Just the headline "The Best of 2020" makes me shake my head. What a year it has been--but it's been a year with time for reading (particularly reading via audio book, since reading print seemed to become more challenging whenever our degree of lockdown went up).
At any rate, it is always fun to look back at what I've read during the course of the year. I note that I don't have much patience for millennials in fiction. I did turn 70 this year, so perhaps that's not surprising--though I have enjoyed a number of books about teenagers, so . . .
A few days ago, my friend Jan asked our book group members to name their three favorite books of the year. I surprised myself by listing three nonfiction books--as always, I read way more fiction than nonfiction, but there were some really great nonfiction titles this year.
Fiction
I once again had trouble choosing a favorite--nothing stood out in the way, say, The Underground Railroad or Life After Life did a few years back. But there were some good ones--and my favorite really could have been any of the ones I listed as honorable mentions.
Your House Will Pay, by Steph Cha. This book was both timely and well-done. It is a fictionalized account of an killing that took place in Los Angeles at the time of the Rodney King riots--a Korean American shopkeeper shot and killed an innocent African American teenage girl. The novel looks at the long-range impacts through Shawn, the cousin of the murdered girl, and Grace, the daughter of the shopkeeper-killer. Both want to do the right thing while dealing with complicated family and cultural dynamics.
Honorable mention:
- The Gifted School, by Bruce Holsinger
- Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid
- Goodbye, Vitamin, by Rachel Khong
Short Stories
As readers of the blog know, short stories aren't my thing, but I read two collections I really enjoyed this year:
Sabrina and Corina, by Kali Fajardo-Anstine, features young women of Mexican American or indigenous heritage. Most of the stories are set in and around Denver, which added to their attraction for me. But even if they had been set elsewhere, I would have found these stories of young women dealing with illness, isolation, injustice, violence, and loss moving, memorable, and instructive.
Honorable mention:
- Fools, by Joan Silber
Mystery
Yesterday by Felicia Yap, is a mystery with sci-fi/fantasy elements. The mystery is set in a time/place where people have only one or two days of memory, and the "Monos" are discriminated against by the "Duos." Indeed, the police detective tasked with solving the murder of a beautiful woman has hidden the fact that he is a Mono for his entire career, and the murdered woman's unusual memory is key to her fate. I thoroughly enjoyed the imaginative and twisty nature of this mystery though I should probably share that my sister did not care for it!
Honorable mention:
- Miracle Creek by Angie Kim
One, by Sarah Crossan, which came to me via a recommendation from my granddaughter, is the story of conjoined twins, Grace and Tippi, who start attending school for the first time as teens. They make two amazing friends but also suffer ridicule -- and they face a health crisis when Grace's heart begins to fail. The poetic form seems especially appropriate to the exploration of identity in a highly unusual situation.
Honorable mention:
- Clap When You Land, by Elizabeth Acevedo
Poetry
As usual, I didn't read as much poetry as I think I should have, but I did have a favorite.
An American Sunrise, by Joy Harjo, poet laureate of the United States, links the Trail of Tears to the current treatments of migrants on the Southwestern border. Many of the poems, which are interspersed with text passages providing historic perspective, are a form of literary resistance.
Nonfiction
I can't choose between my two favorites, which are extremely different -- and any of the honorable mentions could just as easily be in the "winners" category.
The Library Book, by Susan Orlean, is ostensibly the story of the devastating fire at the central Los Angeles Library in 1986. And it does explore many aspects of the fire and recovery in fascinating detail, but it's also a history of libraries and their role in the community; a love song to books, libraries, and librarians; and a memoir of the author's relationship to libraries at various points in her life. It might seem the book could fall apart under the weight of so many different stories, but it doesn't. I loved it.
Memorial Drive, by Natasha Tretheway (a former poet laureate), is wonderful in an entirely different way. Tretheway writes about her childhood as the daughter of a black mother and white father, the dissolution of her parents' marriage, her mother's eventual re-marriage and divorce, and the mother's murder by the second ex-husband. It's a devastating portrait and exploration of trauma and its effects, as well as a way to look at what it means for African American to seek freedom and how writing can heal. And it's beautifull written.
Honorable Mention:
- Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, by Lori Gottlieb
- Know My Name, by Chanel Miller
- Supreme Inequality, by Adam Cohen
- Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama
Favorite Passages
I always look for themes in the quotes I especially loved during the year. There are definitely themes in 2020. One is love and what that means. Another is harder to describe, but perhaps it is self-examination or reflection. I know this is a lot of quotes, but somehow it feels like we need a lot of inspiration as we leave 2020 behind.
**
How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us. But we have to ask with an open heart, with no idea what the answer will be.
We call such a limited number of relationships love in our lives, but there is always love around us--it's as ubiquitous as oxygen. It lives in the houses where we've slept, the kitchens where we've cooked, in the food we've prepared for the people we love and in the walls we've shaped with our hands.
--Pam Houston, Deep Creek (a wonderful nonfiction book that didn't even make it into the year's best!)
**
"Break My Heart" (excerpts)
The heart is a fist.
It pockets prayer or holds rage.
It's a timekeeper.
Music maker, or backstreet truth teller.
--Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise
**
What imperfect carriers of love we are, and what imperfect givers. That the reasons we an care for one another can have nothing to do with the person cared for. That it has only to do with who we were around that person, what we felt about that person.
--Rachel Khong, Goodbye, Vitamin
**
The unexamined life is not worth living, as the aphorism goes, but perhaps an honorable an dinformed life requires examining others' lives, not just one's own. Perhaps we do not know ourselves unless we know others.
Comfort is often a code word for the right to be unaware.
--Rebecca Solnit, Whose Story Is This?
**
In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn't understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual's consciousness is a collection of memories we've cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.
--Susan Orlean, The Library Book
**
They say that a person's personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn't true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we'd never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we're more than a mistake we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.
. . . we weren't ready to become adults. Somebody should have stopped us.
--Fredrick Backman, Anxious People
**
In the narrative of my life, which is the look backward rather than forward into the unknown and unstoried future, I emerged from the pool as from a baptismal font--changed, reborn--as if I had been shown what would be my calling even then. This is how the past fits into the narrative of our lives, gives meaning and purpose. Even my mother's death is redeemed in the story of my calling, made meaningful rather than merely senseless. It is the story I tell myself to survive.
--Natasha Tretheway, Memorial Drive
**
And these two don't fit the themes but I like them:
He cares about other people . . . Most men don't know the pleasure.
--Kali Fajardo Anstine, Sabrina and Corina
Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists.
Racist ideas love believers, not thinkers.
--Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist
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