It’s that time of year again a.k.a. time for best of lists! In 2024, I read 58 books. These were my favorites:
Have You Been Long Enough at Table? by Leslie Sainz (2023)
I remember listening to an episode of Poetry Off the Shelf that had Leslie Sainz on as a guest back in 2023. After she read some poems, I wrote down these lines about family that I still think about all the time: “Faithfully, I am a large shard / made of their smaller shards.” (The poem is “Glassware”). It seems reductive to merely say that Have You Been Long Enough at Table? revolves around the experiences of a Cuban American immigrant daughter. Sainz herself hones in on a key intention of her book:
“. . . it became quite clear to me that this collection needed to name and confront the rampant political conservatism I grew up with—the one that still plagues most of my family members and much of the Cuban American population in this country. But none of that labor felt just or stable or worthwhile without thorough self-implication. Though I had no models for it, I knew the collection needed to trace the evolution of the primary speaker’s politics as it progressed . . .”1
With most poetry collections I read, I end up bookmarking one or two poems I like. With Have You Been Long Enough at Table?, there are several.
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (2019)
Whereas most novels I read by poets are like beautiful, unsound buildings (a few perfect, lyrical sentences amidst a poor infrastructure), Girl, Woman, Other is the rare novel by a poet that actually succeeds as a novel. One of the things I admire about the book is that it’s experimental while also being thoroughly readable, and not just so—few works of literary fiction have propelled my reading late into the night like Girl, Woman, Other. Across a series of vignettes follwing twelve principal chacters, eleven women and one nonbinary person, Evaristo offers a portrait of the Black British life without privileging one character’s voice over the others. A review in The New Republic said that Girl, Woman, Other “is a sprawling book, but too intimate to be considered an epic,”2 and I agree that Girl, Woman, Other isn’t an epic in the sense that it feels so much more like life than fiction.
Brother, Alive by Zain Khalid (2022)
Reader, I’ll be honest. I initially picked up this book so that I could crtitique it. Outside of the adoptee community, few people (including writers who have written about adoption), are aware of the historical conditions that have shaped the systems of domestic adoption in the U.S. and transnational adoption. When I learned that Brother, Alive was about three adopted brothers—one Nigerian, one Korean, and one “indeterminately Middle Eastern”—all the sons of a Staten Island imam, I was immediately skeptical. But while Brother, Alive is very much about kinship and—in ways that surprised me—the politics and complications involved with devotion to family, to faith. Khalid’s prose is exceptionally gorgeous; his writing challenged me in a way that was somehow tremendously pleasurable. After I finished the novel, I wrote in my notes app “incredibly ambitious, more imaginative than pretty much all of contemporary literary fiction.” Reader, I savored it all.
about:blank by Tracy Fuad (2021)
about:blank is both my favorite poetry collection I read this year and the collection that brought me back to poetry after a month of burnout! This book is so strange in the most perfect of ways, by which I mean the language is unlike that of any other poet. I usually find myself struggling with long poems, but the ones in about:blank are some of my favorites I’ve ever read. about:blank explores the technology of language (with particular attention to Kurdish) and the technology of the internet, how each limits and expands the self—and selves—beyond it.
And last but not least:
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga (2022)
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is a book I had the incredible privilege of being changed by. Since reading it, my understanding of my relationship to diaspora has been altered. It goes without saying, but If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is one of the best books I’ve ever read: prose written on the sentence level, a work that has expanded what I know the novel’s capacity to be, I could go on and on. Before reading this book, I don’t think I’d ever encountered a narrative that was critical of or even complicated the idea of a diasporic “return to a homeland.” I hadn’t realized how much I’d needed to encounter such a narrative, especially one that expertly captures the violent intimacies of class difference. I should also say that If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is a divisive book—there is something that happens that will make you love it or hate it. For me, it’s this moment within the novel that raised a whole set of questions—ones I’ve been thinking about since I read the book last January.
Some aspirations for my reading in 2025:
- No more half-baked fiction books from the poet-to-novelist pipeline
- Read more plays (I would love recommendations!)
- Take more notes/writing down my thoughts right after reading
- Try to read a writer’s entire body of work (whose??)
- Read more books actually published in the current year (i.e. suck it up and buy a copy of a book when there are over 200 holds for it at the library)
- Write to each poet whose book I finish (and enjoy)
- Create a syllabus for my own personal canon
- Log my notes from reading poetry collections in Zotero in a timely manner
Leave a Reply