Best of 2020

 My annual Best of list is usually not a "proper" Best of the year list, because it's just my favorites among the things I read that year, not an argument about the best things published that year. This is because I generally feel like I haven't done enough to keep up with current fiction to make those kinds of claims. But 2020 was weird, baby, and it emboldened me! No, actually, what happened is that, first, my consumption of contemporary fiction gradually increased — I mostly consume it via audiobook, using the Libby app — and second, most of the books I loved didn't make it onto any Best of lists, and it pissed me off. So here's mine, I even made you a nice photo collage!

A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire, Yuri Herrera. 

I've pretty much committed to reading everything of Yuri Herrera's that gets published, so I dutifully bought this as soon as it came out, despite the fact that it seemed very different from his other books. And indeed — this is a work of non-fiction, a reconstruction of the events of the El Bordo mine fire of 1920, with a particular focus on the decision to seal up the mine while people were still inside. The claim was that there were less than 10 of them, and that they were surely dead already. Days later, when the mine was unsealed, 87 corpses were found — and 7 survivors. Herrera's book is a scathing look at how little the workers' lives are valued. The title is an apt one — the rage is astonishingly compressed in terse, bitter prose. The full horror of the various things he describes really only hit me two days later, when I was talking to my partner about the book. 

    As I read it, I kept thinking of the Soma mining disaster of 2014, in Turkey. The story is not so different (is it ever?) — over 300 people died; just weeks before, an effort to investigate working conditions and safety had been overturned by the government. It was utterly devastating, and everyone was grieving, but in the back of my mind there was also this sense of a weird disjunct with the rest of the world as I wondered, how many people outside of Turkey even know about this, or mourn it?

    I had never heard of the El Bordo mine, or the fire there. I know, there are many things like this that I am utterly unaware of. There is more to say about this, the Angel of History, etc etc. But for now all I really have to say is that I'm glad to have read this book.

 

Temporary, Hilary Leichter. 

This novel is incredibly difficult to describe: to say that it is a powerful meditation on work, what it is for and how it makes you feel, really doesn't capture the wonderful absurdity; the humor; the poignancy of it. It's a marvelous and strange book. I loved it.

 

Memorial, Bryan Washington.

This one made it onto plenty Best of lists, so you probably know the set-up:  two young gay men, one Black, the other Japanese, whose relationship is on the rocks, and suddenly, one of them leaves to go tend to his dying father — the day after his mother arrives for an extended visit. Hilarious hijinx ensue? Not exactly. It's a continuously surprising novel, and a wonderfully nuanced and complex story of relationships — with lovers, parents, friends, across race, across class difference, in the aftermath of hurt and harm, as a refuge and a solace. It's extremely understated, and yet, I was so fully in this world, I couldn't stop thinking about it.  

    I had a really odd experience, because somehow I was reading this at the same time as two other popular books from 2020: Mieko Kawakami's Breasts and Eggs and Michelle Gallen's Big Girl, Small Town, and I would not have expected those three to be anything like each other, but they turned out to overlap in such unexpected ways that I literally got confused, at moments, about whether a particular scene happened in one or the other. There was the vivid depiction of a small after-hours bar in Japan in two of them, which somehow merged, too, with stories of late-night drunken  crowds at the chipper; there were relationships between family members who were very different people, and whose closeness was in part a result of trauma; the presence of passive characters who were positioned as narrating observers, in contrast to the "bigger," more gregarious personalities around them; frank representations of bodies that subverted norms of gender/sexuality; and finally, all three were among the more compelling depictions of working-class life, and the difficulties of poverty, that I've read in a long time. 

 

Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid

I think this technically came out at the end of December 2019 but whatever. It's terrific. It reads like a guilty pleasure — soooo much cringe. But it's also a really smart and nuanced take on race and class, and on viral videos and social justice.

 

Feast Your Eyes, Myla Goldberg

I got so sucked into this book, I could hardly bear to to put it down. An incredible story about women, art, motherhood, ambition, and friendship. It’s told in the form of an exhibition catalogue, and the description of the photographs, and the way they are woven into the story, is so ingenious. I had a good long cry at the end, and just seeing the cover, I still feel a glimmer of that cathartic feeling. It is spectacular.

 

Birth Chart, Rachel Feder

If you were to make a Venn diagram of this book's various interests — motherhood, astrology, Romantic and Modernist literature, forgotten 90s hits — I would be right there at the middle of it. Plus, I'm friends with a lot of the author's friends who make occasional guest appearances. Which is to say, I am, like, the perfect target audience for this book, so OF COURSE I loved it. I loved it so much that I don't know if you will love it too, though I really think it is wonderfully creative, mesmerizing poetry. But if you're trying to decide whether it's right for you, you can start by following Rachel Feder on Twitter: you'll be convinced.

 

A Little Annihilation, Anna Janko

I wrote about this for the Asymptote blog — a really gripping meditation on second-generation memory.

 

Homie, Danez Smith

Beautiful, tender, funny, moving. 

 

Exciting Times, Naoise Dolan

This novel could almost have been co-written by Sally Rooney and Caitriona Lally, it seemed like such a perfect blend of their sensibilities. Is this an Irish Millenials thing? I don't usually make generalizations like that, but I do wonder, a little bit. What I really want to think about, and hopefully will at some point, is the interconnection between avowed Marxist ideals and the resistance to bourgeois heteronormative marriage plots, because there's something really interesting going on there.

    But anyhow. This novel follows the adventures of a young Irish woman who is teaching (British) English in Hong Kong, particularly her romantic entanglements with a British banker (male) and a Hong Kong lawyer (female). It wears its politics on its sleeves, and I couldn't quite decide how I felt about that — they were so closely aligned to my own that I couldn't help but enjoy it a little, even as I also felt somewhat wary of the way they were so openly presented. But given how much time I spend thinking about politics, or discussing them with my friends, why wouldn't characters in novels do the same? Sometimes realism is weird.