A Year in Reading: Santiago Jose Sanchez

I read very little this year. I was living by myself for the first time and learning that the longer you’re alone the harder it is to not be alone. When I wasn’t on my phone for six hours a day, I was stoned out of my mind and streaming every single episode of Survivor I could find online. For much of the summer and early fall, as I finished my first novel, I avoided reading altogether to protect this book from my bottomless need for comparison; it’s impossible, when you’re an immigrant, to not notice everything you’re not. But now that my novel has sold, I feel ready to take risks as I haven’t since my early 20s. I want more books, more sex, more writing, more love. There is so much more to life than protecting myself from—and I hate to say this—myself. The following are the few books that managed to draw me into the world, when all I wanted was to curl into a ball and forget I was human.

’s—January, my first book of the year. Sharma’s deceptively simple sentences and bewildering transitions were a map for huge grief at a time when my mind