At the end of 2021, I jotted down a few notes on readings from the year – they draw a circle around themes of spirit, the body, art-making – the mystery and complications in how these things hang together:

• This year, I indulged in a lot of re-reads. I think it was a combination of comfort-seeking and realizing that my memory was actually kind of hazy on some of the books I tell people are “favorites”.
• Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton and Agnes Martin: Making Space for the Sacred by Joanna Weber feel like inverses to me. The first is about spirituality, but written in a way that made me think about practicing art – and the second is about art that clears a ground for spirituality. Can art be a devotion made physical?
• Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder is one of those books I was bound to read: the woman, the artist, the existential angst. (lol) It explored motherhood and artistry and embodiedness in a way that was unexpected and unsettlingly (as in, activated my gag reflex a few times) memorable.
• I took Getting to Center by Marlee Grace as a sort of workbook to kick off my year, which is a nice way to engage it.
• After seeing Lucille Clifton poems here and there, I finally read a collection of her work – which was so worth the deep dive. The introduction (by Toni Morrison) described her work this way, “for Clifton there’s no split between the body, the spirit, and the intellect: no ideas but in the body.”

The books listed in bold stood out to me for one reason or another, and asterisks (*) indicate a re-read.

• Getting to Center: Pathways to Finding Yourself Within the Great Unknown, Marlee Grace
• Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna, China Galland
• Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie
• *My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
• *Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems, Mary Oliver
• *Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang
• Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis, Dean Spade
• *The Gift of Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
• All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson
• Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief, Claire Bidwell Smith
• The Incendiaries, R.O. Kwon
• *East of Eden, John Steinbeck
• The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010, Lucille Clifton
• Woman No. 17, Edan Lepucki
• Bon Appatempt: A Coming-of-Age Story, Amelia Morris
• Chroma: A Book of Color, Derek Jarman
• The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie
• Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy, Angela Garbes
• Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free, Linda Kay Klein
• A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Karen Armstrong
• The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes
• The Murder on the Links, Agatha Christie
• *Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill
• *Vermeer in Bosnia: Selected Writings, Lawrence Weschler
• Let’s Talk About Hard Things, Anna Sale
• The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver
• Last Things, Jenny Offill
• Grand Union: Stories, Zadie Smith
• Pigs in Heaven, Barbara Kingsolver
• The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence
• *The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
• Contemplative Prayer, Thomas Merton
• Swimming Studies, Leanne Shapton
• Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, Angela Chen
• *The Eight Limbs of Yoga: A Handbook for Living Yoga Philosophy, Stuart Ray Sarbacker and Kevin Kimple
• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie
• Nightbitch, Rachel Yoder
• The Mystery of the Blue Train, Agatha Christie
• This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, Naomi Klein
• Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Caroline Fraser
• A Giacometti Portrait, James Lord
• The Energy of Prayer: How to Deepen Your Spiritual Practice, Thich Nhat Hanh
• All Our Happy Days Are Stupid, Sheila Heti
• Agnes Martin: Making Space for the Sacred, Joanna Weber
• Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, Deborah Feldman
• The Ninth Hour, Alice McDermott
• The Body’s Question, Tracy K. Smith
• *Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life, Emily Nagoski
• Warlight, Michael Ondaatje
• *The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems, Marie Howe