66 Book Recommendations to Bring You Into the New Year
A Bookseller Reflects on 2020 Reading
For the first few months of shelter in place, I didn’t get much done, but I did spend many fabulously long hours lying in the sun working my way through the collected works of Jane Austen. When the weather began to change in October, I started rereading Moby Dick — the perfect adventure when all you can do is stay home. Books can provide us with a welcome escape from reality at times when we need it most. I read over 100 books in 2020, and went down many rabbit holes, into classic works, into books of sheer escapism, and through denser nonfiction I thought I’d never have the time to finish.
I work at a used bookstore, Moe’s Books, but all I saw recommended online were the same bestsellers. Most book reviews are only written to be positive, and the focus is on new releases. I hope that the following recommendations and reviews may provide some titles outside the mainstream for those who’ve worked their way through all of their quarantine lists, and perhaps a glimpse into the reading life of a bookseller in 2020.
Most recently, I read Hurricane Season, by Fernanda Melchor. It’s hard to stomach at times, but completely impossible to put down, and I still can’t stop thinking about it. It centers around the murder of a woman called the Witch in a small Mexican village, and goes into the lives of a number of people closest to the maelstrom. Melchor moves in and out of intense focus on small details, elegantly structuring a book so teeming with violence it would otherwise be hard to parse.
Another gem was Oreo, by Fran Ross, a hilarious and tragically underappreciated experimental novel about a Black and Jewish girl who sets out to find her dad. I enjoyed Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman and her new book Earthlings, both of which are about outsiders struggling in a world that does not want them. For short stories, I recommend Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories. Each tale is like a small, perfect package, and there are enough of them to keep you going for a long time. The Emissary, by Yoko Tawada, is a surprisingly hopeful slender work about a post-apocalyptic Japan where children get weaker and weaker. For a longer novel, Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half achieves the finest literary excellence while also being an astute social commentary on race, passing, and sisterhood. A story of Black twin sisters from Louisiana whose lives diverge sharply, it is also notable for the inclusion of a trans character who is well-developed but not the focus of the story.
Two books which were hilarious, quirky, and light despite their subject matter were Annie Hartnett’s Rabbit Cake and Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin. Rabbit Cake is an extremely weird story of a precocious child who struggles to keep her family together after her mother sleepwalks to her death and her sister starts sleep-eating everything in sight. Goodbye, Vitamin is also about a dysfunctional family, but centers around the main character’s father, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. Khong’s dry and self-deprecating wit keeps the story flying.
For some nonfiction, Braiding Sweetgrass is just as incredible as everyone says. Robin Wall Kimmerer has written a very special meditation on plants, science, motherhood, and traditional Indigenous knowledge. I also learned a lot from Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, an ethnography of the matsutake mushroom. Both of these books offer hope as well as critical truths in this moment of unprecedented climate change and shift in how we relate to the natural world.
In April, I read the excellent anthology Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940, and these supernatural stories from the early 20th century gave me a taste for more. Rebecca, the classic thriller by Daphne du Maurier, was recently turned into a movie now on Netflix. It’s been adapted for film several times, but nothing will ever compare to the psychological complexity of the original book. Similar in tone, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret remains just as scandalous and sensationally gripping as it was when it first came out in 1862. Another book that is perhaps more famous for its film adaptation is Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives: housewife oppression and sex robots, need I say more?
Something gentler is Picnic at Hanging Rock, by Joan Lindsay, which is the story of the mysterious disappearance of three girls on Hanging Rock in Australia. Amparo Dávila’s The Houseguest & Other Stories is a delightfully strange, often heavy and supernatural collection — Dávila passed away this year, leaving a powerful mark on Mexican fiction in her wake.
Finally, Shirley Jackson is the master of psychological horror, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle is quite possibly her masterpiece. After everyone else in their family dies of arsenic poisoning, two sisters live in a spooky mansion in the woods on the edge of town while facing increasing hostility from the townspeople. It’s witchy, creepy, weird, and incredible.
For surreal works in a related but different flavor, Leonora Carrington is perhaps my favorite underrated writer. Down Below is her account of her time in a mental institution, and it’s very intense. Her novel The Hearing Trumpet is simply scrumptious — absolutely hilarious, it’s a very weird romp through a home for old ladies. I can’t really put it better than Luis Buñuel: “Reading The Hearing Trumpet liberates us from the miserable reality of our days.” The story was inspired in part by Carrington’s friendship with Remedios Varo, whose Letters, Dreams & Other Writings is worth a peek as well. Finally, Silvina Ocampo’s Thus Were Their Faces is a great collection of strange and surreal short stories.
My taste is completely subjective, and probably a little particular. For example, I have only read 11 books by men this year. You could accuse me of anti-male bias, and you are probably right, but it’s really not intentional — I just happen to be bored by the vast majority of the things that men write. (I did enjoy most of the male-written books that I read this year.)
Natalia’s Ginzburg’s books are an excellent example of work that centers women’s internal lives. I wholeheartedly recommend The Dry Heart, a short and sweet tale of a woman who shoots her husband between the eyes. My favorite book of Ginzburg’s is Happiness, As Such, an epistolary novel centered around the good-for-nothing prodigal son of an Italian family. I love her novels because they contain political complexity in equal measure with emotional drama — Ginzburg was involved in leftist politics in Italy during the Fascist years, and the trauma she and her family suffered left a marked impact on her work. I also read Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon, All Our Yesterdays, and The City and the House this year. Fans of Elena Ferrante should definitely check her out. (Speaking of Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults was good but not particularly noteworthy — the quality we expect from her at this point, on par with her earlier books but not on the level of the Neapolitan Novels.)
Mother of 1084, by Mahasweta Devi, is a phenomenal feminist novel that a friend introduced me to. One of the best books I read this year by far, it is an exquisitely rendered portrait of a wife and mother who becomes gradually aware of her own oppression under capitalism as she grieves for and investigates the death of her radical son, who was killed by the police. It was written in 1974, during the height of the Naxalite revolution in Bengal. Leftist and feminist, but also tender and poetic, it should immediately go on your list.
One of my favorite anti-patriarchy novels of all time is Lolly Willowes, by Sylvia Townsend Warner, which I reread this year. It’s the delightful story of a spinster aunt who moves to the country to get away from her overbearing family, realizes that all she needs to be happy is just to be alone with herself, and…well, I don’t want to spoil it for you, but witchcraft features heavily in the plot. And Satan. And nary a husband to be seen. Written in 1926, it was really ahead of its time.
Other books of a similar vein that I read this year include The Bookshop, by Penelope Fitzgerald, A View of the Harbor, by Elizabeth Taylor, Manservant and Maidservant, by Ivy Compton-Burnett, Excellent Women and A Few Green Leaves, by Barbara Pym, and The Hole, by Hiroko Oyamada. Ivy Compton-Burnett is an underrated gem — super bizarre, lots of dry English wit, and a singular style that is almost entirely dialogue based. Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women is a similarly hilarious, and perhaps a bit more accessible, story of a church-going spinster who keeps getting dragged into other people’s business. The Hole, by Hiroko Oyamada, is about a woman who moves to the country to become a housewife and spends her days following a strange creature that digs large holes all over the place. Oyamada does an excellent job of evoking a landscape of imprisonment, both self-imposed and the result of circumstance, though her dialogue is a bit stilted.
Tove Jansson is best known for her Moomin comics, but her fiction for adults is excellent as well — The Summer Book is a series of lovely vignettes of summer taking place on an island off the coast of Finland. Fair Play is similarly structured and deeply pleasant to read, but about two women who have lived and worked together for decades who still find new ways of relating to life. I love a good subtly gay book, and Fair Play is exactly that. You won’t find it anywhere on a list of queer fiction, but you should, because it’s a wonderful lesbian love story.
Susan Sontag’s journals also don’t generally make it onto lists of queer literature, but the main pleasure I got from Reborn: Journals & Notebooks, 1947–1963 was reading Sontag’s experience of discovering her sexuality in 1950s Berkeley. I read a lot of LGBTQ+ books, and some highlights from this year include Zami: A New Spelling of my Name, by Audre Lorde, which is obviously incredible, and Females, by Andrea Long Chu, a short meditation on Valerie Solanas and what it means to be female. I also read Female Masculinity, by Jack Halberstam, and Curious Wine by Katherine V. Forrest (lesbian pulp with a happy ending — what more can you ask for), Virtuoso, by Yelena Moskovich, Heroine, by Gail Scott, about a leftist writer struggling between her ex-boyfriend and a developing crush on a woman, and The Stonewall Reader, edited by the New York Public Library in honor of the 50th anniversary.
Some slight queer book letdowns: The End of Eddy, by Édouard Louis, which I thought contained more shock value than substance, and My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, by Jenn Shapland, which I really wanted to like but couldn’t. I finished reading all of Carson McCullers’ novels this year, with The Member of the Wedding, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Clock Without Hands, so I was really excited for Shapland’s work, with its focus on McCullers’ lesbian love letters and queerness in the archives. Unfortunately, I found Shapland’s style of inserting her own life into the book to be a bit pretentious. If you are a fan of Maggie Nelson, you will probably enjoy the book, but just go into it with the idea that it’s Shapland’s memoir, not a work on Carson McCullers.
Another book I wanted to like but couldn’t was Jenny Offill’s Weather. It’s the story of an white upper class Brooklyn mom who wanders around in academia and her rapidly gentrifying neighborhood (though this is not acknowledged) while vaguely worrying about climate change. The thing about the book I found the hardest to swallow was the way that Offill used women of color as background figures in the narrative without having any actual BIPOC characters. We need to hold white writers more accountable.
Speaking of which, I was also let down by Eve Babitz’s Black Swans. It was the first collection of her stories that I read, and I definitely see why people love her. She’s a strong storyteller, and her stories have a certain sparkle to them that’s hard to resist. But something about the flippancy of her tone really rubbed me the wrong way — maybe it was reading her story about how she didn’t realize the Rodney King riots were happening because she was immersed in a dramatic love affair in a hotel room. I think I picked Black Swans up just as the George Floyd protests were starting this summer, and it did not feel like relevant reading in 2020.
The wave of people reading books about race this summer was pretty incredible to witness. Everything was on backorder, and the African American Studies section at Moe’s was completely cleared out. Like many other white people, I was spurred to read more books about race and the history of racism in the US. There are many resources out there for antiracist education, but books remain an excellent option. Unlearning racism is a continual process, and educating oneself about race is something that should be ongoing. I am definitely continuing my reading, as I hope many others are as well — this is in no way an exhaustive or even particularly cohesive list. However, some titles I enjoyed and would recommend: How To Be An Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi, which everyone should read; The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, an eye-opening account of the ways in which the current carceral system mirrors Jim Crow; Me and White Supremacy, by Layla F. Saad, a 28-day course of reflection on personal white supremacy; Good Talk, by Mira Jacob, a graphic novel about an Indian American mother having conversations about race with her son; So You Want to Talk About Race, by Ijeoma Oluo, a really excellent introduction to antiracism and also a great book to give to others to start conversations; The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein, which is written by a white man and expresses some deeply questionable viewpoints but really helped me understand the history that has lead to present day segregation; All Our Relations, by Winona LaDuke, which is a history of Native resistance to oppression, especially environmental racism like pipelines; An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, which is an accessible introduction to Indigenous history; and The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.
The Warmth of Other Suns was truly phenomenal, one of the best books I read this year. Wilkerson interviewed over 1,200 people for this book, and the oral histories shine through in an incredibly rich and detailed history of the Great Migration of African Americans out of the Jim Crow South that manages to be as gripping as a novel. It’s over 600 pages, but I read it in less than a week, and I can promise you won’t want to put it down either. In fact, if you’ve made it this far through these recommendations, I am certain you are capable of reading 600 pages.
In conclusion, there are a lot of great books out there, and there’s never been a better time to read them. May I suggest hunkering down with a cup of tea and a few of these titles this winter?
