A Year in Reading: Ruth Madievsky

2023 was the most surreal and intimidating year of my adult life. I was going to have my first baby! I was going to publish my first novel! I was going to have my first baby three months before publishing my first novel!

I committed to All-Night Pharmacy book launches all over the country, willing my unborn baby to be chill enough to drag across tarnation. I learned that my low platelets might prevent me from getting an epidural, and proceeded to tell everyone I knew that I refused to raw dog labor.

I was still haunted by my seventh grade Health teacher playing a video of childbirth and joking, “If you don’t like the baby, you can always return it.” I will never forget how the mother’s vagina sucked the baby back in like a monstrous vacuum.

Consumed with unease about labor, how to be a good parent, and whether the novel I’d spent nine years working on would find its readers made escaping into the world of books more necessary than ever. Also, third trimester had me winded simply from eating an apple. Reading in bed—already my favorite activity—reached god-tier status.

This year, I mostly read books by my contemporaries. I wanted to luxuriate with my peers and support their work—we fucking did it. My record keeping got shoddy after my baby was born (I hustled my way into getting the epidural, by the way), but I think I read 50-60 books this year. Many of these reading sessions happened while nursing or while my baby napped on me, and my relationship with these books feels extra intimate for that reason.

When I read, I underline the sentences I wish I’d written, the images that grabbed me by the throat. I record these in a notebook, which I turn to when my writing needs defibrillation. Below is a brief selection of memorable lines from my 2023 in reading. Instead of telling you why you should read these books, I’ll let the authors speak for themselves in their darkly funny, inimitable voices. Together, they make a chaotic, dreamy poem that speaks to the times we’re living in.

“I felt wet, porous, as if the world were washing in and out of me, a nudity of the soul.”

—Vauhini Vara, This Is Salvaged

“Do you think being ruled by dictators and fighting each other on mountains is in our DNA?”

—Nazli Koca, The Applicant

“We came with our own talismans—jade, bronze—protections against a city that didn’t live up to our expectation”

—Mai Nardone, Welcome Me to The Kingdom

“We don’t think in economic cycles, we don’t think in election cycles, we don’t think in presidential administrations…we think in earth time. Geological time. There’s no short-term problem we can’t wait out”

—Lydia Kiesling, Mobility

“Worker solidarity in the United States is literally political theater.”

—Tembe Denton-Hurst, Homebodies

“Fraulein Agata switched her allegiances easily. An imperial general, a Socialist revolutionary, it was all equally exciting.”

—Katya Apekina, Mother Doll (available for preorder!)

“But curiosity, mixed with something else, made me turn to her and ask if she would show me them, her beautiful breasts, what I called them…to make it seem more like a joke than something serious. As her closest friend, I felt I should see as much of Klara as some boy who barely knew her; a part of me felt that it was my right to see all of her.”

—Alexandra Chang, Tomb Sweeping

“Sometimes I took an upper and she took a downer, or vice versa. But we preferred coordinating, like dressing up our minds in little matching outfits.”

—Ben Purkert, The Men Can’t Be Saved

“She told herself she couldn’t blame Claudia for stealing her husband, given how few healthy men were left after the war.”

—Sasha Vasilyuk, Your Presence is Mandatory (available for preorder!)

“In more honesty, more New Year’s gleam, I admitted I was looking for women to be kind to me by being mean, and to have sex with me, as well as breakfast.”

—Marissa Higgins, A Good Happy Girl (available for preorder!)

“Things my mother left me: Three wooden jewelry boxes, mostly filled with earrings she had stopped wearing. Pictures of every house she lived in. A raku vase and bowl. A pink needlepoint heart I made for her in grade school. Every card, note, and drawing my daughters ever sent her.”

—Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy

“assuring various robots that I’m not a robot several times daily.”

—Alina Pleskova, Toska

“I love and cherish my ability to desire…[but] I’ve found a great amount of peace in the phrase, ‘That’s enough, thanks.’”

—Katy Kelleher, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things

More from A Year in Reading 2023

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