A Year in Reading: Lydia Kiesling

I was pregnant with my second child for most of the year and I was also working from home, which meant I was very sedentary and slothful, and able to spend a lot of time reading articles that made me miserable. And since I was working on a book, and the pace and nature of that work were utterly different from any other kind of work I’ve done, I was grumpy and anxious a lot of the time even without reading anything at all. And I worried about being miserable and anxious and grumpy, and sedentary and slothful, wondering what it would do to the fetus, and whether the fetus would want to be around someone like me.
 

The reading I did while gestating the baby and my book was catch-as-catch-can and felt mostly like a reprieve and a cheat when I should have been working or doing something civic-minded. Books and the time they went with are blurring together for some reason. I think I read and was ruined by last year, but I can’t be certain it wasn’t this year. I think I read this year and found it spiky and perfect, but I’m not actually sure I didn’t read it in 2016.  I do know this year I read , which is among other things a delightful evocation of, which is absurdly ambitious and devastating. I read , which is weird and transporting. I gratefully blew off my work for , , , , , and . I read and and on the bus to the OBGYN and marveled at the ways great writers are documenting the effects of the unholy past on the unholy present. I read in a lovingly serene and receptive state after spending $60 to float in a very salty pool in the dark (I was trying to make the fetus turn head-down). When I was freaked out about everything the only book that sort of soothed me was the phenomenal new translation of , which is modern but not jarringly so, and highlights the sense of human continuity we apprehend from an ancient text. I re-read , a wonderful California novel that has become one of my favorite books in the last few years. I re-read to get ready for , which is allegedly arriving in 2018 and which I’ve been waiting for my entire adult life. I read , gemlike memoir about growing up. I read a Word document containing the first half of excellent forthcoming literary history , and I’m clamoring for the rest of it. I read a Word document containing the entirety of forthcoming essay collection, , and it is a stunningly insightful book that I’m hesitant to say is about motherhood because it might turn away people who might otherwise profit from it. I loved my colleagues Edan and Claire and Sonya’s novels and  and , which are about motherhood (and fatherhood, and daughterhood, and a lot of other things too). More mothers: I cried over in an airplane after reading in .  The book I thought about most during my gestational period was  , which is a love story of a different kind. I don’t think I’ve read another book so deft in transmitting both the desire and the violence that are bound up in the production of knowledge, another complicated act of creation.