A Year in Reading: Isle McElroy

Every year I get to the end of the year and feel as though I haven’t read any books. This year was no different, which means I suspect this year was worse than last year, that I read even fewer books in 2023 than I did in 2022, fewer in 2022 than in 2021, you get it, though in truth I have a hard time remembering the books that I read. I read an early copy of Maggie Millner’s Couplets to kick off the year and felt a giddy intoxication over the prose. I read Wolfish by Erica Berry, then Sink by Joseph Earl Thomas, then Biography of X by Catherine Lacey, then picked through Renee Gladman’s Plans for Sentences without entirely understanding what I was reading, which is my favorite way to read Gladman, experientially.

Near the end of February, I began reading fewer books and instead read and reread texts from my friends. I was in the early stage of a breakup, one of those breakups that seems inevitable in hindsight but mystifying and dumb in the moment, and in the moment I read and analyzed texts from this person while sending summaries of her texts to my friends and then read the responses from friends, their theories and pep talks, their insistences that I deserved better and more and I held those texts close to my heart because I longed to absorb every word that they wrote. One morning in April, the breakup occurred and after a friend texted to tell me to meet him for lunch and at lunch I fell in crush with a friend of my friend who was leaving that week for LA and the crush was a little lozenge of lust on my tongue, something I’d suck on and nibble when the scratch of grief in my throat became a little too loud.

In the spring, I listened to Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Glover Tawwab and read Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships—but never ever in public—and Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance for like the 4th time in 4 years because it turns out healing is cyclical and in May I fell off my bike and landed smack on my shoulder, causing my collarbone to snap like a stick. “The worst collarbone break I’ve ever seen,” said the doctor at CityMD. And I read reviews of the surgeon who would screw a plate in my bones and reread my health insurance policy, hoping the deductible might decrease if I read hard enough and when it didn’t I was wheeled into surgery and returned home with my partner and didn’t sleep for a month and in the mornings I journaled and exchanged audio messages with a lover-and-friend and read Claire Dederer’s Monsters and when I finished I read The Magic Mountain, 10 pages a morning, thinking this would be how I finally got to the end but I didn’t, I stopped where I always stopped, the place where my copy is falling apart, smack in the middle.

I read Megan Fernandes’s I Do Everything I’m Told over and over again, read her poem “Letter To a Young Poet” aloud to my partner and cried as she gave me a look of pity and love and then I went for walks, the only exercise I could perform with my arm in a sling, listening to Nora Ephron’s Heartburn and Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know, which I recommended to everyone in my life. I read Jenny Xie’s Holding Pattern, one of the smartest and tenderest books about relationships of the year and I read Julia Fine’s Maddalena and the Dark, a seductive and witchy historical novel set in 18th century Venice.

In August, I read a text from a friend inviting me to eat dinner at the restaurant where he bartended and I brought a copy of Hilary Leichter’s Terrace Story to read at the bar, a perfect novel about friendship and family and longing and space (literal and metaphorical), but when I got to the bar, eager to read my Hilary Leichter, sitting there was the crush who had moved to LA, in town for a weekend, no longer a lozenge but all attractiveness and wit and we flirted and we went back to where she was staying and when I returned home my partner was thrilled for me (this isn’t Passages, a movie I thought was okay) and soon I was reading texts from the crush who lived in LA and sending her poems by Megan Fernandes and reading The Collected Emily Dickinson and Annie Ernaux’s The Years and Jon Fosse’s A Shining and Elisa M. Gonzalez’s Grand Tour and James Frankie Thomas’s Idlewild and K Patrick’s Mrs. S and Hua Hsu’s Stay True and Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches and Chloe Caldwell’s The Red Zone and Catherine Lacey’s Nobody is Ever Missing, reading with a kind of enthusiasm I hadn’t known all year, because I read most when I am falling in love and my heart was open to love.

And in late September, my second novel came out, People Collide, and I read all the reviews and I felt a sense of pride and annoyance, because wanting good things to be a little bit better is a problem of mine, but then time passed and I read Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s Digging Stars and C Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey and Jamel Brinkley’s Witness and Mary Ruefle’s The Book, which features a long essay about friendship that I photocopied and texted to all of my friends, saying, Read this! You need to read this! It’s the best thing I’ve read in so long! though it wasn’t, it was simply the most recent thing I had read that made me feel loved and alive and that’s why I sent it to everyone, to say thank you, to say, I’ve read this and I want you to read this because you are important to me and I love you. I love you so fucking much.