2020 Reading List
Getting settled back into routines after checking mentally. Anyway, 2020 was a big year for reading for me:
Down in my Heart - William Stafford
I thought I’d seen most of the depictions of Americans during World War II: From the front lines, to the women working in the factories, to the Japanese internment camps. But Down in my Heart, revealed the a group I had not heard of, conscious objectors. Stafford’s essays have a quiet and thoughtful feel, to be expected from a poet, but not overwrought. He relates things in a straightforward manner without too much editorializing. What surprised me about the book was how seriously these men took being conscious objectors. The war was a heavy thing, it came with great hours both home and abroad, and they grappled with that horror. In a world where people rushed to fall in line, these men stopped to ask questions. And in that stillness, which was forced upon them by their work, they found community.
Authority - Jeff VanderMeer
I finished the first book in the Southern Reach Trilogy, Annihilation, in one day while out in the woods. The dispassionate narrator, the uncanny nature of Area X, and the constant sense of dread swept me along. Authority is a different sort of story. Set back in the ‘real’ world after the events of Annihilation it follows the newly appointed director of the research station overseeing Area X. He has to piece together the mystery of the anomalous area and the political maneuvering of the secretive government agency researching it. Information is always withheld from the narrator so I was constantly frustrated by the obfuscation, but so is the narrator. I wasn’t sure Annihilation needed a sequel, but I think it worked well enough to tell a new story set up the third.
Find Your Artistic Voice: The Essential Guide to Working Your Creative Magic - Lisa Congdon
Congdon is an illustrator but I found a lot of the discussion about voice to apply to any kind of artist. All artists have a ‘voice’ and it’s something we don’t think about that often. What I really appreciated about this book was about how it challenged me to think about that explicitly, what it is, what I want it to be, and how I can explore it.
My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante
When I finally cracked open My Brilliant Friend I found it pleasing but was not sure why everyone raved about this book. It wasn’t till the end that I realized how immersed in it I was. The world of two young Italian girls during the 1950’s felt real. Their friendship was tantalizingly complex and in that final chapter I saw how the social forces that governed their lives seemed to explode with a simple gesture. This was the last book I read before the country went into lock down.
Her Body and Other Parties - Carmen Maria Machado
Machado leans hard into ‘genre’ and I am here for it. These stories span horror, gothic, fantasy, and dystopian future (that was a strange one to read as the pandemic started). What ties these stories together are how women’s lives are shaped by violence, but Machado’s characters are not helpless, they navigate their circumstances with grace and determination.
The Secret Lives of Glaciers - M Jackson
Jackson recounts her time living in Iceland as she studied glaciers but also learning about how people have lived in the shadow of them. History, science, culture, and politics all intersect here. I like this approach to environmentalism. Not just facts but stories. How do the people in Iceland feel about glaciers? What stories do they tell about them? Why? And how can we learn to incorporate these stories with what science tells us to give us a more nuanced view of our world? It’s a book that invites the reader in to think about how we talk about climate change. In a charged discourse that prioritizes action and talking points Jackson slows down and dives deep.
The Creeps - Fran Krause
A favorite webcomic of mine. I enjoy how Krause distills humanity’s worst fears into four simple panels over and over again. The cartoony watercolor always heightens the dark subject matter.
Dear Life - Alice Munro
I inherited this collection from a friend who was moving. Munro is a writer I was familiar with in name only. I wouldn’t have picked it on my own up because I’m usually looking for an element of weirdness in short story collections. And there’s nothing weird about her stories about women who live in Canada. But there is something exquisite about them. The ordinary rendered beautiful and heartbreaking.
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
I thought Never Let Me Go had been spoiled for me but the twist I thought would end the book ended up being revealed in the first third. I enjoyed the way Ishiguro slowly draws out the sense of ‘wrongness’ in the world he created, always at the edges of the story, drawing the reader further into it until you can’t question it anymore and it’s crushing you.
Giovanni’s Room - James Baldwin
Baldwin’s economy of language is incredible. This novel is short but rich. It captures so much about identity, masculinity, and queerness.
Portland Noir - Kevin Sampsell
Reading this reminded me a lot of when I first moved to Portland. The city felt different than it does now. Grittier. Thought not as gritty as these stories. I enjoyed the collection of stories about betrayal, seedy dealings, and murder but I wondered how much mileage someone outside of Portland would get from this.
Freedom is a Constant Struggle - Angela Davis
I started this book just a few weeks before George Floyd was murdered by the police. I was finding it hard to focus so I had set it down for a few days. As protests that sprang up all around the country I picked it up again. The book is actually a collection of Davis’ interviews and speeches, so it was different that I had expected. But she manages to pack so much into such a small amount of space, drawing lines between what happens here and what happens across the ocean. It’s a good lesson that the work of abolition is not new. This showed up on a lot of anti-racism reading lists from 2020. I don’t know if it’s a good first choice if you’re new to the subject but definitely worth reading to get a perspective on Davis’ work through the decades.
Lay Your Sleeping Head - Michael Nava
2020 will be a year for a lot of… important events for me. One of the good ones was discovering that there were gay mystery novels. I picked this up after reading it won a Lambda Literary award and was interested in branching out into reading different kinds of books. Lay Your Sleeping Head follows a gay Latino lawyer named Henry Rios as he investigates the murder of his lover. I finished it in two days while camping. It was exciting, fun, had a great mystery, and was very very sexy. Very sexy. It was a relief to read a narrative that was unabashedly exciting. Lay Your Sleeping Head is a reissue of the first book in his Henry Rios series and has some very astute observations about class and race for a book written in the 1980’s.
Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby
I actually laughed out loud reading this book so. Many. Times. A hilarious collection of essays about getting older and settling down.
Carved in Bone - Michael Nava
Once I discovered that Lay You Sleeping Head was part of a series I knew I had to work my way through it. Carved in Bone alternates between two POVs, the only one to do so, in a surprising way.
Howtown - Michael Nava
My least favorite of the series so far but still finished it in two days.
Guantanamo Voices - Sarah Mirk
You can read my review for this on Oregon ArtsWatch.
Lovecraft Country - Matt Ruff
The work of H.P. Lovecraft is influential in ‘weird’ literature but the man himself (very racist) is hard to reconcile with his position. After listening to an episode of the podcast Imaginary Worlds I became interested in modern writers who, instead of rejecting Lovecraft, use his ideas to play with (and critique) him. In Lovecraft Country the monsters are horrors beyond comprehension: literal monsters and also racism. The novel is episodic as it switches from one character to another in the Turner family as they navigate danger both supernatural and societal, and manages to tie all the story lines together satisfyingly enough. It’s not surprising that it’s been adapted into a series for HBO. I was interested in watching the HBO series but friends tell me it’s a lot scarier and gorier than the book so I don’t know if I’ll actually do it.
The Hidden Law - Michael Nava
One thing I find inconsistent with the series is how side characters are handled. They pop up in Henry’s life only to disappear without explanation through the years. Even his lovers sometimes feel like an afterthought in the story.
New and Selected Poems, Volume One - Mary Oliver
It took me five months to finish this collection. A few nights a week I would open the book and read a few poems before going to bed. It was actually a really nice way to go through the collection. I could live in a Mary Oliver poem, they’re usually about walking around in nature for a bit and thinking about death, which are two of my favorite activities.
The Nowhere - Chris Gill
I would not have finished this book if I not for the gay-mystery book club with a friend during quarantine. I found the self-loathing protagonist an insufferable (and a tired trope), the framing device (a one-dimensional side character who only exists for the narrator to regurgitate their trauma to) clunky, and the ‘mystery’ became clear to me halfway through. This novel is bleak, but without any bite, and doesn’t build to anything either satisfactory or gut wrenching.
The Death of Friends - Michael Nava
I’ll usually be close to the end of one of Nava’s book and start to get nervous about how he’s gonna wrap things up. And he always does. And often with a twist I don’t see coming. My only complaint with the series is that as Henry gets older the books get less sexy which was one of the things that drew me into the first one.
The Burning Plain - Michael Nava
The Henry Rios series definitely gets darker as it progresses. And this one was brutal. The crime at the center of the mystery feels more brutal than the previous ones, and there’s a dark sense of nihilism pushing in at the edges. LA definitely comes off as the worst city anyone could ever live in.
Rag and Bone - Michale Nava
This was an immensely satisfying end to the Henry Rios series (though apparently there Nava is returning to the series this year with a new book after 20 years). After so many books, I realized I was just as invested in the character as the mysteries. The stories span decades and it’s interesting to see how Henry develops as a character, how he’s worked through a lot of his own trauma. And I felt like he got the ‘sendoff’ he deserved.
Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children’s Crusade - Ryan North
Snuck in one last book before the end of 2020, the comic adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five. It’s been quite a few years since I’d read the novel, so there were a lot of flashes of recognition of the story, but I couldn’t tell you how closely it adhered to the novel. That said, I think the story was perfect for the medium of comics because time can easily be broken and rearranged in the visual medium.
