Hello, writers,
I chose George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo: it wasn't my favorite book of 2018, but it was my favorite -- my most vivid and lasting -- reading experience.
As I've written about before, I have a serious problem with retention. I'm the kind of reader who, just after finishing a novel, might immediately and then forever struggle to recall the plot and/or the names of the major characters.
This frustrated me for years. I tried all sorts of reading-retention tools and methods, and even memory exercises, but nothing worked. I continued to forget most details about every book I read, fiction and non.
Then I read the following passage in a 2013 New Yorker piece written by a man struggling with the same problem, and it really landed for me:
"What I remember most about Malamud's short-story collection The Magic Barrel is the warm sunlight in the coffee shop on the consecutive Friday mornings I read it before high school. That is missing the more important points, but it is something."
Since then, I've been taking as much -- and often more -- pleasure in the experience of reading as I have in the book itself.
And so what I want to know is, what was your favorite reading experience of 2018? What was the book, where did you read it, and what made the experience so valuable?
