My Year in Reading

on reading projects and writing projects

Every list and letter and passing thought my father ever wrote down became a sacred text for me after he died. When I dropped out of high school, the “syllabus” for my planned self-homeschooling was just a list of books I found on a scrap of paper in my father’s things (not even a list of his favorite books—literally just a list of a few books he happened to write down). And a substantial amount of my ethos about art-making and its role in a life worth living comes from things my father either said to me or wrote in the letters that his friends and my mom and aunt later shared with me.

In one such letter, he wrote “I’m in the midst of a big reading project,” describing the exploration of Judaism that he began a few years before his death. Everything he wrote in that letter about his relationship to religion, and the connections he found between Judaism and being an artist, is fascinating to me—and a quote from that letter (“no answers, but a deepening and sharpening of the question(ing)s”) became a pillar of my approach to nonfiction writing. But it’s the passing phrase, “reading project,” that embedded itself most deeply in my mind when I first read that letter fifteen years ago. He wasn’t just reading about Jewish history, thought, and mysticism—he was doing a reading project. That framing makes it feel so much more substantial than just saying “I’ve been reading about…” It connotes intention and diligence, makes the reading into its own endeavor rather than just a means to an end.

Around the time I first read that letter, I realized that the book I was writing was not going to be a straightforward artist monograph about my father as I had originally thought, but that it was, in fact, a memoir. It was clear that this was what the project demanded, but I had no idea how to write a memoir, had only read a couple of memoirs in my life. And so I embarked on a reading project—reading as many memoirs as I could get my hands on, from the foundational classics of the genre to the newest innovations. If I was going to write a memoir, I wanted to fully internalize the form and its conventions and possibilities, so that every choice I made about how to approach my own would be informed, intentional, in context. I wanted to go deeper than just acquainting myself, or doing research. The reading itself was its own project. And that reading project lasted years, leading to not only the completion of my memoir, but also to a career as an editor and teacher of the genre.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that my first impulse when I got the itch to write a novel was to start with a big, ambitious reading project. In the “Year in Reading” piece that I wrote for The Millions at the end of last year, I mentioned that I was getting back into reading fiction after a decade-plus of mostly nonfiction. And I explained my spreadsheet-driven approach, with a massive list of to-read titles culled from various online lists and crowdsourced from friends, organized by decade. But since my novel project was still a secret at the time, I didn’t explain the relationship between this reading project and my new writing project.

The idea that you should read widely in whatever genre or form you want to write is not revelatory, of course. But a lot of writers get tripped up by the idea of this reading as a prelude to the writing, and a potentially endless source of procrastination. For me, thinking of the reading as its own project has helped prevent this. The reading project and writing project are deeply connected, they feed and influence each other. But one does not need to be complete for the other to begin. They may run alongside each other for years, or the reading project may even outlast the writing project, as was the case with my memoir exploration.

At the rate I’m going, it will probably take me at least ten more years to make it through my current novel reading project. I don’t want to wait that long to start writing my novel. And if I think of the reading and writing as two interrelated endeavors rather than one as a prerequisite for the other, I don’t have to.

So yes, I am deep into a writing project, but the reading project I’ve been working on feels just as substantial. And like any good project, this one has its own notebook, in which I’ve been recording observations as I read—tracking craft and style choices that I find interesting or annoying, thoughts about which characters feel most real to me and why, etc., all spiraling around the question I wrote on the first page of the notebook, which also became the title of this series: What is a novel?

So far, most of my favorites have been the novels that remind me that the possible answers to that question are infinite. That a novel can be pretty much anything the author says it is, can do anything the author wants it to do. (I wrote in the Millions piece about falling in love with Moby-Dick—this is why.)

I saw an exhibit recently of Nan Goldin’s photographs, featuring a video that combines her images with classic paintings and sculptures, set to narration of several Greek myths. Through this collage approach, Goldin made these classic pieces—and even the myths themselves—part of her work. As I walked around the gallery with my friend Raiona and we commented on how unusual it was to see photographs of existing works of art in a photography exhibit, I felt the wheels whirring to life in my mind. “I didn’t realize you could do that,” I thought, and then realized immediately that “I didn’t realize you could do that” is maybe my favorite feeling to get when interacting with art.

It's in that spirit that I’m chasing down as many answers as I can find to the question: What is a novel? I knew when I started this reading project, of course, that there was not going to be one singular answer—but I’m enjoying deepening my understanding of just how many answers there are. I want to come to know the novel form as intimately as I know memoir. I know this will take years. Good thing I’m not in a hurry.

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And because I had so much fun contributing to the “Year in Reading” series last year, I figured I’d include a few favorites from this year in that spirit, while I’m talking about reading.

First, a few older favs I enjoyed in 2024:

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov: This is the only book I remember from the list I mentioned above—the random list of books I found in my father’s things and assigned myself to read instead of going to high school—because it was the first one I (tried to) read. I was fourteen and liked the black cat on the cover. I did not get it at all, and gave up after two chapters. It was so satisfying to revisit it more than twenty years later and enjoy it deeply. It’s so fucking weird, but this time I was able to go along for the ride and not be put off by the weirdness. The two connected but very different halves definitely add some kindling to the “What is a novel?” fire.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: I loved this book so much I wrote a whole separate newsletter about it, on inevitable endings and how much tension is possible even when you know what’s coming. I am also probably going to write more about it in a later post where I talk about POV and the experiments I’ve done (and am still doing) to figure out which POV(s) to write my novel in. ABTP: Always be Tolstoy Posting.

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: This book made me think a lot about the increasing demand for “likeable” characters, and what constitutes “stakes” in a novel. Everyone in this book is terrible, and Lily Bart’s striving for social status is about as low stakes as it gets—until it throws her life into such chaos that it becomes, despite itself, a matter of life or death. So masterful.

Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion: I started reading this one the week after the election, just because it was next on my list, not because it was timely. But with an illegal at-home abortion at the center of the story, it really threw into relief for me how much things have changed for women, and how much they might soon change back. So that definitely colored my reading of it. But also, damn if Joan doesn’t remain the queen. So spare and clean—Hemingway could only dream. This book definitely added some new dimension to the “What is a novel?” question with its super short chapters, some consisting of just a few lines.

And some newer ones:

Amphibian by

Tyler Wetherall

: Disclosure: I blurbed this book. Tyler reached out to ask me for a blurb before First Love came out, and as I read Amphibian I found myself wondering how she could have known, without reading First Love, how completely this story of two tween girls who are obsessed with each other and want to both devour and hide from the world would be my jam. It’s a modern fairytale and a love story and I absolutely adore it.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee: This book is the most like East of Eden of any book I’ve read other than East of Eden, which if you know me at all you know is some of the highest praise I can give. (For years I wanted an East of Eden tattoo that I didn’t end up getting (for reasons), but as I write this the temptation is flaring back up.) (But seriously, I wrote more about what I loved about this book on a craft level here.)

Madwoman by

Chelsea Bieker

: A gorgeously written, literary thriller! Madwoman has it all: beautiful language, compelling characters, and shocking twists.

Luster by Raven Leilani: Maybe it’s just because I read them in close proximity, but I got some House of Mirth vibes from this book—characters making just god awful choices, digging themselves deeper and deeper into their terrible circumstances. But unlike The House of Mirth, we get very little reflection/explanation of why the characters do what they do, to really interesting effect. You’re left to be baffled and infuriated by their choices, like you would be if you knew them in real life. The characters may be unhinged, but the writing is deftly restrained, and this contrast is discomfiting in a thrilling way.

“What Is a Novel?” is an ongoing series of dispatches from a work-in-progress, a record of the trial-and-error process of teaching myself how to write a novel. Read past installments here.