Year in Review 2020: Books

Best Books I Read in 2020

• The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin (2015-2017)
  Synopsis: Orogenes have the ability to redistribute and control energy, which is helpful in a world constantly threatened by seismic instability that is sometimes so extreme as to cause a Fifth Season, a winter that lasts for years. It’s also a power that makes them feared by the rest of the population, and not for no reason, given many orogenes’ inability to control it. Kept under close (and often fatal) supervision for generations, and officially considered subhuman, the best an orogene can hope for is to make themselves useful enough that they don’t get killed out of hand. Finally, one orogene decides he’s had enough, and starts a Fifth Season set to last thousands of years. But there may be more going on, and it may have something to do with how Fifth Seasons started in the first place, and a bunch of mysterious stone obelisks that are floating around all over the place which are probably important.
  
  
  • The Fifth Season
    
    The problem with a book this engrossing is that I didn’t really think about it much while I was reading it. This is why real reviewers read things twice—once as reader, once as a critic. I can tell you that this was a very enjoyable book to read, but I don’t have any organized thoughts as to why, other than that the characters are engaging, the plot is compelling, and the world is interesting, which tells you pretty much nothing.
    
    Oh well.
    
    
  • The Obelisk Gate
    
    It wasn’t until I got about halfway through The Obelisk Gate that I started to realize what makes this series different than a lot of other fantasy series, and the big risk that Jemisin took in writing it this way.
    
    In most fantasy series that focus on a single protagonist, that character spends much of their time trying to find out more about the world they live in, either because they’re naturally curious, or because it’s part of their quest (or, often, both). Jemisin’s protagonist, however, while a keen observer, is almost obstinately incurious. Crucially, this is an understandable character flaw—the society she was raised in prioritizes survival above all else, and aside from a small cluster of seemingly contemptible intellectuals, no one is incentivized to question or even analyse the status quo.
    
    Because of this, we don’t really hold it against her in a way that we might with some other characters (*coughharrypottercough*), but it does mean that the characters and beat-by-beat plot (as opposed to the series arc plot, which is barely even hinted at in book 1) are having to do a lot more work in the first book than usual. It isn’t until the second book that all of the little bits and pieces scattered throughout start to come together, and even then we don’t see the whole picture until literally the final chapter. It’s a testament to Jemisin’s skill that The Fifth Season is as gripping as it is, and that The Obelisk Gate is even more so and manages to build out the world and the series arc without being dragged down by lore dumps.
    
    
  • The Stone Sky
    
    Damn.
    
    Damn.
    
    I was gonna write an actual sentence but then I thought about that ending again and…damn.
    
    This is a good series.
    
    This is a very good series.
    
    And it’s a slow burn. Honestly about the second or third Syl Anagist flashback I was starting to think that this book was suffering from the lore dump effect that I was so impressed wasn’t a problem in the previous volume. But I was wrong. I was a big ol’ dumb-dumb.
    
    Jemisin knows exactly what she’s doing. The pace here is absolutely intentional, and it works. The slow unfolding of the Syl Anagist stuff, the wandering through the desert, the litany (key word) of instances in which orogenes used their power for the benefit of others and either died in the effort or were punished for succeeding.
    
    “How can we prepare for the future if we won’t acknowledge the past?” Is a pertinent sentiment.
    
    It all builds, brick by brick, until finally you see it. You see the world that Essun wants to save, and you see the world that Nassun wants to destroy. You feel it. The truth of it, all the more powerful for not being some obvious, on-the-nose allegory.
    
    This is an amazing series.
    
    And amidst this epic, millenia-spanning, big-picture stuff there’s still room for intimacy, for the personal joys and heartbreaks that humans experience no matter the scale of the events surrounding them.
    
    Damn. I love this series.

• The City & the City by China Miéville (2009)
  Synopsis: A world-weary detective has his world upended when a routine murder investigation leads to a conspiracy that may reveal forbidden truths that people would kill to keep hidden. Also it all takes place in two cities with interlacing topographies which is by far the most interesting aspect of the story.
  
  Utensils are not the highlight of a meal. They’re useful, and in many cases it would be difficult and/or messy to try to consume the meal without them, but they’re just methods of conveyance for the food, the flavor and the sustenance that are the point of eating.
  
  In some novels, the world of the story is just the set of utensils being used to convey the narrative to the reader’s hungry maw. It gives context, grounds the narrative in a particular time or place, justifies certain contrivances, but it’s entirely functional. In other novels, the world is a coequal ingredient, spicing up the meal with intriguing locales and cultures.
  
  In The City & the City, the world is pretty much the entire meal, and the narrative is mere spoons and forks. Our world-weary detective is so lacking in personality that he’s barely a cliche. The plot in and of itself is likewise barebones: the dead girl, the conspiracy, the predictable murderer hiding in plain view all along. The plot is sparse because it’s only job is carry the reader deeper into the increasingly fascinating world of Beszel, Ul Qoma, and Breach.
  
  I assumed going into it that The City & the City would be somewhere on the magical realism/urban fantasy spectrum, as that’s been Miéville’s wheelhouse in the previous works of his I’ve read, and despite there being, technically, no supernatural events or metaphysical shenanigans in the entire book, I would still classify this as magical realism. That’s the genius of Miéville’s worldbuilding here. There’s an inherent mythology to borders that’s so obvious that it’s almost trite to even point it out (or would be if the consequences of buying into that mythology weren’t so significant), but Miéville manifests that mythology in a way that is tangible, complex, and fundamental to the fabric of his invented cultures. I can’t think of another book where what kept me turning the pages had very little to do with what was happening and who it was happening to and everything to do with where it was happening.
  
  And I think this was intentional, too. When I say the plot’s only job is to carry us through the world, to justify the unfurling of the two cities around us, I don’t just mean that’s how I experienced it; I’m pretty sure that’s how Miéville conceived of it. I don’t want to get bogged down in examples, so let’s just look at one, the climax of the story. Our detective has figured out who the murderer is and the chase is on. But it’s not a car chase, there’s no final shootout or nail-biting hand-to-hand combat, nor even a battle of wits, at least not of the typical kind. The tension of the scene comes entirely from the world, not the plot. The obstacles that the murderer throws in Borlú’s way are not physical objects or brilliant riddles; it’s the mythology that he uses to try to make his escape. The murder investigation doesn’t matter in this scene, only the world it takes place in.
  
  Semi-unrelatedly, I’d be really into a video game adaptation, albeit one with a better story. Like, how do you make an open-world game where for most of it the PC is only allowed to sense half the world? I think it would be really cool if done well.
  
  

• The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner (2016)
  Synopsis: An essay on poetry, and the hatred thereof.
  
  I like, or at least don’t mind, most visual art: paintings, drawings, sculptures, etc. My own artistic talents are…underdeveloped, to be generous, but more importantly my experience and technical knowledge of art is fairly casual and limited. The medium is somewhat arcane to me, and thus I’m easily impressed, not knowing enough to tell the tossed-off amateur from the epic masterpiece. I don’t usually get dance at all, but I can see there’s obviously skill and hard work involved, some artistic language I’m not privy to.
  
  This is, I think, most people’s experience with art outside the bounds of their experience: they might casually appreciate it, might bemusedly tolerate it, but it’s unlikely to arouse strong feelings one way or the other.
  
  But people hate poetry. And this book—well, it’s not going to change their minds, I don’t think. Because it’s not really for them. See, the problem is if you ask someone why they hate poetry, they likely won’t be able to give you a satisfying answer. When I eat food I don’t like, if it’s too sweet or too salty I can hone in on that, but if there’s some specific ingredient, or worse some complex interplay of ingredients, whose flavor just rubs me the wrong way, I’ll generally be at a loss to describe what I dislike about the dish. And usually the cook is no help, because the cook think’s the dish is great. Thus is the case with poetry: those who hate it can’t say why, and those who understand it feel the need to defend it.
  
  Lerner bridges this gap by using the first line of Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” as a sort of guiding mantra: “I, too, dislike it.” Disposing of the apologetics and euphoric praise, Lerner digs deep into the history and psyche of the hatred of poetry, and brings up a deeper understanding of the space poetry occupies in human life, the liminal, paradoxical nexus of the Ideal and the Actual. As I said, I don’t think people who hate poetry will find his explanation any more satisfying than the poems they despise, but poets might find in here a new way to think about our work and the role it should play.
  
  
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2004)
  Synopsis: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell both want to bring magic back to Britain, but they have very different ideas of how to go about it.
  
  I’ve never disliked so many pages of a book I ended up being fully invested in by the end. There are parts of the first 600 pages that I liked, but they felt like transpositions from a better version of the book that wasn’t filled with banal Victoriana. Turns out that all of that seeming banality was actually building up to something, and yeah, I actually enjoyed it in the end. I still think there are a lot of times when the book is trying to be funny and I wasn’t feeling it, and the scene where Strange tells Norrell he’s leaving gives us a much more 3-dimensional picture of Norrell than we get anywhere else in the book, and that still feels out of place. And in general Norrell is a piece of crap and Strange isn’t much better.
  
  But yeah, if you can get through the first 400-600 pages it’s actually pretty good.
  
  Also, and this has nothing to do with quality of the book, but can people stop comparing every fantasy book to Tolkien? To say this book “rivals Tolkien” is absurd, not because it’s necessarily worse but because it has nothing to do with Tolkien-esque high fantasy. “Rivals Dickens” would make more sense.

• Monkey Was Here by Jasmine An (2020)
  Synopsis: A poetry collection exploring the links between the Monkey King legend and the Asian-American experience.
  
  Monkey Was Here is a discomfiting, confrontational, vulnerable exploration of what it means to be an Asian-American woman. Sun Wukong is both muse and persona, investing these poems with a vivacious need to question, to challenge, to proclaim and prove their worth.

• This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone (2019)
  Synopsis: Two opposing agents in all-encompassing war for the control of the past, present, and future begin a correspondence. What starts as professional curiosity and competitive one-upmanship slowly turns into something else, something that could destroy them both.
  
  I don’t even know what to say about this. It’s really good. Like, really really good. Like, break-your-heart-into-a-few-thousand-pieces good. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen sci-fi used in this way. The closest I could think of was How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and some of the best episodes of Doctor Who, but it’s less noir-y than the former and more intimate than the latter.
  
  (Though there is one bit that is straight out of DW. Not that I’m saying they stole it or anything, just, there are only so many time travel narrative formats, you know? And you’re not likely to get one over on a show that’s been going for over 50 years.)
  
  And the sci-fi actually matters. Like, the basic beats of the story obviously are genre-neutral, all stories are probably fundamentally genre-neutral (not the point, don’t quote me on that), but it would be such a boring story if it were just some historical fiction piece. And there is at least one key moment that really only works as sci-fi (that’s also, incidentally, part of what makes this the best version of Romeo & Juliet ever).
  
  And I get why the synopsis on the back of the book is written the way it is, because if you had to write a two-paragraph synopsis of what the story is actually about it would sound either very confusing or very stupid (which is why my synopsis is pretty much the same). But it’s neither and it’s great and you should read it.
  
  
• The Topeka School by Ben Lerner (2019)
  Synopsis: A sort of coming-of-age story that’s also about toxic masculinity, intellectual elitism, and the promise and problems of psychiatry.
  
  I’ve had Ben Lerner on my radar for a couple years now, but this was my first chance to actually read his work. And I really enjoyed it. The non-linear structure and multi-vocal narration are obviously right in my wheelhouse, and there’s definitely some DFW influence in the prose, especially in how Lerner writes about language. He really takes his time establishing the themes of the novel before slowly weaving them together, so that by the time I got to the last third or so of the book I was so drawn in that I resented having to put it down. I was aware going in that it was somewhat autobiographical, but that wasn’t distracting or gimmicky, and I’m glad I knew that going into the final chapter, as it makes that transition a lot easier. Definitely looking forward to reading more.
  
  
• What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah (2017)
  Synopsis: A collection of stories about a father’s love for his daughter, an unlikely friendship between a young girl and her family’s maid, and what it means when a man falls from the sky.
  
  An exciting debut collection from a writer with a knack for both deeply empathetic characters and imaginative magical realism. A few stories feel a little under-developed narratively, but even those serve as engaging vignettes in these characters’ lives.
  
  

Honorable Mentions

• Sorry Please Thank You by Charles Yu (2012)

• What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading by Leah Price (2019)
  
  

Best Book I Re-Read in 2020

• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004)
  Synopsis: A series of nested narratives about a seafaring accountant, an passionate composer, a persistent reporter, a hapless publisher, a genetically-modified revolutionary, and a cowardly shepherd.
  
  I never know how much I need to care about all of the clever things Mitchell does—the birthmarks, Ayres’s dream, the reference to Buenas Yrbas outside of the Luisa Rey section, even the artifacts (the journal, the letters, the manuscript, the film, the orison) that form the structure of the novel. I don’t know if any of that really matters. The thesis of Cloud Atlas is pretty clearly the last few paragraphs of Ewing’s journal, and I feel like none of the clever stuff I mentioned really has anything to do with that thesis. The artifacts do justify getting these specific stories in this specific order, I suppose, but other than that it all feels like a distraction; I don’t think Mitchell has done his job right if after reading it I’m spending just as much time trying to figure out if Luisa Rey is actually fictional within the world of the novel as I am contemplating the nature of humanity.
  
  So yeah, third time around I wasn’t as impressed with all the meta hijinks as I was first time. But Mitchell’s mastery of genre is still impressive, the characters are still compelling, and the themes are feeling particularly relevant right now:
  
  “If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being…. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the ‘natural’ (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?
  
  “Why? Because of this:—one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.”
  
  
• Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges (ed. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby) (2007, orig. 1962)
  Synopsis: Stories about an infinite library, a man who tries to write Don Quixote, and various forms of labyrinths.

“Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is.”

I first read Labyrinths in the summer between high school and college because my friend recommended it and he was constantly talking about esoteric things I didn’t understand. Though I was barely able to scratch the surface of Borges’s ideas I was fascinated and edified by the experience, even referencing “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” in my first college paper.

I next read Labyrinths in my senior year of college, this time taking notes after I realized that it might be useful for my senior thesis. Though I hadn’t even thought about Borges when I started working on it, my thesis ended up focusing in large part on synthesizing the ideas of “The Library of Babel” and (once again) “Pierre Menard”, and it wasn’t until I steered it in that direction that I really got excited about the project.

Now once again I find myself seeing Borges’s work with new eyes. For example, this passage that I had never paid much attention to before, but in which I can now see a striking poetry: “[M]arvels are perhaps incommunicable; the moon of Bengal is not the same as the moon of Yemen, but it may be described in the same words.” His description of “the aesthetic phenomenon” as the “imminence of a revelation which does not occur” prefigures, rather succinctly, Ben Lerner’s argument in The Hatred of Poetry, which I just read this year and thought so novel. And I find myself deeply moved by his parable of “The Witness” in a way I never was before. And so many of his other stories maintain their power to make me think, and to bring about a certain kind of joyous wonder.

I think it likely I’ll be returning to these pages, and I expect to find them no less powerful.

• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1994, orig. 1955)
  Synopsis: A young hobbit finds himself thrust into an epic adventure when he inherits his eccentric uncle’s magic ring.
  
  Unsurprisingly, I wrote a long one.
  

• Shame by Salman Rushdie (1983)
  Synopsis: A story of the rise and fall of a powerful family, and also a mythologized retelling of the establishment of the state of Pakistan and the conflicts that followed.
  
  When I first read this for school, we were given a brief history of the events and people that are allegorized in Shame. For my second time through I wanted to encounter the work with as little background knowledge as possible, just to see what it was like, and fortunately I’ve forgotten most of it because I am, first and foremost, a terrible student of history. Mostly I vaguely remember the real-world events the novel is based around, and honestly I think that’s probably good knowledge to have going into it, as the narrator generally assumes you’re familiar with those events. Not remembering anything about the people some of our main characters are based on, however, I can say that those characters do stand on their own.
  
  Rushdie’s plot and themes are intricately woven, and I like the casual voice of the narrator, though he can occasionally be a little too pleased with himself. Certainly the novel rises above being merely historical allegory.
  
  
• Trout Fishing in America/The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster/In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan (1989, orig. 1967)
  Synopsis: A novel about trout fishing in America (and also Trout Fishing in America), a collection of short, whimsical poems, and another novel about a post-apocalyptic commune.

Although I come back to The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster frequently, it’s been a while since I’ve read either of the novels. I think when I first read them in high school I mostly enjoyed the whimsical elements, and it wasn’t until this time through that I recognized Trout Fishing in America‘s subtle satire and In Watermelon Sugar‘s…darkness to the point of being kind of disturbing? From a certain angle, it could totally be a modern horror movie like Midsommar, and I found myself much more empathetic toward Margaret this time around, and kind of pissed off at everyone else, especially the narrator. It definitely sheds an unflattering light on the way Brautigan’s narrators (who as far as I can tell are always at least partially autobiographical) tend to be indifferent toward the emotions and internal lives of the women they interact with. I feel there’s a connection to be made between how the narrator treats Margaret, and reacts to her suicide, and how the narrator of An Unfortunate Woman deals with the two women at the center of that novel, as if the latter feels guilty for the callousness of the former—though that’s probably a bit of a stretch.

As for the poetry, though some of his work is a little too experimental for my tastes, he has the ability to fit his finely-honed combination of whimsy and melancholy into just a few, perfect lines.

Honorable Mentions

• Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders by Neil Gaiman (2006)