bookmarking time
This Year in Reading
I read 50 books in 2018. It is a substantial number, though one I have managed to consistently hit for the last 4 years. Fifty is a lot of books to read in any case, but it is a particularly baffling number when I consider the sheer number of things that happened this year. I gained a second roommate and moved into a new apartment, conveniently located 4 blocks from my favorite indie bookstore (I subsequently spent a lot of money on books in 2018). After not showing work since graduating in 2015 I had my first solo show this year, and did three group shows besides. I went to Mexico City and Mount Rainier and Utah and Ensenada and Yosemite and Arizona; camped and read and hiked and skiied and read some more. I saw so many movies and bought so many plants. I signed a lease on an art studio, found a therapist, worked on music video sets and commercials and high fashion photo shoots. I built a coffee table with 16 legs and a triangular bookshelf that nestles perfectly beneath our staircase. I made a decent chunk of money selling things that I had made.
And yet, this list, while vast and exhausting, seems to omit so much. Because in truth, all of these plot points felt, both at the time and also now, as I sit down to recount it— like a backdrop to the thing that loomed in the foreground of my entire year.
It is impossible to write about this year without writing about love, I am sorry. I started out the year very very sad. At the start of 2018 I sat under the glowing lanterns of a Chinatown plaza while a girl very gently, very tenderly, broke my heart. I cried about it for months: right when I woke up at 6 am, while sitting in traffic on the 101, in bathrooms across the city. I told her that I needed a month to myself, that maybe in February we could be friends again. I didn’t text her for a month (or to be more accurate, a month and a half— we were both counting) and instead read 5 books. I read Annie Dillard and Sylvia Plath and Carol Anshaw and thought about her every single day. My childhood cat died, an event that gutted me in ways I was deeply unprepared for. I completed another full series reread of Harry Potter, revisited characters I had known for a full decade before I had even met her. I read Nora Ephron because I desperately needed a laugh.
In March I exclusively read books I bought at my local grocery store. In the springtime the girl told me that she could imagine us happily living on a ranch in New Mexico for the rest of our lives but that she didn’t want to kiss me. It was the most insane thing anyone has ever said to me in my entire life. What part of forever wasn’t enough? How could you see eternal happiness and then simply say, pass? She told me she was sorry but it didn’t really make me feel any better. We set a texting curfew to help us try to “de-escalate our friendship.” At some point I read The Haunting of Hill House and wrote a very pointed newsletter about how female friendship was basically lesbian erasure and then proceeded to send it to my entire mailing list including her. (I am... not sorry for this.)
Anyways, then I got hit by a car on my 26th birthday, and that girl who had spent seven months insisting that we were Just Friends realized that actually, maybe, I was the person she was supposed to be with. I’m sure there are other ways of telling that story, but this is the way I am telling it now.
I spent the rest of the summer woozy and happy, beaming blearily into the sun. I spent autumn the same way, shuffling around her kitchen, looking to be kissed. Winter is shaping up to be more of the same.
This version, too, is punctuated with omissions: the terrifying lack of control as you navigate someone else’s sexuality, the anxiety that bubbled under those early months— the fear that maybe love wasn’t enough, that perhaps heterosexuality was more rigid than I had ever imagined. But these parts are perhaps not mine to tell.
She gave me her copy of Black Swans by Eve Babitz so I read it, and thought that there was no place I would rather be the Los Angeles.
I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I know it’s gross. You might already know this— but love is good. Have you heard? It’s so good. If you had told me five years ago that I would be living in LA, dating a girl who had sat in the back of my high school history class with whom I had exchanged no more than a handful of sentences— I would have laughed in your face. Life is wild, y’all.
In many ways, books are simply a way of marking the passage of time. My year can be charted by the books I read: I read Alana Massey’s All The Lives I Want alone in a tent in Icebox Canyon. I read All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg in a hammock on the Oaxacan coast. I was in the middle of Priestdaddy when I got hit by a car, read David Sedaris while standing outside of the DMV in the blistering heat for 7 hours.
Books are a way of marking time, and books are a way of marking my friendships. I read Alanna Massey because Anne told me I would like her, I told her she needed to read Conversations with Friends after I finished it. I texted Mark for recommendations for graphic novels (I read The Prince and the Dressmaker in one day, sitting in front of my parents’ Christmas tree), I asked Annie for poetry recs. My friend Eleanor published a book, which filled me unwarranted pride. I went to Mexico with Minnar for a week and she didn’t bring any books, having planned to read whichever ones I had finished. I am genuinely touched when people read books I recommend, honored by friends who tell me they have essentially allowed me to curate their reading list.
In the interest of maintaining the illusion that this tinyletter is about books: I read 50 books in total this year, 8 by men, 42 by women, 11 by writers of color. Genre breakdown is always a bit messy but by my definitions I read 32 novels, 7 essay collections, 3 poetry collections, 3 short story collections, 1 play, 1 memoir, 1 graphic novel and 1 academic nonfiction book. This doesn’t add up to 50 but I don’t know where I went wrong. My favorite fiction book of the year was The Idiot by Elif Batuman, and my favorite nonfiction book was Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood.
The last book I read in 2018 was The Summer Book by Tove Jansson— a Christmas gift from Sophie.
Happy New Year, thank you for reading and replying and everything else, I appreciate you.
Love,
Nicole
"I Have Never Not Thought About Taylor Swift", 2018
Studio-ing
Psssssst I finally got my Taylor Swift liturgical calendars printed. If you want one they are $80 + $6 for shipping, or free local pickup if you are in LA. They are 24” x 36”, digital prints on bond paper.
Further Reading
If you are new around here, I wrote a newsletter about the vast majority of the books I read this past year, you can dig through the archives here. The complete list can be seen on my goodreads.