What I Read in September Through December 2020
I stopped blogging about the books I’d read during the -ber months of 2020. It had started to feel like a chore, an obligation, and not a very fulfilling one.
But now I look back at the entirety of my reading during 2020 and, in trying to consider how to write about the Books I Read in 2020 or something like that, I feel obligated to round off this “What I Read in [Month]” series.
One of the favorites of the year. Go read it.
I am going to take a new approach in 2020, although I haven’t decided what it will be yet. First, here are the books I have not blogged about, so far, that I read in 2020:
2666 by Roberto Bolano
John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead
Bullfighting by Roddy Doyle
Antarctica by Claire Keegan
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask by Gabe Durham
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh
All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda
Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The Guest List by Lucy Foley
Truly Madly Guilty by Liane Moriarty
Pretty Things by Janelle Brown
Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam
Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead
Yikes. We are staring at a daunting list here. 18 books about which I haven’t yet written. Where to begin?
Oh, but I should stick with the previous themes and also mention the books I partially read but did not finish, at least not yet:
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
Principles by Ray Dahlio
Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith
A Legacy of Spies by John le Carre
Moneyball by Michael Lewis
Mislaid by Nell Sink
Visits from the Drowned Girl by Steven Sherrill
The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley
My Year of Flops by Nathan Rabin
The Deportees by Roddy Doyle
A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe by Alex White
Great. What are we to do about all this?
Why it’s hard to maintain a monthly book blog
Let’s consider the reasons I’ve had a hard time maintaining this book blog:
The more time that passes between reading a book and writing about it, the harder it is to know what to write, BUT
Sometimes it’s good to put some space between a book and you before you write about it
Sometimes I’m not sure if I have anything new or interesting to say about a given book, and then I question the entire existence of this book blog
I have been prioritizing other writing (my own fiction, mostly) over blogging
Those are compelling reasons not to write these blog posts, aren’t they? Is that enough to wrap this thing up right now and not provide any thoughts or editorializing? Perhaps. What I will do is provide some thoughts on a few specific topics that this reading list got me thinking about.
If You’re Working Your Way Through an Anti-Racist Reading List and You Don’t Tell People About It, Does It Even Count?
I recently read the article What Is an Anti-Racist Reading List For? by Lauren Michele Jackson, published in Vulture in June of 2020. It asks a lot of good questions that I’m not going to repeat here, but you should go read it. This is the first paragraph of that article:
I have this pet theory about book recommendations. They feel good to solicit, good to mete out, but someone at some point has to get down to the business of reading. And there, between giving and receiving, lies a great gulf. No one can quite account for what happens. Reading, hopefully, but you never can be sure.
At my most cynical, I view an anti-racist reading list as a vehicle for sharing on social media, something to let people know “look, I’m doing the work.” Or as a resource to pull books from that are instagrammable, promotable, friendly for your followers. “Look, I read a book that explains you to me!”
I say this while also recognizing a lot of the books I read in 2020 can be found on such lists. I read one book by Baldwin, two by Coates, and two by Morrison. Plus I read two novels by Colson Whitehead, who I think should be added to such lists. Wait, do I think that? Am I suddenly writing my own anti-racism lists? Who do I think I am? I’m the one who has work to do, not the one to go recommending books. Oh God, I wrote a blog post about books to give people at the end of 2020 and I recommended James Baldwin AND Kiley Reid AND Colson Whitehead on there. Why didn’t I recommend Coates or Morrison? Why haven’t I read White Fragility yet? What am I doing? Who do I think I am?
This is where the consideration of anti-racist reading lists takes me. I think the best thing for me to do is continuing to read, continuing to write about it in my own way, and trying to avoid over-thinking about how I write about it—unless the entire problem is that people aren’t thinking hard enough about how they’re writing about what they’re reading? Isn’t that the entire issue here?
The Page Turner
This is a good moment to pivot to a different kind of book. The one you cannot put down. The one that you consume in one sitting, the kind with short chapters and cliffhangers and present tense action and lots of exciting dialogue. The page turner. Sometimes known as the thriller, although I realize page turners and thrillers aren’t exactly synonymous.
This definition leaves something to be desired.
I started reading page turners for a simple reason: I wanted to figure out how to write one. I continued reading them because it turns out they’re pretty fun to read.
Here are the books I read in the last few months of 2020 that I think qualify as page turners:
All the Missing Girls
Dark Places
Sharp Objects
Gone Girl
The Guest List
Truly Madly Guilty
Pretty Things
Leave the World Behind
I had read a few books earlier in 2020 that could also be considered page turners, particularly Such a Fun Age and, arguably, various books by John le Carre and Roddy Doyle. It was in November that I started reading them, at least initially, with the intent to study them. What makes these books so compelling? Why are people so obsessed with this certain kind of book, the book within the genre that I loosely think of as the Girl Extended Universe, i.e. anything with Girl in the title or some other dark, exciting name and, usually, a storyline involving someone dead, someone missing, or both.
There are variants on this theme within this list, and within this overall genre. Truly Madly Guilty involves lower stakes than murder or kidnapping, while still being compulsively readable. Leave the World Behind has much higher stakes—the world ending—which, when paired with a third person omniscient narrator, made it a less enjoyable read for me. All involve quick chapters, ever-increasing stakes, and plenty of big reveals.
The thing I like least in page turner fiction, I’ve realized, is one of the most common tropes: the coincidence. It was coincidence that hurt my enjoyment of Such a Fun Age, coincidence that undercut the realism of Dark Places, coincidence that had me rolling my eyes at the third act of The Guest List. I am constantly brought back to this rule from Pixar’s rules of storytelling:
Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
That is a rule I intend to hold myself to. Don’t use coincidence as your deux ex machina.
On Consuming Parody Before the Parodied
I believe that one of the quintessential aspects of being a millennial is a childhood spent consuming parodies and homages we did not understand. I intend to write about this more in the near future.
While I have not written about this before, I did once tweet about it:
(I meant Rear Window, not Read Window.)
This happened to me when I read Death in Her Hands before I plunged into the page turners. It’s not a book about a woman who discovers a murder mystery. It’s a book about a woman who imagines herself into a murder mystery. Is it worth reading? Sure. Should it be at the top of your list? I don’t know. Will people who love murder mysteries enjoy seeing themselves in the protagonist of Death in Her Hands? I don’t know, will they?
What does good pandemic reading look like?
The last question is one I haven’t fully answered for myself: what should someone read during these uncertain times? Escapism? Dystopian fiction? Non-fiction? Something that makes you angrier, something that holds up a mirror, something that lets you pretend the world is not what it is?
I don’t know the answer to that. But one thing I’ve discovered is how much certain works of fiction remind me of the era we live in. The private schoolboys who pretend the war doesn’t exist in A Separate Peace reminded me of the COVID truthers you hear about daily. The family living in the peaceful neighborhoods of a slowly disintegrating Shanghai in When We Were Orphans reminds me of my own suburban existence while neighborhoods of Minneapolis burned. The family in Leave the World Behind trying to vacation during the possible apocalypse in 2020 was, well, pretty on the nose, huh?
Is that what good reading looks like now? Seeking ourselves in whatever we read? Reading about uncertain times within uncertain times? Should we hold up the mirror or should we escape? How annoying will the next season of Black Mirror be?
I like to ask questions I don’t know the answer to. And unlike my previous blog posts, I’m allowing comments on this one. What’s the worst that could happen?