2020 in Books: A Selection of Great Books Read
As an individual who spends the vast majority of their free time reading, it is my duty to cap the end of the year by writing about some of the great books I’ve read. Because I was trapped inside 90% of this year instead of my usual 70%, 2020 marked the first time I have surpassed reading 100 books for the year. A marked increase from me being steadily at around 85 for the last three years. So now I’m going to talk about every book I read.
Calm down, come back, I was only kidding. I’m approaching this as an appreciation post, and am not going to make a numbered list or even pay much attention to the exact amount of books I discuss. Just going to write about a selection of the books that, looking back on the entire year, have stuck with me most.
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (Modern Library)
The decline and fall of an unmarried woman by dinner party warfare. Lily Bart is vain, snobbish, moral and loyal. Her life is spent being a docile and helpful companion to various affluent ladies of the New York upper-classes. In exchange for mailing their letters, listening to them complain, and accepting their insults, she is allowed to stay in their homes for extended periods of time. Lily wants the life of comfort and pampering that these women have, but is unwilling to marry the type of rich and shallow man that would provide it. Her refusal to sacrifice her freedom for an existence of superficial excess and an absence of love is her downfall. Lawrence Selden, Lily’s friend since her introduction to New York society, is intelligent and moral, but when his loyalty is tested he proves to cling to the same sort of hypocrisy of appearances as the elites he disdains.
Wharton is wonderfully subtle with her characterization of Lily. At the beginning she relishes in portraying Lily’s vanity and complaisance with her life as lovely scenery for the rich and snobbish. But with each new test to Lily’s value of herself and commitment to her personal freedom, Wharton reveals a moral strength in Lily that is at brutal odds with the weakness and corruption of the wealthy who treat her future as a perverse game. Abandoned and alone, Lily’s tragedy is her commitment to values alien to everyone around.
The Red and the Black by Stendhal (Liveright, translated C.K. Scott Moncrieff)
The backdrop is France during the Bourbon Restoration where, following the final fall of Napoleon, increasingly conservative rulers reinstated many of the rigidly royalist institutions that had been eliminated following the French Revolution.
Stendhal uses this setting for a different sort of exploration of social climbing and moral hypocrisy. Julien Sorel is in many ways the anti-Lily Bart. Born to a poor farming family, there is nothing he won’t do to rise in the ranks of first the clergy, then, when he is forced to abandon that due to scandal, the aristocracy. His two major love affairs at split between being genuine passion and a means to satisfying his ambitions. He thirsts for glory and has no reservations about what it will take to accomplish it.
The novel brilliantly balances satire and tragedy, for while Julien is a parasitic manipulator on a grand scale, his hypocrisy and bitterness is a response to a broken system. In his relationship with Mme de Rênal we see glimpses of the kind of man he may have been if his life wasn’t a constant escape from the poverty and desperation of his birth.
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Picador)
Obviously this is no longer Lydia Davis’s collected stories, but goddamn does it alone represent a stunning body of work. The brilliance is there from the start and arguably my favorite story of the entire book is from her first collection, Story and Other Stories. “Sketches For a Life of Wassily” is an example of what Davis does best, a story told via scattered and expressionistic vignettes, often very short. Davis is a master of the strange and evocative sketch, so many of her stories consist of a page-long scene, but a number of my favorites see her take this unconventional approach and develop it into a story traditional only in length. With “Wassily” she explores the micro-adventures and micro-misadventures of the titular dandy-esque buffoon, a man of much pointless intellect and many rather preoccupying neuroses. The intellectual neurotic is what Davis knows best, and in this story she takes it to a more comical extreme than she usually does, but handles in with a wit that Laurence Sterne would admire.
The other four collections included in the book are equally as impressive. The longer stories in general work less consistently, likely because it’s hard to not get greedy for the unconventional when reading a 20-40 page traditionally structured story sandwiched between 1-5 page stories full of formal invention and delightfully strange narrative techniques. It’s not a rare occurrence to have read 5 stories over the course of 12 pages and feel the urge to go back and re-read them all. Her stories often read as if while having a strange and manic thought she spontaneously grabbed a stray sheet of paper to write it down, then, being as brilliant as she is, was also able to manipulate it into something with a perfectly fitting narrative. She makes it seem so easy, but trying it yourself (believe me) reveals how much skill it requires.
Seduction & Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick (NYRB Classics)
This book is exactly the type of nonfiction I want to read constantly. Meaning, it is nonfiction about writers, writing and literary trivia. I already knew this one was going to be great as I’ve consistently fallen down the rabbit hole of reading Hardwick’s fantastic essays in The New York Review of Books. Lo and behold, it was as good as I expected.
Hardwick’s subjects are a collection of complex, brilliant, and misunderstood women writers: the Brontë sisters, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Carlyle and Zelda Fitzgerald. I already knew a good amount about the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath, but Hardwick so insightfully analyzes their public image vs. the responses to their work. Jane Carlyle, wife of historian Thomas Carlyle, was a new discovery for me. A lively and deeply intelligent woman, such a contrast to the somber and brutal personality of her husband. She is considered by Virginia Woolf to be one of the great letter writers. I knew a decent amount about Zelda Fitzgerald, but Hardwick’s essay gives Zelda the credit she deserves as an artist. Going into detail on how she became a gifted ballet dancer in spite of constant discouragement and brutal manipulations to stop her, and how while being kept in a mental asylum she wrote the novel Save Me The Waltz which even F. Scott believed to be impressively written.
Hardwick is in a class of her own when it comes to writing about the messy lives of complicated writers.
Sátántangó by László Krasznahorkai (New Directions, translated by George Szirtes)
Oh, what a fitting book to read in 2020. As rains surge, a Hungarian community of drunks explodes in a fit of hysteria on the return of Irimias, a former member who is a little bit messiah and little bit more charlatan. That’s the narrative in a nutshell, but Krasznahorkai writes in a style of Bernhardian apocalypse. His style is made up of long paragraphs that extend for 30-40 pages at a time, with each section covering a very confined period of time where the characters seem trapped in a cycle of anticipation and confusion which, combined with the constant darkness and storms, gives the entire book the feeling of being in a waking nightmare. Little is explained about the origins and intentions of Irimias, strange Kafka-inspired scenes evoke the ominous bureaucratic conspiracy of The Castle with him as the instrument of destructive panic. It all creates an environment of universal collapse and disintegration that is solid companion for the current worldwide moment.
I know there are some that view the book’s ending as too gimmicky. Personally, I loved it. Krasznahorkai so thoroughly builds an atmosphere of nightmarish illogic that to me justifies it ending on a note of such brilliantly futile circle closing.
Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg (NYRB Classics, translated by Jenny McPhee)
Is it fiction or memoir? Neither, really. Ginzburg admits that she indulges in creative license, however the characters involved were all real people. As fits someone who grew up reading Proust, and also translated In Search of Lost Time into Italian, she has a creative relationship with memory. It’s not a memoir because Ginzburg only writes about herself very sporadically. The focus is her family, especially her father and mother. Her father is a bombastic eccentric, and her mother is an elegantly passive vessel of much inner strength.
The book is set in the mid-1930s as Fascism is gaining strength in Italy, and progresses to the immediate aftermath of World War II. During this time, through mainly the perspective of her father, mother, and siblings, Ginzburg portrays how her liberal family becomes isolated from friends and other family members who submit to the influence and pressures of the Fascist government. We see much of this pass from the confines of their family’s house which becomes a safe haven for political refugees. Her father, although politically liberal, harbors many prejudices that he inflicts on everyone within earshot. He is a passionate orator and dedicated propagandist for his own brand of moral values. Meanwhile, Ginzburg’s mother is at turns emotionally withdrawn, spontaneously affectionate, and delightfully witty. Ginzburg captures them with a cruel eye and a loving empathy.
We do get glimpses of the beginning of Ginzburg’s literary career during the time she worked for the publisher Einaudi in the 1940s.It is in this period that she meets charming and tragically depressive Cesar Pavese, author of The Moon and the Bonfires. As distant as she keeps the perspective from focusing on herself or her emotions, you feel her grief as she recounts her husband Leone’s imprisonment and subsequent murder by the Italian police in 1944.
Through an inventive family portrait Ginzburg explores how political corruption and war invades the lives of every person.
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie by Jean Rhys (W.W. Norton)
I read three Jean Rhys novels this year: Good Morning, Midnight, Voyage in the Dark and this one. I enjoyed all three, but this is the one I loved. All three follow a young woman on a downward spiral of disaffected love affairs, alcoholism and poverty. Men are exploitive and only tolerated for their money, other women are unsympathetic and malicious—the protagonists see both as predatory figures seeking their humiliation.
The key difference between Mr. Mackenzie and the others is that it is written in third-person while the others are narrated by their protagonists. This proved to be crucial. With the first-person narration there is a numbing repetitiveness to being inside the mopey, despairing heads of the narrators. Rhys is a master of capturing the tragedy and melodrama of self-destructive women, but seeing as the books often see these women sitting alone in their rooms drinking and being melancholy, the variations on this theme wear rather thin.
By shifting to the third-person in Mr. Mackenzie, Rhys enables herself to take a step back from her protagonist and view her from a remove, and also shift focus to other characters. She is equally adept at digging into the psyche of lazily affluent men with their fleeting passions and whims. I knew she was a good writer, but with this one she showcases her full genius.
A Heart So White by Javier Marías (New Directions, translated by Margaret Jull Costa)
Marital anxieties and familial mysteries treated as Shakespearean high tragedy. Oh how I love long sumptuously introspective sentences where fleeting moments are revealed to have consequences lingering for decades. It feels simultaneously old fashioned and modern. Love and betrayal as the themes encompassing all of existence, updated and further complicated by contemporary society. The protagonist, Juan, is trying to escape the sins of his father but in the process turns his marriage into a perverse social experiment. But echoes of the father’s sins ultimately are everywhere he turns.
This is an amazing novel that is difficult to write about because the beauty and brilliance of it lie in how Marías’s language explore the labyrinthian complexities of his universal themes.
The Summer Book and The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson (NYRB Classics, translated by Thomas Teal)
These are two books that I just can’t stop thinking of as integrally linked. Summer Book is about childhood, innocence and age. A young girl and her grandmother pass the summer on an idyllic island while the young girl’s father watches over them, paternal and distant. It is full of love and wonder, but a mournful cloud hangs over everything. The daughter is imaginative and restless, the grandmother is tired and lonely. In turn they comfort and wound each other,
True Deceiver is set in winter, it is cold and unrelenting. A young woman watches over her younger brother, plotting freedom and escape for them both. Companionship with a reclusive older woman, a children’s book illustrator, makes these desires seem possible. Deception and self-preservation is everywhere, but there is also loyalty. This book has no illusions, every character is wounded and fragile, yet there are glimpses of life’s little beauties.
Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas (New Directions, translated by Jonathan Dunne)
An encyclopedia of failure as a life’s work. The protagonist takes leave from their job and says goodbye to a decades-long writer’s block by deciding to create a history of all the writer’s who when demanded to write responded, “I’d prefer not to.” What progresses is a novel of footnotes collecting neglected writers from literary history, both real and invented. Writers who wrote and refused to publish, writers consumed by an unconquerable project, writers whose ideas are eternally published by others before they even get the chance to put pen to page, etc.
This book is a literary delight and one of the most deeply enjoyable and exciting books I’ve read. It’s written specifically for those of us who view life solely through a literary lens. Existence is made up of writing, the guilt of not writing, and preparing to write again. The only kind of world I want to live in.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (Penguin Classics)
Saving the best for last. Everyone who knows me saw this coming a mile away. This book has been on my mind every day since I read it back in April. The novel of digressions is the greatest literary tradition we have. Laurence Sterne presents you with the memoirs of Tristram Shandy, and in the process is never content to keep his attention of any one character or subject for very long. Picturesque side-stories with the sole purpose of making increasingly elaborate innuendos, diatribes on siege warfare, homages to Don Quixote, extensive tributes to Rabelais, obvious and brilliantly subtle jabs at the solemnity of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy make up a small collection of the glorious collection of digressions Sterne takes from the telling of Tristram’s story. However, the greatest digression of them all is Tristram’s uncle Toby. Toby, a kind-hearted man dedicated to his hobbyhorse of recreating famous battle scenes in his backyard, is the novel’s true protagonist, in particular the recounting of his amours.
Side note: I recommend reading the Penguin Classics edition as it has amazingly comprehensive notes on the intertextual references, cultural context, and delightful insight into the complexity of Sterne’s language.
Sterne doesn’t see writing a novel as telling one story, he views it as a medium to tell many stories in as inventive a way as possible. He embraces that every character has the possibility of hijacking the narrative. Why fight it? Cervantes understood this with Don Quixote and who are we to think we know better? With this mindset, it’s a miracle Sterne ever finished it. His final novel, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, is very much in the same spirit, and even follows a character from Tristram Shandy—the clergyman Yorick. Sterne’s health was failing while he wrote Sentimental Journey, and he ultimately died the year it was published. Right to the end he dedicated himself to the humor and playfulness of literature.
At the beginning of the novel’s lifespan, Tristram Shandy, following in the Cervantes tradition, was already challenging the medium to be as inventive and experimental as possible. Whenever I hear anyone complaining about the limits of novels I can’t help but assume they haven’t read this book.
Honorable Mentions
Jacques the Fatalist by Denis Diderot (Penguin Classics, translated by Michael Henry)
Came very close to giving this one a full mention as it is one of my favorites of the year, but it is in such close dialogue with Tristram Shandy that I didn’t want to end up repeating the same thoughts. Another novel of digressions, but the formal invention I loved most was Diderot’s use of a reader-scolding third-person narrator. Sometimes us readers need to be told to shut the hell up and stop asking questions.
Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist (New Directions, translated by Michael Hofmann)
This book is pure madness. A revenge thriller, philosophical novel, and tragedy all in one. Virtue and honor as a destructive obsession. Cameo appearance by Martin Luther. Labyrinthian political corruption that would heavily influence someone pretty good at that sort of thing—Kafka. Already impressive, then Kleist has a further stroke of genius and goes in such a gloriously crazed direction for the final 1/3.
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (Vintage)
Felt like I didn’t need to go on too much about this, everyone familiar with Morrison (which should be everyone) knows about this book. Read it earlier in the year so my thoughts aren’t very fresh, but it’s incredible. Morrison was America’s greatest tragedian.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Penguin Classics)
Another obvious choice. A book we’re all told incessantly is great, and it’s because it is GREAT. The final paragraph is one of the most powerful endings I’ve ever read.
Key Author Discoveries
Marcel Proust
As I mentioned in my previous newsletter, I was close to giving The Guermantes Way its own mention due to how amazing it’s final 100 pages are. But the true genius of In Search of Lost Time lies in the entire project. Reading Proust has taught me to be a more patient reader—you have to be considering the opening volume is the shortest at 500 pages. You come for the horrifying depictions of the aristocracy’s decadence, but you stay for the heartbreaking depictions of illness and the way Proust captures the beauty and agony of the most fleeting moments.
Thomas Bernhard
A voice for these relentlessly chaotic times. I read both Frost and Gargoyles this year. Both are hypnotic and brutalizing books, flawed but unforgettable works of madness and fury. Have Woodcutters lined up next, and plan to read a good deal more of Bernhard’s next year. Expect to be discussing him quite a bit in 2021.
Muriel Spark
I love this weird and gleefully morbid woman. Very easily could have given The Driver’s Seat its own mention, it is cold and calculated savagery at its best. But felt it more appropriate to give Spark her own mention seeing as I read six of her books over two months. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with its bizarre blend of empathy for young girlhood and viciously satiric look at the monomaniacal urge for devotional loyalty, The Public Image with its gloriously grotesque portrayal of celebrity culture, Memento Mori for its passionate morbidity, and others but you get the point. Plan to read plenty more of her next year.
And with that I will wrap this up. Here’s to a less terrible year in 2021, but may the books be as amazing.