2015 was an eventful year, to put things mildly. I lumbered into it heavy with child, in mid-March I gave birth to a bundle of joy, and post-mid-March has been spent living with said bundle of joy—an experience filled for the most part with elation, excitement, and gratefulness, with a good dose of exhaustion, frustration, and terror.

In other news, I completed the manuscript of my second novel, worked with my publisher to see my first novel The Oddfits through the final stages of editing and proofing (it comes out on February 1, 2016!), and filled in remaining cracks with a few smaller projects—translation, writing, and editing. Chaos took the opportunity to reign supreme in our apartment. What you could see of the apartment between the eternal hillocks of yet-to-be-folded laundry.

Don’t look at the bathroom. For the love of God, don’t look at the bathroom.

And somehow, thankfully, I managed to read. In hindsight, reading is perhaps what kept me sane…if it could be called sanity. Audiobooks were useful when I didn’t have a hand free but still needed to be in motion. And it was nice to be read to, though my choices were hardly the stuff comforting bedtime stories are made of. With the relentless cynicism of Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh cackling in my ears, I saw the world’s cheeks drained of their rosy hue; and I cackled along. Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower took me by the hand, led me up the stairs, and pushed me off the roof. Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son set me adrift on a nightmarish sea, the pitching so constant, however, that I almost felt as if I were being rocked in a cradle. READ MORE…