I hooted over Elaine Hsieh Chou’s sharp and zany satire Disorientation, which dissects Orientalism, yellowface, and what it means to be, study, love, and make art as Other. Alongside ketchup-dipped fries and very cold and dry martinis, I read Antonia Angress’s Sirens and Muses, which gives us bisexual excellence and (and bisexual chaos), art world hijinks, scenes of Occupy and protests, a love letter to Cajun country, and some of the more memorable scenes of making art I’ve encountered in a contemporary novel.

In this restrained, compassionate, lovely, and wise book, Cole creates an unforgettable portrait of his character Owen Callahan’s Kentucky. It was a great year for debut novels and campus novels. In the phenomenal Groundskeeping by Lee Cole, I found a campus novel and love story for the age of Trump, and tbh for the ages. I read these over mugs of green tea and lunches of leftover chicken peralen or Calicut-style biriyani: think rice layered through with crisped slivers of deep-fried onion, the sweetness of an errant golden raisin, bay leaf and cinnamon stick, intensely umami pressure-cooked meat. It’s the unforgettable story of King Rao-child of Dalit coconut farmers, eventual global tech titan-and the meaning his daughter Athena must make of her life and his. Vauhini Vara’s The Immortal King Rao lit me up with joy for its soaring ambition and panache, for its world-bending and its structural wisdom. I’ve included some of those meals here as well.Īt year’s beginning I read Christopher Isherwood’s melancholy, exquisite, funny A Single Man and Goodbye to Berlin and was reminded that autofiction is not new. To combat dour-scorecard syndrome I set forth on an experiment: I would keep a record of what I ate and drank alongside the books I read this year. And maybe I am more interested in being this sort of person. Sure, you need a certain kind of person to dourly hold up a scorecard at the end of a world-class gymnast’s routine, but you also want the kind of person who, beholding it, gasps in wonder.

I’ve been writing for a long time, but for so much longer I’ve been a reader, and a certain kind of reader at that: a baby hedonist in love with the world, a cheerleader for another’s journeys in language. I’d noticed a change descend subtly upon me in the year before this one, a sort of over-professionalizing of my reading eye, a heightened scrutiny that left me feeling uncharitable and curmudgeonly. Like melting Arctic permafrost freeing innumerable new pathogens, a host of novel anxieties were released in me I will spare you a recounting, except to say that somewhere on the list of my many fears was this: that I would genuinely stop finding pleasure in books. If you’ve dreamed your whole sentient life of writing a book, the year your debut novel is slated to come out feels like a banner one, an epoch in your little life.

Sarah thankam mathews books