Any summation of 2020 is automatically exceptional- it’s tempting to begin with some platitude about the disruption of this year, or to scour this list for some cohesive offering, but I can’t form anything that lucid or discern any such available pattern.

In the maelstrom of anxiety, premature predictions, heightened everything that was the beginning of the Covid crisis, I expected books would be my saviors- I had grand visions that I’d burrow into my chunkiest tomes (Infinite Jest? Proust?) and be swept away by megalithic adventures. Quite the opposite happened: many days this year, my attention span barely accommodated the narrative scope of a Bob Book. I ended up turning to short stories, essay collections, forms that offer immersive depth in miniature. Despite the dissolution of my dreams of gluttonous literary consumption, in retrospect I realize that books did indeed save me—just not in the way I had anticipated…

A few days ago, I did an Ask Me Anything on Instagram, and one response in particular, about combating nerves onstage, garnered follow up questions and requests to extrapolate. I thought I’d take a break from alphabetizing various aspects of my apartment and eating pringles to share it here and expand a bit, because it’s an optic which I’ve returned to- for both guidance and reevaluation- during this bonkers moment.

This year was, in a word, bonkers, and I relied on books to guide, chide, and beatify me more than ever before. In writing this list, a theme emerged: all of my 2019 favorites challenge codification, they contend with the impossibility of stable self-knowledge. Their stories showed me not to lament confusion but to savor the opportunities it yields: uncertainty bequeaths the gift of curiosity, and protects us from coalescing with the flattened, algorithmic versions of ourselves. So, cheers to bewilderment that bolsters unbuckling, happy 2020 friends!!

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” So wrote the philosopher Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace, a book that compounds her aphorisms and notes, most of which contend with a search for spiritual purity. Gravity and Grace was published posthumously in 1947, well before the advent of the term “attention economy,” which emerged over twenty years ago and refers to the imbalance between the massive amount of information available on the internet and the limited amount of attention (and time) humans have to offer. In 2019, this disparity is more pronounced than ever: practically every online media platform is designed to apply the logic of scarcity to our minds, to treat our attention as a commodity to be harvested and manipulated. One of the cruel paradoxes of modern life is that the companies that abuse our attention treat is as much more precious than we do.

I’ve never been more grateful for reading and the expansion it facilitates than I was this year! Here I add my voice to the chorus (cacophony?) with another top 10 list, the most impactful books I read in 2018.