A Year in Reading: Elaine Castillo

I began 2020 in convalescence.  Which, in the end, fits the aura of nonstop emergency that the year turned out to feel like, I suppose.  I was hospitalized for emergency surgery at the end of 2019, and spent a long while very slowly recovering both physically and emotionally from that ordeal and its enduring fallout.  To be honest, the realization that it’s already been nearly a year since then feels wild and instinctively wrong to me, but such is the carefree march of time, that dickhead.  In that year I’ve withdrawn from a lot of things like book events or promotion, and have more or less gone off what little social media I participated in—which mostly amounted to posting donut pictures on Instagram—and have thought a lot in that time about privacy, intimacy, loneliness and community; about the difference between being a public person and a civic person; about reading during grief, and not-reading during grief.  Prior to all of this, I’d been working on a collection of essays about our reading culture (and everything that’s wrong with it) along with a second novel, but increasingly the books I’d begun writing (and in the case of the essays, practically finished) in 2019 started to feel like transmissions from another planet when I was trying to edit