1. Best 2020 Reads
Welcome to the first issue of Insatiable Bookshelf! This first issue is dedicated to the books that I most enjoyed reading in 2020. These are not books that necessarily came out in 2020, in fact, many of them did not, but I did manage to work my way through the stack of unread books around the house while also doing my part to keep my local bookstore busy.
My reading for the year was more or less constant but I feel like without a set schedule for most of the year, I didn’t get through as many books as I somehow had the previous two years while working and going to grad school. I don’t need to get into the kinds of distractions we all have been facing, either. In terms of reading goals, I generally tried to read as few books by white male authors as possible, though one still ended up on this list - but deservedly so. Anyway, most of the books I read last year I really enjoyed, but these eight books stood out in particular as ones I’d really recommend.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, 2019
My number one book of the year happened to also be the first book of the year. Nearly 365 days later, I can still remember the pure enjoyment I felt on every page of this book, originally published in Polish in 2009. Most of what I loved about the book purely derived from Janina, Tokarczuk’s main character who is obsessed with William Blake, astrology, and the local animals. One of the biggest realizations I had from reading this book is that I seldom choose novels that have older female protagonists, and it was definitely a different experience getting into the headspace of someone experienced and set in their ways, who also was not taken seriously by other characters. She’s also (spoiler-alert-ish) a bit of an unreliable narrator! This book about mysterious murders in a small village was a delight to read and has stayed with me ever since. It’s a great pick if you’re looking for something wintery, too.
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, 2002
I’m sure many people have read this book already because it came out eighteen whole years ago. But if you haven’t read it and you love plot twist after plot twist, and hearing the same story from two completely different vantage points, and if you love Dickensian con artists who take advantage of the rich and get people thrown into mental institutions against their will, and if you want to read a lesbian romance with all of those things, then I highly recommend Fingersmith. And if you don’t think you love those elements, maybe reconsider?? This was a doorstop of a book but I inhaled it in a few days because I had to know who was conning who. But wait, if you have already read this book and liked it, you should do yourself a favor and watch Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden, which adapts the story and changes the setting to Japan-occupied Korea.
Made for Love by Alissa Nutting, 2017
I am writing this newsletter because I love book recommendations myself, and some of my favorite ones come from Samantha Irby (stay tuned, she’s also on this list). I don’t think I would have picked this book out for myself without an endorsement from Irby. This book is pretty weird. The main character, Hazel, leaves her Elon Musk-esque husband because he wanted to put a chip in her brain to monitor her thoughts. When she goes to stay with her widowed father, she finds out he’s living with one of those realistic sex dolls and has named it Diane and has to treat her with all the respect of a step-mother. There is also a character who is sexually attracted to dolphins after a near-drowning incident! In this wild ride of a novel, Alissa Nutting makes you ponder the role of technology in our lives and what love really is. I also loved how Hazel was kind of an underachiever and kind of just bad at making life decisions. A page turner and easy to get into if you’ve been struggling with reading anything too deep.
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, 2020
Yes, I read this very bookclub-y book for my bookclub, and yes it was my favorite book club choice for the whole year. This book was definitely hyped and I know that sometimes you see a book around everywhere and you think it couldn’t possibly be as good as EVERYONE says (looking at you, Crawdads) but in this case I found that The Vanishing Half genuinely deserved all of its praise. Bennett’s prose is a combination of highly digestible and beautiful. In some book club books I often feel that the author has bigger designs on writing their characters or developing plot and the sentences themselves seem more perfunctory than anything else, but I’m happy to report that The Vanishing Half gives the prose-lover something to admire. If you have somehow missed reading anything about this book, it’s the story of twin Black girls with skin light enough to pass as white. One of the sisters chooses to live her life passing and estranged from her family, while the other sister does not. Bennett tells the stories of each of their daughters as well, which does an excellent job of illustrating how the choices each twin made manifest in the next generation.
How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr, 2019
Often I judge my enjoyment of a book by how quickly I read it. Usually, if I’m loving a book, I’ll up the amount of time I devote to reading because I need to know what happens or I would rather just be deep in that book above all else. I will fully admit that it took me a long two months to finish Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire and yet here it is, on my Best of 2020 list (and please don’t let that dissuade you from reading it!). This book is laden with information about the overseas empire that the United States carefully and strategically built for centuries. If you didn’t know about this overseas empire, it’s because the US also carefully and strategically hid its efforts from its mainland citizens lest they think they lived in a country with a notorious empire like Great Britain. I really felt like my history classes in school had failed me especially after the chapters on the Philippines, the medical experiments done on Puerto Ricans, and the almost successful assassination attempt on President Harry Truman by a Puerto Rican independence group. While it covers a wide time frame and a broad topic, it gave me a good sense of what moments in history I’d like to study more. I’d definitely recommend this if you consider yourself a pretty well-informed citizen, or especially if you don’t!
Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War by Tiya Miles, 2015
I do not usually make a habit of buying books I know nothing about, but I randomly threw this book in my cart during the University of North Carolina Press sale over the summer. I was intrigued by the idea of analyzing what was problematic about ghost tours and other sensational methods of interpreting historic sites in the South. In under 200 pages, Tiya Miles combines a road trip travelogue to Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans with a takedown of the tourism industry’s reliance upon exploiting the pain of Black bodies during slavery for the entertainment for mostly white visitors. It’s an academic book, but the writing is so captivating and familiar — Miles originally started this project with the intention of writing a fiction project as a break from professorial duties and it’s clear that getting this information out was a matter of personal importance. As someone working (or rather, waiting to go back to work) in a historic site, it was valuable to me to think about the strategies that public historians mistakingly employ for the benefit of entertainment over actual proven facts. I’d recommend this book to any one with an interest in social justice, public history, museums, ghost tours, and dismantling white supremacy (so… everyone, hopefully?).
The Fact of a Body by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, 2017
I have toned down the amount of true crime that I consume, but this book contains all the elements of the best of the genre with none of the exploitative. It’s part memoir, part legal investigation and achieves the effect of being unlike other books I have read for its comfort in sitting between genres. Marzano-Lesnevich writes about their own childhood sexual abuse and subsequent quest for understanding trauma; but they layer their own life experience with an attempt to understand how a convicted murderer who also went through childhood abuse grew up to kill a young boy. It’s not a light read, but it is a complicated portrayal of humanity. The self-awareness and introspection in this book were remarkable and I’d recommend it for lovers of memoir, true crime, and legal ethics.
Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby, 2020
I suppose that you could say that Samantha Irby is also a master at self-awareness and introspection, but her brand of communication is wildly different. I am a big fan of her earlier book We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, her blog Bitches Gotta Eat, and her almost daily substack in which she recaps “Who Was On Judge Mathias Today?” so I was delighted to pre-order this book as soon as it was announced. And oh boy by the end of March did I need something funny to read. We Are Never Meeting in Real Life was pretty successful, and in this collection of essays Irby writes getting the book deal to write Wow No Thank You, but true-to-her she spends all of the advance and messes up her taxes. To be funny and self-deprecating at the same time is a delicate balance but Irby is so good at describing her anxieties and mistakes in the most relatable, hilarious way. This is book I’d recommend if you want something easy going to get you back into reading, or if you just finished a big heavy book and need an antidote.
Currently reading:
Twenty Minutes in Manhattan by Michael Sorkin
The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans
Just added to my to-read list:
Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley (from R.O. Kwon’s “43 Books by Women of Color to Read in 2021” in Electric Literature)
Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (from the same R. O. Kwon list)
A Swim in the Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders (from a Goodreads email)
The Dead are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne (from NPR’s Book Concierge)
X Ray Architecture by Beatriz Colomina (from friend Emily)
A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers (from Amy Silverberg’s NYT review)
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (From Porter Square Books and seeing it everywhere on #bookstagram)
And that’s it for the first newsletter of 2021! Thank you for reading and please let me know what your top books were in the comments. I’d love to swap recommendations. In two weeks I’ll send out the next newsletter about a yet-to-be-decided topic centered around reading itself. See you then!