Good morning everyone,

I hope you are well. I hope you are looking forward to my books of the year!

Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters

Let me tell you about my grandmother. My mum’s mum, that is; I’ll tell you about my dad’s mum another time. My mum’s mum would always read the last page of a book first, to see if it had a happy ending. If it didn’t, she wouldn’t read it, on the grounds that it was a waste of time to read all the way through a book just to get to a sad ending. I’ve spent almost three decades being sniffy about this habit – PERFECT ART CAN BE UNCOMFORTABLE, GRAN – but for the first time understood the impulse as I read Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby. It geniunely occurred to me that I could stop forty pages before the end, never finish it, just imagine that the life I wanted for its characters was the life they got. All of this is to say, Detransition, Baby is my book of the year and one of the most emotionally involving novels I have ever read. I’m not going to tell you whether or not my Gran Dot would have liked it, but I can absolutely guarantee that you will. It is, if this means anything to you, all of the things I love about Iris Murdoch. Kind, flawed characters. Good jokes. Emotional truth. You need this book.

Square Haunting – Francesca Wade

Square Haunting is a beautiful book about women finding their place in the world, and using Mecklenburgh Square as a base from which they find that place in the world. It told me new things about women I already knew about, and introduced me to some brand new women as well. This is a non fiction book with a clear argument in a tight field; it's clever without being overbearing and charming without being sickly. You should read this book if you like social histories, intellectual histories or the early twentieth century, and also if you are thinking of writing non-fiction. There's so much here.

Family Lexicon – Natalia Ginzburg

Surely everyone knows and can delineate the way that (for example) every member of their family sulks on holidays, but this sort of thing rarely written about and, I'm going to say, never so well written about as it was by Natalia Ginzburg. Her incredible gift is to take all of this… not quite everyday, but day-in day-out stuff – jokes and little habits and moments of grace and rage – and make it into something that's lovely and sad to read.

Priestdaddy – Patricia Lockwood

Kind of the Taylor Swift's Folklore of my books of the year list, I know that you have already read this or feel like you don't have to because the discourse has caught you up on the key themes. I'm not sure that the discourse has, though! Incredibly, given that the title tells you directly that it's about the Christian church, I didn't go into expecting new insights into my faith, and in fact I got several new insights into my faith and the transformations that love and faith facilitate and demand. And what happens when we don't meet the insistent demands of love and faith. I know you know it's funny, and yeah, it's also really funny. But the jokes aren't the things I remember the most.

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nicki Greenberg

I encountered The Great Gatsby in several ways this year, and this comic is the one that stayed with me the most and opened up the most about the text for me. Nicki Greenberg imagines each of the characters as a weird, often invertebrate, sometimes imaginary creature. Gatsby is a seahorse! Nick is a slug (ha!) and Tom is a hairy chested demon thing. It's so good, and it feels completely new and fresh.

Also, this isn't fully a part of my books of the year list, but did you read The Babysitter's Club books when you were a kid? Do you remember Mallory, who was the bookish one? In the book in which she was introduced, she said she was reading All Quiet on the Western Front, but that she was finding it boring. I remember, at the time, being highly critical of the way she was reading, and even thinking that maybe she was a bit young to be embarking on that particular book, but somehow also I absorbed the idea that All Quiet is not very good. If you too have allowed an IMAGINARY ELEVEN YEAR OLD to shape your literary tastes, let me tell you right now that I read All Quiet on the Western Front this year and it was straight up fantastic, not the only work of fiction I read about the First World War this year but absolutely the best. I can't believe I waited all this time. If you are writing a young adult novel, don't try to put your readers off reading classics of world literature! Your words matter.

Hey I will see you next on Christmas Eve!!! EXCITED.

A xxx.