances as they were an indication of, and related to, the larger antiblack world that structured all our lives. Wake; the state of wakefulness; consciousness. It was with this sense of wakefulness as consciousness that most of my family lived an awareness of itself as, and in, the wake of the unfinished project of emancipation.”
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“And a part of that leap and apart from its specificities are the sense and awareness of precarity; the precarities of the afterlives of slavery…”
Voyager – Nona Fernandez
Because all of it—everything collected in the kaleidoscope of our hypothalamus—speaks for us. Describes and reveals us. Disjointed fragments, a pile of mirror shards, a heap of the past. The accumulation is what we’re made of.
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We bear in our bodies hundreds of millions of stories from the past, messages passed on through us unawares, constellations guiding us and accounting for our way of being. We are vessels of genetic memories.
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…because what we forget takes up space just as surely as what we remember.
Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief – Victoria Chang
Memory works like this. You are astonished. You remember only what astonishes you.
-‘Dear L’
That maybe we only see any bird once. That seeing a new bird is an elegy.
- ‘Dear Father’
That memory, trying to remember, is also an act of grieving.
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Maybe silence is not something you interact with, to be filled in, but rather to let wash over you, to exist within. Maybe silence is its own form of language. Maybe silence is also a life lived. Maybe the unspoken can lead to the widest imagination. Maybe it’s the most open text. The loudest form of speaking we have.
- ‘Dear Reader’
A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance – Hanif Abdurraqib
I can’t provide any quotes from this essay collection, however Hanif Abdurraqib is one of my favorite authors. I read his first poetry collection The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, during the first year of my MFA. The collection greatly shaped my thesis. I will read anything Hanif Abdurraqib publishes. He was one of the first poets I followed on social media when I was trying to discover more writers.
My favorite non-fiction book in 2023:
The Non-fiction book I was the most excited and shaped by in 2023 is Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice by Cristina Rivera Garza. I’ve also read her essay collection, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, and her novel, The Taiga Syndrome and automatically fell in love with her writing. Liliana’s Invincible Summer begins with Christina in Mexico City trying to find her sister Liliana’s case file. Liliana was murdered by Angel Gonzalez Ramos, someone she was seeing off and on since high school. Naming how and what led up to the murder of Liliana plays an important role in the book in order to understand the pervasiveness of femicide. I emphasize ‘how’ here because Cristina Rivera Garza includes many ways for readers to see the fullness of Liliana’s life. She uses journals and passages from Liliana’s notebooks, her own relationship, and conversations with friends and family. By allowing Liliana’s voice to stand alone in the book, her memory intersects with family and friends who are still alive and trying to comprehend her murder.
Liliana’s Invincible Summer completely defies the true crime genre and rhetoric by crafting together a language with care and resistance against spectacle many readers of that genre often unconsciously or consciously desire. Cristina looks at systemic structures and the lack of language at the time to place domestic violence in the spaces of homes, schools, and within relationships. Liliana had every right to autonomy and freedom, and we understand who needs to be held accountable (Angel Gonzalez Ramos). I will come back to this book again and again in the years to come.
She wanted everything and she loved everything. Demanding the impossible was her calling. And this lesson, which we learned at home, which our parents taught both of us, was later reinforced in books and poems, plans and buildings, songs, complicated clouds, university campuses, trips, infinite gatherings, close friends. We broke down, when the patriarchal machinery crushed our bodies and hearts, laying siege to the past and the future, Liliana was, indeed, trying to get out. I have no doubt about it. Liliana was already out, believing deeply, honestly, provocatively, that a radically different life was possible.
Some of my Favorite Poetry Books I Read This Year:
I read a lot of great poetry collections this year. I’m reminded how much other poets influence my work. Poems I revised for years formed into coherent pieces. I’m finally starting to see the path towards a potential project. I’m excited for the first time since graduating with my MFA in 2019.
House A – Jennifer S. Cheng
It is important to note that before language, children experience memories as image and sound, which is to say they experience them as poetry.
- ‘Letters to Mao’
A house on the edge is a house ready to unseam itself against the contour of things unseen.
- ‘How to Build an American Home’
Civil Service – Claire Schwartz
To be alive is to be suspended
in G-d’s sentence
like a spider in amber.
- ‘Lecture on Time’
To ruin your knowing in your mouth
and dress the ruins with your best tongue.
- ‘Lecture on the History of the House’
The Rupture Tense – Jenny Xie
those yielding wicks of false metaphors
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That we feel most deeply in the creases between utterances
- ‘The Rupture Tense’
Hydra Medusa – Brandon Shimoda
I felt the eager learning of children
in my teeth
and touched my teeth
-‘The Desert’
The children arrive at night
is one of several meanings of the desert
- ‘All Souls Procession’
Zong! – M. NourbeSe Philip
This book should be a required reading for every poet. M. NourbeSe Philip only uses the “words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert” to write about the murder of 150 Africans on the slave ship Zong in November of 1781.
The not-telling of this particular story is in the fragmentation and mutilation of the text, forcing the eye to track across the page in an attempt to wrest meaning from words gone astray. I teeter between accepting the irrationality of the event and the fundamental human impulse to make meaning from phenomena around us.
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And only in not-telling can the story be told; only in the space where it’s not told—literally in the margins of the text, a sort of negative space, a space not so much of non-meaning as anti-meaning.
Malevolent Volume – Justin Philip Reed
…To slowly tear the wings until a thing
torn from itself is its whole self and won’t grieve
a flight it can’t recall…
- ‘The Whiteness of Achilles’
Concentrate – Courtney Faye Taylor
I want badly for centipede to be a verb—to aggregate, to hone, to serenade the limit I’ve set
- A thin obsidian life is heaving on a time limit you’ve set
But rather than events, I want timelines to detail a sermon of interactions.
- The phenomenon of withholding
My Favorite Poetry Book in 2023:
The poetry collection I was most excited and shaped by in 2023 was Best Barbarian by Roger Reeves. An incredible collection weaving myth, biblical text, and literature to address the speaker’s questions of the future, especially for his daughter. The reader encounters Black authors and artists in conversation with these narratives. Examples include James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, and John Coltrane. By incorporating some of the most popular poetry and narrative in English today, Reeves presses against the expectation of what this type of literature reveals and instead looks at a multiplicity of experience and suffering in America, such as police brutality and the legacy of colonialism. One of the many reasons this collection is important for me is Reeve’s use of subversion.
What breaks apart the established ways we enter a text? How are we often dictated by hierarchical understanding? What other ways can characters be embraced or comprehended within the violence they commit? One example from the collection is Grendel:
In The New York Times Sandra Simonds says:
Grendel emerges from the wilderness “With absolute prophecy in his breast/And a desire for mercy, for a friend, an end/To drifting in loneliness.” The monster’s status as “outsider” is precisely what enables the Danes inside the mead hall their positive self-regard. They see the “best vision of themselves,” a version that, Reeves declares, “must be slaughtered.” If men are “great” only in relation to the barbarian, the terms “barbarian” and “man” are suspect, not to mention the cultures that uphold these binaries. Who, then, Reeves asks us, is the “best barbarian”?
When looking at the relationship between Grendel and the men in both the poem and Beowulf (where the the character Grendel comes from) we must reenter the text by leaving behind any established recognition of what it means to be a ‘man’, and what it means to be a ‘barbarian’. As stated above, the word ‘barbarian’ seems to exist within this relational understanding of the story. The last two lines of the poem disrupt that relation by using one of the most violent forms of death humans commit against animals, ‘which, of course, must be slaughtered’. Roger Reeves flips the meaning of slaughter on its head and leaves the reader with difficulty to grasp for any definition we originally desired.
Books by Palestinian Authors I Read this Year:
In the Presence of Absence – Mahmoud Darwish tr. Sinan Antoon
It might take you by the hand to inspect the ruins of our forgotten self in a distant land. You say: I am he and he is the shadow, and you run through your memory. When the dream sees that you are about to notice the map of memory, it lends you one of its wings and takes off with you to orange groves hanging above the clouds, to unfamiliar birds that speak to you in their own language, which you understand without difficulty. A higher self is borne of you. You embrace the universe and it embraces you, your interior becomes your exterior and your exterior your interior. And you say: I am I!
Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire - Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, Mike Merryman-Lotze
For change to occur, Gaza must be understood as an integral part of historic Palestine. There can be no meaningful or sustainable resolution in Palestine and Israel without Gaza. – The Editors
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Regimes of oppression work tirelessly to render the historical context of oppressed people irrelevant and obscure.
Overall, conversations about Gaza fall under a security discourse promoted by Israel and its allies, one that reduces the question of Gaza’s reality into how it factors in Israel’s security, therefore dismissing the political and historical roots of Gaza’s ongoing predicament.
The problem with the current discourse on Palestine in general, and on Gaza in particular, is that Palestinians are not allowed the space to engage in conversations about their future. - Jehad Abusalim
Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? - Mahmoud Darwish tr. Jeffrey Sacks
I left the dream
renewing itself in itself
I left peace
alone, there, on the earth…
- ‘How Many Times Will it be Over’
Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories - Ghassan Kanafani tr. Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Riley
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 - Rashid Khalidi
It is the issue of inequality that is most promising for expanding the understanding of the reality in Palestine. It is also the most important since inequality was essential to the creation of a Jewish state in an overwhelmingly Arab land, and is vital to maintaining that state’s dominance. Inequality is so crucial not only because it is anathema to the egalitarian, democratic societies that the Zionist project has primarily relied on for its support, but because equality of rights is key to a just, lasting resolution of the entire problem.
The Blue Light - Hussein Barghouthi tr. Fady Joudah
I was the memory of landlocked terrain, and the sea was rearranging my memory.
He pressed his face to mine and emphasized every utterance: “You need this clarity. To see the depth as you see the water at the bottom of this pond.
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear - Mosab Abu Toha
Dabble your hands
in the water
and
catch the words
or your poem
Write the words upon
the clouds.
Don’t worry, they will find
their land.
- ‘Memorize Your Dream’
You can read my original post on this collection here.
Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance - Fady Joudah
…I always hold back from writing in the margins of the clearest sentences…
- ‘After No Language’
What books or pieces of writing were you shaped by this past year?
Do you have reading intentions for 2024?
My Intentions:
- Read more books I own:
I tend to check out books from the library rather than reading books I own. I set this intention last year and didn’t follow it as much as I wanted to, but some of the best books I read were from the library, ultimately it’s about finding a good balance.
- Read more fiction books to balance my non-fiction reading:
I’m excited to pick up more novels this year. I read only two novels in 2023 which is unusual. Most of the fiction I read was short story. I’m craving some complex plots and characters.
- Read more literature from Palestinian authors throughout the year:
An important practice for me and I hope for you as well.
- Read more craft essays/books:
I often find books on poetic writing encouraging and motivating.
Finally, I’ll leave you with some recommendations I’m excited for this coming year.
Four books from my library I look forward to reading:
Ordinary Notes – Christina Sharpe (Non-Fiction)
Memory for Forgetfulness - Mahmoud Darwish (Non-Fiction)
The Blue Clerk - Dionne Brand (Poetry)
Let Us Descend - Jesmyn Ward (Fiction)
Three forthcoming books I’m excited about:
Root Fractures – Diana Khoi Nguyen (Poetry)
The Moon That Turns You Back – Hala Alyan (Poetry)
Magical Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders – Vanessa Angelica Villarreal (Non-Fiction)