NONFICTION
I read a lot of
great nonfiction this year. The one that I’ve recommended the most is Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. This book
was about the science behind sleep – and what our bodies and brains are doing while
we sleep. It covered everything from how memory is created and strengthened
while we sleep to the impact sleep has on illnesses like heart disease and
diabetes, all with scientific studies to back up the claims. More than
anything, this book gave me license to sleep, and to think about it as equally
important to diet and exercise.
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez
was also excellent. It talked about how women are not included in most research
studies in most fields, which impacts everything from civic decisions to
healthcare to furniture design. While she occasionally drifted into a paragraph
or two of sarcasm, overall this book was grounded in data and quite
eye-opening, even for a well-read feminist.
The comprehensive Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
was recommended to me by someone years ago at synagogue and I finally got into
it this year. It chronicled the Great Migration of African Americans to the
North from roughly 1916 to 1970. The book both told the general history, as
well as followed three specific individuals throughout their lives as they
moved from the brutal familiarity of the South to the foreign opportunity of
the North and West. While long, this book was not boring at any point – and
made me really think about the impact this has had on American politics and
race today.
Webster read The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston
before I did, a rare occurrence. It was written by a journalist who accompanied
a group of archeologists to Honduras to search for a mysterious and famous
“lost city.” While it was fun to read along as they make some amazing
discoveries, several of them also contract a sometimes-fatal disease, which
becomes in and of itself a part of the narrative.
My last nonfiction
highlight is a memoir by Steve Jobs’ daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs: Small Fry. Her relationship with Jobs is
complex, to say the least, and she does a beautiful job depicting the truth
around his behavior and their interactions, both good and bad. She’s honest
without being vengeful, though as a reader I could have understood either
choice.
Some others I
enjoyed include Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People
About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge, based on her now-famous blog post
of the same title, and memoir I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou that I had shamefully missed
until this year.
The Great Pretender by Susan Cahalan
continued her personal story about misdiagnosis (chronicled in Brain on Fire)
with an examination of a famous experiment where several people went undercover
in mental hospitals to prove how poorly mental illness is diagnosed, with
unexpected results. Michael Pollan’s How to Change your Mind
was a thorough history and current state reporting of how LSD and other
hallucinogens can be used to treat mental illness.
Perhaps the most
unique book I read this year was On Finding
by Andreas Eckstrom, a Swedish futurist who keynoted by company’s
conference in 2019. It goes from the very public evisceration of big tech
companies who control what information we get, to very personal concerns about
his health, without being preachy or meandering. Finally, I enjoyed a
predictable romp with Bitcoin
Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, which posits that the Winklevoss
brothers are headed towards redemption.
FICTION
My fiction game was strong too.
It’s hard to pick a favorite, but I
really enjoyed Saints for All Occasions by
Courtney Sullivan, which was about two sisters who leave Ireland for
the US, and the story of how one becomes the matriarch of a large family while
the other becomes a nun. There were
predictable turns of plot, but it was the writing and the characters who made
it compelling.
A
Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles was charming and complex,
despite its being about a man who is living in a hotel under house arrest, and
the entire book occurring within its walls.
He befriends a young girl who is living there, and they create an entire
universe within the hotel, full of games and tricks and secret hideouts. It’s a sweet relationship, and one that takes
center stage as other things occur in the hotel and in the world that could
otherwise darken their lives.
Where
the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens stood up to the hype. It was
beautifully written, with a complex and tough heroine and rich setting, in the
marshland of North Carolina. This is the kind of book that stayed with me more
for how it made me feel while I was reading it than it did the plot, but
certainly ranks as a favorite.
I don’t remember reading anything like
Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson
recently. This book is about a young woman who finds herself nannying for the eccentric
step-children of her college roommate, who is living a storybook life with
a beautiful home and blue-blooded politician husband. It had great pacing, and
kept me reading, but the true value was in the depictions of who we love and how
we love.
Decades, I might suggest, before Hulu
made Gilead a household name, I read The Handmaid’s Tale and never
forgot it. This year I was delighted to find that though the library queue for The Testaments by Margaret Atwood was hundreds of people long, 2018-me had
pre-ordered it, and it arrived on its publication day. It did not disappoint.
Taking place 15 years after the previous book, this one brings back several familiar
characters, and adds some new ones.
While there are still open questions at the end of The Testaments,
the reader’s understanding of the beginnings of Gilead, and the nuances behind
the decisions people make, is far evolved.
The
List by Martin Fletcher follows a boardinghouse full of refugees in London
after WWII. In particular, two Austrian
Jews who are expecting a baby, and who wait daily to hear whether relatives of
theirs survived or not. In the face of rising anti-Semitism and anti-refugee
sentiment in London, they remain steadfast in their desire to continue building
a new post-war life; the parallels are not lost on today’s reader. Not only does this book tell the story of an
individual family, it also tells the story of a generation, and of a universal
human experience.
Not just a mystery, but also not just
a dystopic novel, The Last by
Hanna Jameson was a
very imaginative book. After a set of nuclear
bombs destroy several major cities, a small remote resort hotel in
Switzerland remains home to a disparate collection of people, some of whom
decide to stay put, while others choose to venture out and see if they can
return home. For those who stay, a new normal emerges, rationing food,
collecting rainwater, and generally keeping busy, until a young girl’s body is
found. While the main character seeks the truth about her death, he also
struggles with his decision to stay at the hotel, rather than face the aftermath
of returning to the real world.
We should all be reading more Native American
fiction, and there’s no better book to start with than There, There by Tommy Orange.
In constructing a world where Indians from different walks of life are
all descending on a convention-center-sized Powwow, Orange introduces us
to several complex characters, who travel there for a host of different
reasons. While a powerful profile of individual
Native Americans, the book also succeeds in being a plot-driven story with a
worthwhile payoff.
The
Atlas of Forgotten Places by Jenny D. Williams satisfied my unrealistic wanderlust.
In it, a woman, long retired from aid work in Africa, is thrust back into the
world she left as her niece disappears in Uganda, herself an aid worker. Exploring
love, devotion, corruption, and the beautiful but complex setting of Africa,
this book was a gorgeous read.
Ambitious yet digestible, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi follows a family hundreds of
years from tribal life in Ghana to modern-day America. This novel tells the
story of two half-sisters, one of whom marries the British Governor, and the
other of whom is enslaved by the British. Each chapter follows one of the
sister’s lines, and the ways in which they diverge, intersect, and contrast.
Beautifully written, with unforgettable characters, this book held my attention
strongly.
Some other novels I enjoyed were Peace Like a River
by Leif Enger,
The Magician’s Assistant by Ann Patchett, and The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, all of
which explored family and love; The Line that
Held Us by David Job and The Mars
Room by Rachel Kushner were strongly written novels about people living
on the edge, one decision indelibly altering their lives.
The
Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende is quintessential Allende, rich
in both plot and characters, this time about people living between cultures, while
A Woman is No Man by
Etaf Rum did the same,
but for Palestinians living in America.
Finally, as period pieces, Column of Fire by Ken Follett (part of the Pillars of the
Earth trilogy) and Through a Glass Darkly by
Karleen Koen (part
of the Tamworth saga) helped fill the hole in my heart that Downton Abbey used
to inhabit.
Enjoy 2020, my readers, and let me know what books you just can’t put down.
