Read more of the 196 moments in music, art, books, theater, film, and TV that helped us survive 2016.

• This line from Ed Skoog's Run the Red Lights: "A lot of 20th-century business coming due / at once," in a year where a lot of 20th-century business seems to be coming due all at once.

• At Elliott Bay Book Company during Indies First, the day after Black Friday that celebrates buying books from independent bookstores, Eloise stood straight-backed in her fuchsia power-tutu, her hands on her hips, her eyes trained upward, not in fawning admiration of Sherman Alexie, but as a kind of challenge: He should be grateful for the opportunity to sign her copy of Thunder Boy Jr., Alexie's children's book released this year.

• In November, Sherman Alexie pulled his car over to the side of the road to talk with me about writing and Trump, which resulted in this perfect summation of the rhetorical strategies taken up by the US far left and the far right: "One side rooting for an America that never existed and one side rooting for an America that is never going to exist."

• In Barkskins, Annie Proulx's masterpiece of historical fiction about international deforestation, the image of a mama bear engulfed in fire and frantically gulping water from a lake.

• Introducing Cave Canem, an African American poetry collective that won a Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community at the National Book Awards this year, Terrance Hayes told the story of hearing a poet named Avery, "a cross between Sun Ra and Donny Hathaway," sing a blues poem during one of the organization's retreats. "He started singing: 'Where were you when they killed that boy? Where were you when they killed that boy? Would you kill the men who killed that boy? Would you kill for that boy? Would you kill for that boy? Would you live for that boy? Would you live for that boy?'"

• Max Porter's gorgeous, genre-transcending, and yet anti-pretentious Grief Is the Thing with Feathers distills the secular magical thinking required to deal with death in a single sentence: "We miss our Mum, we love our Dad, we / wave at crows. / It's not that weird."

• During the "Fuck Yo Couch" reading at LitCrawl in October, hearing Anastacia Renee Tolbert's poem about being a mother in the #BlackLivesMatter movement, listening to her question whether raising two black children in this country is essentially "doing enough."

• During a Q&A at Elliott Bay Book Company in September, legendary L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Rae Armantrout fields a question about the failure of her early poetics to produce desirable social effects by saying something like, "You know, the thing scholars never mention when they write about that movement is we were all kids. We were twentysomethings living in San Francisco."

• In his National Book Award–nominated novel Imagine Me Gone, Adam Haslett's full-throated defense of disco in the voice of Michael, a Klonopin-popping white guy dedicated to African American studies who advocates for sensible reparations policies as he works on his theory that black music is a vehicle for the inherited trauma of slavery, and the greatest literary character we came across this year.

• Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for literature and not giving a fuck, which birthed the Nobel Prize for being Bob Dylan.

• When Tommy Pico said at Hugo House in July that he'd never read with only indigenous writers before and then paused as if he couldn't believe it himself.

• At the book launch for Ed Skoog's Run the Red Lights this November, Skoog mentioned that his old college friend heads up the department of agriculture in Kansas. When asked if she should be doing that, he said: "Of course. It's a job. What a rare thing to have in this world, a job."

• Katrina Dodson, translator of Clarice Lispector's The Complete Stories, in January presenting a long argument about why she translated the word "galinha" as "chicken" instead of "hen," and then going on to describe the moment when she found herself watching a makeup tutorial by a Brazilian teenager with a hick accent on YouTube because she was trying to figure out something about the way Brazilians use the words "eyebrows" or "eye shadow."

• During APRIL Festival this March, Jenny Zhang read a poem while standing on a table beside a lizard eating peaches in a glass case at Indian Summer.

• Oxford Dictionary choosing "post-truth" as word of the year for 2016.

• The idea that fucking in an airport is more daring than fucking in an airplane, which Maged Zaher laid out frankly and lyrically in his book of poems The Consequences of My Body.

• During an iteration of Hugo House's Literary Series at Fred Wildlife Refuge in September, Tyehimba Jess projected onto the walls a poem he'd written about vaudevillian geniuses Bert Williams and George Walker. The poem was really two poems, twin ghazals that could be read left to right, right to left, top to bottom, and bottom to top. Normally that kind of bullshit doesn't work. But when Jess read it, bouncing from line to line, it all made sense. Because he's a genius.

• In a note at the back of Mary Ruefle's My Private Property, she writes that one could replace the word "sadness" with the word "happiness" in all of her poems and nothing would change.

• Laura Albert, famous literary hoaxer, followed through on her promise to mail me a raccoon penis bone. She signed the bone in print "JT LeRoy."

• I'm glad someone found Pablo Neruda's lost poems, and that Copper Canyon Press published them, because now we have this metaphysical take on the moon: "It grew swollen cruising the air unhurried, unmarked / and we didn't imagine that you and I made up one element of its motion, / that it's not merely hair, languages, arteries, ears that compose the shadow of a man / but also a thread, a fiber stronger than nothing and no one, our time coming and running down and swelling to fit this attenuated hour."