“The problem is, it’s so hard to connect a cause to an effect in a large body of flowing water.”   -Wendell Berry

At year-end, on the cusp of change—with a vaccine being distributed and an elemental shift from earth to air in the heavens—I’m reflecting on 2020 through the reading I’ve done, believing as I do that I can discover what’s really going on inside me through observing the unconscious byways governing the movement of my attention and obsession.

In the mid-90s, a colleague asked me about my summer reading and then said, “I guess you are trying to figure out something about marriage.” I had not noticed the theme. And I soon separated from my first husband. When I chose those books at the library—Two-Part Invention by Madeline L’Engle and a big biography of Charles Lindbergh and his writer wife Ann Morrow Lindberg, two books that would turn out to be based on deceptions of self and others—I did not know I was trying to solve a problem. So my question now is: what am I trying to figure out?

My 2020 reading –books I finished:

Free Food for Millionaires

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World

The Yellow House

Train Dreams

The Great Fire

The Sympathizer

Girl, Woman, Other

True Grit

Police Procedurals: A collection of novellas

Patsy

The Dutch House

Forest Dark

The Green Road

Austerlitz

The Maytrees

Brooklyn

Cassandra at the Wedding

The Vanishing Half

Cave & Julia

The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties that Helped Create Modern China

Things I haven’t finished yet (out of lack of focus, agency and energy not interest)

War and Peace

The Art of Mystery (Graywolf art of writing series)

Exciting Times

Ninth Street Women

The Third Rainbow Girl

Born a Crime

Feel Free: Essays

The Living (I was re-reading this having read it in the 90s, but it was too death-centric for a person living in NYC in the Spring of 2020. I had to abandon it in order to stay afloat.)

I’d love to hear from you–what have you been reading? And what themes are developing for you? What are you trying to figure out?