Note 2: Kindle version unless otherwise noted. Non-fiction unless (novel) is appended. This year THB switched over to supporting local book stores by buying many hardbacks (at LB’s suggestion, a good one!).
Department of Sex: THB read his first book (of several this year) where the author self-identified as a non-binary individual, so the analytics section has gotten smaller
Department of Selection: How did you know that Biden was truly elected president? When both Vladimir and Mitch called the race in his favor (Dec 15); subject to change before Jan 21, 2021
Department of Clarification: nothing to report other than there was a pandemic going on all of 2020
Department of Analysis: THB was overwhelmed by outside
forces this year and that affected his book selection in unpredictable ways
(like all things 2020)
·
The CO-19 pandemic: sheltering in place encouraged THB to read
more, source his books from independent book stores, notice how often pandemics
were mentioned in books pub’d before the pandemic started. THB rarely watches
much TV and when baseball got off to a 4 month delay it created even more free
reading time.
·
The George Floyd protests: finally, there is a sustained mass
movement to re-examine the political, cultural and military power as the
dominant features of western democracies where white supremacy maintains one
group’s advantages to the disadvantage of all others.
· DJT: the wrong leader at the wrong time, willing to kill Americans of all colors especially those of color or over 75, to further his strongly held essence and the motivation for re-election. Can the bully win? Is folie a deux (a shared madness or delusional disorder) the way to run a country? Can one man dominate almost every possible conversation across the entire world? President Inappropriate can/did. Would you wear a mask to save someone's life?
Department of Conclusions:
1. Somehow
this all translated into THB finding more Highly Recommended and Recommended
books. Influenced by reading “real” books? Heightened awareness of content
being more impactful given the environment? Better books found to read? Reading
more books published years ago? More memoirs?
2. THB
read way more translated books this year than normal, and for the most part
they were either Highly Recommended or Recommended. THB thinks this because the
translators have greatly improved…can it possibly be that THB has become more
“liberal” in his reading choices?
3. At a certain point this year (around April), THB became almost afraid to start a novel, fearing it would be too “light or fluffy” given the demons ravishing the landscape in 2020. Maybe so…The sort of Highly Recommended books: 22 non-fiction, 14 fiction
{Ed. note: Which do you rate more important to you in 2020: THB should do three separate lists, one for pandemic, one for the rise of nationalism/racial awakening in the 2010s and one for books that don’t fit in the first two categories. THB did not do this, so the Highly Recommended books meander amidst these categories.}
Top Picks (36) in order of highest reco to lowest; first just titles and authors, then in same order with highly arbitrary descriptions
1. Autobiography
of Storm Jameson, Journey from the North, Vol 1, Margaret Storm Jameson (paperback, pub’d 1969)
2.
A
Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel
Defoe (historical fiction, pub’d
1722)
3.
Hamnet,
Maggie O’Farrell (novel, hardback)
4.
What
You Have Heard Is True, Carolyn
Forche’
5.
Cost, Roxana Robinson (novel, paperback, pub'd 2008)
6. Red
Famine, Stalin's War on Ukraine, Anne
Applebaum (paperback, pub'd 2017)
7. The Bass Rock, Evie Wyld (novel, hardback)
8. No
Visible Bruises, What We Don’t Know about Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, Rachel Louise Snyder (hardback)
9. Underland, A Deep Time
Journey, Robert Macfarlane
10.Homesick, Jennifer Croft
(hardback)
11.Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson (hardback)
12.Hidden Valley Road, Inside the Mind of an American Family, Robert Kohler
13.Goat Brothers, The True-Life American Epic of Five Men Who Met
as Fraternity Brothers in the Early 1960’s and Live Out the Dreams, Failures,
Loves, and Betrayals of Their Tumultuous Generation, Larry Colton (hardback, pub’d 1993)
14.Loose Change, Three Women of the Sixties, Sara Davidson (hardback, pub’d 1977)
15.The Mirror and the Light, Hilary
Mantel (novel, hardback)
16.The Yellow House, Sarah M Broom (hardback)
17.Fierce
Attachments, A Memoir, Vivian Gornick
(paperback, pub'd 1987)
18.Boom Town, the Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma
City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball
Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-Class Metropolis, Sam Anderson (paperback)
19.Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de
Beauvoir, and Me, a Memoir,
Deirdre Bair
20.Samuel Beckett, A Biography, Deirdre Bair (paperback, pub’d 1978)
21.Simone de Beauvoir, a Biography, Deirdre Bair (paperback, pub’d 1990)
22.Blindness, Jose Saramago (novel, paperback, pub’d 1995, xlated by two
since the original translator passed away before completion)
23.What Are You Going Through, Sigrid Nunez (novel)
24.Stranger in the Forest, On Foot
Across Borneo, Eric Hansen (used paperback,
pub'd 1988)
25.The Club, Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an
Age, Leo Damrosch (paperback,
illustrated)
27.A Pure Heart, Rajia Hassib (novel)
28.Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, A Therapist, Her Therapist,
and Our Lives Revealed, Lori
Gottlieb
29.The Bluest Eye, Toni
Morrison (novel pub’d 1970, hardback, afterword 1993)
30.White Fragility, Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk
About Racism, Robin Diangelo (paperback, pub’d
2018)
31.This Is Happiness, Niall
Williams (novel, hardback)
32.Olive Again, Elizabelth
Strout (novel, hardback)
33.Autobiography of Storm Jameson, Journey from the North, Vol 2, Margaret Storm Jameson (paperback, pub’d 1970)
34.The Discomfort of Evening, Marleke Lucas Rijneveld (novel, paperback, translated, pub’d
2018 in Dutch)
35.The Red Lotus, Chris
Bohjalian (novel, hardback)
36.The End of October, Lawrence Wright (novel)
Top Picks (36) in order of highest reco to lowest, this time with descriptions
Autobiography of Storm Jameson, Journey from the North, Vol 1, Margaret Storm Jameson (paperback, pub’d 1969): written in the early 1960s, Vol 1 covers 1891 to 1938, this is a scintillating book, brimming with truth from a novelist and critic, an intellectual with an overwhelming desire to lead a life driven by some innate need to move and never be bored. Her description of the 1930s and the emergence of nationalism and fascism dramatically echoes the state of the world over the last 10 years.
A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe (historical fiction, pub’d 1722): Yep, THB has dug deep into the archives for this one. Eerily similar to our current pandemic (guess not much has changed in 350+ years), this is a re-creation of the bubonic plague in London 1665. Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, was actually a well known journalist for most of his life (as well as a secret agent), and this book reads much more as actual happening than a novel. Scary, and even scarier: after the plague year there was a fire in London that destroyed much of the city.
Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell (novel, hardback): Very little is known about Will Shakespeare, and even less about his family and their life in Stratford. This story primarily revolves around Will’s wife Agnes (even her name is in contention) and three children who stay behind in Stratford while Will (never called by name) goes off to London (lightly told). When one of the twins dies due to the plague, it provoked Will to write Hamlet (THB’s all-time fave play).
What You Have Heard Is True, Carolyn Forche’: A beautifully written memoir of the poet’s time spent in El Salvador 42 years ago (or so) just as the country was about to dissolve into civil war, and brought current with what is really a short epilogue. It is frightening in its naivete of the danger the author was enmeshed in all those years ago and how complicit the US was in fostering yet another destabilization of a much poorer country for reasons that have always seemed to ignore the needs of the many for the benefit of the very few. Corruption and force are a terribly potent combination, always lurking there in humanity to the detriment of the many. And, a brief and intense glimpse into the life of a highly unique activist/philosopher
Cost, Roxana Robinson (novel, paperback, pub'd 2008): a terrifying look at a family in deterioration (and in reflection, post-deterioration) brought together when one of the grandchildren turns into a heroin addict. Extremely well written and crafted, THB found himself switching sides as the viewpoints from each member of the family has their moment in the forefront of the story.
Red Famine, Stalin's War on Ukraine, Anne Applebaum (paperback, pub'd 2017): An excellent examination of the Stalin instigated (political) famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine. Strong parallels with how Stalin viewed Ukraine not as an independent nation, rather that of a colony (and thus Stalin's intent to eliminate Ukrainian nationalism and language) and a threat to incite other Soviet controlled territories to seek independence and Putin's destabilization of the Ukraine in 2014 (to keep Ukraine from becoming part of Western Europe). Much of Putin's techniques are obviously now being used to destabilize the US and put into action by DJT. The least interesting part of the book is coverage of the actual famine: if you remove all means of obtaining food from the targeted groups, then 4 million die in a matter of 18 months. Too easy to do in a totalitarian country.
The Bass Rock, Evie Wyld (novel, hardback): A young woman in post WW1 marries a widower and they move to outside Edinburgh, and shortly thereafter the boys from the from the first marriage are put in boarding school. This somewhat mirrors what happened to THB’s mother’s father. And, eerily, most of what happens from then on (and maybe before) is a re-imagination of THB’s maternal family. Extremely well done imagining the women in the book, and the men are men (i.e., jerks).
No Visible Bruises, What We Don’t Know about Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, Rachel Louise Snyder (hardback): Another ongoing pandemic in our country, this one with a bit more optimistic story line except Republican control of the Senate (let alone Mr. Inappropriate as president) keeps the permanent House bill sitting idle. The optimistic part of the story is that there are more and more crises teams being established and following guidelines for saving the abused (almost always a woman) from abusers (almost always a man). Extremely well written and told mostly through those on the front lines, not from the perspective of theory or polemics. Snyder actually allows her sense of humor, naivete and fallibility to show.
Underland, A Deep Time Journey, Robert Macfarlane: a tour of place below our feet that we all take for granted and no nothing about. Several of the chapters were absolutely scintillating and captivating. Others were well thought out explorations of climate change. All the writing was exceptional, not surprising since Macfarlane is a poet.
Homesick, Jennifer Croft
(hardback): a memoir that reads like a fictional coming of age story. Crafted
to include many photographs by Croft (or her mother) distributed throughout the
book that make this a must-buy-in-hardback. It’s slight in text, and poignantly
both a mother-daughter story as well as a sister dealing with illness story.
Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson (hardback): Beautifully written, an excellent explanation of what has been 450 years of subjugation of the lowest US caste through slavery, Jim Crow, and white privilege. Apt comparisons are made between the Nazis, India and the US. Amazingly, Nazi Germany scholars looked to the US as a blueprint on how to “legally” disenfranchise Jews (and other “non-Aryan” groups. From a conversation in the book: “…if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?” Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, no Democratic nominee for president has received at least 50% of the white vote. Carter received the highest total, 48%. DJT received 62% of the white male and 53% of white female vote in 2016. Between 2014 and 2016, states purged approximately 15 million voters, mostly Democrats. Caste is very hard to purge, getting rid of voters is easy.
Hidden Valley Road, Inside the Mind of an American Family, Robert Kohler: The story of schizophrenia as told through the lens of a family of 12 children, 6 of whom develop schizophrenia as they reach late teens. Of course, the younger children are terrorized by the older ill siblings and the terror tears to fear as the boys especially worry that they will become ill as well. Very thorough review of the treatments, none of which really work and some that make the patient worse off. What is schizophrenia? How do families deal with the tragedy of illness? Does nurture matter? Grandpa, why are there more questions than answers?
Goat Brothers, The True-Life American Epic of Five Men Who Met as Fraternity Brothers in the Early 1960’s and Live Out the Dreams, Failures, Loves, and Betrayals of Their Tumultous Generation, Larry Colton (hardback, pub’d 1993: A jock fraternity brother decides to profile four other of his jock fraternity bros many years after graduation from UC Berkeley. All five struggle through the emerging feminist movement, raising children, and the doubts and enthusiasms of turning from youth to adults. Sports actually plays a relatively small part of the book; who knew that going through rush and hazing would leave such a large bonding imprint. The college days at Cal took place a few years before THB and DB showed up; the book came well-recommended by DB’s brother, AH, who was a contemporary and knew many of those named in the book.
Loose Change, Three Women of the Sixties, Sara Davidson (hardback, pub’d 1977): the companion to Goat
Brothers, both reco’d by AH, covering the early 60s through the mid
70s. These three Cal sorority women were part of the first group of women
liberated as part of the revolutions in the 60, and to THB’s amazement seem to
have just as much sex (or more) as some of the Goat Brothers, and it was told
in much more intimate stories. THB recommends reading both though it will take
you some digging to find them.
The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel (novel, hardback): The closing of the Wolf Hall trilogy. This book is long, and as Mantel herself says on page 513 (of 758): it’s all Henry and Cromwell, Cromwell and Henry. Beautiful prose, every sentence, very paragraph, each book. Full of history and the rise of a middle class never imagined in England before Cromwell. Needless to say, it resonates in our time as our current president believes himself to be king and we are all his servants serving at (and for) his pleasure.
The Yellow House, Sarah M Broom (hardback): a memoir of Broom's
life, family, growing up in New Orleans, leaving for college, jobs and
travels around the globe, and how home and family can haunt you. After a
chaotic start - Broom is one of 12 kids and her father died just as she was
born - with a huge family to document and cement in THB's memory, things settle
down to a very well-told tale of poverty, life full of deaths, Katrina (she was
in NY during the "Water" while two of her brothers stayed). Can also
be read as a love story between a very bright daughter and her strong-willed
mother (see Fierce Attachments, same-same).
Fierce Attachments, A Memoir, Vivian Gornick (paperback, pub'd 1987): What makes a classic? Timeless, full of truth, brilliant intelligent sentences that glow on the page, unusual phrasing and grammar. Gornick relates growing up the Bronx in a mostly Jewish tenement, then in Manhattan, life as a journalist and author, her love-life and mostly a story of her mother and what it meant to be her daughter (her father and brother hardly are even profiled).
Boom Town, the Fantastical Saga of
Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined
Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-Class Metropolis, Sam Anderson (paperback): Exceptional! An
interesting story mostly focused on juxtaposing the history of the city with
the year (2012-13) Anderson spent researching and reporting on OKC. The coverage
of the NBA's OKC Thunder is a huge bonus (and easy to skip over the infrequent
vignettes for you non-basketball fans). More busts than booms keep the story
moving, right through the biggest booming bust of all, the blowing up of the
Murrah Federal Building.
Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me, a Memoir, Deirdre Bair: A coming of age story, this time of a woman journalist in her late 20s who decided to ask Samuel Beckett if she could write his biography. The long story (almost 20 years) of how the Beckett and Beauvoir books came into being match almost perfectly the onset of the feminist movement and hurdles facing any woman trying establish herself as a competent individual in the workforce given the (white) male dominant culture, even with a supportive family.
Samuel Beckett, A Biography, Deirdre Bair (paperback, pub’d 1978): Can there ever be an odder man or an odder life? Bair captures this unique guy who, and even though a supreme control freak, basically gave her carte blanche (“I won’t help or hinder you”) and for a private guy gave her quite an insight into his character through a series of interviews when he was in his mid-60s. Beckett had big-time mommy issues, a writer and iconoclast who lived on the kindness of others until he was 40, stabbed by a pimp in his early 30s, served in the French resistance in WWII, and after the war published his first few books (no sales, all this now after mom died) and then hit the jackpot with Waiting for Godot (Gahdeau? GODoh? GodOH?), became world famous and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Wrote in three languages, did his own translating (sometimes with help). When he became successful, he also became extremely generous.
Simone de Beauvoir, a Biography, Deirdre Bair (paperback, pub’d 1990): and what
a life it was, as Bair paints a very realistic and complex story of a woman
that lit a fire under the feminist movement and lived one of the most
non-conventional and productive lives as a partner to Jean-Paul Sartre. Known
to many by his surname alone (which he preferred), this is also his biography
as their lives were deeply entwined for 50 years, a two-fer. Bair was able to interview Beauvoir intensely
over the last few years of Simone’s life, yet brings a critical eye to
everything they discussed. Beauvoir agreed to Beckett’s same rules, though she
controlled the results much more aggressively than Sam.
Blindness, Jose Saramago (novel, paperback, pub’d 1995, xlated by two since the original translator passed away before completion): another pandemic, this time loss of sight, somewhere in Portugal though no names are used in the book. Very depressing, as society crumbles and humans go back to the basics: how to save themselves from going blind and where to find food. Also a version of the parable that in the land of the blind the one-eyed person is God.
What Are You Going Through, Sigrid Nunez (novel): A semi-close friend agrees to help another writer through the last stages of cancer, ruminating on what it means to die. Maybe not the best choice in the age of Covid, yet the humor and oddities of life carries this short book. Ed. note: THB skipped the ten pages of a talking cat (worse than a dream sequence). THB also highly recommends The Friend, Nunez’s last book.
Stranger in the Forest, On Foot
Across Borneo, Eric Hansen (used paperback,
pub'd 1988): Two of the most used plots, a man takes a journey and a stranger
(madman) comes to the village, are articulated extremely well by Hansen in his
journeys across Sarawak and into Kalimantan, mostly by walking through jungle
as the only Westerner among native inhabitants. With a major sympathy towards
the customs of the locals, it is still impossible for a non-native to adjust
after growing up in the US. Another classic.
The
Club, Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age, Leo Damrosch (paperback, illustrated): A scintillating
revue of the era of Sam Johnson (a legendary intellectual, dictionary author
and writer of the late 1700s) and his awe-struck friend, James Boswell. Boswell
was 20 years younger, a sycophant and compulsive (and exceptionally detailed
keeper) of a journal that he used to publish the classic book, Life of Johnson,
after Johnson's death. Damrosch is chatty, opinionated, thoughtful, articulate,
and has spread a number of illustrations throughout the book that help place
the participants in their time. Definitely read the "real" book as an
e-reader won't convey the impact of the pictures near as well.
The
Great Shakespeare Jubilee, Christian
Deelman (pub’d 1964, used Clinton, Iowa, public library hardback): a terrific
companion to The Club; a witty history of the 1769 Jubilee put on by the
greatest actor of the day, David Garrick (a member of The Club), in Will’s
birthplace, the sleepy village of Stratford. Includes a great vignette
involving Boswell, much correction of past attempts to reveal the inside story,
resulting in a tale worth telling. A must read of fans of Shakespeare.
A Pure Heart, Rajia Hassib (novel): Extremely well crafted,
the story of two Egyptian sisters who take different paths in life because they
have different personalities that neither can reconcile easily given what
happens to them in their twenties. Then the sister that stayed in Egypt is
killed in a terrorist bombing, leaving those behind to deal with the aftermath.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed, Lori Gottlieb: A journalist/psychotherapist writes a good book about what therapy is all about, from both sides of the couch, using her own experience in therapy and stories of some of the more memorable patients she’s helped. THB is here to tell you that talking therapy works (psychotherapists don’t prescribe meds, only physicians can do that). Here’s a great quote in the book from John Weakland: ”Before successful therapy, it’s the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it is one damn thing after another.” While the book tends towards the optimistic, could use some more editing/cutting, and leaves you wanting to find out who the people in the book really are (obviously to protect confidentiality, the names and any identifying details have been changed).
The
Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison (novel pub’d 1970,
hardback, afterword 1993): written in the early 60s, taking place in 1941 in a
small Ohio city, narrated by the younger daughter of a family of four, and
mostly about another Black family in their neighborhood, exposes the context of
poverty and corrosive racism endemic to their existence. Morrison’s afterword
is a thing of beauty: articulate, expository, and a description of the author’s
intentions that hint at a regret that the book still doesn’t quite capture her
best writerly self.
White Fragility, Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, Robin Diangelo (paperback, pub’d 2018): One of THB’s big life themes is the individual vs the group. This book explains how impossible it is for individual white people to deal with centuries of collective behavior since the power structure has been in place forever and being called a racist is considered the worst thing possible and each of us believe we are kind and considerate at heart.
Olive Again, Elizabelth Strout (novel, hardback): Olive rides into the sunset along with what seems to be every dysfunctional family in a sparsely populated part of the Maine coast. If you haven't read the other two Olive Kitteridge books or missed Frances McDormand playing Olive in a multi-part HBO series, this book won't resonate quite as much. If you have, it is another great read.
Autobiography of Storm Jameson, Journey from the North, Vol 2, Margaret Storm Jameson (paperback, pub’d 1970):
written in the early to mid 1960s, Vol 2 covers 1938 to 1965, this is also a
scintillating book, brimming with truth and brilliance of sentences from a
novelist and critic, an intellectual with an overwhelming desire to lead a life
driven by some innate need to move and never be bored. This volume is subtly
different from Volume
1: less of a day-by-day, more essay-like
in stretches. Still, if you appreciate great writing, it is more of the same.
The Discomfort of Evening, Marleke Lucas Rijneveld (novel, paperback, translated, pub’d 2018 in Dutch): Every family is dysfunctional, and each family is dysfunctional in its own way, especially when dealing with grief. The narrator is a pre-teen, slightly mentally incapacitated girl who can’t quite grasp reality yet has a view of the events around her that are insightful and frightening (to the reader). Rijneveld is very young, a well-published poet, raised and still lives on a farm, and identifies as them.
The Red Lotus, Chris Bohjalian (novel, hardback): a thriller that touches on the race to sell a version of plague that is spread by rats. Pub’d just before the pandemic (so written well before CO-19 became a reality), it seems to have perfectly predicted the early days of December 2019. Makes a nice read (THB sick humor) after Defoe’s The Plague Year: sharp, snappy, fast paced, well researched and almost a Hollywood ending (double meaning, if you read the book).
The
End of October, Lawrence Wright (novel): A dystopian
book like this one, so on top of the major current event of 2020, CO-19, has to
have been written and prepped for publication at least a year or two ago. It is
eerie how spot on it is about the world-wide risks of a pandemic. Read at your own
peril; real life could be worse, a lot worse, than it is now. In the same
sub-genre, biological warfare, as American War, a 2017 Highly
Recommended book. And is Putin a super-villain or just a guy trying to get his
country back to the top of the heap?
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