A Year in Reading: Manuel Gonzales

It has been a difficult year in reading for me, mainly because the late winter and spring required too much reading from me — for contests, applications, submissions — and left little time for me to read what I wanted when I wanted. And because I have found myself increasingly drawn to reading snippets of news from my phone instead of books and when that becomes too much for me to handle mentally or emotionally, escaping into cheesy super-hero television shows on the CW. So here is what might seem like an abbreviated list, but which is in fact mostly the list of books I’ve read since the beginning of 2016.

I don’t collect comic books anymore, mainly because there are so many titles I would love to keep up with that I would put my family into hock if I were to try, but I did pick up Bitch Planet, Volume 1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick, after listening to the author talk about the series on some public radio manifestation. If you haven’t heard about it yet — I don’t know anyone who hasn’t, but in case — the story takes place in a (too) near future, where independent and free-thinking women, whenever they are perceived to rage against the patriarchy, are shipped off to a penal planet known commonly as Bitch Planet, and there trained gladiator style to play a vicious version of rugby, subjected at every turn to misogyny, humiliation, and fear of physical and emotional suffering. Not once does Kelly Sue DeConnick pull any punches. But she injects the work with action and humor and compelling characters, too, and right now, I’m waiting for Volume 2, waiting to see how the women of Bitch Planet will (fingers crossed) undermine their patriarchal overlords through noncompliance — though now I’m maybe reading it as a manual, not a fiction.

It’s been, overall, a tense and unsettling year — the Year of the Monkey, y’all — full of uncertainty and instability, at home, abroad, politically, socially — and weirdly I found the tension of Hannah Pittard’s road trip novel, Listen to Me, not so much a soothing balm to the fears and tension plaguing me, but maybe the kind of bolstering affirmation of my own worries I wanted — a novel version of your friend who says to you, “Oh yeah, everything’s going to hell and we’re all going to die sooner than anyone thought.” It’s comforting when you find that friend, just as it was comforting charging through this slim but evocative novel. Pittard’s writing is funny and dark and she captures a marriage at crossroads with unsettling precision, and at the end, I had a good cry.

Speaking of good cries, this year I taught creative writing to a lecture class of almost 100 students — most of them freshman — and when approaching poetry, immediately turned to the new-ish collection Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón, many of which I read aloud to my class with the hope of making them cry (not just her poems, but also the poems from Natalie Diaz’s stellar collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec). The poems in this collection are — again — dark and wicked and at times frightening and personal, and it’s the close, personal, exposed glimpse of her own life that Limón offers the reader that makes this collection as moving as it is. Limón collects the pieces of herself and stitches them together in these poems and draws us into the fabric of her pain and pride and sadness and badassery and success and failure and by the end of it, we are ourselves exposed and undone, and this year, nothing feels more satisfying than that raw feeling.

Seeking more of that raw feeling — and hoping to impart it to more students — I recently revisited with my graduate students Ramona Ausubel’s luminous collection, A Guide to Being Born, published three years ago, and found the stories contained here as relevant as before, if not, in fact, more so. Time and again, Ausubel navigates her readers through a version of our world full of fantastical conceits that are frightening (there seems to be a theme here) and outlandish — a society that grows extra appendages, love-arms, any time they experience true, deep love, and a group of grandmothers on an ocean liner that carries them into the after-life (maybe?), and the one grandmother who jumps overboard — but told with such aplomb and with gorgeous prose that by the end of the collection, it was our world — our current frightening saddened disturbing uncertain world — that felt outlandish when compared to the landscapes of Ausubel’s stories.

I read other beautiful novels and stories and poems this year, I know, but these are the ones that have kept with me, the ones I keep picking back up, then, after reading the first few pages, realizing, “Oh, I just finished this, I should find something else,” but without fail, I bring them with me back to bed, or to the couch, and I find myself caught up all over again.

More from A Year in Reading 2016

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Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005