A Year in Reading: Daniel Loedel
2020 was a year of events. Though time became warped when we went into isolation, it remained hugely punctuated on the global level: the pandemic, the protests, the election. On the personal level, it was the same, at least for me; I can tell you where I was emotionally every month, and by the same token what I was reading, since the two are often inextricable.
2021 was a different beast. Blurrier, seemingly blander, much more limbo-esque. January is one of the only months I can report anything definitive about without consulting my journal or work calendar. News-wise there was the coup and the mounting death rates. Me-wise there was the publication of my first novel. All of it chaotic and frightening, and for my pleasure’s which in its strange way was incredibly reassuring. First, probably, because it took me into a mind so radically not my own; and second because it was so removed from the narrow-minded arguments of the present and so undaunted in its tackling of the big questions—what does it mean to be human? To be ? No other novelist today seems to me to produce work so timeless. That month I also read ’s and, for the first time, ’s . A brutal love story set against deep New England snows, it was a perfect companion for the dark days of winter.
