books

Year in Reading – 2025

Selected 2025 Reading:

Fiction Novels/Novellas

  • Tomorrow They Won’t Dare To Murder Us by Joseph Andras
  • On the Clock by Claire Baglin
  • The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
  • In a Distant Valley by Shannon Bowring
  • The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
  • Headshot by Rita Bullwinkle
  • Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
  • Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell
  • Our Long Marvelous Dying by Anna DeForest
  • The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
  • The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
  • Light in August by William Faulkner
  • The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne
  • Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg
  • The All of It by Jeannette Haien
  • I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
  • Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf
  • Orbital by Samantha Harvey
  • Sift by Alissa Hattman 
  • We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
  • The Liberators by E.J. Koh
  • The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey 
  • A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Tales from Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
  • Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie 
  • Ancillary Mercy by Anne Leckie
  • Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato
  • The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
  • Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor
  • A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe
  • Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
  • Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys 
  • Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
  • Home by Marilynne Robinson
  • Lila by Marilynne Robinson 
  • Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson 
  • Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson 
  • The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson
  • Isle of Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson
  • Coram House by Bailey Seybolt
  • The Cliffs by J Courtney Sullivan
  • The Emissary by Yoko Tawada
  • War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 

Short Stories

  • Green Frog: Stories by Gina Chung
  • She and Her Cat: Stories by Makoto Shinkai and Naruki Nagakawa

Graphic Novels/Graphic Nonfiction/Graphic Memoirs

  • A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll
  • Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City by Guy Delisle 
  • Hostage by Guy Delisle
  • The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo by Joe Sacco
  • The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman
  • On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden

Art

  • Latin American Posters: Public Aesthetics and Mass Politics edited by Russ Davidson
  • Art of the Literary Poster by Allison Rudnick
  • Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton

Poetry

  • American Wake by Kerrin McCadden 
  • The End of Childhood by Wayne Miller
  • Ariel by Sylvia Plath
  • Loss and Its Antonym by Alison Prine
  • Frank: Sonnets by Diane Seuss 

Nonfiction

  • A Horse at Night: on Writing by Amina Cain
  • 50 Ways to Protect Book Stores by Danny Caine
  • The Dry Season by Melissa Febos
  • Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly
  • Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert
  • The Eighth Moon by Jennifer Kabat
  • The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story by Pagan Kennedy
  • Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
  • The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner
  • Motherhood and its Ghosts by Iman Mersal
  • Cultish by Amanda Montell
  • Opacities by Sofia Samatar

Delmarva Review Anthology

The Delmarva Review has released their first anthology, a beautiful book spanning the best of sixteen years of publications. Included are two of my prose pieces: “Nursing 101,” creative nonfiction from Volume 4 (2011), and “Undertow,” a short story from Volume 6 (2013). I am so pleased to be one of the seventy-five authors selected, and the only author represented in both the nonfiction and fiction sections.

The Delmarva Review was my first literary magazine acceptance. They published my work three times while I was a nursing student in Baltimore, and I cannot overstate how supportive they were of both the work they published and of me as a writer. I learned so much just going over edits with the team. Twice they invited me to read at the Writer’s Center. I drove my battered car—the Toyota I later sold to the autobody shop to cover my outstanding repair bills—to Bethesda, and at the end of my first reading, they let me take home the extra cheese plate. I made fancy pepper jack omelettes for my classmates. I remember exactly where I was when I opened my email to find out they’d nominated me for a Pushcart Prize. Twice, they interviewed me for Writer’s Edition on Delmarva Public Radio.

On a very concrete, editorial level, The Delmarva Review helped me become a much better writer. But they also introduced me to the idea of literary community and taught me what that looked like.

All of which is to say: I am deeply grateful. Support literary magazines in general, and the Delmarva Review in particular. Buy a copy of this anthology. I’m proud to be included.

Protocol for What to Do After Hearing Another Rape Story in Exam Room Five

Many thanks to Morgan Talty for choosing my flash fiction story, “Protocol for What to Do After Hearing Another Rape Story in Exam Room Five,” for the Fractured Lit Anthology 4 Contest. 

The story comes out twice: online today, and in a print anthology which will be published next spring.

It’s always gratifying to be published but it’s especially thrilling to know that one of your writing heroes has read and selected your work. Morgan Talty’s short story collection, Night of the Living Rez, wrecked me so thoroughly, I can remember exactly where I was (in my parents’ house in Maine) when I finished the last story. I can’t wait to read his debut novel, just out with Tin House.

I drafted “Protocol for What to Do After Hearing Another Rape Story in Exam Room Five” about one year into my first job as a family nurse practitioner. I had awkwardly tried to ask one of my mentors whether or not there was a list of things I should be doing when people shared great traumas with me. I was very new to primary care and was routinely horrified at my own position of authority, and was hoping that medicine, a field which adores algorithms, might have a flowchart for me. My mentor did that thing where you ask for a resource and they reply, what a great idea, why don’t you make one. It was yet another moment of me realizing that medicine was not magic and the guidance I was looking for, if it existed, was not readily available. I also started writing a tongue-in-cheek protocol. The story didn’t grow legs until after I revised it several times over several years, finally leaning into the surreal. Which, on further reflection, is sort of closer to what most medical providers are taught to do: oh, you’re exposed to trauma? Have you tried leaving your body?

Thanks, Fractured Lit. Thanks, Morgan Talty.

Year in Reading – 2023

Selected 2023 Reading for the end of year list:

Fiction Novels/Novellas

  • Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
  • How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
  • Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
  • Boyfriends by Tara Atkinson
  • I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Marisa Crane
  • History of Present Illness by Anna Deforest
  • Childhood by Tove Ditlevsen
  • Youth by Tove Ditlevsen
  • Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen
  • Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
  • The Shame by Makenna Goodman
  • The Great Transition: A Novel by Nick Fuller Googins
  • This Other Eden by Paul Harding
  • The Long Answer by Anna Hogeland
  • What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez
  • Mobility by Lydia Kiesling
  • Yellowface by R. F. Kuang
  • Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
  • I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai
  • Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
  • Bringing Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
  • The Mirror and The Light by Hilary Mantel
  • Tripping Arcadia by Kit Mayquist
  • The Group by Mary McCarthy
  • People Collide by Isle McElroy 
  • Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
  • Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
  • Mistborn: The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson 
  • Mistborn: The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson 
  • Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson
  • Edgedancer by Brandon Sanderson
  • On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
  • System Collapse by Martha Wells
  • Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
  • The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
  • Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabbrielle Zevin

Short Stories

  • Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
  • People Want to Live by Farah Ali
  • Almost Famous Women: Stories by Megan Mayhew Bergman
  • How Strange a Season by Megan Mayhew Bergman
  • Out There by Kate Folk
  • Bliss Montage: Stories by Ling Ma
  • Self-Help by Lorrie Moore

Art

  • Eye Mama by Karni Arieli
  • A Comic Year by Meg Reynolds
  • Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America by Matika Wilbur

Poetry

  • Gravitas by Amy Berkowitz
  • Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley 
  • Turn Up the Ocean by Tony Hoagland
  • Tap Out by Edgar Kunz
  • Fixer by Edgar Kunz 
  • Does the Earth by Meg Reynolds

Nonfiction

  • Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell 
  • The Undying by Anne Boyer
  • The Highs and Lows of Shape-Shift Ma and Big-Little Frank by Frances Cannon
  • The Loneliness Files by Athena Dixon
  • Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick
  • The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick
  • Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto by Triscia Hersey
  • Stay True by Hua Hsu
  • Good Inside by Becky Kennedy
  • The Magical Language of Others by E.J. Koh
  • Trauma Stewardship by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky
  • Enchantment by Katherine May
  • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
  • Thin Skin by Jenn Shapland
  • The Light Room: On Art and Care by Kate Zambreno

Year in Reading – 2020

Here are the books I’ve read during this very strange year of 2020. I keep these lists every year as a record for myself, but I post them in invitation for fellow readers to talk about books both read and overlooked. If you want to chat about these or if there are books you think I should read, please email me! Sometimes I write short notes (I hesitate to say “reviews”) over on my Goodreads page.

I’ve put ** next to my absolute favorite reads of the year.

Selected 2020 Reading (by genre, then alphabetical by author/editor last name)

Fiction/Novels/Novellas

  • The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
  • Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison**
  • Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
  • To the Wedding by John Berger
  • Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles
  • The Stranger by Albert Camus
  • O Pioneers! by Willa Cather**
  • Trust Exercise: A Novel by Susan Choi**
  • How to Catch a Coyote by Christy Crutchfield
  • The Maytrees by Annie Dillard**
  • Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
  • Heartburn by Nora Ephron
  • The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter
  • The Guest List by Lucy Foley
  • Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier
  • Empire City by Matt Gallagher 
  • Cleanness by Garth Greenwell 
  • Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
  • Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
  • Suicide Club by Rachel Heng
  • The End We Start From by Megan Hunter
  • Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane**
  • Writers & Lovers by Lily King
  • Passing by Nella Larsen
  • The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
  • Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli
  • Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch
  • Sula by Toni Morrison**
  • Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
  • The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
  • Weather by Jenny Offill
  • The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa**
  • Last Night at the Lobster by Steward O’Nan**
  • The Dive from Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer
  • The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
  • Such A Fun Age  by Kiley Reid**
  • My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
  • The Ancestry of Objects by Tatiana Ryckman
  • Self Care by Leigh Stein
  • Real Life: A Novel by Brandon Taylor**
  • Women Talking by Miriam Toews
  • We the Animals by Justin Torres
  • Distant Dead by Heather Young
  • Drifts by Kate Zambreno

Nonfiction/Essays

  • Art of Subtext by Charles Baxter
  •  A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt
  • On Immunity: An Inoculation by Eula Biss
  • Art of Perspective by Christopher Castellani
  • All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung
  • A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott
  • The Blue Jay’s Dance by Louise Erdrich 
  • Abandon Me by Melissa Febos**
  • Things That Helped by Jessica Friedman
  • The Unreality of Memory by Elisa Gabbert**
  • Make it Scream, Make it Burn by Leslie Jamison
  • In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
  • Ongoingness by Sarah Manguso**
  • Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum
  • So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
  • My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland **
  • No Visible Bruises by Rachel Louise Snyder

Short Story Collections

  • Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close
  • Animal Wife by Lara Erlich**
  • We Had No Rules by Corinne Manning**
  • Wild Milk by Sabrina Orah Mark
  • Buckskin Cocaine by Erika T. Wurth**

Lit Mags and Anthologies

  • Always Crashing Issue Three
  • The Best Small Fictions: 2019 Anthology
  • The Lascaux Review Prize Vol 6

Poetry

  • Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
  • Bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward**

Zines/Chapbooks/Interviews

  • One More For the People by Martha Grover
  • Claim Your Space by Minyoung Lee
  • Women at Work: Interviews from The Paris Review by The Paris Review

Understanding Book Use and Its Impact on You

My story “Understanding Book Use and Its Impact on You” has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine.

dangerous books

I drafted this story during a slow shift at an urgent care, in which I alternated between reading the clinic’s drug treatment pamphlets and compulsively checking the hold queue on my online public library account between patients.

You should know that I screen BAST-10 positive.

You can read the story online here.

Year in Reading – 2018

2018 Reading.jpg

Here’s my annual list of the books I’ve been reading. If you’ve read any of these and want to chat about them, please email me! Likewise, if there are books you think I should read, let me know. Sometimes I write short reviews over on my Goodreads page.

This year I’ve put ** next to my absolute favorites.

Selected 2018 Reading (by genre, then alphabetical by author/editor last name)

Fiction:

  • Nine Island by Jane Alison**
  • Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
  • Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.
  • Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
  • The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
  • The End of the Story by Lydia Davis
  • White Noise by Don Delillo
  • All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
  • Into the Forest by Jean Heglend
  • A visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan**
  • Less by Andrew Sean Greer**
  • Motherhood by Sheila Heti
  • The Seas by Sam Hunt**
  • Take Me With You by Catherine Ryan Hyde
  • Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
  • Obelisk Gate by NK Jemisin
  • Stone Sky by NK Jemisin
  • The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
  • The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner**
  • The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
  • The Incendiaries by R O Kwan**
  • The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
  • The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli
  • Self-Portrait with Boy by Rachel Lyon**
  • A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism by Peter Mountford
  • Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
  • The First 15 Lives of Harry August by Claire North
  • Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates**
  • There There by Tommy Orange**
  • A Tale for the Time Being: A Novel by Ruth Ozeki
  • Excellent Women by Barbara Pym**
  • Bonfire by Krysten Ritter
  • Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao
  • Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
  • Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko**
  • Idaho by Emily Ruskovich**
  • Empire Falls by Richard Russo
  • My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent
  • This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper
  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
  • All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren**
  • Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
  • Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf**
  • Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend by Erika T. Wurth
  • A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara**

Nonfiction Books/Essays:

  • Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme edited by Ivan E. Coyote
  • Not That Bad edited by Roxane Gay**
  • How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays by Alexander Chee.
  • Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
  • Plagues, Politics, and Policy: A Chronicle of the Indian Health Service, 1955-2008 by David DeJong
  • Evicted by Matthew Desmond
  • The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism by Kristin Dombek
  • THIS MUST BE THE PLACE by Sean H. Doyle
  • Altitude Sickness Litsa Dremousis
  • All the Real Indians Died Off  by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Dina Gilio-Whitaker
  • The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel
  • Writing Past Dark by Bonnie Friedman
  • Against Everything: Essays by Mark Greif
  • The End of My Career by Martha Grover
  • A Bestiary by Lily Hoang**
  • The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits
  • The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk
  • Navajos Wear Nikes: A Reservation Life by Jim Kristofic
  • H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
  • Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot**
  • 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso
  • American Indian Health and Nursing by Margaret P. Moss PhD JD RN FAAN
  • Dirty River by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
  • Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris
  • How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ
  • I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do) by Tatiana Ryckman**
  • White Man’s Medicine by Robert A. Trennert
  • Educated by Tara Westover
  • The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch
  • Heroines by Kate Zambreno**

Single-author short story Collections:

  • The Tent by Margaret Atwood**
  • A Guide to Being Born by Ramona Ausubel
  • Forty Stories by Donald Barthelme
  • Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill
  • The Dark Dark: Stories by Samantha Hunt
  • Get in Trouble by Kelly Link**
  • Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado**
  • People Like You by Margaret Malone
  • Leaving the Sea by Ben Marcus
  • Thunderstruck and Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken**
  • The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen
  • Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley
  • Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Lit Mags:

  • Blue Mesa Review, Issue 38
  • Cincinnati Review, 14.2
  • Copper Nickel, 24
  • Frequencies, Vol. 2
  • Gold Man Review, Issue 8
  • Paper Darts, Volume Seven**
  • Pacifica Literary Review, Issue 12
  • Ploughshares, Spring 2018

Poetry:

  • Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar
  • When my Brother was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz**
  • Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing**
  • Go Because I Love You by Jared Harél
  • In Mad Love and War by Joy Harjo
  • Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón**
  • The Carrying by Ada Limón
  • Sparrow Pie by Katie Quinnelly**
  • The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich**
  • Palominos Near Tuba City: New and Selected Poems by Denise Sweet
  • No Parole Today by Laura Tohe**
  • Tséyi’ / Deep in the Rock: Reflections on Canyon de Chelly by Laura Tohe, with photographs by Stephen E. Strom

Zines/Chapbooks

  • Jane: Documents from Chicago’s Clandestine Abortion Service 1968-1973 by Firestarter Press**
  • The Nizhoni Beat: Native American Feminist Musings Vol. 1 by Melanie Fey, Amber McCrary
  • Shik’is ShiHeart: My Friend, My Heart (Native American Feminist Musings) by Melanie Fey, Amber McCrary
  • Troubleshooting Silence in Arizona by Bojan Louis**
  • Honorary Men by Marisol Limon Martinez
  • Sugar by Anca L. Szilágyi
  • Violence by Vanessa Veselka and Lidia Yuknavitch
  • EVERYONE CALLS THEMSELVES AN ALLY UNTIL IT IS TIME TO DO SOME REAL ALLY SHIT by Xhopakelxhit

Visual Art & Graphic Novels

  • Chicken with Plums by Marjane Satrapi**
  • Master of the Photographic Essay by W. Eugene Smith
  • Looking Out, Looking In by Andrew Wyeth

MargaretAdams