2019 was the year I read all of Chee's works. A great capper to his wonderful writing.

A non-fiction book that reports the inner, predominantly sexual, lives of three women in the United States. A completely fascinating piece of record; who doesn't want to know what leads a woman to start an affair, acquiesce to a married life that includes having sex with men in front of her husband, or... to be coerced by a predatory high school teacher? That last one's the head scratcher, but I won't deny the readability of this book.

Taddeo flourishes her reporting with writing styles that differ between the women, making their accounts (along with the tremendously talented audiobook narrators!) distinct not only in story but in the emotions provoked as reader. For non-fiction—for something called reporting—I wouldn't say this was objective. Or about a varied group of women and their sex lives (despite marketing, very little is understood regarding their actual desires). It's insightful only into these three specific women (all of whom, it must be said, are white, straight, and cis-gender). Taddeo's thesis she seems to be trying to prove from the outset (not sure if it's too spoilery to share here, so I won't?), is pretty pessimistic, and true. But I'm not sure what this non-fiction book intends to bring to the world, beyond three cases that prove, yep, we live in a patriarchy.

Like I said, it's intensely readable—hell, I read it in the space of 24 hours on audio—but by the end I felt defeated as a woman and confused as to intent.

When I went to the Brooklyn Book Festival in September and decided to go to the panel called "We Need to Talk," about the art of conversation in graphic memoirs, I originally only knew one of the authors, Mira Jacob. However, after the panel I scooped up Erin Williams' COMMUTE and this, Ebony Flowers' HOT COMB. I was not disappointed in any of these stellar works of memoir—and Flowers insightful collection of autobiographical short stories centered on Black women's hair is a particularly arresting perspective. In contrast to Jacob discussing the reasons why she always made the characters in GOOD TALK have the same face (to let the readers explore the emotions via the writing, not told to by the drawings), Flowers focused on the facial features to show emotion, to convey her characters' feelings. The drawings themselves come across as effusive and like they are moving; I learned a lot and laughed, too. I especially loved the last story, 'Last Angolan Saturday,' centered on three friends driving to the beach. At times heavy, at times light, these stories are always discerning of the many layers of processing identity. I highly recommend the collection, and look forward to more of Flowers' work.

Last year for book club we read Mary H.K. Choi's EMERGENCY CONTACT and some of us suburban moms were disappointed by The Youth and others, like me, admitted to being charmed by the young adult characters who forge a relationship mostly via text. I love novels as reflections—you might even say time capsules—of the world around us. I think Choi has an immense talent for capturing what it's like to be young today, and that is really always a complicated thing. And today's world, rooted in so much self-identifying, can be especially complex to navigate as a conscientious writer who wants to do right by everyone.

In PERMANENT RECORD, our hero is Pablo Neruda Rind (yup), a Pakistani-Korean-American who works at a bodega, grew up in Brooklyn, and worries about the cost of college but remains largely ambivalent about next steps. In the wee hours of the morning, a disheveled, beautiful popstar walks into the bodega and permanently changes the trajectory of his life. Or does she? The thing about PERMANENT RECORD is that the romance, for me, was the least interesting part. I'd hesitate to even call this a romance; I don't normally use the term 'coming-of-age,' but I'll use it here for expediency. The best parts are Pablo shining as a snack connisseur (the snack descriptions are A+), interacting with each of his family members (the heartstrings were pulled), and my own gob-smacking realizations about the entire book as I turned the final page expecting there to be more. I looked for a predictable ending, but Choi subverted that payoff.

I love Choi a lot, and look forward to more of her novels.

It's rare when I love a book so much—to the point of designating it a 'favorite'—that I don't mark even one page with an underline or dog-ear. Perhaps the book, with its stellar cover art by Gustavo Rimada, was simply too beautiful to mark up. But more likely it's due to the fact that I was held so rapt by these short stories that I could not pause to underline; I had to get to the next gorgeous sentence. Even as I was halfway through, I knew I would be reading this collection again. I will say that page 33 is a little worn, and I didn't realize why until I saw that it held a sentence listing family members which I used as a key to the how the stories interlocked.

SABRINA & CORINA is a collection of short stories about indigenous Latinx women in Colorado. Fajardo-Anstine has crafted something quite singular in perspective and prose. The sense of place grounds the collection, while the cycles of violence and racism and fractured families repeatedly break the reader's heart. (That the cover features an anatomical heart makes sense.) I was trying to figure out which story was my favorite, but I can't discount a one. They're all tremendous works for how short they are; I feel as though I inhabited these characters for how intimately they're presented. The first story "Sugar Babies" certainly set the tone for the entire collection, and the final story "Ghost Sickness," left me in tears for its last line to the story and to the farewell of everything that preceeded it. That this is Fajardo-Anstine's debut is astounding; I'm awaiting her sophomore effort excitedly.

A stunning memoir told in true Machado fashion—part horror, all innovation. Machado studies her former relationship with an abusive partner in slices of genre that captivate from the start, and she does not slow down. There were times while reading I had to pause to underline something, or paused to breathe, or felt tears welling up. Machado sincerely lays out the genuine trauma of being in an abusive relationship while queer, and how little representation and resources there are for such relationships in literature and society. She aims to fill a void, and I can't help but think how difficult it must have been to write this, and revisit a painful (yet forming) time in one's life. Machado also manages to telegraph something so often difficult to describe: emotional, non-physical abuse. She relays its insidiousness so well and with such creeping tension, and I understood in those moments why she chose to tell her story in this way. Thank you, Machado.

Of course, I am going to quote from Machado's chapter entitled "Dream House as an Exercise in Point of View." You know me.

"You were not always just a You. I was whole—a symbiotic relationship between my best and worst parts—and then, in one sense of the definition, I was cleaved: a neat lop that took first person—that assured, confident woman, the girl detective, the adventurer—away from second, who was always anxious and vibrating like a too-small breed of dog."

She is one of my favorite working authors; I pre-ordered this book based on how much I loved her collection HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES, and I imagine I will be pre-ordering her books until the end of time.

A compelling and compassionate memoir in which Chung pieces together the story behind her adoption while she is pregnant with her first child. A sickly baby born prematurely to an Asian-American couple in Seattle, Chung is adopted by a white couple and grows up in a predominantly white town. Chung grapples with the WHY of being given up for adoption (and the terms we use around the process), and also the strength of the relationships with her adoptive parents as she navigates to find the people she is related to by blood. It's a memoir full of tension that made me cry more than once, especially as Chung unveils only pieces of information before laying it all out later. I learned so much from this book. It's not a story we see much in non-fiction or fiction, and I think Chung does a tremendous job of letting the reader in to her struggle and self-doubt and self-discovery.

I was always interested in this book when I first heard of it, I'm sad it took me so long to get to! I remember coming across her name again and again on internet pieces that I loved. Her 2015 article in the New York Times entitled "What I Learned from Kristi Yamaguchi" speaks to lack of representation, and the thrill of finding it. A few years ago, John Cho sat next to me and my friends at a hotel lobby bar in a finely tailored navy suit. You might say the encounter changed me

The U.S. poet laureate's memoir reverberates with language that reads like English, but seems to come from a world Harjo has created for herself. And that may very well be the case; Harjo's story of her life brims with hardship and heartaches, yet it never ekes a moment of pity. She frames her memoir with cardinal directions and prose that explains what they represent to the earth, to people, to herself. Her lyrical storytelling invites you in while she illustrates ancestral trauma, abuse, familial strain, trusting in oneself, and creativity. She imbues something spiritual as well and relays visions of possible futures and evokes emotion rather than clinical or straightforward descriptions. She is in her own league and it's a beauty to witness.