A Year in Reading: Vanessa Veselka
I grew up in New York and all year thought of the library across the street from my childhood with its library flag and librarian who told our four-grade class that Turkish fairytales started with Once there was and twice there wasn’t… This is how I hope we will speak of 2020. I have been lucky where others haven’t, but because I am a human, I don’t feel spared. This may also be because I work at a nursing home workers’ union and the wrongness of what we do to poor people is on full display.
At the height of the pandemic in New York, I desperately missed the city and wanted to move back, but it is still true that I cannot afford to live in the city I grew up in. Some of the books I read this year, I first read there years ago.
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
After several’s novels over two weeks in my late teens. Reading them altogether they became one novel, full of wide-open-beavers, overlooked-novelists, spree-shooters, spaceships, and a deep and sometimes illustrated critique of patriotism, capitalism, and war.
