This morning, as I set the breakfast eggs to boil, I heard the chatter of men outside my kitchen window. My kitchen window faces on to the stem of the “H” of the building in which I live, a kind of courtyard-cum-shrubbery landscape lovingly tended by my neighbor Rose and the various women she gently persuades into to help her, a group I call the “gardening brigade,” a group to whom I do not add my skills, but I have none in that regard.

These men were no friends of Rose’s. They shuffled against the cold with the air of aimless purpose of men brought together to do A JOB. In this case, the JOB was to undo a rather stupid earlier job, namely, to remove a series of four trees planted in the middle of the sidewalk on 29^th Street.

You may have read about these trees here or here or here.

I saw them last Thursday, when I ventured out to the drug store upon feeling the swelling of my glands. I knew a cold was coming on and I wanted to get provisioned before I was confined by it. I stopped to take a photo of this sapling planted in the middle of the concrete sidewalk, a location of doom, and then set off to get medication, thinking no more of it until I ran into my neighbor Hannah, who asked me about the trees. I knew nothing more about the trees than any other hapless resident but pointed out that in a few years when the trees grew (if they were permitted to grow), their roots would begin to disrupt the sidewalk, as has already happened on 31^st Avenue, in particular the sidewalks abutting the Trinity Lutheran Church.

Then I went home to sniffle into the New Year.

From my laptop on my couch, I typed out my year in reading list for 2023. It struck me as scant. There were many, many books I did not finish last year. I did not finish several poetry books — a few by friends — because it takes me forever to read a book of poetry. I managed the two by Ada Limon only because I was in a wonderful class held by Soapstone where I was easily the least poetry-literate and had to cram to keep up.

I don’t see how a book of poetry can be a page-turner. I’ve never understood the Sealey Challenge — a book of poetry a day for an entire month. A single poem a day would be a lot for me. I am a very slow reader of a poem, and books taken even longer, because I need to think about how the poems are in conversation with one another. Or maybe I am still a novice. Or maybe there is no maybe about that.

Other reasons I did not finish — I was reading the book for research and did not need to know all the particulars of, say, the life of John Winthrop, or the entire history of the coffee industry. Or at least I could skim it, for my purposes. And sometimes I didn’t finish a book because the book did not compel me to finish. There are more books out there awaiting attention. 

So without further ado — the list for 2023. Italics means I reviewed it somewhere, and bold means it was a favorite.

Nonfiction
Crying in H Mart – Michelle Zauner 
What Are You Looking At – Will Gompertz
Jersey Breaks – Robert Pinsky
Cary Grant’s Suit – Todd McEwen
Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
Voice First – Sonya Huber
Love and Industry – Sonya Huber
How to Kill a City – Peter Moskowitz
Women We Buried, Women We Burned – Rachel Louise Snyder
Old in Art School – Nell Painter
The Third Rainbow Girl – Emma Copley Eisenberg
The Slip – Prudence Peiffer
Fires in the Dark – Kay Redfield Jamison
Is There God After Prince – Peter Coviello
The Red Parts – Maggie Nelson
St. Marks is Dead – Ada Calhoun

Fiction
The Girls in Queens – Christina Kandic Torres
Babel – R.F. Kuang
Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion – Bushra Rehman
The Cloisters – Katy Hays
Boundless as the Sky – Dawn Raffel
Forbidden Notebook – Alba de Cespedes
The Only Woman in the Room – Marie Benedict
Take What You Need – Indra Novey
Yellowface – R.F. Kuang
Anatomy of a Blackbird – Claire McMillan
All Among the Barley – Melissa Harrison
Normal Rules Don’t Apply – Kate Atkinson
I Have Some Questions for You – Rebecca Makkai
One Woman Show – Christine Coulson
Now is Not the Time to Panic – Kevin Wilson
The Wren, The Wren – Anne Enright

Mysteries
A Time to Kill – Anthony Horowitz
The Twelfth Night Murder – Anne Rutherford
The Bandit Queens – Parini Shraff
The Locked Room – Elly Griffiths
The Stranger Diaries — Elly Griffiths

Poetry
The Gospel According to Wild Indigo – Cyril Cassells
The Hurting Kind – Ada Limon
The Carrying – Ada Limon

I hope when I repeat this post in 2024 that I will report that I have read more entire books of poetry, cleared some of my research shelf, and banged out a draft of dog cafe. Until then, maybe all your trees remain where you plant them!