As part of our year-end coverage, we’re once again asking this annual question of our staff and readership: What’s the best non-2020 book you read this year?
Haven’t touched a book since 2020 went full 2020. But, three million years ago, when 2020 still felt like just another year, I seem to remember having read a few interesting things. Such as Li, a short novel (followed by unrelated short stories) by one of my favorite poets. I think they made a movie about it, although I hardly see the point of just keeping the ‘audiovisual’ of Kavvadias’ words.I also used Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking as a companion to try and tame mourning, and while a fine book, I found it still marginally less pointed than Espitallier’s La première année (The first year), on the same subject. Maybe because I read Didion in a french translation. Or maybe because I read Espitallier in 2019, closer to the event. The rest is, frankly, a blur. A big for of parallel readings and studies on a couple of subjects, that fused in 2020’s big reset. Maybe it’s time (and an opportunity) to let the dust settle and check where I had left which book.
I got a Community notification for this?Most of my reading was non 2020 releases. My library doesn’t always get the new releases I’m interested in and if they do they get scooped up quick. I caught up on some older stuff like The Third Man and some Agatha Chritstie’s I hadn’t ready yet.
Most of the books I read are not new publications, although I do think I read more of them (new publications) this year than in the past. I don’t think that’s due to the pandemic—I work in the food supply chain and we never shut down—but more to reading more sites that have book reviews. I think my favorite fiction not published this year that I read in 2020 was The Vices by Lawrence Douglas. It just kind of had a little of everything and was very witty, and yet reading it was also like putting on a comfy old cardigan. It reminded me of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History in that way (not in anything to do with plot).
Best In A Generally Undisputed Classic Of Modern Western Literature (Which Is Also Fun To Read) Kind Of Way: Animal Farm by George Orwell. I’m sure I read this years ago but I can’t remember it, which makes me think I was probably a bit too young to really get what was going on beyond the fairy tale aspect of it. Reading it as an older person who’s learned a little something about Stalinist Russia makes it a lot easier to get the parallels to the forced collectivisation of the gulags. Best In A Re-Reading These Helps ScottyEnn Stay Sane Kind Of Way: The Golden Spiders by Rex Stout. The Nero Wolfe novels are pretty much my go-to comfort read and, yeah, 2020. They’re all good, but they can get pretty formulaic if you read them one after another; FWIW the earlier ones are best, but this is probably my favourite of the ones I read this year.Best In A ScottyEnn’s Branching Out Kind Of Way: Shane by Jack Shaefer. I started getting into westerns this year (maybe it was something to do with being stuck indoors for a fairly large chunk of the year, I dunno) and I read this and True Grit by Charles Portis. Both were really good, but I think Shane just pipped it. (Incidentally, does anyone have any good western recommendations? Especially westerns involving gunslingers and shooting and all that good stuff?)Best In A Welp, ScottyEnn’s Pretty Much Just Reverting Back To Childhood Now Kind Of Way: Doctor Who: City of Death by James Goss/Douglas Adams/David Fisher (it’s complicated). Best. Doctor Who. Story. Ever. Change my mind. (Just kidding, you won’t.)
On the good Western front — Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is one of the best novels, full stop. It is very long but that is part of what makes it so good, it is a book you live in. Not so much gunslingers — it’s about a cattle drive from Texas to Montana — but there is gunplay and violence, including a character who wandered in from a Cormac McCarthy book. Highest possible recommendation. (And the early 90s miniseries is great too, but I think is best after the book.)
I finished Lonesome Dove in September after picking it up on and off since the previous November. The last chunk especially ties it all together emotionally. I picked up Streets of Laredo this last weekend for my vacation, and while people describe it as a disappointment in comparison, I’m enjoying it mightily so far. I plan on reading the rest in publication order and am curious what you thought of them, if you’ve picked them up.
Heh, Lonesome Dove was so good I’ve hesitated to go further, I don’t want to taint it. But I’ve heard good things about Laredo, if not necessarily other follow-ups.
I read two books that I loved this year. Less by Andrew Sean Greer. A delightful and unassuming book that somehow won the Pulitzer. A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles. A fabulous tale of life in Russia after the revolution told largely by a man who’s locked down in a hotel. Very fitting for our current time.
After reading about 3/4 of the books over the years, I did a full re-read/completion of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin books (just finished Blue At The Mizzen yesterday). “There is not a moment to lose” is a repeated line in the books that becomes comical at points and then a refrain, it’s amusing and touching to see the tetchy Stephen eventually deploying it. Always moving, Jack in particular striving for station within the Navy that will let him keep moving — at one point an old shark following the Surprise in BATM is ripped apart by younger, quicker ones. Jack and Stephen have destinations in mind and they reach them only to keep their journey going and looking back on the books and who they contain — Jack and Stephen themselves, changed and unchanged, but also characters who have fallen away or died, other ones who have stuck around, and newer ones who have joined and are learning their way — and it becomes clear how this really is one long book showing two lives. And life goes on. As Mike Watt said about working on a boat and working in a band, “There’s always more duty / Maybe that’s the beauty.” In non-beautiful books, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s How To Be A God has stuck with me after reading it for the first time this year. Despair and increasing helplessness as obvious destruction looms, wonder why that resonated.
I felt the series started loosing oomph and direction towards the end, but overall really liked it. Very immersive, and nice mix of “missions of the week” with longer term character development. The Master and Commander movie was damn near perfect, too, and it’s a shame we never got more of them.
It’s obvious in retrospect how O’Brian had to fudge the actual wars’ timeline midway through, the multi-book “uhhhh Jack and Stephen are off in the Indian/Pacific Ocean” run is partially to keep them in a bit of a timeless place and that leads to a certain lack of overall momentum even while good stuff is happening on a micro level — I love Stephen in Indonesia, having that wonderful interlude of peace among the monks but also ruthlessly, ah, disposing of some problems. The Hundred Days was a real slap in the face though, O’Brian spends much of The Yellow Admiral foreshadowing two things that don’t happen there, but then do happen offscreen or in truncated ways here and it’s not unfair but damn does it hurt. I think that ultimately makes the series and ending stronger though.
I just finished a 2008 novel I’d been saving for the right time: a signed copy of Moxyland by Lauren Beukes. Dystopian near-future sci-fi set in South Africa, it is surprisingly current (incl. a pandemic reference!) and the predictions hold up better than most in the genre. Unusually, it has well written characters which is not often the case in this genre. Also, the setting is a bit more exotic than usual, which is a plus when you can’t travel abroad. The plot has just the right amount of thrills and dark humor.
Generally speaking, you shouldn’t store near-future sci-fi like fine red wine; it doesn’t age well. But in this case the payoff was worth it – now was definitely the right time to read this.
I’m almost done with the Three Body Problem trilogy, which I started earlier this year. The first book was interesting but dragged at times, and I feel like I would have gotten a lot more out of it if I were more familiar with Chinese history and culture. The second and third books are much more universally accessible, and holy hell does the plot move along quickly. I like how the timeline of eras at the beginning of the third book gives you an inkling of how bonkers the scale of the book will be by the end.
I read the first as well this year and thought similar thoughts – so I’m glad to hear that about the other two. Will add the second to my reading list before I forget who everyone is.
Yeah, Tana French is great. Her most recent one “The Searcher” is about a former Chicago cop who retires to Ireland, and it is quite impressive how an Irish woman convincingly writes an American man — often when writing a main character of another gender or nationality authors make errors that make the character unbelievable, but I think French pulls it off.
Thank you for reminding me about the new French! And whoa, a Chicago cop as the lead? Very interesting. I think she’s great in general (Broken Harbour is probably my favorite) but really liked The Wych Elm, in part because it seemed to be a Murder Squad book inside out, looking at one of her cops from the outside.
Yeah, I visited Ireland shortly after the Great Recession a decade ago and recall seeing those half-built housing developments that were left abandoned due to the construction firms going bust. So I could really picture the setting of Broken Harbour when I read it.
I think its shift in focus threw people (everyone wants more Murder Squad) and the narrator himself is sort of a dick in a passive-aggressive way instead of the more active dickery of the Squad. But it’s very effective at peeling back his facade.And on Broken Harbor, that setting would definitely make it more intense, yikes. That last quarter or so of the book is like falling down a hole, I don’t think it’s a coincidence the next two Squad books are somewhat happier in how their cops resolve the job and relationships on it.
I appreciated how we got to see Murder Squad from the inside out, especially as earlier books hinted at the dark side of a lot of the cops (and let’s face it, Rob clearly killed his friends) but we never got to see them spiral quite like we do in The Witch Elm. I think one thing The Witch Elm didn’t do is leave something unresolved or magical, which is a Tana French hallmark that I know frustrates some people but which is one of the things I love best about her. I always pitch In the Woods as “this is a mystery book and the mystery doesn’t get solved” because so many people I recommended it to got mad at me once they got to the end. I think you have to go into her books with a particular enthusiasm for the journey and not the destination, and a lot of mystery fans are more about the destination.She’s back to the unresolved nature in The Searcher – the mystery does get solved but it leaves you with that nice Tana French feeling of “I don’t really know where they go from here.” It’s also maybe her saddest book? Even sadder than Faithful Place or Broken Harbour, I think, which is saying something.
Holy shit, that’s sad! I will go in prepared.“I think you have to go into her books with a particular enthusiasm for the journey and not the destination” — exactly, or at least an understanding that the destination is not what you think it is, that some things can’t be explained. Broken Harbour takes that as far as it can go from the cop end and The Secret Place twists things around toward the people being investigated, I think that’s French’s strongest work in the magical realism vein.
Also Broken Harbour is also my favorite of the six Murder Squad books – I read it when I had just given birth to my youngest and we had just bought our first house, which gave it a certain sense of immediacy, as you can imagine.
Fantasyland by Kurt Andersen – a fantastic 500-year breakdown of how America is primed to believe in fiction and falsehood and how we’ve wound up where we are today. It ties it everything from the Satanic Panic to McCarthyism to the Salem witch trials to the Puritans to the Scopes monkey trial to Disneyland to suburbia, showing exactly the line from the first settlers in America to Trump’s election.I found it extraordinarily poignant in 2020, the year of COVID-19 denial, QAnon congresspeople, and our ongoing insane election dispute, as a method of piecing together why the fuck this kind of thing is happening with such frequency in this country in particular.
I’ve read and liked a number of his books before, but I really enjoyed Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris. His writing is always funny at times, but I was really laughing out loud at this one. It hit the spot.
Covering three genres: science fiction, historical fiction and graphic fiction I’ve reread Gene Wolfe’s Urth of the New Sun, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Gerald Way’s The Umbrella Academy.
Just to butt in out of the blue, if your into graphic novels (or manga), I 100% recommend Vinland Saga to everyone. It’s the best Viking Age story I’ve ever read and blows all the network and streaming shows out of the water. Great character-driven arcs and manages to avoid most of the tropes that infest a lot of good manga. Also highly recommend Monstress from Image.
Lonesome Dove, which I finally got around to after more than 30 years. And Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I haven’t quite finished, but I can’t imagine it going to absolute shit in the last 160 pages.
Spoiler alert: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell does the complete opposite of going to absolute shit in its final 160 pages.Wooo Lonesome Dove! Let’s hit the trails and tragically subliminate our feelings!
JS&MN only gets better in the last 160 pages. I love that damn book so much.Once you’re done with it, there’s a companion piece called The Ladies of Grace Adieu – it is a collection of short stories that expand on some of the “historical magic” events mentioned in the book. Her new book, Piranesi, (more of a novella, especially as compared to the tome that is JS&MN) is a wild trip. It took me a while to get into and then it gets so ridiculous and compelling. Susannah Clarke’s imagination is a weird place and I want to live there all the time.
Love of my life, you’ve hurt me. You’ve broken my heart and now you leave me. The final nail in my coffin of 2020…so went back to my old favourites to find meaning where there is none. Best re-reads: Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte, Watership Down – Richard Adams, Stardust – Neil Gaiman, The Last Unicorn – Peter S Beagle, Endless Night – Agatha Christie, Anna Karenina – Tolstoy, Gone with the wind – Margaret Mitchell, The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy, Tess of the D’urbevilles – Thomas Hardy.Best new reads: Everything I never told you – Celeste Ng – a book about suicide and the attempt to understand. It ends with us – Colleen Hoover – about love and abuse intertwined, and the complexities of the power dynamic.
Whenever I see the title of Kavalier & Clay, I think of “The Generals” from Shel Silverstein’s “Where the Sidewalk Ends”, because one of them is General Clay and Kavalier just has the military connotation.
How had I not heard about the Bonfire disaster making-of? The novel is fantastic and should have been a no-brainer good film. Just went to the top of my list.
I have one best re-read and one new read.New read: Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers (1978). Such a great set of stories, and kinda how I think an actual alien visitation would probably go.Re-read: The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018). I have never paid closer attention to trees & weeds & the dirt in the woods than I did for probably the first 6 months after I read this the first time. This thing just hits me in the gut every time & makes me sad at how little we appreciate all the miraculous natural things around us.
Plowed through the 2001 John Adams biography by David McCullough. It’s very good and quite prescient given the waning days of the 2020 Presidential election and the country’s political divisiveness we currently have. President Adams had to row upstream his entire term (1797-1801) sandwiched between Washington and Jefferson. He deserves much more popular respect than he gets. If I was ever to become a national politician, I plan to be a John Adams style politician/patriot/statesman.
I felt like McCullough was a bit in the tank for Adams (Alien and Sedition Acts will always suck shit) but it was a nice look at a guy who gets overshadowed. The focus on Adams building up the Navy (USS CONSTITUTION WOOOOOOOO) was really cool.
I didn’t get the sense that McCullough underplayed the terribleness of the Alien/Sedition Act, but he certainly is a fan of Adams for sure, but without compromising objectively. The Act was terrible then and now, but a couple minor and major mistakes in such a long prominent political life shouldn’t overshadow the overall great work Adams did. Hell, he was somewhat making it up as he went and was pretty successful through that lens.
Beastings by Benjamin Myers A Small Thing to Want by Shuly Xochitl CawoodLanny by Max PorterIn the Distance by Hernan DiazShe Would Be King by Wayetu MooreCountry by Michael HughesDucks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
My pick would be One Hundred Years of Solitude, which would have been a great book in any year but which felt particularly suited to the surreal year we’ve had.
With Trump’s electoral defeat, I finally felt emotionally able to read Shattered, the book about Hillary Clinton’s doomed campaign from 2017. It was a good read.Vulgar Favours, the true crime book about Andrew Cunanan’s killing spree which ended with the murder of Gianni Versace. Great book.King’s Counsellor – The war diaries of Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, George VI’s private secretary. The Suspect – the inside look at the Richard Jewell case.Of books that I re-read:A Vast Conspiracy, the Jeffrey Toobin book about the Lewinsky scandal.Nevil Shute’s On The Beach (that was fun reading during the opening weeks of the pandemic).I’ve got about halfway through Bill Clinton and James Patterson’s The President is Missing but have not yet come back to it.
I finally decided to read “And The Band Played On,” the story of how government inaction, ignorance and callousness took a public health emergency and turned it into a catastrophe and thank God THAT couldn’t happen again these days right? Right?Also, “The Right Stuff” because I needed to read about dedicated nerds (and the pilots, who were nerds in their own way) doing something awesome.
Notes On a Scandal by Zoe ZellerThe Plot Against America by Philip RothThe Rapist by Les EdgertonA Head Full of Ghosts by Paul TremblayBeloved by Toni MorrisonThe Outsider by Stephen KingLess Than Zero by Brett Easton EllisFrozen Hell by John W CampbellMy lone 2020 book: Devolution by Max Brooks.
I also read Sword of Destiny this year, and it was indeed amazing. I started the one following that, Blood of Elves I think, but felt bogged down by the plot and missed the light feeling of the previous book, with every chapter being its own story. I might try it again, though.I actually most enjoyed The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis, which I had wanted to read ever since seeing it on Michael Ondaatje’s list of the five novels he rereads the most. It is really an excellent book, minus one or two scenes I thought could be excised (and were in the Netflix series), and it was ridiculously thrilling in the chess scenes. I don’t even play chess, but they were so exciting. I much preferred it to the series, actually. The funniest book I read was Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer, which is a mix of a memoir, a travelogue, and an account by a frustrated writer trying to focus on his in depth study of D.H. Lawrence. I don’t think I can even describe how hilarious, but also thoughtful, it is. Give it a shot if you enjoy Lawrence and acerbic wits like David Sedaris.
I couldn’t get into Out Of Sheer Rage (maybe in part because I dislike Lawrence), but I like Dyer’s Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It.Is The Queen’s Gambit worth reading if you’ve already seen the series?
Not sure? I read the book before I watched the series, and it felt like a bit of a waste of time to watch, honestly, because all of the major beats are there. But as I said, I enjoyed it much more, just because TV always glamourizes things in a weird way, and the book is very detached, in a way. Beth in the book feels disconnected from her own life, possibly from being an orphan from such a young age, and the book is a way to experience her reconnection as she grows up. (There is one scene in the book that I absolutely hated, but they didn’t put it in the show thank god.)Oh, and a lot of the dialogue is the same, they pulled a lot from the book.
If you can answer generally — does the novel’s ending have the same tone as Queen’s Gambit the series? Because that seemed very off based on what I know of Tevis’ other works about competition, but maybe he went in a different direction here.
It has the same basic plot beats, but the weird inclusion of the “love interest” is entirely fabricated for the show. The book ending is beautiful and introspective and perfect, and I thought it was far superior to the show in that regard. Less about the acclaim and more about Beth finally feeling like a full person. But again, major plot points are all the same.
Thank you! What felt extremely off to me wasSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERnot the win, which felt fair, but the happy teamwork aspect. (Which I was OK with at the start, from an individual, and when the phone was passed I may have made loud noises in opposition). And the final scene in the show was bizarre — there are plenty of American weirdoes playing chess outside at any given moment, why is this a happy thing? You lived in the East Village for a few months! America’s chess goons are very much out there!
The phone scene is there, but it is all from Beth’s perspective, so a lot quieter and not that “The gang’s all here!” energy. Just support from across the sea. And she goes to the chess park and sits down across from an old man, says “Would you like to play chess?” and that’s it. No recognition or anything. So yes, the energy in the show is completely different from the book, very TV. I kind of hated it.
I’ve read several books this year, but most were disappointing (Library at Mt. Char) or straight up bad (Carrion Comfort). I guess the couple that stuck with me were Warchild, which was just beautiful and kind and horrifying all at once. Exceptional psychological work put into it. I genuinely cared for the characters in it.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August was another I enjoyed. It was pretty light, but time travel is always fun and it had interesting themes and a strong internal logic.
On the fence would be the second book of the Southern Reach trilogy (I like the sub-genre of sci-fi where it’s just people doing their jobs competently but shit’s all crazy, lol). The third was pretty boring and repetitive though, and neither recaptured the sheer bizarre terror I felt from reading the first one.
I also mostly liked The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, though again, it wasn’t exactly heavy lifting and the premise itself is pretty tired. But it didn’t wallow in grimness nor pull plot points from gratuitous sexual violence as maaaaany others in its oeuvre have/do. I also liked that we learned what happened to secondary and tertiary characters after their interactions with the protagonist end. Overall, it felt like a respectful piece of writing, if that makes sense.
Finally, while I wouldn’t say I really “liked” it, To Say Nothing of the Dog was amusing, light in tone, and surprisingly keeps popping up into my head even though I finished it months ago. It is also about time travel, which was a popular theme for this shitty garbage year.
I loved To Say Nothing Of The Dog but I’m a big Willis fan in general. If you haven’t read Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat, which inspired Willis’ title and a good chunk of the early part of the novel, it is hilarious — three dopey buddies go on holiday on the Thames, hijincks and digressions ensue, straight comedy no moral. A lot of fun.
I probably read 30 books this year, and I don’t think ANY of them were from 2020! But I’ll go ahead and name Max Hastings’ “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975″ because it’s a brilliantly written, coherent history of that complex conflict. An amazing book.
Max Hastings is great. The one thing that turns me off from history times is how by-the-numbers and dry a lot of writing is, but he does an awesome job keeping it just light enough to keep your attention while still doling out the facts. Retribution and Overlord are the ones I’ve read.
When I read about Vietnam or World War II, I’m interested in what actual human beings, who should have been doing other things with their lives, were forced to do when war broke out. I don’t get off on reading about battle strategies or finding out which kind of rifle is the best one to use if you’re a sniper. I’d be thrilled if no one ever had to pick up a weapon again. My interest is in the humanity of the thing, and that’s what Hastings does very well. You never lose sight of the fact that real people were involved. I have a couple of his other books on my list. I’m sure I’ll get around to at least one of them before the end of next year.
Oh, then the best book you’ll ever read is Japan at War. Nothing but personal stories from Japanese people across all walks of life. Soldiers, sailors, pilots, mothers, journalists, reporters, priests, actors, diplomats, communist dissenters, kabuki theatre mangers, you name it.
I recommend the Dublin Murder Squad Series to everyone who enjoys detective novels OR literary fiction, as they are a perfect blend of both. And, outside of the series, The Searcher, which she released this year, is just a perfect little book about loneliness (and, like, crime or whatever). I know a lot of people weren’t fans of The Witch Elm, but I really dug what she was trying to do in that one.For my money, the best release of last year that I reread three times this year because holy shit, I needed it, is Red, White and Royal Blue. Probably not the AV Club’s usual speed, but if you need to read a ray of sunshine, that’s the one. Also, books I finally read this year after having them on my TBR list for too long -The Song of Achilles and Circe by Madeline Miller. They were absolutely gorgeous, particularly The Song of Achilles, and if you’re a fan of the Greek myths, I highly recommend them.
I joined a zoom science fiction/fantasy book club for 2020, so read a non-2020 book a month. I don’t now how many I’ll cover here since some were rereads (Sir Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards! and William Goldman’s The Princess Bride for example)I started out with the excellent 2019 Lesbian necromancers in space story that was Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. It took a while to get going and the Gideon character was somewhat unsympathetic for the first third, but once it pivots in the third act, it’s an absolutely amazing read. I enjoy Muir’s world-building immensely and would recommend strongly.I also read a YA duology, Six of Crows/Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo. These were a romp because they’re two of my favorite general plots, a jailbreak and a heist filtered through an interesting urban fantasy world (apparently the world existed already in Bardugo’s Grishaverse trilogy) with a few clever interactions between magic and illicit substances.A more challenging read was Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, which I’ll be honest, I didn’t really enjoy due to the prose style. A lot of stuff is introduced and frustratingly underexplained, so it’s a little difficult to tell what’s going on. It does coalesce a little towards the end, which makes me think that the other two volumes in the trilogy might be more digestible.Possibly the best book I read in 2020 was The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin. Again, absolutely amazing world-building with some very sly and clever analogs to reality. Plus the structure of the story did lead to a couple of reveals absolutely flooring me.The other candidate for my favorite read of 2020 was The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. While it does have a plot, this was very much the book version of a “hangout movie,” in that the joy was watching the characters interact either on their ship or planetside. Chambers also write aliens that don’t feel like humans with extra prosthetics stuck on. The cultures actually felt more authentically alien than I was expecting. Despite this, the book absolutely drips with humanity. After listening to Patrick Rothfuss on a bazillion different RPG podcasts and talking about his World Builders charity, I finally bit the bullet and read The Name of the Wind. It feels very, very generic fantasy to me. Does the Kingkiller chronicle get deeper in the second book? I realize that Kvothe is meant to be an unreliable narrator but he really, really comes across as a Marty Stu type character.And with current discourse surrounding the Cyberpunk 2077 video game (that I haven’t bought and probably couldn’t run), I decided to get into a cyberpunk headspace and rented Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash as an eBook from my local library yesterday. It’s my first exposure to Stephenson, and so far the first chapter has been equal parts absurdist and propulsive.In non-fiction, I finally finished rereading Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. For such a foundational text on the power of monomyth and stories, it’s a slog of a textbook and the structure is all over the place.The other couple of non-fiction books I tackled were both history. First up, These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore. It’s very much a broad strokes analysis, since a single volume covering everything form 1492-2016 really can’t go in depth on things. One thing I did appreciate is that it didn’t present the myth of US history, and talked about a lot of the dirty underbelly of US politics and disenfranchisement, especially post-Civil War with the issues of Reconstruction, dirty politics, racism, sexism and general dog-whistle strategies. I was more familiar with the post World War II, and especially post-Nixon Southern Strategy stuff but it paints quite the story when its all presented together.The final book was A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage. It’s much more a history of the western world than the whole world, but it’s filtered through the influence of six beverages on Western Civilization. Those six beverages are: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola. The first three seem to mirror the rise of philosophy and civilization in general, while the last three more serve as an outline of colonialism, imperialism and the projection of soft power. It’s a fascinating read, but I feel like Standage’s conclusions need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Hey! I was introduced to Gideon the Ninth and Becky Chambers this year, too! Becky Chambers hit me right when JK Rowling was showing her WHOLE ass earlier this year, and Gideon was like a bizarro game of Clue.
i am currently in the middle of reading harrow the ninth, the sequel to gideon. i actually reread gideon, before reading this one, even though it may have been only 3-4 months after the first read. i am glad i did. but harrow is totally different, but just as absorbing. different in that it is just as initially disorienting as the first one is, until you start getting an idea of what is going on. i have to slow down though, otherwise i will read it too fast too. :)thanks for the heads up on the history in six glasses, that is just the kind of history i like, and probably needed to read. 😀
I also read Harrow the Ninth (and immediately re-read Gideon after) but that’s a 2020 book and this article was specifically about non-2020 books.Harrow is a wild ride until you figure out how to decode it…
Oh, one thing this year was good for was reading books. Actually red 6 Discworld novels, The Console Wars, a time travel brazilian novel called A Máquina (The Machine) and Pools of Radiance.
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Haven’t touched a book since 2020 went full 2020. But, three million years ago, when 2020 still felt like just another year, I seem to remember having read a few interesting things. Such as Li, a short novel (followed by unrelated short stories) by one of my favorite poets. I think they made a movie about it, although I hardly see the point of just keeping the ‘audiovisual’ of Kavvadias’ words.I also used Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking as a companion to try and tame mourning, and while a fine book, I found it still marginally less pointed than Espitallier’s La première année (The first year), on the same subject. Maybe because I read Didion in a french translation. Or maybe because I read Espitallier in 2019, closer to the event. The rest is, frankly, a blur. A big for of parallel readings and studies on a couple of subjects, that fused in 2020’s big reset. Maybe it’s time (and an opportunity) to let the dust settle and check where I had left which book.
I got a Community notification for this?Most of my reading was non 2020 releases. My library doesn’t always get the new releases I’m interested in and if they do they get scooped up quick. I caught up on some older stuff like The Third Man and some Agatha Chritstie’s I hadn’t ready yet.
Just started Dune. I’ve had several false starts with this book, but it seems to have clicked this time. Hoping to be done by the end of the year.
stick with it, it gets more and more interesting. then you start getting really hooked with the sequels. 🙂
Most of the books I read are not new publications, although I do think I read more of them (new publications) this year than in the past. I don’t think that’s due to the pandemic—I work in the food supply chain and we never shut down—but more to reading more sites that have book reviews. I think my favorite fiction not published this year that I read in 2020 was The Vices by Lawrence Douglas. It just kind of had a little of everything and was very witty, and yet reading it was also like putting on a comfy old cardigan. It reminded me of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History in that way (not in anything to do with plot).
Best In A Generally Undisputed Classic Of Modern Western Literature (Which Is Also Fun To Read) Kind Of Way: Animal Farm by George Orwell. I’m sure I read this years ago but I can’t remember it, which makes me think I was probably a bit too young to really get what was going on beyond the fairy tale aspect of it. Reading it as an older person who’s learned a little something about Stalinist Russia makes it a lot easier to get the parallels to the forced collectivisation of the gulags. Best In A Re-Reading These Helps ScottyEnn Stay Sane Kind Of Way: The Golden Spiders by Rex Stout. The Nero Wolfe novels are pretty much my go-to comfort read and, yeah, 2020. They’re all good, but they can get pretty formulaic if you read them one after another; FWIW the earlier ones are best, but this is probably my favourite of the ones I read this year.Best In A ScottyEnn’s Branching Out Kind Of Way: Shane by Jack Shaefer. I started getting into westerns this year (maybe it was something to do with being stuck indoors for a fairly large chunk of the year, I dunno) and I read this and True Grit by Charles Portis. Both were really good, but I think Shane just pipped it. (Incidentally, does anyone have any good western recommendations? Especially westerns involving gunslingers and shooting and all that good stuff?)Best In A Welp, ScottyEnn’s Pretty Much Just Reverting Back To Childhood Now Kind Of Way: Doctor Who: City of Death by James Goss/Douglas Adams/David Fisher (it’s complicated). Best. Doctor Who. Story. Ever. Change my mind. (Just kidding, you won’t.)
On the good Western front — Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is one of the best novels, full stop. It is very long but that is part of what makes it so good, it is a book you live in. Not so much gunslingers — it’s about a cattle drive from Texas to Montana — but there is gunplay and violence, including a character who wandered in from a Cormac McCarthy book. Highest possible recommendation. (And the early 90s miniseries is great too, but I think is best after the book.)
Funny you should mention that….
I finished Lonesome Dove in September after picking it up on and off since the previous November. The last chunk especially ties it all together emotionally. I picked up Streets of Laredo this last weekend for my vacation, and while people describe it as a disappointment in comparison, I’m enjoying it mightily so far. I plan on reading the rest in publication order and am curious what you thought of them, if you’ve picked them up.
Heh, Lonesome Dove was so good I’ve hesitated to go further, I don’t want to taint it. But I’ve heard good things about Laredo, if not necessarily other follow-ups.
Will check it out. Thanks!
I read two books that I loved this year. Less by Andrew Sean Greer. A delightful and unassuming book that somehow won the Pulitzer. A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles. A fabulous tale of life in Russia after the revolution told largely by a man who’s locked down in a hotel. Very fitting for our current time.
After reading about 3/4 of the books over the years, I did a full re-read/completion of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin books (just finished Blue At The Mizzen yesterday). “There is not a moment to lose” is a repeated line in the books that becomes comical at points and then a refrain, it’s amusing and touching to see the tetchy Stephen eventually deploying it. Always moving, Jack in particular striving for station within the Navy that will let him keep moving — at one point an old shark following the Surprise in BATM is ripped apart by younger, quicker ones. Jack and Stephen have destinations in mind and they reach them only to keep their journey going and looking back on the books and who they contain — Jack and Stephen themselves, changed and unchanged, but also characters who have fallen away or died, other ones who have stuck around, and newer ones who have joined and are learning their way — and it becomes clear how this really is one long book showing two lives. And life goes on. As Mike Watt said about working on a boat and working in a band, “There’s always more duty / Maybe that’s the beauty.” In non-beautiful books, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s How To Be A God has stuck with me after reading it for the first time this year. Despair and increasing helplessness as obvious destruction looms, wonder why that resonated.
I felt the series started loosing oomph and direction towards the end, but overall really liked it. Very immersive, and nice mix of “missions of the week” with longer term character development. The Master and Commander movie was damn near perfect, too, and it’s a shame we never got more of them.
It’s obvious in retrospect how O’Brian had to fudge the actual wars’ timeline midway through, the multi-book “uhhhh Jack and Stephen are off in the Indian/Pacific Ocean” run is partially to keep them in a bit of a timeless place and that leads to a certain lack of overall momentum even while good stuff is happening on a micro level — I love Stephen in Indonesia, having that wonderful interlude of peace among the monks but also ruthlessly, ah, disposing of some problems. The Hundred Days was a real slap in the face though, O’Brian spends much of The Yellow Admiral foreshadowing two things that don’t happen there, but then do happen offscreen or in truncated ways here and it’s not unfair but damn does it hurt. I think that ultimately makes the series and ending stronger though.
I just finished a 2008 novel I’d been saving for the right time: a signed copy of Moxyland by Lauren Beukes. Dystopian near-future sci-fi set in South Africa, it is surprisingly current (incl. a pandemic reference!) and the predictions hold up better than most in the genre. Unusually, it has well written characters which is not often the case in this genre. Also, the setting is a bit more exotic than usual, which is a plus when you can’t travel abroad. The plot has just the right amount of thrills and dark humor.
Generally speaking, you shouldn’t store near-future sci-fi like fine red wine; it doesn’t age well. But in this case the payoff was worth it – now was definitely the right time to read this.
Lonesome Dove. Getting ready for my cattle drive to Montana now!
Oh man, that’s one of my favorite books. Just wonderful.
Also, two other people have mentioned Lonesome Dove in this comment section! Must be something in the water…
There’s something in the water all right…SPOILERWATER MOCCASINS AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
I’m almost done with the Three Body Problem trilogy, which I started earlier this year. The first book was interesting but dragged at times, and I feel like I would have gotten a lot more out of it if I were more familiar with Chinese history and culture. The second and third books are much more universally accessible, and holy hell does the plot move along quickly. I like how the timeline of eras at the beginning of the third book gives you an inkling of how bonkers the scale of the book will be by the end.
I read the first as well this year and thought similar thoughts – so I’m glad to hear that about the other two. Will add the second to my reading list before I forget who everyone is.
Do yourself a favor and don’t look into the author’s politics.
Uh oh.
Yeah, Tana French is great. Her most recent one “The Searcher” is about a former Chicago cop who retires to Ireland, and it is quite impressive how an Irish woman convincingly writes an American man — often when writing a main character of another gender or nationality authors make errors that make the character unbelievable, but I think French pulls it off.
Thank you for reminding me about the new French! And whoa, a Chicago cop as the lead? Very interesting. I think she’s great in general (Broken Harbour is probably my favorite) but really liked The Wych Elm, in part because it seemed to be a Murder Squad book inside out, looking at one of her cops from the outside.
Yeah, I visited Ireland shortly after the Great Recession a decade ago and recall seeing those half-built housing developments that were left abandoned due to the construction firms going bust. So I could really picture the setting of Broken Harbour when I read it.
I feel like I’ve found the only other person who liked The Witch Elm!
I think its shift in focus threw people (everyone wants more Murder Squad) and the narrator himself is sort of a dick in a passive-aggressive way instead of the more active dickery of the Squad. But it’s very effective at peeling back his facade.And on Broken Harbor, that setting would definitely make it more intense, yikes. That last quarter or so of the book is like falling down a hole, I don’t think it’s a coincidence the next two Squad books are somewhat happier in how their cops resolve the job and relationships on it.
I appreciated how we got to see Murder Squad from the inside out, especially as earlier books hinted at the dark side of a lot of the cops (and let’s face it, Rob clearly killed his friends) but we never got to see them spiral quite like we do in The Witch Elm. I think one thing The Witch Elm didn’t do is leave something unresolved or magical, which is a Tana French hallmark that I know frustrates some people but which is one of the things I love best about her. I always pitch In the Woods as “this is a mystery book and the mystery doesn’t get solved” because so many people I recommended it to got mad at me once they got to the end. I think you have to go into her books with a particular enthusiasm for the journey and not the destination, and a lot of mystery fans are more about the destination.She’s back to the unresolved nature in The Searcher – the mystery does get solved but it leaves you with that nice Tana French feeling of “I don’t really know where they go from here.” It’s also maybe her saddest book? Even sadder than Faithful Place or Broken Harbour, I think, which is saying something.
Holy shit, that’s sad! I will go in prepared.“I think you have to go into her books with a particular enthusiasm for the journey and not the destination” — exactly, or at least an understanding that the destination is not what you think it is, that some things can’t be explained. Broken Harbour takes that as far as it can go from the cop end and The Secret Place twists things around toward the people being investigated, I think that’s French’s strongest work in the magical realism vein.
Also Broken Harbour is also my favorite of the six Murder Squad books – I read it when I had just given birth to my youngest and we had just bought our first house, which gave it a certain sense of immediacy, as you can imagine.
Broken Harbor was definitely the creepiest as well; I was on-edge while reading it at night!
What was in the wallllllllls?
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAT WAS IT
Well, it probably helped some that she was born and raised in the US. But yeah, I do love her novels very much.
Fantasyland by Kurt Andersen – a fantastic 500-year breakdown of how America is primed to believe in fiction and falsehood and how we’ve wound up where we are today. It ties it everything from the Satanic Panic to McCarthyism to the Salem witch trials to the Puritans to the Scopes monkey trial to Disneyland to suburbia, showing exactly the line from the first settlers in America to Trump’s election.I found it extraordinarily poignant in 2020, the year of COVID-19 denial, QAnon congresspeople, and our ongoing insane election dispute, as a method of piecing together why the fuck this kind of thing is happening with such frequency in this country in particular.
I’ve read and liked a number of his books before, but I really enjoyed Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris. His writing is always funny at times, but I was really laughing out loud at this one. It hit the spot.
I knocked off several Heinlein books, and I returned to the Michael Moorcock Jerry Cornelious quadrilogy.
Covering three genres: science fiction, historical fiction and graphic fiction I’ve reread Gene Wolfe’s Urth of the New Sun, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Gerald Way’s The Umbrella Academy.
Just to butt in out of the blue, if your into graphic novels (or manga), I 100% recommend Vinland Saga to everyone. It’s the best Viking Age story I’ve ever read and blows all the network and streaming shows out of the water. Great character-driven arcs and manages to avoid most of the tropes that infest a lot of good manga. Also highly recommend Monstress from Image.
Best First Time Read: Jeffrey Eugenides MiddlesexBest Re-Read: Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s Transmetropolitan
Lonesome Dove, which I finally got around to after more than 30 years. And Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I haven’t quite finished, but I can’t imagine it going to absolute shit in the last 160 pages.
Spoiler alert: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell does the complete opposite of going to absolute shit in its final 160 pages.Wooo Lonesome Dove! Let’s hit the trails and tragically subliminate our feelings!
Thanks a lot, dick.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is one of my all-time favorite books. It is a bit of a challenge though, so kudos.
JS&MN only gets better in the last 160 pages. I love that damn book so much.Once you’re done with it, there’s a companion piece called The Ladies of Grace Adieu – it is a collection of short stories that expand on some of the “historical magic” events mentioned in the book. Her new book, Piranesi, (more of a novella, especially as compared to the tome that is JS&MN) is a wild trip. It took me a while to get into and then it gets so ridiculous and compelling. Susannah Clarke’s imagination is a weird place and I want to live there all the time.
Love of my life, you’ve hurt me. You’ve broken my heart and now you leave me. The final nail in my coffin of 2020…so went back to my old favourites to find meaning where there is none. Best re-reads: Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte, Watership Down – Richard Adams, Stardust – Neil Gaiman, The Last Unicorn – Peter S Beagle, Endless Night – Agatha Christie, Anna Karenina – Tolstoy, Gone with the wind – Margaret Mitchell, The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy, Tess of the D’urbevilles – Thomas Hardy.Best new reads: Everything I never told you – Celeste Ng – a book about suicide and the attempt to understand. It ends with us – Colleen Hoover – about love and abuse intertwined, and the complexities of the power dynamic.
Two I’ve read that I’ve been meaning to – and enjoyed both:Michael Chabon – The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & ClayLarry Niven – Ringworld
Whenever I see the title of Kavalier & Clay, I think of “The Generals” from Shel Silverstein’s “Where the Sidewalk Ends”, because one of them is General Clay and Kavalier just has the military connotation.
How had I not heard about the Bonfire disaster making-of? The novel is fantastic and should have been a no-brainer good film. Just went to the top of my list.
I have one best re-read and one new read.New read: Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers (1978). Such a great set of stories, and kinda how I think an actual alien visitation would probably go.Re-read: The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018). I have never paid closer attention to trees & weeds & the dirt in the woods than I did for probably the first 6 months after I read this the first time. This thing just hits me in the gut every time & makes me sad at how little we appreciate all the miraculous natural things around us.
Plowed through the 2001 John Adams biography by David McCullough. It’s very good and quite prescient given the waning days of the 2020 Presidential election and the country’s political divisiveness we currently have.
President Adams had to row upstream his entire term (1797-1801) sandwiched between Washington and Jefferson. He deserves much more popular respect than he gets.
If I was ever to become a national politician, I plan to be a John Adams style politician/patriot/statesman.
My wife loved that Adams biography. I’ve been meaning to read it myself.
I got mine for $1 at the local Friends of the Library sale shelf in the front of the Library. One of the best spent $1 in a long time.
Good deal! I love those library sales.
I felt like McCullough was a bit in the tank for Adams (Alien and Sedition Acts will always suck shit) but it was a nice look at a guy who gets overshadowed. The focus on Adams building up the Navy (USS CONSTITUTION WOOOOOOOO) was really cool.
I didn’t get the sense that McCullough underplayed the terribleness of the Alien/Sedition Act, but he certainly is a fan of Adams for sure, but without compromising objectively. The Act was terrible then and now, but a couple minor and major mistakes in such a long prominent political life shouldn’t overshadow the overall great work Adams did. Hell, he was somewhat making it up as he went and was pretty successful through that lens.
Beastings by Benjamin Myers
A Small Thing to Want by Shuly Xochitl CawoodLanny by Max PorterIn the Distance by Hernan DiazShe Would Be King by Wayetu MooreCountry by Michael HughesDucks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
My pick would be One Hundred Years of Solitude, which would have been a great book in any year but which felt particularly suited to the surreal year we’ve had.
With Trump’s electoral defeat, I finally felt emotionally able to read Shattered, the book about Hillary Clinton’s doomed campaign from 2017. It was a good read.Vulgar Favours, the true crime book about Andrew Cunanan’s killing spree which ended with the murder of Gianni Versace. Great book.King’s Counsellor – The war diaries of Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, George VI’s private secretary. The Suspect – the inside look at the Richard Jewell case.Of books that I re-read:A Vast Conspiracy, the Jeffrey Toobin book about the Lewinsky scandal.Nevil Shute’s On The Beach (that was fun reading during the opening weeks of the pandemic).I’ve got about halfway through Bill Clinton and James Patterson’s The President is Missing but have not yet come back to it.
I finally decided to read “And The Band Played On,” the story of how government inaction, ignorance and callousness took a public health emergency and turned it into a catastrophe and thank God THAT couldn’t happen again these days right? Right?Also, “The Right Stuff” because I needed to read about dedicated nerds (and the pilots, who were nerds in their own way) doing something awesome.
I read several Jeeves and Wooster books. Amazingly funny.
Notes On a Scandal by Zoe ZellerThe Plot Against America by Philip RothThe Rapist by Les EdgertonA Head Full of Ghosts by Paul TremblayBeloved by Toni MorrisonThe Outsider by Stephen KingLess Than Zero by Brett Easton EllisFrozen Hell by John W CampbellMy lone 2020 book: Devolution by Max Brooks.
I read the Shattered Sea trilogy by Joe Abercrombie and got mad I waited so long to read them. Fantastic books.
I also read Sword of Destiny this year, and it was indeed amazing. I started the one following that, Blood of Elves I think, but felt bogged down by the plot and missed the light feeling of the previous book, with every chapter being its own story. I might try it again, though.I actually most enjoyed The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis, which I had wanted to read ever since seeing it on Michael Ondaatje’s list of the five novels he rereads the most. It is really an excellent book, minus one or two scenes I thought could be excised (and were in the Netflix series), and it was ridiculously thrilling in the chess scenes. I don’t even play chess, but they were so exciting. I much preferred it to the series, actually. The funniest book I read was Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer, which is a mix of a memoir, a travelogue, and an account by a frustrated writer trying to focus on his in depth study of D.H. Lawrence. I don’t think I can even describe how hilarious, but also thoughtful, it is. Give it a shot if you enjoy Lawrence and acerbic wits like David Sedaris.
I couldn’t get into Out Of Sheer Rage (maybe in part because I dislike Lawrence), but I like Dyer’s Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It.Is The Queen’s Gambit worth reading if you’ve already seen the series?
Not sure? I read the book before I watched the series, and it felt like a bit of a waste of time to watch, honestly, because all of the major beats are there. But as I said, I enjoyed it much more, just because TV always glamourizes things in a weird way, and the book is very detached, in a way. Beth in the book feels disconnected from her own life, possibly from being an orphan from such a young age, and the book is a way to experience her reconnection as she grows up. (There is one scene in the book that I absolutely hated, but they didn’t put it in the show thank god.)Oh, and a lot of the dialogue is the same, they pulled a lot from the book.
If you can answer generally — does the novel’s ending have the same tone as Queen’s Gambit the series? Because that seemed very off based on what I know of Tevis’ other works about competition, but maybe he went in a different direction here.
It has the same basic plot beats, but the weird inclusion of the “love interest” is entirely fabricated for the show. The book ending is beautiful and introspective and perfect, and I thought it was far superior to the show in that regard. Less about the acclaim and more about Beth finally feeling like a full person. But again, major plot points are all the same.
Thank you! What felt extremely off to me wasSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERnot the win, which felt fair, but the happy teamwork aspect. (Which I was OK with at the start, from an individual, and when the phone was passed I may have made loud noises in opposition). And the final scene in the show was bizarre — there are plenty of American weirdoes playing chess outside at any given moment, why is this a happy thing? You lived in the East Village for a few months! America’s chess goons are very much out there!
The phone scene is there, but it is all from Beth’s perspective, so a lot quieter and not that “The gang’s all here!” energy. Just support from across the sea. And she goes to the chess park and sits down across from an old man, says “Would you like to play chess?” and that’s it. No recognition or anything. So yes, the energy in the show is completely different from the book, very TV. I kind of hated it.
I’ve read several books this year, but most were disappointing (Library at Mt. Char) or straight up bad (Carrion Comfort). I guess the couple that stuck with me were Warchild, which was just beautiful and kind and horrifying all at once. Exceptional psychological work put into it. I genuinely cared for the characters in it.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August was another I enjoyed. It was pretty light, but time travel is always fun and it had interesting themes and a strong internal logic.
On the fence would be the second book of the Southern Reach trilogy (I like the sub-genre of sci-fi where it’s just people doing their jobs competently but shit’s all crazy, lol). The third was pretty boring and repetitive though, and neither recaptured the sheer bizarre terror I felt from reading the first one.
I also mostly liked The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, though again, it wasn’t exactly heavy lifting and the premise itself is pretty tired. But it didn’t wallow in grimness nor pull plot points from gratuitous sexual violence as maaaaany others in its oeuvre have/do. I also liked that we learned what happened to secondary and tertiary characters after their interactions with the protagonist end. Overall, it felt like a respectful piece of writing, if that makes sense.
Finally, while I wouldn’t say I really “liked” it, To Say Nothing of the Dog was amusing, light in tone, and surprisingly keeps popping up into my head even though I finished it months ago. It is also about time travel, which was a popular theme for this shitty garbage year.
I loved To Say Nothing Of The Dog but I’m a big Willis fan in general. If you haven’t read Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat, which inspired Willis’ title and a good chunk of the early part of the novel, it is hilarious — three dopey buddies go on holiday on the Thames, hijincks and digressions ensue, straight comedy no moral. A lot of fun.
I probably read 30 books this year, and I don’t think ANY of them were from 2020! But I’ll go ahead and name Max Hastings’ “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975″ because it’s a brilliantly written, coherent history of that complex conflict. An amazing book.
Max Hastings is great. The one thing that turns me off from history times is how by-the-numbers and dry a lot of writing is, but he does an awesome job keeping it just light enough to keep your attention while still doling out the facts. Retribution and Overlord are the ones I’ve read.
When I read about Vietnam or World War II, I’m interested in what actual human beings, who should have been doing other things with their lives, were forced to do when war broke out. I don’t get off on reading about battle strategies or finding out which kind of rifle is the best one to use if you’re a sniper. I’d be thrilled if no one ever had to pick up a weapon again. My interest is in the humanity of the thing, and that’s what Hastings does very well. You never lose sight of the fact that real people were involved. I have a couple of his other books on my list. I’m sure I’ll get around to at least one of them before the end of next year.
Oh, then the best book you’ll ever read is Japan at War. Nothing but personal stories from Japanese people across all walks of life. Soldiers, sailors, pilots, mothers, journalists, reporters, priests, actors, diplomats, communist dissenters, kabuki theatre mangers, you name it.
I’ve heard of that. I’ll check it out some time. Thanks.
I recommend the Dublin Murder Squad Series to everyone who enjoys detective novels OR literary fiction, as they are a perfect blend of both. And, outside of the series, The Searcher, which she released this year, is just a perfect little book about loneliness (and, like, crime or whatever). I know a lot of people weren’t fans of The Witch Elm, but I really dug what she was trying to do in that one.For my money, the best release of last year that I reread three times this year because holy shit, I needed it, is Red, White and Royal Blue. Probably not the AV Club’s usual speed, but if you need to read a ray of sunshine, that’s the one.
Also, books I finally read this year after having them on my TBR list for too long -The Song of Achilles and Circe by Madeline Miller. They were absolutely gorgeous, particularly The Song of Achilles, and if you’re a fan of the Greek myths, I highly recommend them.
I joined a zoom science fiction/fantasy book club for 2020, so read a non-2020 book a month. I don’t now how many I’ll cover here since some were rereads (Sir Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards! and William Goldman’s The Princess Bride for example)I started out with the excellent 2019 Lesbian necromancers in space story that was Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. It took a while to get going and the Gideon character was somewhat unsympathetic for the first third, but once it pivots in the third act, it’s an absolutely amazing read. I enjoy Muir’s world-building immensely and would recommend strongly.I also read a YA duology, Six of Crows/Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo. These were a romp because they’re two of my favorite general plots, a jailbreak and a heist filtered through an interesting urban fantasy world (apparently the world existed already in Bardugo’s Grishaverse trilogy) with a few clever interactions between magic and illicit substances.A more challenging read was Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, which I’ll be honest, I didn’t really enjoy due to the prose style. A lot of stuff is introduced and frustratingly underexplained, so it’s a little difficult to tell what’s going on. It does coalesce a little towards the end, which makes me think that the other two volumes in the trilogy might be more digestible.Possibly the best book I read in 2020 was The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin. Again, absolutely amazing world-building with some very sly and clever analogs to reality. Plus the structure of the story did lead to a couple of reveals absolutely flooring me.The other candidate for my favorite read of 2020 was The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. While it does have a plot, this was very much the book version of a “hangout movie,” in that the joy was watching the characters interact either on their ship or planetside. Chambers also write aliens that don’t feel like humans with extra prosthetics stuck on. The cultures actually felt more authentically alien than I was expecting. Despite this, the book absolutely drips with humanity. After listening to Patrick Rothfuss on a bazillion different RPG podcasts and talking about his World Builders charity, I finally bit the bullet and read The Name of the Wind. It feels very, very generic fantasy to me. Does the Kingkiller chronicle get deeper in the second book? I realize that Kvothe is meant to be an unreliable narrator but he really, really comes across as a Marty Stu type character.And with current discourse surrounding the Cyberpunk 2077 video game (that I haven’t bought and probably couldn’t run), I decided to get into a cyberpunk headspace and rented Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash as an eBook from my local library yesterday. It’s my first exposure to Stephenson, and so far the first chapter has been equal parts absurdist and propulsive.In non-fiction, I finally finished rereading Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. For such a foundational text on the power of monomyth and stories, it’s a slog of a textbook and the structure is all over the place.The other couple of non-fiction books I tackled were both history. First up, These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore. It’s very much a broad strokes analysis, since a single volume covering everything form 1492-2016 really can’t go in depth on things. One thing I did appreciate is that it didn’t present the myth of US history, and talked about a lot of the dirty underbelly of US politics and disenfranchisement, especially post-Civil War with the issues of Reconstruction, dirty politics, racism, sexism and general dog-whistle strategies. I was more familiar with the post World War II, and especially post-Nixon Southern Strategy stuff but it paints quite the story when its all presented together.The final book was A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage. It’s much more a history of the western world than the whole world, but it’s filtered through the influence of six beverages on Western Civilization. Those six beverages are: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola. The first three seem to mirror the rise of philosophy and civilization in general, while the last three more serve as an outline of colonialism, imperialism and the projection of soft power. It’s a fascinating read, but I feel like Standage’s conclusions need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Hey! I was introduced to Gideon the Ninth and Becky Chambers this year, too! Becky Chambers hit me right when JK Rowling was showing her WHOLE ass earlier this year, and Gideon was like a bizarro game of Clue.
i am currently in the middle of reading harrow the ninth, the sequel to gideon. i actually reread gideon, before reading this one, even though it may have been only 3-4 months after the first read. i am glad i did. but harrow is totally different, but just as absorbing. different in that it is just as initially disorienting as the first one is, until you start getting an idea of what is going on. i have to slow down though, otherwise i will read it too fast too. :)thanks for the heads up on the history in six glasses, that is just the kind of history i like, and probably needed to read. 😀
I also read Harrow the Ninth (and immediately re-read Gideon after) but that’s a 2020 book and this article was specifically about non-2020 books.Harrow is a wild ride until you figure out how to decode it…
Oh, one thing this year was good for was reading books. Actually red 6 Discworld novels, The Console Wars, a time travel brazilian novel called A Máquina (The Machine) and Pools of Radiance.
Miss Marjoribanks. It’s a novel by a lesser-known woman Victorian author whose name escapes me. It’s long, but very funny.
The Undoing Project – Michael LewisPerdido Street Station – China MievilleThe Devil’s Chessboard – David Talbot