My 2019 in Reading
In many ways, 2019 was a radically different year for me than 2018. In 2018, I ran for State Senate. In 2019, I was a journalist and columnist again, and I starting teaching journalism and media studies at NYU and St. Joseph’s College. People ask me if I’ll run for office again. To be honest, it was a thrilling experience and I never rule out anything — there’s the pol-speak — but I really enjoyed this year. I had far more time for family, friends, reading, and writing. There are novels I want to write and publish, to be read far and wide, and there are so many books I’ve been able to read this year that I wouldn’t have gotten to had I been on a campaign trail. In 2018, as I noted a year ago, I read far fewer books than ever before for obvious reasons. This year, I read the most books in a year since I started keeping track back in 2015. (Here’s 2016 and 2017 too, if you are wondering.) In total, I managed to complete 43 books, a bulk of them fiction.
In past years, I would diligently provide summaries and slapdash criticism for all the books I read. Time constraints will force me to abandon that tradition this year. Instead, what I want to do is write a bit here about the books I really enjoyed, and then provide my full list at the bottom. Of course, I’d be a poor self-promoter if I didn’t mention you should buy and read my novel, Demolition Night, which was published last year. If your thing is near-future dystopia mashed with noirsh 70’s underground New York, give it a look.
I closed 2019 reading two novels, one far better than the other, both the products of American masters. When She Was Good, Philip Roth’s second published full-length novel, might have been the worst book I read this year, and I say this as someone who is a great admirer of Roth, who is still can’t quite believe he’s dead, who counts Sabbath’s Theater, The Counterlife, American Pastoral, and Patrimony among the great English-language works of the last half century. When She Was Good was the second to last book I read in 2019; Americana, by Don DeLillo, was the last. This was by coincidence. Also coincidentally: both men, born three years apart, published these novels when they were 34. Each baseball-mad writer also happened to make reference to the now forgotten Chicago White Sox star infielder, Luke Appling.
Beyond that, the books have little in common. Americana was DeLillo’s debut, overshadowed by subsequent mythic novels like White Noise, Libra, and Underworld. Americana, published in 1971, is a brilliant work, a dispatch from the future that has aged remarkably well. In David Bell, a young TV executive who takes to the road to film a movie that he hopes can encompass America, modernity, and existence itself, DeLillo creates a benign precursor to Patrick Bateman (no murders here) or Don Draper (he’s stolen no one’s identity), a mordantly funny company man, satirizing midcentury corporate culture, the advertising business, the film industry, and the road novel. Largely plotless, the novel still manages to hum like a jet engine, DeLillo’s propulsive, almost apocalyptic prose — the type that stops you dead, that begs for rabid underlining — powering it forward. I think Americana is among his best. The threads of his career unspool from it. For DeLillo completists, it’s a must. David Bell, sweating and shirtless on the land of UFO worshippers, tossing a baseball through the hot desert air, pounding a Luke Appling model baseball mitt — these are the sort of scenes only one person can write. As a fellow New Yorker who is also baseball mad, I’ve always felt a kinship with DeLillo, who aptly writes in Americana that baseball is the closest thing to café society — those languid, striking afternoons — we have.
When She Was Good is a disaster. It happens to be Roth’s only novel with a female protagonist, but it’s too simple to say this is a shining example what critics contend is Roth’s poor handling of women in his books. Lucy Nelson, a tough Midwestern girl modeled somewhat on the first wife Roth hated, tries to defy a world of feckless men, and is suckered into a terrible marriage to a wannabe photographer when he impregnates her after another night of rough, terrible sex. The novel suffers because it’s moralistic and humorless, Roth’s attempt (God knows why he did it) at morose, 19th century realism. Thankfully, just two years later, he published Portnoy’s Complaint, and he became, for good, the novelist who loomed over American fiction for the next 50 years. One imagines Roth locking himself in his room, rereading When She Was Good, and thinking he could do so much better. Out poured a vulgar, uproarious bestseller.
One of my favorite current novelists is Nell Zink, who is, thankfully, pounding out almost a book a year these days. I highly recommend Doxology, her latest, a satire that hops seamlessly between the 1990’s downtown New York punk and tech scenes and the 2016 election. For Don DeLillo on an acid trip, read Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn, an epic that begins with the Twin Towers appearing in the middle of the desert, holding Elvis Presley’s still-born twin, now a full-fledged adult, on the 93rd floor. K Chess’s debut novel, Famous Men Who Never Lived, dropped this year and is another, to use the trite term, tour-de-force: a parable of the disassociation refugees can feel in a new nation, deprived of the language and culture they knew, Chess’s protagonists are fleeing a parallel Earth, forced to live with us: they know English, but never heard of the Beatles. In their Brooklyn, an elevated highway blighted Park Slope. And their science fiction masterpiece, The Pyronauts, never existed here. Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room, the story of a female prisoner serving a life sentence, may not reach the same stylistic heights as The Flamethrowers, but it cements her place as one of America’s great prose writers.
There are obvious hits I can, with near-equal fervor, recommend here, like George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous. There are the overlooked books that might just be better: Percival Everett’s Erasure, a tragic, hilarious, and profane take on race in American and the plight of the black artist. Sergio De La Pava, who may be our generation’s Thomas Pynchon, published Lost Empress — try to find another novel so ambitious in scope, ranging from the darkest reaches of the criminal justice system to the sublime terror of the NFL — just last year, and I finally found time for it this autumn. David Markson’s Springer’s Progress is just as good and a difficult book to describe, written in a neo-James Joycean dialect, still laugh-out-loud funny, a tale of a philandering novelist meeting his match with a 25-year-old woman aspiring to surpass him. One of the most original writers working today is Jarett Kobek. You should read his latest novel, Only Americans Burn in Hell, and check out my interview with him, where you can get a full sense of his sizzling ouevre. I also strongly recommend Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s debut novel, Only Bangkok Wakes to Rain. I have the pleasure of knowing Pitchaya, through his local political activism, personally. I began the year reading another friend’s book, Lincoln Mitchell’s Baseball Goes West, the story of how the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants, by breaking our hearts in New York, actually powered MLB to new heights. (Lincoln has a new book out, San Francisco Year Zero, I also want to read.) Yet another friend, Aaron Short, co-wrote an oral history about Donald Trump’s rise to power, The Method to the Madness, that is refreshing for the sheer number of people in Trump’s orbit he manages to track down and its refusal to use anonymous sourcing. One more recommend on the nonfiction front: Sam Stein’s Capital City, which deconstructs how the real estate industry and austerity economics have held the discourse around development captive, and what the socialist left can do to redefine the future. Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I finally read this year, inspired an entire essay.
Finally, 2019 was the year I read American Psycho. For most of my serious reading life, I warily circled Bret Easton Ellis. He was always more of a caricature to me, the 1980’s party boy who, improbably, published a novel at 21, never won a major literary award, and stopped writing books right around the time I began reading them, in earnest. What brought me to Ellis was his first book in nine years, White, a nonfiction work widely hated in the liberal circles I travel in. White was published this spring, I read it out of curiosity, and developed complicated feelings for this author, now a stout 55. The book’s weakest sections are those that caused the most controversy; Ellis is now a podcaster and a troll, mocking millenials (my generation) as “Generation Wuss” and dismissing most criticism of Donald Trump as self-indulgent whining. He is disdainful of progressive politics, though not a true conservative, more of a half-baked anti-anti-Trumper than anything else. Ellis is not a deep political thinker; he longs for a time when aesthetics and politics could be radically separate. He is right to mock those wealthy and powerful people who bemoan Trump’s uncouthness while continuing to exist, otherwise unencumbered, in the gated communities of Los Angeles, but he is blithely and wrongly dismissive of those who have suffered under Trump’s presidency, like immigrants, Muslims, and the poor. Had White excised all references to Donald Trump and been a straight memoir mixed with literary and film criticism, it could have been a very good book. Ellis is an incisive fiction and film critic, drawing on a deep well of knowledge that belies his slacker persona. And he is trenchant on his 1970’s Southern California childhood, when parents were little more than background noise and he could devour R-rated movies without a second thought.
But American Psycho. It is a cultural touchstone because of the punchy movie, released in 2000, Patrick Bateman-as-Christian Bale living in our collective conscious. The novel is far more brutal. By comparison, the movie is tame, sanitized, which will come as a shock to the many people who have seen the movie but not read the book. Published in 1991, American Psycho was dropped by its first publisher and then issued as a paperback, greeted with a firestorm of controversy over the savage murders, particularly of women, depicted in the novel. It’s not clear such a book could be published today. But to read it is to see that the murders are, remarkably, beside the point. American Psycho, if you can believe it, can be a very funny novel, a scathing satire of 1980’s excess, the vapidity of big finance and urban living, not as much a psychodrama of a murderer as a deep dive into what it means to live a dissociative existence in the crucible of late capitalism. Ellis has since said Bateman, in part, represented his own alienation from the New York lifestyle he was living, an endless bath of cocktails, high-priced dinners, and cocaine binges. Bateman is an unreliable narrator. By novel’s end, it’s entirely unclear whether he’s a sadistic mass murderer or delusional, imagining all of it. He is disdainful of men and women alike, truly estranged from the world that made him. And he worships Donald Trump. Yes, Trump is a recurring character in the novel, a running in-joke, Bateman name-dropping the real estate mogul repeatedly, bragging to his brother about a pretend party Trump has invited him to, believing he spotted then-wife Ivana in a restaurant. Three decades on, American Psycho is one of those generation-defining novels that has outlasted its critics. It is an important book. The complete Ellis body is hit-and-miss — no novel, in my estimation, comes close to the heights of American Psycho — but he is the sort of writer, as Jarett Kobek has argued, that American fiction must reckon with, whether the mandarins want to or not. With Trump’s election to the presidency, American Psycho takes on a new, painful weight, as a book that can show us the sort of souls who were first attracted to Trump’s berserk mythos. Donald Trump is not an outside virus, a contagion. He was always here with us. No other country could give birth to such a man.
Now, without further ado, all the books I read in 2019, in chronological order.
All the Books
- Baseball Goes West: The Dodgers, the Giants, and the Shaping of Major League Baseball by Lincoln Mitchell
- Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Our Democracy by Siva Vaidhyanathan
- Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
- The Idiot by Elif Batuman
- Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier
- Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
- Big Bang by David Bowman
- Eastman Was Here by Alex Gilvarry
- Famous Men Who Never Lived by K Chess
- Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State by Samuel Stein
- Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson
- Springer’s Progress by David Markson
- White by Bret Easton Ellis
- King Zeno by Nathaniel Rich
- American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
- The Municipalists by Seth Fried
- Just Kids by Patti Smith
- Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
- Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad
- The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis
- The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren
- America Was Hard to Find by Kathleen Alcott
- The Method to the Madness: Donald Trump’s Ascent as Told by Those Who Were Hired, Fired, Inspired — And Inaugurated by Aaron Short and Allen Salkin
- Erasure by Percival Everett
- About Yvonne by Donna Masini
- The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
- High Rise by J.G. Ballard
- Doxology by Nell Zink
- The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor
- The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink
- The Players by Don DeLillo
- McArthur Park by Andrew Durbin
- The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel
- Only Americans Burn in Hell by Jarett Kobek
- The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
- Play it As it Lays by Joan Didion
- Atta by Jarett Kobek
- A Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava
- Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis
- Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino
- On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
- When She Was Good by Philip Roth
- Americana by Don DeLillo
