Staff Year-End Reading Wrap-Up - Part One
Ally
This year the bookstore turned five! It was a full circle sort of reading year for me. Five felt momentous, important—most small businesses don’t hit five years, but Old Town Books is really hitting its stride. It felt like the first time I could read what I wanted to and not just what I should. It’s also the year I got back to writing. After a harrowing health crisis in the middle of the year, following the birth of my third daughter, I was drawn back to quiet books, nature writing, essays, and voice-driven and slow plotted novels. I also read a ton of romance in those early weeks after giving birth. Romance and its comforting conventions, tropes, and warm fuzzies—they’re perfectly fun, fast paced, and escapist for the postpartum period.
Surprisingly good reads:
I recently read Exhibit by R.O. Kwon, and it surprised me how punchy and to the point a sentence can be; how much voice can say about a character. I also was surprised by how such a slim book managed to go deep on dilemmas of art and life; how personal desires can complicate artistic ones. I am a lover of tiny, dynamite books. That may be because of the season of life I am in—I can only “one-sit read” super short novels but I just love enjoying a book that way.
I was also surprised by Reproduction by Louisa Hall. I can’t explain why I liked it so much other than thinking about language again, especially word choice and how the sentences sound. I will read anything that feels like a fever dream prose poem embodied, a little angry. The publisher calls this one “A lucid, genre-defying novel that explores the surreality of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood,” and I have to agree with that. In a letter to the booksellers the author sent with the advance copy, she said “the seams show”. Appropriate for a book that thinks a lot about Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, creating life, and stitching things together. I agree the seams showed. It is a novel in three parts, sometimes choppy. You could feel the effort of it, which to me, as a reader-writer-mother, was divine.
Amnesiac comfort reads:
I gulped down romance, barely letting the story sink in. It was sort of like journaling again after a dry spell, when you need to just practice moving your hands across the page to get back into the rhythm, the habit, of writing. It was like that for me reading romance—a totally rote way of reading, but powerfully happy and routine. The sensation of burning through all of Lorena Bell’s backlist on my Kobo will forever be linked to the depleting but full bodied joy and wonder of caring for a newborn. Could I tell you the name of one character? Or a single plot point? No. The details of the books, true comfort reads, are as transient as those early days with baby.
A book I’d recommend:
To a friend I’d recommend Cross Stitch by Jazima Barrera, translated by Christina Macsweeney. I would ask if we could also read her essay collection On Lighthouses in a mini book club, then spend a long day at a cafe noodling around in our notebooks, trying out our own stories. I am learning I like coming-of-age stories, a new thing for me and in weird symmetry to other books I read this year.
A book I re-read:
This year I have been thinking about aging–-I had my last baby, turn 40 next year, my kids keep doing this odd thing where they don’t stay babies. The three year old still wears a cat costume everywhere; I am preemptively mourning the day she takes it off for good. Life changes every day, it’s radical and unsettling. I’m trying to, if not embrace that fact, then at least accept it. I returned to Diana Athill’s late-in-life memoir Somewhere Towards the End, after seeing her work reprinted in special editions from NYRB, in sleek new editions where Lena Dunham and Helen Oyeyemi offer afterwords.
Su
2023 has been a year of rest and growth for me. I lived out a book nerd dream and quit my full-time job, which has allowed me to live a life that mainly revolves around reading for the second half of the year. I’m excited to share my reading highlights from the year:
A book that surprised me was All the Fighting Parts by Hannah V. Sawyerr. I didn’t think I would be able to internalize and understand a book entirely written in verse, but this book blew me away. The poetry is incredibly powerful while still being very attainable to those new or averse to poetry (me included). I loved every word.
My favorite comfort read of the year was The Dreamatics by Michelle Cuevas. Middle Grade is where my comfort always lies, and this was no exception. It’s Inside Out but for dreams, with a very endearing protagonist, a fun cast of characters, and a wonderful way to understand grief and love. It should definitely be made into a movie!
A book I would recommend to my friends is The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. A middle-aged female pirate with a bad knee begrudgingly comes out of retirement and gets a ragtag crew together for one final hurrah. You’re telling me this doesn’t have universal appeal to millennials?
Lastly, I’ve discovered a new sub genre of lit fic to love, which I’ve fondly labeled “messy woman trying her best.” I think more love needs to go to None of This Would Have Happened if Prince Were Alive by Carolyn Prusa, both for its content and its title.
Jackie
My 2023 reading seemed to alternate between romance, thrillers, memoirs, and fiction. My favorites of the year were varied—at the beginning of the year, my favorite reads were The Daydreams by Laura Hankin and The Guest by Emma Cline, both from our fiction shelf.
The Daydreams tells the story of a group of young adults who were child actors on a Disney Channel-esque TV show. They reunite in the present day in an attempt to film a reunion episode, bringing up the cast drama of the past. I love millennial pop culture nostalgia, and The Daydreams brings up the same thoughts and feelings about child stars of the era that we’ve seen in books like I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy.
The Guest is the story of a 22-year-old woman kicked out of her older lover’s home in the Hamptons. Told over a short period of time, the woman wanders through life, determined to get back to her lover, while slowly revealing her backstory. Hard to put down, I enjoyed the way the book perfectly captured the feeling of being lost in your early 20s.
The standout book of the year for me was Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll—a fictionalized re-telling of the Ted Bundy murders in Tallahassee. As a Floridian, I’ve been familiar with the story of these murders for decades (my mother was a student at FSU at the time), and the author does a great job of capturing the setting in Tallahassee as well as providing a redeeming story for the women involved.
Kim
While I always have been and always will be a huge sci-fi and fantasy reader this year felt particularly full of amazing reads that got me thinking about tough topics wrapped in amazing adventures, found family, creative world building, and fantastic characters. This year really brought it across ages and some of my absolute favorites that I know I’ll be reading for years to come were:
Where Peace is Lost by Valerie Valdes
The Adventures of Amina al-Siradi by Shannon Chakraborty