Happy 2020, my bookish friends!

First off, let me say right away that I will NOT be doing a favorite books of the past decade post. Sorry, but also I am not sorry, because I would actually drive myself insane trying to figure out my favorite books from the PAST TEN YEARS. That is so many years! So many books! How is that even possible? Also, it seems unfair? Ten years ago, I was 22, and the books that hit me hard at 22, I may roll my eyes at now at 32, but I don’t think that diminishes the impact they had on me a decade ago, so, yeah, I’m not touching that.

If you want recaps of my past reading habits, check out my 2018 Reading Round-Up and 2017 Reading Round-Up posts and this piece I wrote for Wellesley Underground about spending 2015 only reading books by women. (2010 to 2012 I was pretty much reading only YA and middle grade books because I was teaching at a middle school in Dorchester, and 2012 to 2014 I was in grad school and was reading whatever my MFA professors were telling me to read, and then I guess I was too much of an empty shell in 2016 to write anything about what I read that year?) You can also browse my GoodReads profile which I have been updating regularly since January 2012, and see my GoodReads reading challenges from 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012.

I would only read 568 pages for Alexander Chee and no one else.

But! As promised, even if I can’t handle recapping the whole past decade, I present to you my annual reading tally for the past year. So, as is tradition, here is the breakdown of what I read in 2019, my top 19 books that were published 2019, plus my reading resolutions for the upcoming decade and some of the books I am looking forward to in 2020.

WHAT I READ:

• I read 122 books, by 107 writers.

THE GENRE BREAKDOWN:

• Fiction: 24
• Nonfiction: 39
• Graphic novels/comics: 3
• Graphic memoirs/nonfiction: 14
• Poetry: 9
• Drama: 1
• Young adult/middle grade: 10
• Picture/art books: 22*
• Books that I had already previously read: 6**

*Again, many of these were dead-pet-related picture books for research.

**Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty, Jane: A Murder and The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson, Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, and How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee.

THE DEMOGRAPHIC BREAKDOWN:

• Books by women of color: 29
• Books by white women: 55
• Books by men of color: 15
• Books by white men: 22
• Books by non-binary people of color: 1
• Books by non-binary white people: 0
• Books by LGBTQ folks: ~23

THE REASON-FOR-READING BREAKDOWN:

• Books for dead pets research: 48
• Books for Non-Fiction by Non-Men/other interviews/essays/reviews: 19
• Books for my People Who Read Darkness book club: 12
• Books for teaching: 4 (though every book I read is for teaching, in a way)
• Books for fun/other reasons/just for the hell of it: 39

E.B.’s TOP 19 BOOKS PUBLISHED in 2019:

As I’ve said in past years, I am really glad that I am doing this tradition of my top [xx] books published in 20[xx] because it means I get to add one more book to my list each year. I am also glad that in this list I focus on only books that were published in 2019 because that helps me further narrow down my choices, though it does mean that some of my favorite books I read this year may not make the cut, just because they weren’t published in 2019, such as Cottonmouths by Kelly J. Ford (2017) or Edinburgh by Alexander Chee (2001) or Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (2011) or The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery (2015) or The Reckonings by Lacy M. Johnson (2018) or Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala (2013). So, it’s an imperfect art, but it makes my life a little easier, so here I present to you: my 19 favorite books that came out in 2019, organized chronologically by their publication date.

1. The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang (February 5)
2. Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden (March 5)
3. Good Talk by Mira Jacob (March 26)
4. The Body Papers by Grace Talusan (April 9)
5. I Was Their American Dream by Malaka Gharib (April 30)
6. Allowed to Grow Old by Isa Leshko (May 10)
7. Ugly Music by Diannely Antigua (May 15)
8. The Edge of Every Day: Sketches in Schizophrenia by Marin Sardy (May 21)
9. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (June 4)
10. Bunny by Mona Awad (June 11)
11. With a Polaroid Camera by Sarah Dickenson Snyder (June 25)
12. Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton (August 6)
13. Mitz by Sigrid Nunez (August 6)
14. Malaya: Essays on Freedom by Cinelle Barnes (October 8)
15. Holding On To Nothing by Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne (October 22)
16. This is My Body by Cameron Dezen Hammon (October 22)
17. In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (November 5)
18. The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West (November 5)
19. Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung by Nina MacLaughlin (November 12)

E.B.’s READING RESOLUTIONS for 2020 (& the rest of the decade):

• Last year I said I wanted the majority of the books I read in 2019 to be by people of color. I did not achieve that goal: of 122 books, 78 were by white people and 44 were by people of color. So, once again, my goal for the upcoming year is to read a majority of books by people of color.
• Also as I said last year, I want to keep reading more and more books by nonbinary people and LGBTQ folks. I am embarrassed that I only read one nonbinary author this year and that this year only 18% (down from 20% in 2018) of the authors I read identify openly as LGBTQ. I can do better.
• I want to continue to make sure my People Who Read Darkness book club reads diverse writers. (This year we only read one book by a person of color, My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, so we really need to work on that.)
• And also, like in past years, I need to keep paying attention to who is writing the books I am reading for research and diversify the voices I am quoting in my own writing.
• And, finally, as always, I want to continue to remind myself that if I don’t love something I am reading… I don’t have to finish it!!!! This is a reminder for you, too!

E.B.’s LIST OF BOOKS SHE IS ANTICIPATING in 2020:

There are many, many, MANY books to look forward in 2020, but here are just a few I am especially excited about, that you should put on your radar:

• I Know You Know Who I Am by Peter Kispert (February 11 from Penguin Books)
• Thin Places by Jordan Kisner (March 3 from FSG)
• Wow, No Thank You. by Samantha Irby (March 31 from Vintage)
• Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs by Jennifer Finney Boylan (April 21 from Celadon Books)
• Summer Solstice by Nina MacLaughlin (April 27 from Black Sparrow Press)
• Fairest by Meredith Talusan (May 26 from Viking)
• Let’s Never Talk About This Again by Sara Faith Alterman (June 6 from Grand Central Publishing)
• The Names of All the Flowers by Melissa Valentine (July 14 from Feminist Press)
• Big Friendship by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman (July 14 from Simon & Schuster)
• A Wicked Magic by Sasha Laurens (July 28 from Razorbill)
• Tomboyland: Essays by Melissa Faliveno (August 4 from Topple Books)
• Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine (sometime in September from Graywolf)
• I also heard a rumor that Eula Biss has a new book coming out in fall 2020!

Here’s to reading all the books in 2020!

The post 2019 Reading Round-Up appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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Cinelle Barnes is a memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, and is the author of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir (Little A, 2018) and Malaya: Essays on Freedom (Little A, 2019), and the editor of a forthcoming anthology of essays about the American South (Hub City Press, 2020). She earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Converse College. Her writing has appeared in Buzzfeed Reader, Catapult, Literary Hub, Hyphen, Panorama: A Journal of Intelligent Travel, and South 85, among others. Her work has received fellowships and grants from VONA, Kundiman, the John and Susan Bennett Memorial Arts Fund, and the Lowcountry Quarterly Arts Grant. Her debut memoir was listed as a Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 by Bustle and nominated for the 2018 Reading Women Nonfiction Award. Barnes was a WILLA: Women Writing the American West Awards screener and a 2018-19 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards juror, and is the 2018-19 writer-in-residence at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC, where she and her family live.

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Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the memoir In the Dream House and the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Machado’s essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, VQR, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Michener-Copernicus Foundation, Elizabeth George Foundation, CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Machado is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

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Cameron Dezen Hammon’s writing has appeared in Ecotone, The Rumpus, The Literary Review, The Houston Chronicle, and elsewhere. Her essay “Infirmary Music” was named a notable in The Best American Essays 2017, and she is a contributor to The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers (W.W. Norton), My Caesarean: Twenty Mothers on the Experience of Birth by C-Section and After (The Experiment) and Common Prayer: Reflections on Episcopal Worship (Wipf & Stock). She is host of The Ish podcast, and her debut book This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession will be published by Lookout Books on October 22, 2019. 

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T Kira Madden is a lesbian APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician living in New York City. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and serves as the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art. A 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts, she has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Tin House, and Yaddo, where she was selected for the 2017 Linda Collins Endowed Residency Award. She facilitates writing workshops for homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals and currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Her debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, is a 2019 New York Times Editors’ Choice. There is no period in her name.

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This week marks five years that I have been living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To celebrate, I spent the better part of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday tweeting about some of my favorite things about this city. Click here to see the thread on Twitter or here to see a more-easily-readable version of the thread.

I’d love to hear what some of your favorite Cambridge spots are — leave a comment below or @ me on Twitter!

The post Five years of living in Cambridge! appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

For the full interview, see it on Fiction Advocate.
Published on August 20, 2019.

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Terese Marie Mailhot is from Seabird Island Band. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Heart Berries: A Memoir. Her book was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-Language Nonfiction and was selected by Emma Watson as the Our Shared Shelf Book Club PiCCK for March/April 2018. Heart Berries was also listed as an NPR Best Book of the Year, a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, a New York Public Library Best Book of the Year, a Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year, and was one of Harper’s Bazaar‘s Best Books of 2018. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, the Electra Quinney Award for Published Stories, a Clara Johnson Award, and she is also the recipient of the Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature. She teaches creative writing at Purdue University.

This month’s guest Non-Fiction by Non-Men interviewer is Céillie Clark-Keane. Céillie lives in Boston, where she currently works as a managing editor. She has a Master’s in English Literature from Northeastern University, and her work has been published by Ploughshares online, Electric Literature, Bustle, and more.

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Photo credit: Andrew Castro

Malaka Gharib is a writer and artist and the author of the graphic memoir I Was Their American Dream. She is also a journalist at NPR in Washington, and reports about global health and development. In her free time, she loves making mini zines, doodling, and leaving nice messages for people on the bus. See her work on her Instagram.

You can read an excerpt of I Was Their American Dream on The Nib.

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Audrey Murray is a redhead from Boston who moved to China and became a standup comedian. The co-founder of Kung Fu Komedy, Audrey was named the funniest person in Shanghai by City Weekend magazine. Audrey is a staff writer for Reductress.com and a regular contributor at Medium.com; her writing has also appeared in McSweeney’s, LitHub, LARB, The Gothamist, Paste Magazine, Narratively, China Economic Review, Nowness, Architizer, and on the wall of her dad’s office. Audrey has appeared on NPR and The Comedy Center: Live from the Table; the Lost in America, Listen to This!, and Shanghai Comedy Corner podcasts; and on CNN, RTN, and ICS. She recently published her first memoir, Open Mic Night in Moscow. Follow her on Twitter at @ACMwrites.

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For the full interview, see it on Fiction Advocate.
Published on May 14, 2019.

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Mira Jacob is the author and illustrator of Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations. Her critically acclaimed novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, and long-listed for the Brooklyn Literary Eagles Prize. It was named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and The Millions. Her writing and drawings have appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin House, Literary Hub, Guernica, Vogue, the Telegraph, and Buzzfeed, and she has a drawn column on Shondaland. She currently teaches at The New School, and she is a founding faculty member of the MFA Program at Randolph College. She is the co-founder of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn, where she spent 13 years bringing literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry to Williamsburg. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, documentary filmmaker Jed Rothstein, and their son.

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