November/December was a little bit of a wash reading-wise. I trudged my way through two more books for my book reviewer side hustle, and continued to enjoy Moby-Dick but there’s so much of it! Then I downloaded Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties and devoured it and felt alternately amazing and awful, like drinking too much whiskey and feeling really understood and then really sad. Then I remembered why I even read in first place: not for school anymore, not for work, not for money. For love.
So here are the books I loved this year–in haiku, because I blogged about most of them before.
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Learn why so many
old tales are of woman’s pain;
live anyway. Love too.
What is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi
Roses, romance, rare
books, things stolen or yearned for,
and their high, high cost.
Queen Sugar by Natalie Baszile
Who knew that sweat, blood,
sex, beauty, intensity
could become sweetness.
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Wars are not only
fought on the battlefield, but
at tea, in marriages.
In the Woods and Broken Harbor by Tana French
Give me a murder,
a troubled cop, a bent rule–
that’s a good story.
The Witches of New York by Ami McKay.
Few things can’t be healed
with the right tea, a mantra,
and a woman’s touch.
What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah
And who among us
has not fashioned a clay child
or solved grief with math?
Home by Nnedi Okorafor
What’s more alien:
tentacled beings from space or
the village girl, their friend.
Coming up soon: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor, the third novella in the Binti series; Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng; a bunch of paperbacks I picked up off the ARC table.
Sara Davis 
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