The 16 Best Books I Read in Year 26 (+ The Other 52, Too)
Books have had to do some heavy lifting this year.
Personally, they continued to be a major source of comfort and companionship as I traveled to all the places year 26 took me, from Mexico to Cuba to Belize to Guatemala to several places in the States. They were a distraction and a salve post-breakup, at least when I wasn’t accidentally reading love stories. As always happens, they taught me a great deal, both when I specifically sought them out for their elucidating contents and when I happened across a story or character or passage that blew my mind right open. (Will that feeling ever get old? Witnessing your empathy or your perception or your sense of wonder stoked into a higher, better, more sustaining version of itself because of something you read, watching it grow in real time?)
Globally—or at least nationally—books had a bit of a renaissance, too, with anti-racist reading lists spreading widely over social media and Black authors forming the majority of bestseller lists for the first time ever. White allies clutched their White Fragility like a talisman and Black-owned bookstores were backordered for weeks (to the ire of some of their would-be customers, who seemed to have missed the whole purpose—learning how to better support Black Americans—and threw fits over waiting times instead, and this pre- the potential dissolution of our nation’s postal service!).
This blog provides a list of all of the books I read over this particular year in my life, my 26th year; this is the fourth year I’ve kept track of the books and the second blog I’ve written about them (the first one is here). You’ll see that I didn’t read a lot of new-to-me nonfiction about slavery and racism in America. Part of that is because I was having a particularly difficult time, personally, when that conversation started, and I knew I couldn’t engage the way I wanted to in those texts at that time. But another part of that is because I decided to read more Black-voiced fiction instead.
I’ve long believed that fiction is powerful. That immersing yourself in worlds of people who might not look or talk or think like you, of following their story as they walk through it, is one of the best ways to build empathy and understanding that we have available to us. Its form makes it all the more impactful: as I sit there, reading each page and taking in each bit of dialogue, I am only listening. I am listening to what the author is saying and not saying; I am listening to how the characters express their pains and their joys; I am listening to how they relate to each other, how their community and surroundings and experience of the world plays out over time. I’m not talking. I’m not waiting for a chance to talk. I’m not, at least not in good fiction, in immersive fiction, in the fiction that makes you check the time and feel thoroughly confused as to how an hour has passed, even cognizant of the listening that I’m doing or the things I’m learning from it. I’m just lost in a story, and when I find myself, having climbed through to the other side, I’m a better—wiser, more empathetic, more patient, more curious, more understanding, more connected—person for having been lost in the first place.
In the list below, which I promise I really am getting to, and wherein I’ve done a loose force-ranking of all of the books I’ve read this year, you will see a bit of nonfiction mixed in, because nonfiction with a solid story can be just as compelling as the most inventive novel. But my lists are always heavily weighted towards fiction because reading fiction is my superpower. I hope you’ll find it to be yours, too, starting with these recommendations. (The mini-list below are books I’d highly recommend you, no matter who you are, to pick up. A bunch of the books in the longer list are good, but not so good I’d immediately recommend them to you irrespective of who you are or what you’re normally drawn to.)
The 16 Best Books I Read This Year
- In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. This is the most inventive, creative memoir I’ve ever read. Each chapter sees Machado narrating part of her life, from coming out as queer to working on her MFA to getting in—and eventually out—of an abusive relationship, in a different literary style. One is a soap opera, another is a gothic novel, another is a poem, still another is a choose-your-own-adventure. It’s masterful, technically stunning writing, but it’s also so alive. It is not just an excuse to flex her superior writerly talent. Each chapter’s form is the perfect vessel for its scenes, for its characters, for its heightening of the noir-ish suspense of the relationship’s death. All in all, it’s excellent, and I couldn’t recommend it more highly.
- Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips. The best novel I read this year, and maybe the best debut novel I’ve read, ever. Phillips is an American but she writes so convincingly of life in Kamchatka, a remote Russian peninsula, that I was convinced she was raised camping with black bears, skiing in bright parkas, traveling between remote indigenous villages for fishing festivals, and debating whether life was better under communist rule or not. The plot at the heart of the novel is a suspenseful kidnapping, but it unspools through a series of loosely related vignettes that explore belonging, love, ambition, and obligation through several women’s perspectives, creating an overall slow-building reading experience (and a masterful execution of place-as-character) that’s evocative and engaging.
- Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino. I won’t spend long on this because if we’re friends in real life, we’ve probably already talked about how enlightening and enjoyable this essay collection is, and even if we’re not, you’ve probably seen it atop many a bestseller list. I love Tolentino’s reported personal essays and think they’re the pinnacle of the form; I’d love to be able to write more like her, so reading her is always an aspirational exercise. But one that also makes me feel incredibly seen when it comes to spending money on friends’ weddings, reckoning with a childhood spent worshipping in a faith I no longer feel connected to, or taking a barre class, among other things.
- Educated by Tara Westover. The second-best memoir I read this year. (This and Dream House make me really want to start reading more of them.) Again, it’s a well-known and well-loved book, and my appreciation of it comes from how well Westover, in writing about her upbringing in a very conservative Mormon household in rural Idaho and how higher education changed her entire life, tells a story. It’s that perfect version of nonfiction, where there’s just as much time and thought and talent spent on pacing, imagery, and allusion as there is to conveying the main plot points. I’ve talked with friends who didn’t love the book and I understand their criticism, but I think this book is truly masterful and I’m very glad the world has the chance to read it.
- The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. I read Circe last year and loved, loved, loved it; this companion novel (written first) of the friendship and love between Achilles and Patroclus is also excellent, if slightly less compelling to me personally. It’s a retelling of the Trojan War, exploring history, myth, and the purpose of life with real characters whose motivations are clear and relatable in a way that’s about one thousand times more interesting than The Iliad itself. I wish I took Great Books 101, the mandatory introduction seminar for my university’s honors college, after 2012, when this book came out. My papers about Achilles’ legacy would’ve been so much more interesting.
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I don’t know why it took me so long to read this book. I read it over the course of one afternoon in Ann Arbor, it being one of the first works of fiction I read post-breakup, and Plath’s writing—so good, so illuminating on every scale—knocked me out. I paused several times to read passages aloud to my sister, who was sitting next to me in the grass. And the passage about the fig tree…I’d read it before, but coming across it organically was a jolt to the heart. I felt incredible seen. It’s heartbreaking to read, knowing how Plath’s life ended, particularly near the end, when it kind of folds in on itself in a manic race to make meaning from mental illness. But it must be read.
- So We Can Glow by Leesa Cross-Smith. This collection of short stories made me simultaneously want to write a thousand short stories and also to never attempt writing one ever again. Cross-Smith writes about love in all its formals—romantic, carnal, familial, between friends—with such a rich, distinct voice that reading her stories all together is a dessert-only tasting menu. Her long paragraphs of sensory-rich descriptions, hooked together by commas in a single sentence that sprawls over three pages, feel like laying on a recliner on a wide wrap-around porch under some flowering fruit trees with a glass of iced tea sweating in your hand. Read her.
- How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones. Another memoir, this one by a poet, where the language is so rich that it almost—but doesn’t—obfuscate the intensity of the subject matter, which sees Jones exploring his experiences coming out as a gay Black man in Texas, developing himself as a poet, and losing his mother. Another masterful marriage of style and story.
- Three Women by Lisa Taddeo. A strange, magical work of nonfiction, Taddeo’s book explores three real-life women and their real-life desires, from searching for connection in their marriages to exposing the truth about an abusive teacher to fulfilling their sexual needs. I think I enjoyed it so much because it was so impossible to imagine writing it. Taddeo writes in the afterword that she spent eight years writing the book, driving around the country and looking for women to interview in support groups, community message boards, and coffee shops, and she somehow found them, spent time with them, and told their story in ways both authentic and captivating.
- On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. Almost another poet’s memoir, but not quite; this is a novel loosely based on Vuong’s own experience growing up as a first-generation American in public housing in Connecticut, exploring his identity as Vietnamese-American, as a gay man, and as a writer. It’s structured as a letter written to his / the narrator’s mother, a moving and impossible story by that structure alone, since his mother can’t read English. The language is exquisite—light-up sneakers become “the world’s smallest ambulances, going nowhere”—and impossibly full of meaning. Probably the most difficult book I read this year for what it exposes about the violence of the American experience, but also the most beautiful.
- Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. This novel is a wonderfully crafted multi-generational epic that covers four generations of a poor Korean farmer family and their forays into 20th-century Japan. It was illumining, sharing cultural and historical moments that I’d never been exposed to before. Place becomes a character in and of itself, whether that’s the tiny boardinghouse kept clean and tidy by a hardworking wife and mother or the sprawling Osaka marketplace where entrepreneurial sisters carve out a place for themselves or the jail where a hardworking father is unfairly detained or the bright, lively pachinko parlors that give the title its name. Lee is at the top of her game here.
- Nobody is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey. This half-thriller half-existential crisis tells the story of a woman trying to find her way through a mediocre marriage, an emotionally stunted family, and a heartbreak caused by the death by suicide of her adopted sister. It sounds heavy, doesn’t it? It would be, and maybe unreadably so, if Lacey’s prose wasn’t so razor-sharp and perfect. She articulates thoughts that I thought I was the only person on earth to ever have, and in so doing, reveals that her main character’s breakdown is just a concentrated dose of what it feels like to be human.
- The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang. The best love story I’ve read in a decade. Hoang takes on half a dozen rom-com tropes—the “hire a fake boyfriend/girlfriend”, the “reinvention of the nerd,” the “hooker’s redemption story,” etc. etc.—and stretches them just wide enough to fit in characters and themes often left out of love stories (mental health, the immigrant experience). The end result is a light, engaging, compulsively readable novel that avoids leaving you with the saccharine hangover of a sugar high.
- If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha. I read this novel about four South Korean women seeking artistic, financial, and relationship success under the crushing weight of impossible beauty standards a week after I saw Parasite. Both works reflect on the inhumane income inequality present in South Korea (as well as the States) and come to a similar ending point: the minute changes that are achievable by one person, whether to the planes of their cheekbones or the zeros in their checking account, aren’t enough to climb out of deeply reinforced caste systems. Having said that, Cha’s story isn’t bogged down by its serious themes, and in fact, is the opposite—breezy plot points of K-pop obsessions and plastic surgery mishaps keep the heavier moments of class solidarity and the exploitation of women afloat.
- The Book of Delights by Ross Gay. This book of short essays by Black poet Ross Gay reads like a dozen conversations between friends on a sunny park bench. They illuminate, they revel, they appreciate, and they acknowledge all that is good and meaningful and rich in our lives, from the tomatoes in our gardens to the weeds in our sidewalks to the music in our headphones, and they’re especially important right now, when all that goodness feels hard to access.
- The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley. Part magical realism, part Victorian family drama, part travelogue, this novel is pure imagination. Pulley’s descriptions of London feel just as real as her descriptions of the Peruvian Andes, and as we follow our main character, a down-on-his-luck explorer and botanist for Britain’s India Office tapped to go source quinine, a necessary ingredient for malaria treatment, from a remote community in Peru, it’s easy to let go and let the story whisk us away with it.
And the Other 52, Many of Which Were Still Great
The first 12 or so of these books I might have included in my “best” section above, if making my recommendations a full third of everything I read this year didn’t seem like a major failure to synthesize. After that 12, the next 30 or so were good books, but nothing to write home about—or to write here about, either—and the last 5 or so I would wish on an enemy, but definitely not you, o reader of my blog.
- The Gurnsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer
- Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
- Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb
- The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
- Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
- Fleischman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
- Women Talking by Miriam Toews
- Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld
- The Bride Test by Helen Hoang
- Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson
- The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
- The Paper Wasp by Lauren Acampora
- Miracle Creek by Angie Kim
- The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
- Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory
- Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
- The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo
- There, There by Tommy Orange
- Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell
- The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley
- After You by Jojo Moyes
- Eleanor Elephant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
- Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver
- A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza
- The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
- Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
- The Turner House by Angela Flournoy
- Still Me by Jojo Moyes
- Time’s Convert by Deborah Harkness
- All Adults Here by Emma Straub
- In Five Years by Rebecca Serle
- Bloodhound by Tamora Pierce
- Terrier by Tamora Pierce
- I Miss You When I Blink by Mary Laura Philpott
- Long Bright River by Liz Moore
- All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
- Love and Other Ways of Dying by Michael Paternity
- The Moment of Lift by Melinda Gates
- Your House Will Burn by Steph Cho
- Little Gods by Meng Jin
- How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
- Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld
- The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power
- Queen by Candice Carty-Williams
- The Forgotten Room by Karen White, Beatriz Williams, and Lauren Willig
- Improvement by Joan Silber
- Bad Land by Jonathan Raban
- Ask Again, Yes by Mary Bethe Keane
- Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot
- Far from the Tree by Robin Benway
- Jane, Unlimited by Jane Cashore
- Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami
By the Numbers
I read 68 books this year, a few more than last year (59) and even the year before (63). The first year I kept track, my 23rd year, I read 40 books, so the overall trend is looking good. I fully and wholeheartedly embraced reading on my phone this year, which I used to make such fun of—a novel! swiped through on a tiny screen like so many Tinder profiles!—before I realized that it was by far the most convenient way to make sure I always had a book on me. I did read all of them; I still haven’t been convinced that audiobooks are for me, but seeing as how I’ve never tried one, I might share with you next year that that opinion went the way of “reading on your phone is silly.”
A full 85% of those books were written by women, even higher than last year’s 73%, the year before’s 63%, and the first year’s 55%. That gender distribution is one that doesn’t make me actively worried about whether I’m reading enough women and non-binary writers anymore—I’m definitely doing my part, especially when you consider that the top 15 literary publications in the world only publish women or non-binary authors 40% of the time—but the race distribution of what I’m reading does.
This is the first year I tracked authors’ race, with the goal of understanding any unintentional gaps in my reading exposure. I want to be engaging with wide set of perspectives and thus finding to the highest possible extent the many, many, many stories in the world waiting for me to learn from them, and I did only okay at that this year.
Of the 68 books I read, 34% of them were written by people of color. That’s okay; it’s roughly in line with the percentage of non-white Americans, but it’s not representative when you break it down by race. Keeping in mind that I had to sometimes assume authors’ race, I read 12 books (17%, overrepresented compared to the general population) by writers of Asian descent, 6 books by Black writers (8.5%, underrepresented), 3 books by Latinx writers (4%, very underrepresented), and 2 books by Native American writers (3%, slightly overrepresented).
Race is a social construct, I know; there’s no scientific support for separating humans into fundamentally different groups. But considering that people of color do have wildly different experiences than white people, it’s especially important that I, as a white person, listen to them and seek to understand them, and I need to do a better job of doing that.
I did read more non-novels this year than last; 22% of the books I read were essay collections, memoirs, short story collections, and works of nonfiction, in line with my goal for myself to read at least one non-novel a month.
En Fin
If I haven’t convinced you to read more—and to read one of my recommendations, specifically!—by now, I probably won’t in this paragraph. But do let me try anyways.
Books connect us. That’s never been more valuable than right now, when we’re six months into living in isolation during a pandemic. I’m in a new book club with old coworkers and having a reason to get together (even virtually) and talk about anything other than death and politics (though both subjects, being ubiquitous parts of the human experience and thus of books, do make it into some of our discussions) is lovely. I connected with two librarians over Instagram and read N.K. Jemesin’s latest, a giant piece of narrational magic, with them. Friends from my college English classes regularly send me book recs that spark conversations about creativity and love and life.
I was a reader long before I was a writer, a partner, or a professional. As some parts of my identity fade away, others are swapped out, and still others are painfully cleaved off, the reader in me remains. I will always be one. I will always love being one with other people.
Come be one with me, will you?
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