I keep a spreadsheet that lists every book I’ve read since 2010. It’s the most consistent and representative record of my life that I have—a life spent reading. I can look back and see that I spent the summer of 2015 reading or rereading Jane Austen novels, and the summer of 2016, all of Sarah Waters’ historical lesbian romances. 2017 was James Baldwin and 2019 was Edith Wharton. I can pinpoint the first appearance of any author in the spreadsheet, remember the thrill of discovery, see their name dotted across the subsequent years like an old friend. Specific books are connected to where I encountered them: the neighborhood bookstores I browse between errands (Secret Garden Bookshop and Magnolia’s Bookstore), the destination bookstores I travel to specifically on the weekends (Elliott Bay Book Company and Third Place Books Ravenna), the bookstores in distant cities I visited while touring. I buy my niece books for Christmas every year, and the spreadsheet shows my December vetting change from middle-grade novels to YA to crime thrillers as she’s grown.
I can see the influences on my writing, what I was reading before and during work on each of my own books. The last book I read before beginning my recent story collection, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, was Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang; the final story written was inspired by one in Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry by Elizabeth McCracken.
The year after my father died, I read very few books, mostly about grief. I remember throwing The Year of Magical Thinking across the room in despair. The column for 2012 is anomalously short, a blank spot where my father used to be.
My first or last read of every year is the annual Best American Essays anthology. In his introduction to the 2022 volume, editor Alexander Chee writes that he lost the ability to read books during the first year of COVID. He struggled to feel reading and writing were the right response to the death and catastrophe all around him:
By January of 2021 I had lost faith in even the idea that writing might improve anything between people… Was the sort of person who might someday push me off a train platform for being Asian really going to be changed by a personal essay, or an op-ed?
2020 is the second shortest column in my spreadsheet, besting only the period immediately after the loss of my father. Early on, when I thought the pandemic would be a temporary blip, I thought we were mainly being called upon to endure. For me, even the lightest, most escapist reads require active construction, a kind of collaboration between me and the writer—to hear their voice, imagine their worlds, respond to their ideas, fill in the gaps as needed. Reading is a joyful but demanding exercise. Other media killed time more viciously and effectively, while asking nothing of me. I could turn off my brain and wait.
As the months wore on, however, my brain started to feel physiologically different, slower to comprehend ink on the page, my attention always drifting. A book I would have once read in a weekend now took weeks. And as the news grew darker and darker, I—like Chee—came to see reading as a hopeful activity in a hopeless time. Reading required me to believe in the value of aesthetic pleasure and the utility of my mind, the life of the mind in general. To believe in the future. And I wasn’t sure I did.
But in the summer of 2021, newly vaccinated, I entered a business that wasn’t a grocery store or pharmacy for the first time in a year. It was the Elliott Bay Book Company. When I felt ready to reenter the world, a bookstore was the first place I went.
Chee found making his anthology selections an ultimately “recuperative act.” He quotes David Wojnarowicz on the value of art that isn’t explicitly political: “We’re being angry and complaining because we have to, but where we want to go is back to beauty. If you let go of that, we don’t have anywhere to go.”
On that day in 2021, I stared up at the tall cedar shelves, full of new books by old favorites, books by authors I’d yet to discover, a thousand potential moments of unlikely connection, infinite experiences that transcend the limits of my one body and life. It felt like a homecoming.
It would be a lie to say my ability to read returned full force in that one moment. Like everything else this past couple of years, it returned slowly, in fits and starts, two steps forward and one step back. But the 2022 column in my spreadsheet is a lush garden, equal to its pre-pandemic peers, and I am boundlessly grateful to the booksellers who make bookstores into these welcoming nexuses of beauty, meaning, and possibility, for their role in the world of letters to which I have devoted my life. And with this award, I’m even more grateful that they have chosen to recognize and celebrate my own little space on their shelves.
Celebrate Kim Fu and the other winners of 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Awards with the virtual event on Zoom Feb 9, 2023 at 6:00 PM Pacific Time. REGISTER NOW.
NWbooklovers posts original essays from this year’s award winners as featured posts in January and February. You can enjoy essays from past winners of the PNBA Book Award in our archive.