Best of 2020

I read a LOT this year--228 books, perhaps the most ever for a year since leaving childhood behind. Getting into audio books has definitely increased my reading, since you can listen while cooking, doing a puzzle, playing a computer game, walking, driving, etc. I've read some very good books this year although I'm not feeling as strongly about the best novels as I did in 2016-2018. But that's not stopping me from making some "best of" picks.

Fiction

Feast Your Eyes, by Myla Goldberg. I will admit I picked this book over my two honorable mentions because it was more original. In fact, it was not like any other novel I have read, in that Goldberg structured it as an exhibit catalog written by the artist/photographer's daughter. It also incorporates excerpts from her mother's journal and interviews with people from her mother's past. The story that unfolds is a complex exploration of a problematic mother-daughter relationship, female friendship, and the life of an artist, both in terms of the economic challenges and the way in which the creative mind works.  I loved Goldberg's first novel, Bee Season, and Feast Your Eyes is similar in its originality, its complexity, its insights into art, and its spot-on portrayal of a young female character, and yet wholly different.

Honorable Mention:  The River, by Peter Heller and The Most Fun We Ever Had, by Claire Lombardo. Still feeling unqualified to choose a best sci fi/speculative fiction, I would just say I thoroughly enjoyed The Dispatcher, by John Scalzi; Recursion, by Blake Crouch; and The Dreamers, by Karen Walker Thompson.

Oops--how could I have forgotten Olive, Again, by Elizabeth Strout? Loved it!

Mystery

Odd Child Out, by Gilly Macmillan. Two British teenage boys, best friends, sneak out after dark; one ends up being fished from a canal. The other is in a state of shock, unable (or unwilling) to speak. As the police try to figure out what happened, the reader grapples with issues of adolescent friendship, childhood illness, immigration, and sexual violence.  

Honorable Mention: Idaho, by Emily Ruskovich; Those People, by Louise Candlish; and Lady in the Lake, by Laura Lippman (Ruskovich and Candlish might not consider their books mysteries, but I wish more mysteries resembled them)

Nonfiction

Grace Will Lead Us Home, by Jennifer Berry Hawes. Hawes documents the horrific 2016 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, and the aftermath for the survivors and families of the victims. The survivors were badly let down by their church and pastors in the aftermath and, while some victims' families were remarkable in their strength, others experienced conflict and estrangement, compounding their losses. The perpetrator's story is equally disturbing, since his radicalization seems to have occurred largely on line. While the book offers moments of uplift, it's mostly terribly sad.

Honorable Mention: Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson; If I Understood You Would I Have This Look on My Face? by Alan Alda; and Everything Happens for a Reason . . . And Other Lies I've Loved, by Kate Bowler, which gets a special award for leading me to the author's wonderful podcast (https://katebowler.com/everything-happens/). 

YA

The Poet X, by Elizabeth Acevedo. This may be the best book I read this year--I absolutely loved it. Acevedo, a former middle school English teacher, wrote the book as the poetry  journal of the main character, high school student Xiomara. The writing is exquisite and the character's challenges as a teenager and the child of strict immigrant parents are presented with great empathy. It's a beautiful book. Here's one poetic excerpt (I love the Legos metaphor so much!):

Every time I think about Aman

poems build inside me

like I've been gifted a box of metaphor Legos

that I stack and stack and stack.

Honorable Mention: The Opposite of Always (my granddaughter's favorite), by Justin A. Reynolds, and Words in Deep Blue, by Cath Crowley

Poetry

Monument, by Natasha Trethewey. I read several poetry collections this year (yay me!) but some were a little too obtuse for my taste (shame on me!). Trethewey's poems chronicle the life experiences of life experiences of African Americans, especially African American women, from slavery to Hurricane Katrina. If the book only included the first stunning poem, it would be worthwhile; that poem is about the murder of Trethewey's mother by her stepfather and the things people say to her about this trauma ("Do you think your mother was weak for men?"). As a farm daughter, I loved these lines: 

. . . Lord, bless those hands,

The harvesters. Bless the travelers who gather

Our food and those who grow it, clean it, cook it,

Who bring it to our tables. Bless the laborers

Whose faces we do not see--like the grl

My grandmother was, walking the rails home:

Bless us that we remember. 

"Invocation, 1926"

Honorable Mention:  Shout, by Laurie Halse Anderson

Favorite Passages

I loved so many passages in The Well-Read Black Girl, edited by Gloria Edim, that I'll just refer you to that review for a sampling: https://novelconversations.blogspot.com/2019/05/well-read-black-girl-edited-by-glory.html. 

Perhaps related at some level to those passages is this one:

Sisters, drop

everything. Walk

away from the lake, leaning

on each other's shoulders

when you need

the support. Feel the contractions

of another truth ready

to be born: shame

turned

inside out

is rage. 

Shout, by Laurie Halse Anderson

And, although it's hard to say this is a favorite of all favorites, I do appreciate some snark: 

If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told it does, it appears that writing takes some away. 

Sigrid Nunez, The Friend (the narrator's thought when she hears another writer say about her friend, "Now he's officially a dead white male")