A Year in Reading: Morgan Thomas

This year, I read for relation. I began the year grieving the end of a close friendship. I end it living with a partner for the first time. Throughout these months, I’ve turned to story, as I always do, for advice about life, for models of family and togetherness. As I reflected on the year’s reading though, I started to think beyond the relationships described in books to consider the relationships between books. How do the books I read relate and speak to one another?

I read books in pairs. A poem interspersed with a few sections of a novel. An alternating pattern of one short story, one essay. These pairs are determined by the whims of my local library and the shelves of nearby booksellers. I rarely choose two books