A Year in Reading: Carvell Wallace

Before 2020 became the 2020 that it became, there was a little sliver, a little alley of time where it seemed like we would just be embarking upon a normal late capitalist American hellscape of the type we’ve grown accustomed to over the past several years. Yes, our reality was presided over by the idiotic bluster of an orange grift monkey; yes, the planet was dying; yes, every single group other than white men was on the daily having an experience that landed somewhere on the spectrum between being painfully oppressed and being killed, and most of those groups were willfully complicit in the oppression of some other group. So yes, it was already pretty bad as narratives of a moment go. But it could actually get worse and we didn’t know it yet. What an amazing thing. The moment where things aren’t yet worse as remembered from the moment when they are.

I entered into this time with the idea that I was going to read more books, which as a writer was not a thing I think I was doing enough of. I did not read a lot of books growing up. Which is not to say I didn’t read a lot, because I did. It’s just that I read the same book(s) over and over. I guess it was early expression of the compulsive nature of my addictive personality. I was afraid that I wouldn’t like a memorized. In my adult pre-writer career, I would maybe read one random book a year which I always thought was the greatest book ever written because I had nothing to compare it to. A biography of . A Biography of . A novel. All these books, in retrospect, were…not…great?  But I thought I was supposed to like them because they were BOOKS and BOOKS were written by SMART PEOPLE and IF YOU DIDN’T LIKE SOMETHING SMART PEOPLE DID IT WAS BECAUSE YOU WERE DUMB.