A Year in Reading: Delia Cai

I began 2022 completely out of touch with reality. There were obvious, immediate reasons for this: I was just finishing a kind of improvised book leave where I’d submerged myself for a month in the final edits for my novel. That same month coincided with the height of the pandemic’s winter omicron wave, which meant I’d also been physically cloistering myself at home, with nothing but the echos in my own head and the bass-heavy thudding of my downstair neighbor’s seemingly endless rotation of dinner and karaoke parties. On one hand, I’d never felt more artistically fulfilled. On the other hand, I’d also