A Year in Reading: Vauhini Vara

At the beginning of this year, we were living in Madrid and reliant, for our English-language reading, on what everyone referred to as the American Library but is formally called the Library of the International Institute of Madrid. My 7-year-old and I would visit almost every weekend; he’d read and play with the Spanish children visiting to practice their English, while I browsed the stacks. It’s a smallish membership-based library, largely stocked with books donated by members, and so I took what I’s , a novel that had never before interested me. It was a simpler book than I’d been led to believe, about a man’s affair with his friend’s wife. It was actually great. I devoured it the way I devour any story—written or otherwise—about someone’s affair with their friend’s wife. I should not, I told myself afterward, be so prejudiced against canonical white male writers.