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.
Every stretch of this year was for me contextualized, kindled, supported by knowledge or insights gleaned from past literary experiences. Sometimes, the simple act of reading feels like the only boundary between me and a much messier, sadder, more febrile self. Olivia Laing writes in Funny Language that art can be “a training ground for possibility,” an observation I find very apt. The possibilities of literature are what I consider so exciting and powerful- the opportunity to greet new information and weave it with old, the potential to experience alternate modes of seeing. Access to the interiority of others has become my coping mechanism of choice.
To that end… here are the 10 most impactful books I read this year!
The Book of Night Women by Marlon James: This novel takes place on a sugar plantation in late 18th century Jamaica during the brutal period in which enslaved Africans outnumbered their colonial masters 10 to 1. It follows a group of 6 half-sisters, the “Night Women,” who plot a slave rebellion against the overseer who fathered them. James denudes the abuse he depicts of any euphemism- he insists that historical violence should be explicit, not “tastefully… or wonderfully wrought.” The result is pages that seethe with intimate agony: the tone is incredibly dark, the subject matter often excruciatingly gruesome, and the language- it’s written entirely in 18th century Jamaican patois- so full of molten rage. Our first encounter with our protagonist, Lilith, is as a newborn “baby wash in crimson and squealing like it just depart heaven to come to hell.” Dark-skinned and green-eyed, the novel is propelled by her intransigence, her longings, and the way the horrors of slavery warp her indomitable human impulses towards care and kindness. “Mayhaps true womanness was to be free to be as terrible as you wish,” thinks a teenage Lilith. Reading this was harrowing and frequently devastating, but James’ ability to probe gnarls of power and cruelty, and to conjure eldritch beauty amidst barbarity, render this novel absolutely unforgettable.
The Possessed by Elif Batuman: Would never have expected a book about the travails of obtaining a PhD in Russian Literature to be so charming or funny, but Elif Batuman makes the voracious pursuit of literary knowledge a romping adventure! Centered around her time as a grad student at Stanford, Batuman writes about intense study and research as an act of love. She combats the idea that analysis and theory sterilize or compromise love for an art: “was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn’t the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?” Writing about vigorous academia could easily be haughty, but Batuman’s wit is so twinkling, her language so adroit, her passion so ardent that they scald away any flab of pomp or pretension. In her humanizing accounts of the lives and works of Babel, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, she demonstrates that the Epic and the Ridiculous are neighbors.
Exhalation by Ted Chiang: Ted Chiang, best known for penning the short that became the hit film “Arrival,” is often described as writing “sci-fi with a soul,” but I think his stories unfurl the binaries that would separate those in the first place. In his work, past and present, science and theology, mechanics and morals aren’t so much dialectical as they are partners that act in concert as midwives to beauty. The first story in this collection juxtaposes contemporary scientific theory with ancient tradition: “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” set in a medieval Muslim civilization, reads like a vivified chapter of “The Arabian Nights.” It imagines a time machine that obeys Einstein’s theory of relativity and consequently adheres to one of the basic articles of faith in Islam: acceptance of fate. The steampunky short “Dacey’s Automatic Nanny” pans a past experiment in animatronic child-rearing for gold of historical marginalia. In “The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling,” parallel narratives explore anxieties surrounding the consequences of documentation: in the near future, a technology called “remem” effectively grants users eidetic memory by allowing them to log, search, and share their entire memories. In the past, an aboriginal man is one of the first of his tribe to become literate- both of these tales question the solidity of truth and possibility of objectivity. All of Chiang’s stories are very elegant and very technical; reading them often feels like conducting a thought experiment dear to your heart. They make my heart feel wind-up, flood my brain with warm sentiment, convince me my soul is measurable and that the act of its calibration could be sacred.
Exquisite Mariposa by Fiona Alison Duncan: I loved this novel, an invigorating, earnest coming of age in LA story and a phenomenology of modern magic, in ktown signage, pico blvd cevicherias, Instagram grids, chakrubs. The book follows Fiona, whose journey to find “the Real,” a mode of being that sheds friction and finds flow through presence, lands her in a tiny sublet on the eponymous Mariposa Ave. LA is a complicated place to search for the Real: to me, it’s a city enthralled by the pursuit of authenticity yet mired in its representation. So much of this town feels performative, but the efforts and desires that fuel the presentation are touchingly raw and open. It’s the perfect setting for this book’s meditations: how can you balance an artistic compulsion to share with the belief that true authenticity requires no witness? Is the act of online self-curation always a limiting synopsis or can it be a synapsis of our baggage and ideals, an opportunity to dictate our own margins? If the inexpressible is contained in the expressible, can’t ‘the real’ be most prominent in that which is brazen about its falsity? This novel recognizes something I’ve felt everywhere, but is especially prevalent in this city: at this point, what’s filmic often feels most genuine. Highly rec to all fellow LA dwellers, and anyone (aka everyone) navigating/ fortifying/ sifting through their relationships to “realness,” economies of love + art + access, the vigilance required to practice sensitivity.
The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone: published in 1970, this really phenomenal, often inflammatory text posits that radical feminism is the key revolutionary ideology, the necessary synthesis of Marx, Freud, de Beauvoir, and Engels. Firestone broadens Marxist historical realism- essentially, the idea that history is a result of material conditions rather than ideals- by arguing that the sexual biological division (the unequal labor of childbirth/ childrearing) is the most enduring and most acute form of inequality and must be the starting point of any revolutionary analysis or praxis. Her ultimate goal is that genital differences have 0 cultural import. This argument retains its sharpness in 2020, when feminism owes its ubiquity in large part to a market ‘girlboss’ feminism that trades what’s useful for what’s palatable… or consumable, Firestone’s work is a reminder that the eradication of sexism demands a truly radical reordering, that fighting gendered oppression and labor exploitation have never been and should never be separate.
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by EL Konisburg: This year, I savored many a re-read of childhood/ YA favorites. When my brain felt mushy and warped from news bombardment (or the TikTok algorithm’s acute ability to stoke addiction and sustain my scroll), these treasured familiar narratives swaddled me like a soulful security blanket. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is an absolute gem of a book. It follows Claudia and Jamie Kincaid, 12 and 9 respectively, who decide to run away from home and stow away deep in the galleries of the Met. The book is adventuresome and intimate, deeply ethical but never moralizing, sweet but avoids being saccharine. I really think of great children’s writers as heroic- the charm and wisdom in these pages is hard to match.
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib: Abdurraqib writes with such urgent sincerity in this collection of essays and music criticism that considers artists from Ice Cube to Carly Rae Jepsen to Prince to Nina Simone. Each piece unsheathes some deeper truth about music-making, grief, temporality, the experience of being black in America. He writes about attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown’s grave, how the promise of Springsteen’s music: “the ability to make the most out of your life, because it’s the only life you have,” is a romance unjustly distributed. Elsewhere, in a piece about Marvin Gaye, he observes “To bear witness to so much death that could easily be your own is to push toward redefining what it is to be a patriot in this country.” Abudrraqib’s prose often mirrors his subject: his use of repetitive sequences, his poetic rubato, the homages in recitative transpose his sentences, make them feel phrased and tonal. I love the way his criticism treats music and musicians- it seems to really look into the art and ask what it has to say, rather than how it can be utilized. “We are nothing without our quick and simple blessings, without those willing to drag optimism by its neck to the gates of grief and ask to be let in.”
Cool for America by Andrew Martin: All the overlapping stories in this collection traverse familiar literary territory: overeducated, underemployed, over-boozed 20 and 30 somethings working through light-grade trauma (often by traumatizing one another). The chapters are tied together by the tribulations of Leslie, a New Yorker continuing her moral and literary education in the Montanan expanse. Leslie, like many of Martin’s characters, is a writer- wry, pessimistic, erudite, a little wretched. They all look upon their education and abilities bleakly; they’ve become aware of their own mediocrity and the limitations of their craft yet remain spurred by a small hope that salvation could exist in the twinkle of a well-composed sentence, a perfectly-tuned passage. Reading Andrew Martin feels akin to taking a really satisfying, cronchy bite of a classic sandwich: it’s not surprising, but the arrangement and freshness of these ingredients make chomping into the final product so pleasurable.
Humiliation by Wayne Koestenbaum: “Imagine a society in which humiliation is essential; as a rite of passage, as a passport to decency and civilization, as a necessary shedding of hubris.” This is what poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestembaum asks of us in this volume that considers all forms of mortification, from the “pleasurable mosh pit of defilement on the internet and reality tv” to the cruelty and abjection of oppression and occupation. The book is written as a series of ‘fugues,’ referring both to the “rhetorical license offered by invoking counterpoint” and a mental fugue state, a “dissociated wandering away from one's own identity.” The result is chapters that flirt with associations and are voiced to suggest surprising resonances and sympathies. Koestenbaum writes about pleasure and prurience in such a satisfying way, he made me consider that embarrassing or shameful experiences aren’t just inevitable, but desirable, connective, a grounding aspect of our shared “corporeal inheritance.”
On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry: A really provocative essay that aims to reclaim aesthetic beauty as a subject of serious philosophical discourse, as well as a powerful force that fosters the spirit of justice. This book is so ambitious and rangy, I find it really difficult to summarize: Scarry argues that beauty can vector towards justice, because it orients our attention to symmetry, to equality, and evokes in us a desire to see those traits replicated in all areas of life. To her, beauty is innately generous and generative: we instinctively want to spread its fruits. I’m still unsure if I’m entirely persuaded that aesthetic and moral sensibilities are so aligned, but Scarry’s brilliant conviction made a deep impression.