One silver lining to 2020: there’s been ample time to read the many, many excellent books that have come out this year. In a year that continues to find new ways to challenge us, these books have pushed, entertained, and educated as we’ve navigated the socially distant world inside our homes. Here are ten of our favorite books of the year so far:
Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley is ostensibly about the four years she spent working at several unnamed startups. But rather unlike the breathless memoirs written by billionaire CEOs, packed with stale advice about how best to squeeze value out of your employees, Weiner’s book is a stylistic marvel. Wiener weaves her specific experiences into the larger story of the way the tech industry is reshaping society, moving from a social network’s personally alienating features to its democracy-wrecking qualities in the span of a single sentence. It is not a particularly hopeful work, but, like your Twitter feed, you will inhale it nonetheless—and feel a lot less miserable when you’re finished.
Sci-fi luminary N.K. Jemisin’s latest novel has been a balm in a difficult year. The City We Became is a supernatural battle for the soul of New York that captures the range of experiences across the five boroughs in a way that speaks to our present moment while capturing the timelessness of the city. Less science-fictional and more classically fantastical than Jemisin’s other work, it’s no less visionary. Which means it’s also a perfect summer read, even in quarantine.
Was Julia Alvarez’s anticipated return to adult fiction, after fourteen years writing for younger readers, with Afterlife worth the wait? Undecided. But don’t be fooled by Afterlife’s minimal size—the narrator, Antonia, is recently widowed (the good cop to her bad, as she says of her late husband), and the observations and memories she shares from within her grief are timelessly poignant. But what begins as a very personal sadness becomes a larger meditation on compassion and crisis in a troubling era.
C Pam Zhang’s debut novel is a classic frontier novel about two people facing the wilderness of the American west. It’s also a moving coming-of-age tale. And a reflection on gender identity and the Chinese immigrant experience. Most of all, it’s a classic in the making.
In the United States, the Cold War is often discussed in binary terms: It was the U.S. versus the U.S.S.R., with both countries on the verge of nuclear annihilation. Through extensive research and interviews, Bevins vividly reports out the full story: After WWII, U.S. presidents, diplomats, and the the newly formed CIA were instrumental in stomping out democratically elected, widely popular communist and socialist governments around the world—many of which had originally moved leftward as a response to decades of colonial rule and mistreatment. The end result in Indonesia and Latin America was the U.S.-backed installation of right-wing regimes, often through coups and other false pretenses, and the mass killings of more than one million “suspected” leftists. Bevins’ The Jakarta Method is a must-read to better understand how the U.S. intelligence apparatus became what it is today, and how it’s ravaged so many other countries along the way.
Brit Bennett’s second novel is a brilliant bestseller about Stella and Desiree, two Black twins who pass as white, run away from home together, and nonetheless wind up on starkly different paths. Passing is a complex subject with a literary history unto itself. The Vanishing Half is at once a crowning jewel within that body of work and a standalone achievement that transcends the subject, a deeply human exploration of relationships and one of the most un-put-downable reads of the year. If you don’t believe us, believe HBO—they just committed seven figures to adapt it into a limited series. It can’t come soon enough.
A 2020 balm: San Francisco-based indie publisher Transit Books’s book club, which sends first editions of their new titles before they’re available in stores. One highlight: their new translation of Dola de Jong’s The Tree & the Vine, first published in the Netherlands in the 50s. It’s an equally spicy, sensitive, and devastating portrait of two young women navigating their taboo desires for one another against the backdrop of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. It’s quick and compelling, and a great introduction to Transit’s growing collection of beautiful novels in translation.
With the rise of Black Lives Matter protests around the world following the killing of George Floyd in May, Danez Smith’s collection of poems is one of the most important and original creative works we can be reading right now. Smith pays homage to a deceased friend, but they also create an unforgettably fierce and loving anthem to other black faces like theirs. In one poem, they elect Eve Ewing, Colin Kaepernick, and a bus driver for president. Smith would make a pretty compelling candidate, too.
Eduardo Porter, a business reporter for the New York Times, has written a comprehensive history of the relationship between racial hostility and the social safety net in the United States. Turns out the progressive movement is not as progressive as you might have thought. Since the formation of the earliest labor unions in the nation, white Americans have worked to exclude BIPOC citizens from social benefits. That trend has brought us to a dangerous present, where the social fabric threatens to collapse under the weight of job scarcity, health care expenses, and a changing global economy. For anyone interested in the intersection between race and American politics (which is to say, anyone paying attention), this is a mandatory 2020 read.
Some of our favorite things: leisure sports; gambling; popular histories of American crime families; thinking about what it would be like to be from the South. Lucky for us, then, that David Hill wrote The Vapors, the story of how all of those things collided in the middle chunk of the 20th century in Hot Springs, Arkansas, which Hill calls “America’s forgotten capital of vice.” Lucky for you, too: it’s one hell of a ride.