38 books for 38 years

Happy solstice, beloveds. I love this time of year: the winter cold has settled in here in New York City, and as of last night, we are regaining light. Also, it’s my birthday.

In lieu of writing an essay about the solstice holiday, I thought that instead, I’d share 38 books for 38 years. We are in a literacy crisis where writers are out here talking about how they don’t read, and so I thought I’d reflect on — and celebrate! — the books that have shaped me as a person. They are broken down by era, sort of. Can’t wait to hear which ones are your favorites, too.

I wrote a whole essay for NYLON years ago about how this book shaped my nascent childhood feminism.

There is a direct line between my love for fairy tale reimaginings and Levine’s work. Also, she once responded to an IG comment congratulating me on becoming a published author, and I have never so deeply cherished a response from an author in my life. Like ma’am, I am an author in part because of you!

I wrote so many short stories in elementary and middle school that were basically Nancy Drew fanfiction. I loved that she solved mysteries with her two best friends. I loved everything. This one was my favorite, and I still have my childhood copy.

My obsession with the Hellenistic period has roots in this novel about Cleopatra. And my love of historical fiction, generally, is largely due to the Dear America series and the aforementioned Cushman’s work.

I have to acknowledge the Bible when I do reflections like this — I grew up in a devout evangelical household and was an eager student of scripture. It’s notable to me that the Book of Esther — only one of two books about a woman, and the only book that does not explicitly reference God — was always my favorite.

I won’t link to She Who Shall Not Be Named’s work, because she will never get another cent from me.

But rather like the Bible, I cannot reflect on my history of reading without acknowledging how deeply the series informed my creative life. I started writing Harry Potter fanfiction in high school, and those were the first novels I ever finished. My first creative community was with fandom writers. The first writers’ retreat I ever went on, in my early twenties, was with those same fandom writers. I wouldn’t be the writer I am, or the writer on the internet I am, without that experience — which was grounded in a shared love of the books and a predictable identification with Hermione Granger.

Another problematic author, another book I loved as an early teen that profoundly shaped my creative interests and showed me what was possible when you blended myth with fantasy and romantic elements.

Are you sensing a theme? Historical fiction + fantasy [elements] + romance = my favorite thing in the world. Oh, but how I loved the Outlander series (or at least the first five books). As a devout evangelical teenager, I, uhh, learned a lot about sex from this series. Which was maybe not the best thing? I stopped reading after the fifth book because Gabaldon’s use of rape as a plot device is just unrelenting and brutal, but another series I reread countless times that informed my artistic interest.

Side note: the books always had very discreet covers, so my mom didn’t know how explicit they were until she watched the TV adaptation decades later. And she was promptly horrified at how young I’d been when I first read them.

Crusie’s entire oeuvre could be on here: I fucking loved her rom coms. Welcome to Temptation remains my favorite — it is a PERFECT, I repeat PERFECT romance novel — but it also introduced me to Crusie’s other writing. In the 2000s and 2010s, she was a prolific essayist, writing about literature and romance in popular culture. Her critical work on the romance genre (she’s also an ex-academic) directly impacted my thesis work in undergrad.

WTT remains singular among my romance faves because while I usually struggleeeeeee with the believability of cross-class romances (as someone who grew up white trash working class), but this one is just chefs kiss.

Gory, lush, uncomfortable, violent, sexually raw fairy tale retellings. I’ve been rereading this short story collection for almost twenty years and still find something new every time. Genius.

Finding out that Sexton abused her daughter was… hard. Really hard, especially given how deeply her “Rapunzel” poem (about mother-daughter incest) has informed my understanding of that story over the years. Another one where I can’t not mention the influence this had on me, it was so profound. Also, the “Snow White” poem is just. Ugh. Also so informative to how I write fantasy.

So this book is considered quite outdated these days, but when I was in school, it was one of the most potent and powerful examples of feminist literary analysis I’d ever read. It really influenced the direction my research would take later on as a doctoral student.

Lahiri’s debut short story collection won the Pulitzer, but what struck me, reading it as an 18-year-old, was how much I related to her characters. Many of them are ordinary people, working people. As a white working class girl in the Midwest, I was wildly removed from their circumstances, but it’s one of the first times I remember so profoundly connecting with contemporary characters who didn’t obviously resemble me or my family.

I didn’t read Austen’s last novel until undergrad, and wow, did it shift my perspective on her work. Also, I love a second chance romance.

Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic” is one of the most important texts of my life. She changed the way I thought about… so much. Just so much. Engagement with her work was integral to deconstructing my whiteness and the role of compulsory heterosexuality in my religious history.

Norris’s entire oeuvre is important to my deconstruction of Christianity, which started while I was still doing monastic retreats in college. She was the first writer I read who wrote about God without proselytizing. Amazing Grace was the first of her books I read, and it remained a dog-eared and battered reference throughout my journey out of faith.

Okay, not a novel. But this short story has lived in my head rent-free since I first read it 20 years ago. I quote it all the time.

I wrote a twenty-page paper on this book specifically for PhD applications, and it worked. I remain obsessed with Smith’s life story; she was one of the most important women writing during the French Revolution.

In many ways, this is the book that got me out of my abusive first marriage.

I moved out of the apartment I shared with my husband in April 2013. Theoretically, that’s not long ago, but wow was the landscape much smaller when it came to women writing about leaving their husbands because they were gay. This was the only book I could find, and it helped.

Toward the end of ~difficult life events~, my beloved best friend Melissa gave me a Mary Oliver poem, “Landscapes,” first published here. That poem has been a touchstone ever since.

One of the first explicitly queer fairy tale retellings I ever read (it’s Cinderella), I proceeded to teach it to my own undergraduates as a baby gay.

A friend gifted me this my first year in New York, and I don’t think either of us could have anticipated how much it would impact my eventual choice of profession! I had been interested in astrology before, but this book really made things click for me in a powerful way. Still one of my favorites.

The way Kelly writes about her abusive first marriage will change any DV survivor from the inside out. This book gave me language not only for my own marriage, but also for what I witnessed between my own parents growing up. There’s so much kindness and grace she gives to her past self that really showed me, as a budding memoirist, how it could be done. I read this long before meeting Kelly (who is SO LOVELY) in person, and what a gift to get to tell someone how much her book changed your life.

I have so many visceral memories of reading these poems on the train to meet various women I was dating. The “Love” poems in here were a touchstone during my, uhh, tumultuous, slutty years where I was closing down Cubbyhole.

I love this book. I love how Gilbert writes about Creativity as a spirit. Of all the books I’ve bought about craft and creativity, this is the one I’ve read the most, and it’s not even close.

I was still in the early years of playing with what would become Heretic when I first read Abandon Me. I devoured it in one sitting — it just broke my mind open about what memoir could be. Hybrid work, hello. Febos is one of the best memoir writers working today, and this remains my favorite of hers. I reread this once a year.

The day she died, I cried and spent the day tucked under a blanket on the couch reading this book. She made space for so many of us to grieve a religion that harmed us — but that had been home.

More poems. I first discovered Lambert probably like y’all did — her work on the song “Same Love” — but finding out she wrote poems like “Jesus Loves My Crop Top”? Huge. When I first bought the book, I sat in a coffee shop with an old friend and we took turns reading her poems to each other. I quote them at length in Heretic.

I would argue that Novik is one of the greatest SFF writers working today (alongside N.K. Jemisin), and this standalone fairytale-inspired novel is my all-time favorite of hers.

It always feels a little sacrilegious, that the work of Morrison’s I reach for the most is her collection of essays, speeches, and meditations. Her nonfiction is just as lyrical, just as poignant as her fiction.

The first time I tried to read The Argonauts, I was still in graduate school and was so turned off by its experimental hybridity that I quit after the first few pages. But after a few years, after leaving academia, after reading Febos, I finally returned to it, and wow. Some books just don’t land until the reader is ready, and then goddamn do they land.

Academically, I have a lot of issues with Tarnas’s methodology (in that there is a marked lack of one). However. As an ex-academic obsessed with blending astrology with historical and cultural analysis — this is theeeeee book for Nerds Like Us. Tarnas is quite literally the only astrologer doing this kind of work, at this scale, on the public stage. This book very much inspires me and my own ambitions for future astro-historical projects.

What I want all queer romance to be. This story brings me an unparalleled amount of joy. I reread it at least once a year. It is a perfect romance. I aspire to this level of structural perfection.

Machado’s use of the Aarne-Thompson index alone sold me. But in the way that Sundberg’s memoir helped give me language for abuse in my first marriage, Machado’s book helped me begin to acknowledge some abusive dynamics I had, it turns out, also experienced in queer relationships. For which I will always be thankful.

Perhaps the most unconventional pick amongst the books I’ve read that have informed how I show up for chosen family and other friends, but this book just had such a huge impact on me. It helped me understand why hosting matters so much to me (and Meg), and it put words to aspects of social gatherings that I hadn’t before been able to articulate.

My favorite novel of the last few years. Groff’s prose is masterful, and the subject — gay medieval nuns! WHO WERE HISTORICAL PEOPLE — is just chefs kiss. This book hits all my favorite things.

Because it’d be silly to list books that impacted me without naming the hybrid memoir that took so much out of me I quite literally almost died. But I survived the writing (and publishing) of it, and hey — she even got a new subtitle and paperback edition this summer!

Thanks to everyone who has read; your engagement with the work means more than you know.