I wasn’t going to write a year-in-reading post. A year is too arbitrary a measure in the longer arc of reading. The phases of my reading life unfold more slowly, shaped by periods of absorption and quiet shifts. It is five in the morning in Beijing. The city is quiet. I am reading through a Japanese IP address to reach this space.
I’ve left a trace of the past decade here. Not a deliberate record, but something that formed slowly. I followed certain books without knowing why, left others behind without regret. The shape only became visible in retrospect. I wouldn’t have been able to say why I read when I began. For a while, I thought it was to see through another’s eyes. That idea no longer holds. Reading matters not because it grants access to another mind, but because it reveals something that cannot be directly named.
Jon Fosse approaches it: “Some authors know that they don’t know, yet they still have the feeling of knowing something which cannot be known, something which cannot be pronounced as meaning, but which perhaps despite everything can be said through literature.”
It is not a matter of elegant books. Ten years ago, I might have defended such things. Now, I look for what resists explanation: when a voice emerges that does not instruct or entertain but unsettles. The trace that remains after the sentence ends.
This year, Maria Gabriela Llansol’s Geography of Rebels trilogy became the centre of that search. Her writing shifted how I read and how I attend. The distinction between world and language began to blur. These symbols on a page, like a kind of Lascaux, invite interpretation and quietly alter the one who reads.
It was a sustained year of reading. Not transformative in any final sense, but steadying, and at moments clarifying. I do not know who I would be without these books. But I have learned to stay with that not-knowing.
I love what you’ve written here, Anthony, especially this idea of who a person might be without the books that have made their way into one’s brain – what a curious, fun, awful thought. Thank goodness for all the enchanted texts.
It’s possibly a nightmare, a different variation of that Joanna Walsh short story.. Thanks, Michelle.
I like the Jon Fosse quote. When a writer tries to hard to “explain” truth, I think we sense it and recoil somewhat. But those who keep the un-knowing aspect of lived, human truth in their works, without preaching, are the ones that speak to me.
that’s “too” hard, obviously.