A Year in Reading: Alexandra Tanner
This year my attention span was worse than ever; I found myself actually stopping to watch when one of those split-screen TikToks with a really intense Grey’s Anatomy scene playing on one side while someone cuts soap or scoops slime out of a bucket on the other side would come up on my feed. I’m as worried for my own brain as I am for the brains of all the Roblox babies and Carbone waitlist girlies out there. For that reason, I had to really entice myself to read by gamifying the process, by reading several things at once, by allowing myself to spend time with books in an intentional way.
My first and favorite read of the year was ’s , a slim novel charting the life of a woman coming of age and finding community of pacifist anabaptists who live on communes across the globe). announced in January that they were releasing a very limited print run; I hit “order” really fast and started reading as soon as it came in the mail. Sweet, frightening, painful, and the most emotionally intricate, detail-luxuriant book I’ve read in an age. A hardcover, I believe, is out from Riverhead next year; I’m dying for a wider slice of the world to discover this book and worship Riley as she deserves to be worshipped. A week or so after I finished reading, I found myself, by chance, in a room with five or six Bruderhof women; stunned by fate, concerned I was in a simulation, I told them about Riley’s novel. They thrilled and said they’d try to order it for their book club and wondered aloud how much they’d find it “got right” about their world. Then they invited me to come to their hof for an overnight, just to see what it was really like; I gave them my phone number and I told them and, in that moment, I meant it.
