A Year in Reading: Kyle Chayka

This year I felt that everything I read was self-consciously fractured into fragments. Aggressively broken up. Left to be reassembled by the reader, that is, me. Maybe it had something to do with the time we’re living through: The entire narrative cannot even be forced to make sense, and so it has to be split into apprehensible parts, isolated and then dissected. But it also took on the feel of a stylistic tic, the millennial equivalent of the Victorian social novel.

I developed an acute sensitivity to section breaks. At times I thought I could feel them coming as the sentences decelerated or the apex of the argument was