Books I read this year! I had an average reading year: not a lot more books than most years, but no fewer either. Not a great number, but not bad for a year of being home with the kids, remote learning, taking on new union responsibilities, and, of course, the whole underlying sense of dread thing. No being holed up with the Decameron, not a mostly topical list, but everything is topical when the world feels the way it felt this year. Since my reading time is limited, I’m selective enough and don’t have to do the kind of “boring but need this for research” academic stuff anymore, so I enjoy pretty much everything I read. I’ve tried a couple times and always failed to do various reading challenges of categories, but not doing academic work per say does mean that I tend to read across genres and topics naturally. This year I also started a regular reading exchange with my writing partner where we mostly alternate between poetry and essay/memoir/fiction, so this added to balance and made my list a little more contemporary than usual. If I had to choose, I’d say Greg Grandin’s book is the one that made me think the most and made me the most angry, and Ellen Bass’s gave me the most pleasure.
History/General Non-Fiction
Ben Ehrenreich The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine. Beautiful, powerful book based on Ehrenreich’s time living with the people of Hebron, Ramallah, and other communities in the West Bank, brining us the stories of heroes of the resistance to occupation like Issa Ammro, founder of Youth Against Settlements, currently facing yet another round of arrest and threatened imprisonment by Israel, and the Tamimi family. The way he slow-builds up to the unspeakably awful and batshit national insanity that lead to the 2014 assault on Gaza is so masterfully done, and he’s wonderful on the absurdity at the heart of occupation: what it means to draw a line around a house, or describing a dogs playing poker in the inspection room of a prison. I know Ehrenreich is also a novelist and essayist, and it shows not just in description but in the fullness of his vision, as when he notes: “I understood for the first time that in its daily functioning, the prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its checkpoints and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair.”
Judith Levine and Erica Seiners, The Feminist and the Sex Offender. I had the pleasure of interviewing Levine and Seiners about their work here. This is a great short and lucid account of the issues of how to have non-carceral responses to sexual violence. My favorite thing about it is how the co-authors foreground their collaboration and transcribe conversations into the text.
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns. A masterpiece of oral history, one of my favorite genres since I picked Studs Terkel up off my parent’s shelves. Wilkerson brilliantly selects her central figures, to represent the three waves of the Great Migration, people who are both representative and exceptional as human characters, and paints the larger picture through the history they brushed up against.
Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth. What kind of a country to you get when, from its beginning, that country claims as its birthright the right to have unlimited expansion, to have no borders at all? That this seems in retrospect an obvious question but that I’d never thought of it exactly this way is a tribute to the power of brainwashing, or maybe just to Grandin’s writing: this is the rare history that’s an overview covering vast periods that’s also full of important things I didn’t know, like the horrific history of the Texas Rangers which were basically a military for lynching Mexicans. It’s also an extremely rare book that put our current horror in a new light, seeing Trump as “new” insofar as it’s a pessimistic turn of the empire turning inward, an imperialism resting on scarcity. Probably the best book I read this year in terms of thinking about it ever since.
Jenny Brown, Without Apology. Great short overview of the history of the radical fight for abortion rights and why the courts didn’t win this right for us and won’t be the ones to protect it. As in her super-important Birth Strike, she packs more knowledge into a single page than many writers do in chapters, while still being totally accessible and engaging.
Adam Hoschschild, Red Cinderella. Fun biography of Ruth Pastor Stokes, a Russian immigrant who married a millionaire and agitated for socialism, not necessarily in that order. I wrote about it here.
Fiction
Brandon Taylor, Real Life. The best novel I read this year, and the Booker Committee agreed. A campus novel that shows the smallness of campus/college town life with out taking easy potshots. Being about biology graduate students rather than literature ones helps perhaps, as does the best descriptions of people coming and going from parties I’ve read in ages, and a digression to the protagonist’s past that is the most devastating, gorgeous, necessary chapter I’ve read in fiction in a long time.
Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad. I’ve been curious about Egan for a long time and after reading a New Yorker profile of her really wanted to read her. She comes up in retrospectives of the 10s as one of the leading novelists, a decade in which the rein of the Jonathans over publishing gave way to something much more interesting. And there’s a lot to like in these loosely entwined stories of music world folks, but a lot doesn’t quite seem to land, and there’s an uncanny valley feeling to the “experimental section” that takes the form of a powerpoint presentation. But I like to keep an open mind about such things. Someone right now is writing a novel in the form of a series of zoom meetings and maybe it will be very good when I read it in 2030.
Kate Walbert, A Short History of Women. I picked this up from the free library a few years ago and started reading it in a fit of insomnia. It deals with the history of suffrage through a multi-generational family story about the descendants of a woman who starved herself for suffrage. I was interested in that since the pandemic seemed to have taken the edge of the centennial of suffrage discourse (and I never wrote the long piece about this I wanted to), and wanted to see how it was handled. It’s well done and apparently got some traction when it came out in 2009. But as often with these kinds of boos, there’s one story that just works more than the others, in this case the one about Dorothy, the 60 something divorcee who finds herself obsessed with Florence Nightengale and getting arrested for taking photographs on military bases. Perhaps not surprisingly the suffrage history feels less alive than the contemporary context: it was bracing to notice how, accurately to the spirit of the time, Dorothy’s affluent daughter casually refers to her own support for Bush as something of a minor faux pas, something to be embarrassed about but no big deal really.
Jenny Offill, Weather. My other standout novel of the year along with Real Life. I wonder if it’s a coincidence the two 2020 novels shone far above these other recent ones I read. This one felt especially timely as an early quarantine read for me, writing about the climate crisis from the perspective of now, of background and mounting anxiety, and illusions of safe places to go. I don’t blog anymore really but I wrote a post about this one.
Katherine Ann Porter, Pale Horse Pale Rider. The only real “classic” I read this year and the only directly pandemic-related book. I started with the title novella with my writing and now reading partner. It’s a stunning account of a young woman working as a drama critic for a small regional paper, dealing with the hassles of office life and the repressive wartime atmosphere when the plague strikes in 1918. It made me feel like I’d read and forgotten it because the rhythms are so recognizable to the modernist era, and I keep trying to place whose they are most like – Delmore Schwartz maybe – but they’re her own, and, most movingly, a more powerful sense of what this year felt like than anything I read about this year with the exception of everything Kiese Laymon wrote about this year:
“Slowly, unwillingly, Miranda drew herself up inch by inch out of the pit of sleep, waited in a daze for life to begin again. A single word struck in her mind, a gong of warning, reminding her for the day long what she forgot happily in sleep, and only in sleep. The war, said the gong, and she shook her head.”
It’s especially moving that this story is one of a survivor, that takes us into what Miranda’s illness and near death feel like physically, psychically, spiritually, from the inside, and the journey back: one of the many stories so glaringly absent from our collective failures this year. The first novella in the book, “Old Mortality” is also stunning, dealing as it does with Miranda’s early life as she works her way out of the thickets of family mythologies and prejudices: the classic bildungsroman story, but stunning when you arrive there, and the stretch forward towards what is to come.
She would have no more bonds that smothered her in love and hatred. She knew now why she had run away to marriage,and she knew that she was going to run away from marriage, and she was not going to stay in any place, with anyone, that threatened to forbid her making her own discoveries, that said “No” to her. . . Oh, what is life, she asked herself in desperate seriousness, in those childish unanswerable words, and what shall I do with it?
A “What is life” has never felt so earned to me since Lily Briscoe picked up her brush. And “Noon Wine” is perhaps even more stunning: the story is something out of Faulkner or O’Conner – hired farm hand with mysterious past shows up; bad things happen – but unlike them, Porter gives these farm people – especially the woman – the same interiority and philosophical seriousness she gives the stands in for her younger self.
The Completist
Vivian Gornick, Unfinished Business, The Odd Woman and the City, and The Romance of American Communism. A lot of people discovered or rediscovered Gornick this year. I wrote about rereading Romance earlier this year; in the piece I also reflect a bit on her new book Unfinished Business, which I heard her read from in one of my last pre-Covid outings and The Odd Woman and the City, the only other book of hers I hadn’t already read, which was heartbreaking to read as a tribute to exploring the city and feeling steeled for life by it. Gornick’s treatment of the experience of politics, her early writings on feminism and explorations of the craft of essays are just about a perfect Venn diagram with my interests and often non-intersecting worlds, so watching people discover her has been a delight.
Memoir/Essay/Biography
Sara Paretsky, Writing in the Time of Silence. A Christmas gift last year from my mother-in-law and I tried to lay some good karma by reading it right away which is . . not always the fate of my Christmas gifts. It a short book and the has an uncanny valley feeling to it, as Paretsky’s not very strikingly radical observations about politics and free speech in the Bush/War on Terror era are presented as daring – I don’t mean this as a criticism, just a reflection on how cramped that decade really was. The parts about Paretsky’s coming of age and coming to writing in Chicago were fascinating and made me want to read her fiction.
Kiese Laymon, Heavy. Perhaps the best book I read this year, probably the one I’ve thought about the most. When I had a my students read excerpts from it I also had them read an interview he gave called “Is it possible to write a truthful memoir” which seems right but also insufficient to describe what he does – truth telling directly to a flawed parent you still love being not just the incidental result of the book but is core aim and a reflection – I can’t really think of another author who so directly connects this country’s inability to tell the truth about itself to our inability to do this in our lives. Along the way, there’s so much about intellectualism among the poor, respectability politics as a complex way of dealing with life, how schools fail to tell us the truth about our world, the cruelties of academia, body image in men, and so much more. Laymon also wrote two of the new essays that got me through this year: “Mississippi: A Poem in Days” and the first great piece of writing inspired by a viral tik Tok that I’m aware of (really)!
Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts. Nelson writes about motherhood and queerness and creativity and is influential with lots of writers I love, but I didn’t love this as much as I wanted or expected to: she tries to do something like Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse with marginal quotations (another technique I love) but it didn’t quite work here: I think there’s an unresolved tension at the heart of the book about trying to write an intimate book that’s in part about a partner whom she describes as craving privacy, and it seems like the tension stands in the way of the project instead of becoming the subject itself as it needed to. I do love that she takes queer theory seriously and tries to work out how it relates to the positions she now wants to take and how those positions come from affect.
Porochista Khakpour, Brown Album. I bought this because of her amazing essay “13 Ways of Being an Immigrant” that I read in an anthology. It’s a very useful model for students of a personal essay through woven scenes. I thought about teaching the whole collection but found it somewhat uneven, there’s a certain self-dramatizing quality and straining towards certain stylistic features of “essay” that didn’t sit quite right, but I still loved a lot of the pieces.
Hanif Abdurraqib They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. Wonderful collection of essays that blend music criticism, memoir and reflections on life under Trump and in the era of Black Lives Matter. He’s also a poet and does great things with form and rhythm. Made me download a bunch of new music and even enjoy reading about music I’ll never listen to. Worth it for the revelry about Prince’s Super Bowl performance alone.
Daniel Mendelsohn The Elusive Embrace. I bought this years ago having enjoyed Mendelsohn’s New Yorker pieces. The way Mendelsohn writes about desire and the hard boundaries he draws between the queer community and family life feel dated even as his own experiences undermine his categories, but the last section is a lovely mediation on family history as he untangles the real story behind a family legend about a the tragic young death of an ancestor.
Poetry
Poetry took over more and more of my reading this year thanks to my own forays into writing it and the addition of a reading exchange to my meetings with my writing partner. I also, like many, found it the best thing to read this year: the art form in which time is already stretched and weird, in which death and grief are always present and everything heightened even when – especially when? – everyday life fails us. Since this is a list of books read, it doesn’t include the countless rereads of Grace Paley or Adrienne Rich or the delights messing around on the Poetry Foundation website, but it should. In the meantime.
Danez Smith, Homie. Delightful and full of life and optimism: feels appropriate the I read it in the before. “My President” is a delight that feels like 2020’s answer to the evergreen “I want a dyke for president” of my youth and I can’t wait to teach it.
Staceyann Chinn, Crossfire. Remarkably, this is Chinn’s first collection, having focused on the performance aspect of her work for years, but they work on the page, especially the direct addresses and the humor and the movement between polemic and ecstatic praise.
Claudia Rankine, Citizen. Years ago before Rankine became one of the best known poets around, I “went” to “The Provenance of Beauty,” a play that took place in the guise of a bus tour through the South Bronx; a stunningly well-done use of this format in a way I’ve never experienced with most “experimental” theater. I also loved her 2004 collection Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. So I’m a little sad Citizen didn’t quite land for me – I wanted the essayistic element to be more fully there, but I’m fully ready to imagine the fault lay with me in some way of how I approached it.
Jericho Brown, The Heritage. As good as everyone said. Love the callbacks, the way the collection is put together, the humor, the light, the sexiness.
Ellen Bass, Indigo. I bought this book because of the title poem in The New Yorker, which is still my favorite poem I read this year. Those turns! So many of them! And this whole book . . I just felt her sitting with me, an older and wiser and funnier version of my friends or the friends I’ve needed and lost, reflecting on age; the way a whole span of twenty or thirty years of a life and its turns are taken in the way only an older poet can, the attention to illness and caregiving, and being old but wanting more more. And then there is this . . .
Today I heard a young woman read a poem
in which her husband lifts her bare bottom
onto the kitchen counter
and, in the next line, spreads her legs.
The marriage has problems. They may already be divorced.
But suddenly I am ruing the fact
that no one has lifted my bottom onto a kitchen counter.
Not when my bottom trotted high and proud.
And not when it began to eye the floor
as if contemplating its future.
And now, I’m going to die
without ever being taken on those cold hard tiles.
Don’t tell me it’s not too late. It is.
Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things. Horses, the alternating pull of city and country, desire and mourning. Surprising and affirming and devastating at turns.
Natalie Diaz, Post-Colonial Love Story. If Indigo was the poetry collection that made me feel the most, this was probably the one that made me think the most: really interesting formal experiments, and something I’ve never experienced in the way she writes about the natural world – especially water – in a way that feels as fresh and vital and necessary as the moment of environmental demands.
Miscellaneous:
Excerpts from the Diary of Rosemary Meyer. The publisher sent this to me and I feel bad I failed to write about it. Rosemary was Bernadette’s sister an artist and this journal of a year is a nice chronicle of artistic circles and feminist preoccupations at the time but ultimately written too sparsely, in the short-hand way I often keep diaries I don’t expect to be published, for me to find a way in, though I was trying, before everything happened.
Anna Deveare Smith, Let Me Down Easy. In this play Smith applies her Studs Terkel as play style oral histories to health care and the body – what it is like to have illness or injury and to seek or give care. It’s brilliant like all her work, and especially relevant for this year: the monologue from a nurse at a hospital abandoned by authorities during Hurricane Katrina read like a message in a bottle to us in the near future that we failed to heed. I taught it in the Spring, which ended up being quite a coincidence, and though I had a very rough transition to online teaching, I think students got quite lot out of reading this as so many of them dealt with illness and caregiving.
Books I Read with/to the (Bigger) Kid
Brian Jaques, Redwall. Kind of like Lord of the Rings, but with rats and weasels.
Raymon Smullyan What is the Name of this Book? I have great memories of working out these puzzles when I pulled this from my dad’s shelves. It was a delict to again puzzle around knights and knaves and the portraits in Portia’s caskets, though I was a bit startled to find out how many jokes my dad had cribbed from it.
Sydney Taylor, All of a Kind Family and More All of a Kind Family. A pure delight to revisit these childhood favorites of mine. Some very old-school gender notions (maybe as much a product of the 50s in which they were written than the 1910s in which they are set) but they hold up very well. It was fascinating to read the account of the polio epidemic of 1916, which sent the family to the Rockaways for the summer out of a belief it was safer. Also when the family gets scarlet fever, the health department comes over to put the quarantine marker on their house, which I found unbearably touching for obvious reasons.
My goal for next year is to read more than this year; or, more ambitiously, one for every year of my life.
Previous years’ books