
Ramon Casas 1866-1932
2020 wasn’t good for much, but it was a very good year for reading. What else was there to do as we hunkered down in our socially distanced comfort zones for months on end? Theoretically I could have cleared out the basement or shredded papers in the obsolete filing cabinet, but counter-intuitively these tasks seemed more difficult to accomplish with so much time spent at home. I’m no Marie Kondo. So in between frenetic bursts of supervising grandsons at virtual school, I walked and I read and I read. All right, there was some TV binging in there too.
I ended up reading far more of the books appearing on the prestigious Best of the Year lists than I usually do. I agreed on some of them. Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener is an insightful take-down of Silicon Valley culture by a young New York publishing assistant who decided to try her luck in a more lucrative profession. She ended up a writer. Erik Larson’s engrossing The Splendid and the Vile proves there can be something fresh to write about the overworked subject of Churchill’s leadership in the first year of the war. But I was disappointed in A Children’s Bible, the novel by Lydia Millet. An intriguing set-up, children escape from their feckless parents in an attempt to survive a climate apocalypse, didn’t quite live up to its promise. As their experiences mirror the Bible stories in a book treasured by one of the boys, the sudden collapse of civilization doesn’t quite ring true. Perhaps the symbolism is a bit too heavy handed. The irresponsible parents obviously represent the generations who have failed to take effective action on climate change and are passing a ruined earth on to the young. Another apocalyptic novel lauded by the critics is Weather by Jenny Offill, the diary entries of a librarian who answers letters from worried listeners of a climate catastrophe podcast. The New York Times found the fragmentary structure “evokes an unbearable emotional intensity,” but I found it just that, fragmentary, and much less than compelling.
Now a confession. I always make it a point to read the Booker Prize winner each year. But this time I passed on Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. With all the awful things going on in the world I just couldn’t immerse myself in a Glasgow childhood of gritty poverty with an alcoholic mother. Instead I read a lot of psychological suspense novels, my favorite escapist genre.
I did read some of the big political books of the year including Bob Woodward’s Rage, but they were all so anxiety inducing that I couldn’t call them favorites.
MY FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
Continue reading
Twas A White House Christmas