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, to unbuckling, happy 2020 friends!!
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino: I probably could have saved a spot for this book before I even cracked it because I adore Jia Tolentino’s cultural criticism in the New Yorker so so much. Her writing is a mélange, in both style and content: her intellectual brilliance is dashed with stoner humor and her empathy and ethics are grounded in curiosity. She links megachurches and MDMA, athleisure and austerity, aligns Ovid with second-wave feminism and the impetus of environmental destruction. I think what I love most about Jia’s writing is her ability to find hope through commitment to honesty. She denudes contemporary phenomenon with scary alacrity and actively pursues harsh revelations, but finds in the ridiculous, fragile, naked core something worth cherishing, worth working continuously to save.
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong: A novel that makes poetic latticework out of hereditary trauma. An immigrant story, a queer coming of age, and a compendium of American violence, it takes the form of a letter that will never be read by its addressee. Little Dog, the narrator, writes to his mother, a Vietnamese refugee who cannot speak English or read any language. Vuong is a veteran poet, and the sensitivity of his wordplay repeatedly gave me chills: he cajoles words til they reveal hidden multifaceted and mirror-like surfaces capable of reflecting the light from ideas or imagery pages back. Language was perpetually morphing, an animal could be a person could be a movement or a feeling or a sound; sentences frequently had an aperture through which a previous gesture was remade. “What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?” is followed pages later by, “What is a country but a life sentence?”
Remembrance of Earth’s Past by Liu Cixin: I had to strategically time my consumption of this trilogy because I knew that each book would derail my work/ social/ sleep life til the very last page. This series spans from the Cultural Revolution to 18 million years in the future, and renders a tired premise (first encounter with hostile alien race) mega wired by vaulting sociological, geopolitical, and astrophysical conundrums to a truly cosmic scale. The mind-bending conceptual velocity made the ineffability and insignificance of earthly existence that propel the series feel so freshly invigorating.
Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil: Encountering the work of Simone Weil was a spiritual highlight of my life. I find her desire for purity, her earnest determination to align her spiritual ethics and political praxis, so moving. Gravity and Grace is a posthumous collection of notes, and many of her quotes have lodged themselves in me like elixirs to be dosed when I need solace or guidance: “Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt... I also am other than what I imagine my self to be. To know this is forgiveness.” “There is nothing nearer to true humility than intelligence. It is impossible to be proud of our intelligence at the moment when we are really exercising it. Moreover, when we do exercise it we are not attached to it, for we know that even if we became an idiot the following instant and remained so for the rest of our life, the truth would continue unchanged.”
Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil
How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell- The book I recommended and gifted more than any other this year! This volume investigates the anomie and fragmentation wrought by the internet-accelerated monetization of attention. The book is kaleidoscopic in the amount of connections and patterns it illustrates, but central is the link between environmental and attentive habitat restoration. Odell writes about how the earth and our minds are similarly endangered, vulnerable to being “paved over by a ruthless logic of use” in which value and profitability are seen as one and the same. She argues that ecological awareness allows us to render our attention in a way that “exceeds algorithmic description,” that’s socially attuned and potentially revolutionary. This book confronted me with the extent to which I had accepted the terms and conditions of capitalist productivity and selfhood, and subverted not only my sense of self but my sense of place, how I conceive of my citizenship within my community, the internet, even my bioregion.
(I previously blogged about how this book’s investigation into the power of reclaimed attention commingled with Simone Weil’s precept “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer” to remake my understanding of artful experiences through the optic of absorption, to be found here)
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill: A cult-favorite that I found entirely worth the hype. It’s a marriage and motherhood story, a tale of infidelity, the novel that coined the term “art monster” to describe a person (although only considered exceptional when female) who accepts the adage that domesticity and creativity are incompatible and embraces selfishness as sacrament to art. The book is comprised entirely of fragments- narrative, informational, philosophical- and I think this format allows it to feel remarkably personal to every reader: given the freedom to sketch our own connective arteries, the shimmering detritus crystallize as constellations, horoscopic and revelatory.
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe: Part history, part true crime, this book is centered on a kidnapping/ murder that took place in Northern Ireland during the Troubles in the 1970s. It also profiles some of the most prolific members of the Irish Republican Army, and in unpacking their layers of convictions, considers the implications of ideological commitment, the borders between fervor and fanaticism. The vibrancy of his profiles allows Keefe to sculpt the distinctions in a higher dimension- he demonstrates that these variances aren’t dissected by anything as simple as a fine line, but 3D figures chiseled by vast fractal histories.
The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud: This year, I started noticing how the best literary topographies of LA’s spirit and sprawl are frequently expressed through vignettes (see: Eve Babitz), whereas those of NYC are often captured by novels that are roving and polyphonic. This is the latter, it’s full-bodied and glinting and rich, like a piece of amber. Set in 2001, it entwines the lives of a group of ambitious yet unstable characters, all of whom are floundering to untangle how they perceive themselves, what they project, and who they actually are. The climax of the novel is 9/11, and the acuity of its characterization and the language through which it’s conveyed enables it to be the rare novel that utilizes a tragedy in a way that feels authentic, with gravitas sans posturing.
Mrs. Bridge by Evan S Connell: petrifying, in character and affect. This book is a series of 117 brief episodes focused on a housewife in Kansas in the period between the First and Second World War. Her attitude is relentlessly saccharine and anhedonic, and the simultaneous existence of these opposites feel like entrapping pincers which only her infuriating incognizance keep rigged to stifle, but not suffocate. Reading this was the experience of staring straight at a fake-smiling clown mask stripped of all clown indicators, and it left me just as breathless.
Against Creativity by Oli Mould: This book raised my antennae to how pervasive- and pernicious- the rhetoric of creative labor is. Mould demonstrates how narratives touting personal innovation are exploited to mask the burdens of privatization and precarity, to justify governmental austerity by painting the burden it places on families and communities as mere conundrums that allow for flexible entrepreneurship to make “more with less.” He offers that true creativity is communal, cooperative, and necessarily disruptive- it shifts the emphasis from individual genius to non-quantifiable social services that remake the playing field itself.