A Year in Reading: Ruth Ozeki

Whenever I’m asked to list books I’ve read, my mind goes blank. I used to blame this on childhood test-taking trauma. Later, I blamed it on hormones or hangovers, and still later, I blamed it on age. These days, I mostly blame the pandemic and the way it has smeared discrete experiences into an undifferentiated blur.

Writing a novel has a similar blurring effect on my reading, especially when I’m nearing the end, by which point I am so immersed in my own fictional world that I’m unable to engage deeply with other worlds, other characters, or other books.

This spring, I finished The Book of Form and Emptiness, a novel that had taken me eight years to write. The moment I sent in the copyedited manuscript, I felt a surge of relief and headed to my bookshelf.  Finally, I was free to read again. 

I celebrated my liberation with , ’s newest novel about a near-human doll who aspires to human sentience and autonomy. I was scheduled to have an online conversation with Ishiguro in March as part of his virtual book tour, and so I decided to has long been a favorite, and I re-read that with pleasure, followed by and finally . I was halfway through  when my own page proofs arrived, demanding my full and immediate attention, so I never finished, but I did read Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize speech and later watched it online. I felt like I was in school again, diving deeply into an author’s work, tracking the way he plays with genre and form, and the way his novels shape-shift around a thematic core, which many of them share.