This year in reading has begun spectacularly with H.G. Parry's The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door.  It is as if Brideshead Revisited had been written by Diana Wynne Jones, with a dash of Sara Paretsky - her Camford is much stranger and more sinister than Oxbridge but just as drenched in nostalgia for the present even as it is lived, the characters are distinctive and endearing, and the plot is full of twists and suspense; Rivka Galchen's Little Labors is a tiny memoir/fragmentary essay/pillow book about early motherhood, all about the rhythm - of the life but also the prose - that made me want to read Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book again and maybe write one myself; Otherhood, essays on not being a mother, edited by Alie Benge, Lil O'Brien and Kathryn van Beek, various perspectives and stories, all absorbing, some especially so; More Miracle Than Bird, by Alice Miller, the story of Georgie Hyde-Lees and her relationship with Yeats, a strange story, told in a way that makes it both completely plausible and unsettlingly strange, hard even to know if the marriage represents a happy ending or not, except that I think a happy ending is what you have to make of an ending, an ending that is after all also always a beginning; What Language Do I Dream In, a memoir, by Elena Lappin, about growing up with many changes of country and language and the life of a translator who continues to move from language to language, told in engagingly short chapters, maybe more of them than would have made the perfect book; Music for the Dead and Resurrected, by Valzhyna Mort, spooky, incantatory poems; The Long Form, Kate Briggs, a book at first I sort of skimmed, then became more and more absorbed by, a detailed account of one day in the life of a young mother and newborn baby, in which almost nothing happens, and even the description of the book she is reading is a description of what happens in the book past the point where she gets up to, and the thinking that takes up so much of the novel, thinking about the novel form itself, is not so much the protagonist's own thinking but the narrator's in a way that I would expect to put me off but didn't at all; Finding a Likeness: How I got Somewhat Better at Art, Nicholson Baker, unexpectedly boring and I think his heart wasn't in it - was in the drawing, maybe, but not the book, an obligation after a successful book proposal, mostly just captions for his drawings and uninteresting ones at that;