Books I Enjoyed This Year

Hi folks — I hope you’re well.

I thought I’d share the books I enjoyed most this year, though many of them are older.

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Fiction

• Nothing To See Here, Kevin Wilson - 2019, 388 pages
  It’s about how to feel good in our relationships with others and to learn what we value in ourselves. Also, about children who can set themselves on fire Fantastic Four-style.

• The Green Road, Anne Enright - 2015, 336 pages
  It’s about four siblings returning to their childhood home (in Ireland) after their mentally-ill mother decides to sell. They reckon with who they are, who she is, and what they owe to one another.

• Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell - 2020, 372 pages
  A brainy young man leaves his wife and new family behind to become a prodigiously successful playwright in London. After his son Hamnet’s death, the family, despite their newfound wealth, struggles. His next play, Hamlet, could be his best.

• Version Control, Dexter Palmer - 2016, 495 pages
  A light sci-fi novel about marriage and time travel.

• Ripper, Isabel Allende - 2013, 496 pages
  Isabel Allende’s thriller about tabletop gaming, toxic masculinity, familial love, and holistic medicine.

• My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh - 2018, 288 pages
  A 20-something woman in pre-9/11 New York decides to drug herself to sleep for a year, supported by a traumatized, co-dependent friend and quack of a therapist.

• The Testaments, Margaret Atwood - 2019, 422 pages
  I thought this was a Trump-era cash grab. It might be, but she definitely didn’t phone it in.

• Weather, Jenny Offill - 2020, 207 pages
  How I described it for NPR’s Book Concierge:
  “I think ahead to my death the way it must feel to experience it: a time when the present is finally over. Though I also worry, as we all must now, about a death one order higher: the end, as the world warms, of the future. Weather is Jenny Offill’s surreal and oddly buoyant novel about a woman going about the soft tedium of life – her work as a librarian, her responsibilities to her young son and brother (recovering from addiction) – while staring down inevitable demise, of her present and all of our futures.”

• Stories of Your Life And Others, Ted Chiang - 2002, 281 pages
  I’m hard-pressed to think of a contemporary writer whose work prompts more introspection or fills me with more joy. This is Chiang’s debut short story collection; I’m excited to read his latest when I come off the library waitlist.

• Euphoria, Lily King - 2014, 256 pages
  A loose novelization of the life of twentieth century icon/anthropologist Margaret Mead. A literary romance that has every chance to falter and, to my eye, never does.

• Overstory, Richard Powers - 2019, 502 pages
  God, this book slaps so hard. It won the Pulitzer. It’s about trees and how they talk to each other via underground fungal networks. It’s also about people. You just gotta read it.

• In the Distance, Hernán Díaz - 2017, 256 pages
  This book is to loneliness what Overstory is to trees. A young Swede gets on the wrong boat in the mid-19th century and, rather than ending up with his brother in New York, he ends up on the west coast. He tries to trek across a rapidly-changing America on foot in hopes of reunification. A Pulitzer finalist.
  

Non-Fiction

• Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation, Edward Humes - 2016, 384 pages
  It’s about how cars are stupid and dangerous, and what a marvel containerization is, and how we should really be thinking more about our infrastructure because it shapes the structure of our lives—and the structure of our lives is what makes or breaks our politics and our happiness.

• Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, Mary Roach - 2013, 352 pages
  This is like a fun (really!) ride through the science and culture of eating. If you know what Mary Roach does, this is that.

• Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe - 2018, 519 pages
  There is a review I read that called Keefe’s writing “architectural,” and… that’s what it is. The history of Irish Republicanism is actually riveting, and because of the book’s stunning prose you just drink it all down line-after-line until you’re full to bursting.

If you’re inclined to share, I always enjoy knowing what other folks enjoyed. You can buy any of these here — and support my local bookstore — if you'd like.