The #SplitLipFAM Thanksgiving Reading List

Happy Thanksgiving! Hope you get to relax this weekend. We want to acknowledge that this holiday has a problematic history—check out the National Museum of the American Indian’s guide to rethinking Thanksgiving celebrations.

That said, we also want to acknowledge how grateful we are for all of you, and for the many good things that have come our way this year. So today our staff and readers are sharing the books they’re most thankful for in 2021:

Janelle Bassett: What It’s Like to Be a Bird by David Allen Sibley

Anna Cabe: This is always a tough one, but for sheer genre-bending fun (Sword lesbians! Necromancers! Haunted palaces! Space!), Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth, for gorgeously intricate spins on superhero mythos and intergenerational sagas, Kawai Strong Washburn's Sharks in the Time of Saviors, for quietly heart-rending explorations of familial relationships and faith, Fatima Farheen Mirza's A Place for Us, and for barn-burning intellectually ferocious polemics on art, feminism, and the Asian American identity, Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings.

Trinity Dearborn: Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao! I stayed up all night reading this book in one go lol. It mixes futuristic Chinese mythology, mecha robots, and fucking up the patriarchy. It’s the first in a series tho so now i have to wait :(

Kendra Fortmeyer: For me this year, it's Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts hands-down. I'd attempted to crack this book several times before, but finally—in the second trimester of my first pregnancy—it caught me. Or, perhaps, we caught each other. I spent a dreamy week completely immersed in the magnificent, fierce intellect of a mind and birth story not my own—a spiritual journey for which I am profoundly grateful.

Megin Jiménez: Grateful for The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton—so much wit, tension, insight and empathy wrapped up in fabulous sentences. And the graphic memoir Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant by Roz Chast, intensely honest, painful, funny. Indelible.

Maureen Langloss: This year I am grateful for frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss, Heavy by Kiese Laymon, Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones., and The Waves by Virginia Woolf. All of these books changed me as a reader, a writer, and a person.

Ashley Lee: Projections: A Story of Human Emotions by Karl Deisseroth

Ruth LeFaive: This year I’m especially grateful for The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler by Lynell George, and Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

Homa Mojtabai: Not all of these came out this year but I’m so grateful for discovering / rediscovering: Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid; Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour; A Certain Hunger by Chelsea Summers

Rita Mookerjee: Blue-Skinned Gods by SJ Sindu

Wendy Oleson: Thank you for asking!!! Kate McIntyre’s Mad Prairie; LaTanya McQueen’s When the Reckoning Comes; Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies; Kelli Russell Agodon’s Dialogues with Rising Tides. Plus glorious chapbooks from Chelsea Stickle (Breaking Points), Cheryl Pappas (The Clarity of Hunger), and Sabrina Imbler (Dyke (geology)).

Tyler Orion: Oh this is dangerous so I will force myself to limit my selection: Our Work is Everywhere: An Illustrated Oral History of Queer and Trans Resistance by Syan Rose; A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam; Heavy by Kiese Laymon; High as the Waters Rise by Anja Kampmann, trans. by Anne Posten; The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris

Becky Robison: I read so many good ones this year, but if I had to narrow it down: Unseen City by Amy Shearn; My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris; Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir; Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood; Danzirly by Gloria Muñoz; Outlawed by Anna North; Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette; Bone House by K-Ming Chang. That wasn’t narrow, was it?

Sara Ryan: Be Holding by Ross Gay! And Vievee Francis’s Horse in the Dark. I read so many books this year but those really stood out.

Miguel Soto: My Kill Adore Him by Paul Martínez Pompa; Fire Is Not a Country by Cynthia Dewi Oka; Beast Meridian by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal.

Teri Vela: Donika Kelly’s The Renunciations, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (x10), Fernando A. Flores’ Tears of the Trufflepig, Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings (x100).

Wendy Elizabeth Wallace: Oof! This is nearly impossible, but I'll narrow down to four. I am thankful for Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz, Little Gods by Meng Jin, I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins, and Blind Man's Bluff by James Tate Hill.