Skip to main content

A Year in Reading: Morgan Jerkins

This year has been a tremendously difficult one for millions across the country as we figured out how to recalibrate our boundaries towards resistance and self-care, protecting ourselves while defending others, and making time for laughter in the midst of a trash-fire administration. For anyone who has been involved with books, this new political landscape has made it difficult for authors, particularly those with debuts, to have a strong opening, as the cultural window kept shuttering around any and everything that did not relate to he-who-shall-not-be-named and a sum total of our political opinions. Yet still, books have prevailed. And they always will, because they are necessary for guidance, transportation, and understanding.

covercovercoverI am proud to say that the majority of the books I’ve read this year was written by women. Immediately in January, I devoured Difficult Women by Roxane Gay within a few days. Homesick for Another World and The Book of Joan were two outlandish works of art that will stay with me for a long time because I feel like despite completing them, there may have been some details that I might have missed, which may or may not give me an entirely new experience while reading them once more. I read All The Lives I Want by my dear friend Alana Massey, The Autobiography of Gucci Mane, and Hunger. Then I read works that delved deeply into the intricacies of family politics, such as Goodbye, Vitamin, What We Lose, Sing, Unburied, Sing, and The Rules Do Not Apply.  I also read some entertaining debuts, such as Start-Up, Marlena,  and Sour Heart, while reading recent works from more established authors, such as Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women and Jami Attenberg’s All Grown Up.

covercovercoverThere’s still so much I need to finish: Masha Gessen’s The Future Is History, Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, and the Nasty Women anthology, and so much more. But the aforementioned books are those that I remember so vividly, whether I was taking a voyage to Brooklyn, reading as I waited for my tapas at a Barcelona restaurant, or having quiet time away from family back in New Jersey. I hope that they will do the same for you.

More from A Year in Reading 2017

Do you love Year in Reading and the amazing books and arts content that The Millions produces year round? We are asking readers for support to ensure that The Millions can stay vibrant for years to come. Please click here to learn about several simple ways you can support The Millions now.

Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005

The post A Year in Reading: Morgan Jerkins appeared first on The Millions.



from The Millions http://ift.tt/2CVraAO

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more