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A Year in Reading: Sarah Smarsh

Inauguration Day was, in the eyes of most people I know, a horrifying day. The poison of hate had taken control of our political system, and it touched us whether we voted for it or not. Thus, the year that followed was for many—even those who sprang into civic action on the right side of history—lived in a state of foul bitterness.

In precise tandem with that political trauma, I happened to receive a shock to my physical system. Hours after the inauguration ceremony, which I had refused watch, I was in an emergency room with a rare, painful infection that progressed far enough to initiate liver failure. I fully recovered from that weeks-long illness, but it set the tone for the resistance I would undertake for the rest of the year. My scary hospitalization was a reminder, for me, that living to fight—to write—another day is reason to not just resist but to be glad.

In the face of such an assault on decency as the current political leadership, there is perhaps no greater act of resistance than to appreciate our lives, even as we fight back against the forces that tear at us. To see beauty in this place called Earth and the broken beings with whom we share it for a short while. To read and write the books that the most corrupted of them would burn.

Here is what I read or re-read this past year. It is a list in which I now see the simultaneous peaceful reveling and spirited reckoning that I hope might save this democracy in peril in 2018.

covercovercoverA Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle

We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation by Jeff Chang

Collected Poems by Jack Gilbert

covercovercoverDark Money by Jane Mayer

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town by Brian Alexander

covercovercoverGorilla and the Bird: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother’s Love by Zack McDermott

Healing the Soul of America: Reclaiming Our Voices as Spiritual Citizens by Marianne Williamson

Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm by Sarah Menkedick

covercovercoverLittle Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America, edited by Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

covercovercoverOn Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry

PrairyErth: A Deep Map by William Least Heat-Moon

Revolution by Russell Brand

Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, edited by Manjula Martin

covercovercoverSing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression by Dale Maharidge

Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, edited by John Freeman

covercovercoverThe Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby

The Clancys of Queens by Tara Clancy

The Dorothy Day Book: A Selection from Her Writings and Readings, edited by Margaret Quigley and Michael Garvey

covercovercoverThe Editor and His People by William Allen White

The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang

The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

covercovercoverThe Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream by Studs Terkel

The Guns of August: The Outbreak of World War I by Barbara W. Tuchman

The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself by Andrew Pettegree

covercoverThe Kansas Guidebook for Explorers 2 by Marci Penner and WenDee Rowe

The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery by Sarah Lewis

Women as Healers: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, edited by Carol Shepherd McClain

Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Magazine Subscriptions:

Columbia Journalism Review
Creative Nonfiction
Dissent
Harper’s
In These Times
No Depression
Poetry
The Believer
The Lion’s Roar
The New Territory
The New Yorker

More from A Year in Reading 2017

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

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