A Year in Reading: Mina Seçkin

I started the year out with Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell, who ingeniously explores how the body can liberate itself in our digital age. My favorite kind of novel is one where a woman does something terrible, so I was thrilled to read Tampa by Alissa Nutting next. 

I had moved to Los Angeles near the end of 2020, for reasons I still don’t quite understand. I believe I wanted to miss New York, the only place I’d ever lived, the only place I ever thought I could live, and a place that was no longer giving me much joy. With my day job remote, it felt like the right time to exile myself from Brooklyn (I had also been living at home with my parents, even before the pandemic). Moving to a new city during a pandemicby on the concrete shore of the Los Angeles river, which suited the climate apocalypse at the center of this brilliant novel. Is there any water in L.A?, I wondered, reading about the narrator’s ancestor and the elusive body of water he sought in Australia. Then I read by and by —both sublime in their focus on belonging and the ills of the United States.