There were many books to celebrate this year, among them the fearsome, the comforting, the sparks and the alarms. Here are twelve books that I loved, that hurt the best and unwrapped something true and real. 

FICTION

It's been a year of magical realism, of blurred lines and blurred genres, of shifting realities and fluctuating desires. A year that sits in uncertainty, in liminality and disorientation, and finds comfort in it. Read Tanya Tagaq's Split Tooth to open yourself entirely, split your ribs apart and touch your wettest parts to the cold night air. Read Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval for a twisting, decomposing love that leaves nothing in its original shape, a tense successor to Bergman's Persona. Let these authors, both musicians, fill your mouth and pull you into visceral, tactile, textured depths. 

Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater is more preoccupied with the mind, and the many selves that coexist, protect and attack, create and destroy. A novel at the nexus of past and present, earth and spirit, the dangers of duality are never ignored. In Northwood, by Maryse Meijer, the boundaries between the desiring and the desired fray, leaving wounds filled but never healed with words. And Daniel Ortberg's The Merry Spinster offers perverse parables, tangled fairytales proffering pearls from the ocean muck.

GRAPHIC NOVELS

Nick Drnaso's Sabrina (well worthy of a Man Booker nomination) embraces the entirety of the political moment, pressing, distilling, until one woman, one life, and one death emerges, expansive yet intimate. Woman World, by Aminder Dhaliwal, looks much further forward, finding the point of light necessary in the darkness and offering softness, sweetness, laughter.

Aisha Franz's Shit is Real is all future landscapes and technologically-mediated lives. Liana Finck's Passing for Human exists in the small moments, in the architecture of home and the secrets of our shadow selves. In Why Art? by Eleanor Davis the hypothetical becomes real and life is breathed into creation as artists gather to weather a storm. There is distance and disconnect in all three; the question of how to exist in the world and feel a part of it remains vague on the tips of fingers. 

 NONFICTION

Read Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel for essays that sit with you.  Feel their weight and roll them around inside you. Savour and consider and come away a more careful thinker. Read Call Them by Their True Names, Rebecca Solnit's latest, for political commentary of the most incisive kind, written with so much kindness and mercilessness that it seems impossible.