A Year in Reading: Alexandra Kleeman

I think it was this year that I felt my hunger for language, the texture and variety of it, come back full force. For the couple years before, I had felt afraid to look away from The Feed—the persistent, unceasing flow of awful news that felt just a bit less out of my controlSome of what I read was related to the fears I felt about the outside world: ‘s eerie, dreamlike thriller , where feelings of xenophobia and exclusion circulate in terrifyingly visceral ways, and ‘s ferociously creative and beautiful , an environmental novel animated by a tremendously tender sense of despair and self-sacrifice. Some of what gave me comfort were novels and memoirs that put me in contact with deeply intelligent, thoughtful, emotional interiorities. At a time when I felt my own interiority continually in flux, dissolving and coagulating, the feeling of pliant, agile mental life that I found in ’s , ’s , and ’s  felt like it could glue me together and make me person-shaped again.