Dead Letter Department #21

(did you miss dead letter department #20? catch up here!)

everything i read this year

There are a couple of writers whose year end lists I wait for—Roxane Gay’s reading list, Hanif Abdurraqib’s top albums, Helen Rosner’s gift guide (recently re-introduced to me by the best bro of the Dead Letter Department). For me, it’s tempting to hedge lists like this with various disclaimers. I’m just getting back my ability to read after the pandemic stomping the shit out of my attention span! Next year I’ll do better, read more works in translation, more poetry! I promise I’ll try to be more impressive next time you look!  But that is not at all the spirit of the thing. It’s meant to be generous: here’s how I’ve furnished this room of my mind.

Interior Portraits: A California Design Pilgrimage, Leslie Williamson

Georgia O’Keeffe/John Loengard: Paintings & Portraits, ed. Lothar Schirmer

Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia & the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World, Anthony Doerr

"Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw—actually saw—a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there’d be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs."

"To write a story is to inch backward & forward along a series of planks you are cantilevering out into the darkness, plank by plank, inch by inch, & the best you can hope for is that each day you find yourself a little bit father out over the abyss."

Berthe Morisot, Jean-Dominque Rey

The Once & Future King, T.H. White (re-read)

"The king put his head in this hands & looked miserably at the table between his elbows. He was a kind, conscientious, peace-loving fellow who had been afflicted in his youth by a tutor of genius."

"She was now to welcome, as she knew well, the people who were to break her heart. She did not interfere with their greetings but watched them like a child who had been left out of a game."

The Long Way to A Small Angry Planet, Becky Chambers (re-read)

Cabin Porn

New Minimalism, Cary Telanderfortin & Kyle Louise Quilici

Full Service, Scotty Bowers

Thick, Tressie McMillan Cottom

“Whiteness is a violent sociocultural regime legitimized by property to always make clear who is black by fastidiously delineating who is officially white.”

“But if I believe that I can become beautiful, I become an economic subject. My desire becomes a market. And my faith becomes a salve for the white women who want to have the right politics while keeping the privilege of never having to live them. White women need me to believe that I can earn beauty, because when I want what I cannot have, what they have becomes all the more valuable.

I refuse them.”

Heavy, Kiese Laymon

The Decoration of Houses, Edith Wharton & Ogden Codman, Jr

“Decoration must rhyme to the eye, & to do so must be subject to the limitations of the eye, as verse is subject to the limitations of the ear. Success in any art depends on a due regard to the limitations of the sense to which is appeals.”

Educated, Tara Westover

“It is comforting to think the defect is mine, because that means it is under my power.”

Cabin Porn Inside, ed Zach Klein

The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien (re-read #?)

“I once saw him sitting all alone on top of the Carrock at night watching the moon sinking towards the Misty Mountains, & I heard him growl in the tongue of bears: ‘The day will come when they will perish & I shall go back!’”

Check Please! Book 2, Ngozi Ukazu

The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, Judith Jones

The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford

“ ‘Oh, don’t pity me. I’ve had eleven months of perfect & unalloyed happiness; very few people can say that, in the course of long, long lives, I imagine.’ ”

Cowboys Are My Weakness, Pam Houston (re-read)

“ ‘The problem,’ he says, ‘with living alone is that you have to go so far away to the place you can do you work, & when you’ve finished there’s no one there to tell you whether or not you’ve gotten back.’”

Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong

Princess Daisy, Judith Krantz (re-read)

In Tearing Haste: Letters from Deborah Devonshire & Patrick Leigh Fermor, ed Charlotte Mosley

“Don’t let anyone else shoot her, you know what I mean, they might do it ghoulishly.”

All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir, Nicole Chung

To Be Taught, If Fortunate, Becky Chambers

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (re-read #3)

“He would have explained, if he’d known what sort of explanation Wykys would understand. I gave up fighting because, when I lived in Florence, I looked at frescoes every day? He said, ‘I found an easier way to be.’ ”

The Legend of Auntie Po, Shing Yin Khor

Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, Lauren Hough

Solutions & Other Problems, Allie Brosh

Travel Light, Naomi Mitchison

“She began to ask herself what she should do, for her life appeared to have been cracked across & in some way she did not feel so dragon-minded as she had done in Uggi’s time. It was as though the murderers who had killed the old dragon had also killed a dragonishness in herself & she hated them all the  more for it.”

Over the Woodward Wall, Seanan McGuire

“Even more unsettling was that the shape of it felt true & right & dangerous, like so many stories had been told that way that this story wanted to be rid of her, to narrow itself to one child, one destination, one destiny.”

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Joan Aiken

Beowulf, tr. Maria Dahvana Headley

“Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!”

Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner

“She was my champion, she was my archive.”

Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel (re-read #2)

“He once thought it himself, that he might die of grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father & master the cardinal. But the pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising & falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself & so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh & gives you a heart of stone.”

The Mirror & The Light, Hilary Mantel

“And I, like wandering Odysseus, salt-hardened, befogged, making my long way home to a house full of raucous strangers. When I see ordinary happiness the horizon tilts & I see something else.”

“But he is tired of trying to wake up different.”

Take This Bread, Sarah Miles

“It was real communion, with all the incomplete, stupid, & aching parts still there. Made by human hands, out of meat & hope, incarnate: what the Russian mystics called ‘a foretaste of the heavenly banquet, where none are left behind.’”

Wayward, Dana Spiotta

“Laughing at them was a shabby use of her time, but she knew part of what made Facebook—the internet, really—addicting was simultaneously indulging your own obsessions while mocking (deriding, denouncing, even) the obsessions of others from the safety of your screen. It was hard to resist, & indulging this impulse—even silently to yourself—made everything worse, made you worse, she was sure of it.

Unraveled, Courtney Milan

“The feel of her was a cool, clear shock, as bracing as fresh morning air after a tortured night.”

Modern Tarot, Michelle Tea

The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde

“Not to turn away from the fear, but to use it as fuel to help me along the way I wish to go. If I can remember to make the jump from impotence to action, then working uses the fear as it drains it off, & I find myself furiously empowered.

Isn’t there any other way, I said.

In another life, she said.”

The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard

“I have seen Fuji, the most dainty & graceful of all mountains, & also Kinchinjunga: only Michael Angelo among men could have conceived such grandeur. But give me Erebus for my friend…he is the most restful mountain in the world, & I was glad when I knew that our hut would lie at his feet.”

Something That May Shock & Discredit You, Daniel Lavery

“In the early days of my transition (when ‘transition’ consisted mostly of refusing to wash my clothes, letting them pile up on the floor so I could weep in bed, getting significant haircuts & responding incredibly tersely if any of my friends acknowledged that I’d cut my hair in any way) I often described my sudden shift in self-awareness as feeling as if a demon had entered my room in the middle of the  night, startled me awake by whispering ‘What if you were a man, sort of?’ into my ear & then slithering out the window before I could ask any follow-up questions.”

Sex & Vanity, Kevin Kwan

We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power & Pride in the History of Queer Liberation, Matthew Riemer & Leighton Brown

Next year: yes, more poetry, more romance, the rest of L.M. Montgomery’s journals, Alexander Chee’s novels, maybe even a few things from the tremendous stack of unread books by my desk before they take up arms & rebel against their neglected state.

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If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend. I hope to see you back here at the Dead Letter Department again soon & in the meantime may the planks you are cantilevering out over the abyss continue to bear your weight.