Year in Reading

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: this year, my debut book was published, but I also contracted thyroid cancer and a number of autoimmune ailments, which ranged from aggravating to genuinely alarming. Suddenly, my life was an exercise in managing my body, just as much a bureaucratic ordeal as an anatomical one. I was lucky—I had good healthcare, an understanding boss, and a curable kind of early-stage cancer—but that didn’t prevent me from feeling frayed and fatigued and enormously sorry for myself. On the bright side, I had a lot of time for books, since I was forever atrophying in one waiting room or another.