2020: What I Read

It would be a cruel understatement to describe 2020 as a less-than-ideal year. It's true that I've been very fortunate, but there's no measure by which this will ever be a truly good year. Lockdown, much as I continue to hope for another one as case numbers and deaths in Michigan continue to grow (and will almost certainly grow once again with Christmas), was sometimes difficult to bear. Being alone I am fine with; being lonely is something quite different.

I have found pleasure and diversion in the realms of music and film and literature. The former I have stretched beyond the film and game scores that bring me the most joy (and still form the bulk of my listening) into the worlds of rock, goth, contemporary classical, and ambient music, if only weird edges of each. Of film I have gone from infrequent viewer to nearly nightly viewer. I've been tracking the books I read since last year, and at the start of September I started tracking films as well. 

And literature -- ah, sweet literature! In ExoSpace, a game I'm contributing music to, there is a character with a line that goes something like this: "Why read a dumb book when you could play a videogame?" My experience has been the reverse of this. I all but gave up gaming a couple years ago so that I could read. 

Last year I read 99 books. This year I have made it to 150, as of 12/25/2020. They span from history to biography to fiction in a variety of genres. I have read books I own, in print and on Kindle, and books that I borrowed from the Library where I work. My sole reading goal for the year was to make 100 books, I've comfortably exceeded that. I have no reading goals for next year other than to read what is interesting and what is enjoyable.

Something I have contemplated over the past year is why literature has the power it does. A month or so ago someone I follow said something to the effect that literature is an unnatural means of communication: it removes completely tone from voice, motion from body -- all that is unconscious, and much that is conscious, in how people behave, can't be set down in paper.

This absence is part of that emotional effect, I think. This isn't to say that there is some sort of fundamental unknowability at the heart of writing. One can sketch a character in a paragraph in a way that one can't with a real person -- and, similarly, film can tell us in a thirty-second scene what would otherwise require days or weeks to understand with somebody real. 

But, I'll try and go a little deeper. I'm speaking now of my personal experience only. Much of the writing that has the greatest effect upon me is when unknowability is built into the characters: when they do something you didn't expect or predict. People in the real world surprise us all the time. They surprise me, anyway, and so to some degree there is a fundamental unknowability at the heart of our relationships with others: you can never, ever fully comprehend another person. (Or yourself, but that's a different subject.) Why should characters in fiction do the same?

I will now do as I did last year and provide thoughts on some of the books I read over the course of the year. This will be long. Title, author, chronological order by start date, and read dates included. I read multiple books at any given time so please don't take that I managed to read a book a day between finishing Born to Be Posthumous and Gods of the Upper Air. There are occasional spoilers. If I have read a series, then those groups will be grouped together with the first regardless of the chronology of its sequels.

Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey
Mark Dery | Nr. 7 (Jan. 9 - 15)

I spotted this at the Library where I work and was taken in by the art, the strange fashion of the man on the cover, and that title. And, it was a biography, so that really was enough to sell me on it. It was an excellent introduction to Gorey -- as a read, however, I had somewhat more mixed impressions after ruminating on it for a time. 

The flaw is that Dery is insistent upon analyzing Gorey's psychology and sexuality throughout, reaching into Gorey's works and letters and statements and family history, and while interesting, it's not always successful or convincing, and Dery's reliance on maybes and occasional admittance that Gorey would've denied Dery's own conclusions undermine the conclusions Dery tries to draw.

Where it provides you with a view into Gorey's work, or sticks to more straightforward biography of Gorey's life and work and hobbies, however, it's very good indeed. With the caveat that Dery's psychological and sexual analysis of Gorey and Gorey's work should be taken with heavy pinches of salt (it's true that an artist's life and character shapes their work; so too however does their intake of the world around them, and Dery does a disservice to that), I strongly recommend it as an excellent introduction to a very funny artist and writer.

Gods of the Upper Air: How A Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
Charles King | Nr. 12 (Jan. 22 - 26)

Another biography: this one of multiple people, including Margaret Mead, with whom I was previously acquainted in Maria Popova's Figuring. And it's an astonishing one, unearthing all-but-forgotten history, of Franz Boas and the women he mentored undertaking research that lead to much of the science of humankind up to that point being shown for the fiction it was.

Much of the growing tolerance and acceptance of the diversity of humankind and the fluidity of gender traces back to the work performed by these cultural anthropologists that heroically fought against the mainstream scientific consensus of the period.


The Ten Thousand Doors of January
Alix E. Harrow | Nr. 19 (Feb. 5 - 8)

Of the year's reads, none connected to me more deeply than this, a stunning portal fantasy that reminded me of my own fantasies of escaping into a better world (though my fantasies were much more banal than the marvelous other worlds conjured here). Beautiful prose and a wonderful main character. I was brought to tears several times.


The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Alex Ross | Nr. 30 (Feb. 28 - Mar. 15)

Writing a history of twentieth-century classical music is a difficult feat because it was during the twentieth century that it began to fragment. It's true that there were national divisions prior -- the differences, for example, between German and Italian and French opera -- but at the tail end of the 19th century, there was a significant splintering into various schools.

The book focuses, mainly, on the first three-quarters of the twentieth century rather than the twenty-five years at its back, but that's a reasonable choice as it's that period which was busiest.It brought us minimalism and serialism and neoclassicism and electronic experimental music, after all. Trying to piece together these various strands into a single narrative that gives sufficient due and attention to each seems to be a difficult feat -- but Alex Ross manages it.


The Mechanical (Alchemy Wars #1)
Nr. 31 (Feb. 28 - Mar. 4)
The Rising (Alchemy Wars #2)
Nr. 52 (May 6 - 11)
The Liberation (Alchemy Wars #3)
Nr. 57 (May 15 - 18)
Ian Tregillis

There are a couple reasons I picked these up and why there's a good two months between reading the first and second one. The first is that Daniel Abraham had mentioned him once in an interview, and though I never did get around to the second or third book of the Milkweed Triptych, I had enjoyed the first one; and the second -- and more crucial -- reason is that they were on sale. There was, however, a time gap between sales on the first one and the later two.

These were marvelous reads. I don't know how much I can speak to philosophical depth -- the trilogy lands very firmly indeed on "they're people," after all, it's not really a debate -- but the story was excellent, the characterization was exceptional and the prose was far better than it needed to be. I look forward to rereading these.


October: The Story of the Russian Revolution
China Mieville | Nr. 37 (Mar. 27 - Apr. 15)

History written like a novel, with all of fiction's propulsion, except everything is true: October is a worthy reminder that in the midst of its happening the Russian Revolution was a time pregnant with possibility and its degeneration into state capitalism and Stalinism was not inevitable. 

Nightwood
Djuna Barnes | Nr. 44 (Apr. 19 - 26)

Probably the first time I've read a proper, literary Classic in quite a long time. The prose here is quite intense in style and it's also quite modernist which means, coming close to a century after it was written (it dates to the Thirties), that it's actually quite dated.

Still, I enjoyed it, and I suspect like so much that a reread will be rewarding. For whatever reason after reading it I had a powerful urge to try and write a script adapting it for film. Now, even if I did that, what the hell would I do with it?

A Shadow in Summer (Long Price Quartet #1)
Nr. 48 (Apr. 29 - May 4)
A Betrayal in Winter (Long Price Quartet #2)
Nr. 51 (May 5 - 6)
An Autumn War (Long Price Quartet #3)
Nr. 53 (May 7 - 9)
The Price of Spring (Long Price Quartet #4)
Nr. 54 (May 11 - 14)
Daniel Abraham

One of the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year was to reread the Long Price Quartet. I've been a reader for years, but it was in reading this quartet that I become a truly avid reader. The final book became the first work of literature that had such emotional force as to bring me to tears. 

It's been over two years since last I read it and rereading it meant I enjoyed half as if afresh, even though I'd read the series twice before. The first book, especially, leaped considerably in my estimation, though I still feel that the final three books of the quartet are strongest. These books have lovely prose, sparse but still distinctive (I have a friend that seems to hate prose with a sense of style. I hate prose without a sense of style.), the characterization is ever Abraham's strong suit, the plotting is tight, and the worldbuilding though minimal (he has expressed in interviews that it bores him) nevertheless is flawlessly integrated and the characters and story quite literally could not work without it.

Sometime in the next couple years Abraham has a new trilogy coming out and as soon as I am able I will be pre-ordering the first book. 

A People's History of the World
Chris Harman | Nr. 58 (May 16 - Jun. 3)

An excellent, Marxist overview of world history, and while it undoubtedly has imperfections, I found it an excellent read (and there was a fantastic reading list at the back of it, too) which deepened my own understanding of history and of class struggle.

If I am to have bias, and there is nothing that lacks it, then this is the bias I want: one that allies itself with the vast majority of humankind and with the vast possibility and potential of humankind. 

Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota #1)
Ada Palmer | Nr. 60 (May 24 - Jun. 14)

One of the most intelligent fiction reads of the year was this fantastic sci-fi novel, which describes the year 2454, an imperfect utopian future which blends the speculative nature of science fiction with Renaissance-era philosophy all written in a -- in the future of 2454 -- historical first-person narrative form, complete with unreliable narrator. Thus this astonishing work could be described as a future historical.

Of course, though utopian and though there are ways in which this future is better than our own, it's still imperfect and flawed, with seams and dark undercurrents all over the place. This novel, and the next one (which I purchased but haven't yet read), describe the a single week in time in which that world changes massively and those seams -- I'm assuming here because I haven't read Seven Surrenders yet -- tear right open.

This and its sequel and the third book (and the fourth book which I think is supposed to release next year if I remember right) are on my reading list for next year, natch.

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
Adam Hochschild | Nr. 65 (Jun. 12 - 20)

A great and worthy insight into both the monstrous and absolute evil of colonialism and into one of the first worldwide humanitarian movements. Written with the panache and propulsion of a novel, it's also intensely readable -- and, because it describes real things that happened to real people, it is sometimes heartbreaking. 

The depths of human cruelty, and complicity to cruelty, amaze me. (And King Leopold is a monster to go up there with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.)

Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity
Peggy Orenstein | Nr. 66 (Jun. 13 - 29)

This is a simply remarkable book that probably every parent raising a boy, especially a teenage boy, should read. And I'll go a step further and say that those teenage boys should read it, too. This is a nuanced, compassionate and candid exploration of the hopes and fears and pressures on teenage boys -- and what one hears is often heartbreaking, for all the occasional glimmers of hope within.

Orenstein, a stranger, gets from teenage boys something that their parents and friends probably never could: raw, painful, stark honesty. It's illuminating and often surprising. One conclusion I walk away with is one of relief that I did not go to a public (or private) high school but was instead homeschooled. Another is that boys needn't grow into bad or cruel men -- but the culture of high school, of the media, and so on, makes it harder than it should be to not become one. And one final thought: boys are as subject as girls to toxic, cruel, unreal media representations, even if those representations differ drastically from one another. (Really, though, you should read this for yourself.)

The Traitor Baru Cormorant (Masquerade #1)
Nr. 71 (Jun. 22 - Jul. 1)
The Monster Baru Cormorant (Masquerade #2)
Nr. 77 (Jul. 2 - 11)
The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (Masquerade #3)
Nr. 98 (Aug. 15 - 25)
Seth Dickinson

This is one of my favorite reads of the year -- an exceptional fantasy series, of which the fourth book is... coming, presumably; anyway, it is an intelligent examination of imperialism and colonialism through the lens of trying to figure out a method to work within the bureaucracy of an imperial system designed to make itself unchallengable because it is able to create the appearance of giving more to its colonies than it takes away.

The first book is a colder read than the later two because there is a very deliberate limitation of perspective: we see things only from Baru's point of view, and for much of the novel, we are shielded even from much of that. (This leads excellently into what's often called a Twist.) The second and third however are a single novel divided into two, and as good as the first is, these later two are even better, massively expanding the world, offering a bevy of new viewpoint characters, two different frame stories (which, in Tyrant, run side-by-side with each other), and even more gorgeous prose. Really excellent, intelligent fantasy. 

Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell trilogy #1)
Nr. 79 (Jul. 7 - 15)
Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell trilogy #2)
Nr. 82 (Jul. 16 - 21)
The Mirror and the Light (Thomas Cromwell trilogy #3)
Nr. 87 (Jul. 22 - 31)
Hilary Mantel

I wrote about this previously in a somewhat messy reaction post and I'll refer you back to that if you want more in-depth thought (for whatever value of depth that can be attached to my thought...) but the long and short of it is that this is an excellent trilogy that makes history feel exactly as it does in real life: immense and miniscule all at once.

It's dizzying, both for its length and for its depth. I'm still slightly dizzied when I think about it. Like all good books, it'll reward rereading.

Among Others
Jo Walton | Nr. 89 (Jul. 27 - Aug. 6)

I read Walton's Thessaly trilogy earlier in the year and it was an excellent exploration of a strange premise: an attempt to figure out what Plato's Just City might look like if it could be realized in reality. They were intelligent books that elided clear genre definition, but I felt that there was some sort of weakness to them overall, and the third book in particular was disappointing compared to the first two.

I decided to pick up one of Walton's singletons, Among Others, that we have at my Library, and I adored it. It's beautifully written -- and virtually plotless in the traditional large-scale events sense of the word. (This may be part of why I didn't hook onto the Thessaly trilogy -- they were so intimate and, to a degree, so devoid of the macro that I was thrown for a loop.) 

This focuses on Morgana and a summer spent at boarding school and the books she reads. There is, to be sure, a greater-stakes story, but it's effectively a frame to hang Morgana's summer and reading on. If that means not much happens, then it's true, not much happens. I found it was like a literary tonic. Maybe you'll agree.

A Radical History of the World
Neil Faulkner | Nr. 90 (Jul. 28 - Aug. 9)

I was tempted initially when writing this article to pair it with Harman's People's History, but my rules were that only books that were part of a series would be grouped together and so I didn't. Nevertheless, these two books do make a good pairing and will give any reader a solid grounding overview of world history through a leftist, Marxist lens.

Faulkner's book can be distinguished from Harman's in two chief ways: firstly, Faulker includes a nr. of excruses on various points (there's an illuminating one on the difference between "time's arrows" and "time's cycles" that made me wish, retrospectively, that I'd -- because I own it on Kindle -- left notes or highlights in place as they are not indexed in the table of contents); and secondly, Faulkner's prose style is a touch more down-to-earth, a touch more conversational than Harman's occasionally lofty tone.

If you are to read them together, then you should read Harman's first, because Faulkner's came later and Faulkner wrote it aware of, and even to some degree in response to, Harman's.

My Real Children
Jo Walton | Nr. 99 (Aug. 16 - 17)

Good as Among Others is, good as Lent and Starlings and Or What You Will (all three of which I also read) are, this is, to my mind, Walton's masterpiece. It is an unspeakably gorgeous and moving book of astonishing beauty and power -- a flawless read if ever there was one -- that left me with the most curious mixture of joy and sorrow.

Trying to describe the storyline in words utterly ruins the power of the book, but maybe, somehow, some tiny fragment of it will leak into my description: Patricia is 89. She is, depending on what notes her nurses leave, either confused or very confused. She has two sets of memories. She remembers her early years, and her teenage years, with perfect clarity. But there's a split, afterward: one in which she married Mark, and was nicknamed Trish, and raised four children before she was able to escape that unhappy marriage; and one in which she didn't, and fell in love with Bee, and went by Pat, and raised three children as a happy and successful travel writer. In the first, Kennedy is assassinated, and the Soviet Union liberalizes quicker. In the second, Kennedy chooses not to run in 1964, and over the course of the next fifty years, multiple cities are incinerated by nuclear bombs. So when Patricia, in the nursing home with disappearing doctors and nurses and wings of the building that are only there some of the time, looks up at the moon, she struggles to recall: is it bristling with nuclear weapons? or does her son live there with his wife and child, on a research base?

The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson #1)
Nr. 109 (Aug. 31 - Sep. 8)
Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson #2)
Nr. 112 (Sep. 9 - 14)
Master of the Senate (The Years of Lyndon Johnson #3)
Nr. 113 (Sep. 15 - Oct. 7)
The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson #4)
Nr. 122 (Oct. 8 - 23)
Robert Caro

This is another reread of a series that I hadn't read in a few years and, naturally, I was able to read it "half afresh." Caro's biographies are magnificent achievements, both for prose and depth of research. This time around, Caro's tendency towards melodrama got a little bit on my nerves, and there's a criticism to be made that Johnson's relationship to women, excepting Alice Glass, Lady Bird, and Helen Gahagan Douglas, isn't explored in sufficient detail -- even though he terribly mistreated woman staffers and had numerous affairs. 

Still, this is powerful reading. It's biography as if it were epic novel. It's an interesting analysis of Johnson, too, one part redemption from his post-presidency reputation and one part total damnation. Ambition and empathy, the latter always subjugated to the former; the Vietnam War next to the Great Society.

The evocation of landscape is especially powerful, too: the poverty of the Texas Hill Country is literally unimaginable, but Caro gets us as close as we will ever get to it. And the description of the lives of the wives of the men of the Hill Country is heartrending -- the chapter "The Sad Irons" is stunning, the Years of Lyndon Johnson equivalent of "One Mile" in The Power Broker.

Unfortunately it's looking questionable whether or not the fifth volume will ever come out. Caro and his wife constitute the whole of the research team and Caro goes through numerous drafts before finishing. (The four books, for reference, released in 1982, 1990, 2002, and 2012 -- and started off as a trilogy.) Due to the pandemic, Caro has put off a research trip to Vietnam and a trip to the Johnson Presidential Library. Caro is 85. You draw your own conclusions -- even though, by all accounts, Caro is apparently in excellent health.

Piranesi
Susanna Clarke | Nr. 115 (Sep. 19 - 22)

The return of Susanna Clarke after a sixteen year hiatus since her first novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has been one of the most exciting literary events of the year; and what is still more impressive is that it manages to match the quality of the first one -- and, in tightness of plotting and prose, exceed it.

Piranesi is completely different from JS&MN. It is, for a start, much shorter; and secondly it operates in a completely different setting with a completely different prose style. It is about Piranesi, an inhabitant of the House, which is filled with things not present in the House -- things, we come to realize, that come from our world -- and his evolving understanding of his relationship and place in the world. 

It's a beautiful novel. Clarke said somewhere that, after her mysterious illness appeared after JS&MN, that when she began recovering, she couldn't bring herself to undertake the scale of research that the sequel she had been planning on would require. So she worked on something else. Multiple something elses, possibly; there's been no formal announcement but a novel called The Cistern by Clarke is listed by Bloomsbury for release in 2022. I'm looking forward to that.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of Piranesi is this: despite being less than half the length, it carries just as much, if not more, emotional heft then JS&MN.

Errol Morris: Interviews
ed. Livia Bloom | Nr. 116 (Sep. 22 - 28)

While I was not, till the later half of this year, much of a movie viewer, the movies I did watch very often had the same director at their head: Errol Morris, documentarian. He is my favorite film director, and he is one of my favorite thinkers, too, with a unique, funny, cynical, philosophically ironic view of the world. This marvelous book is a collection of interviews across decades.

So, of course, there's a lot of anecdotes and stock stories that get repeated across various interviews. But there's also insight -- often quite funny -- into his views on filmmaking, on art, and on his approach to the world. There's many very entertaining quotes. (Just one for you: "I call it anti-curiosity: how much will it cost me to know less?") A particular highlight is the long interview with Paul Cronin. All in all, it's entertaining and intelligent, and I want a copy of it for myself.

Titus Groan (Gormenghast #1)
Nr. 120 (Oct. 3 - 24)
Gormenghast (Gormenghast #2)
Nr. 127 (Oct. 24 - Nov. 4)
Titus Alone (Gormenghast #3)
Nr. 133 (Nov. 5 - 11)
Mervyn Peake

Yet another reread series, and once more I enjoyed it "half afresh." Having become a more attentive reader, I was able to appreciate Peake's sometimes verbose, oft poetic prose anew, and unlike the first time I read it, at no point did I have to go back a page because I had been skim-reading. 

The trilogy dates back over half a century, yet reading it, I think again that it's a truly unique reading experience, unduplicable by other writers, simply by virtue of the power of Peake's prose and the strangeness of his landscape. The storyline, ostensibly, is easy to describe: Steerpike's rise to power, and eventual mess-up in Gormenghast which leads to his fall; and then in Titus Alone, Titus traveling into the outside world and finding it so different he wonders if Gormenghast even is real. (Probably good to note that Gormenghast is both the name of the trilogy, the second book, and the eponymous castle in which the first two books take place.)

Yet this hardly captures the many strange and delightful and melancholy characters that populate the castle and the lives and sub-plots they lead; much less the strangeness and beauty of the writing. Best read for one's self, these.

The Once and Future Witches
Alix E. Harrow | Nr. 125 (Oct. 14 - 29)

Having loved The Ten Thousand Doors of January, naturally when I found out that Harrow had a new novel coming out this year, I had to read it. And I did! I was fortunate enough to be first in queue for my Library's copy, and I got it as soon as it arrived.

It is very good. The three central siblings are sketched out fantastically -- rare indeed is the multiple P.O.V. novel where each P.O.V. is equally enjoyable, but this is one of them. The story is about women's power and empowerment, about magic hidden in the crevices that men ignore: sewing, knitting, embroidery. 

The prose is beautiful -- indeed, it's almost excessively so. I liken it to Debbie Wiseman's soundtrack for Wilde: it's beautiful, lush, and melancholic, and it hammers that home, without any subtlety, every single opportunity it gets. There were even moments where it irritated me and I wished that it weren't quite so melodramatic. Still, this was very good and I look forward to what Harrow does next.

Antkind
Charlie Kaufman | Nr. 130 (Oct. 30 - Nov. 15)

Of everything I've read this year, nothing has produced quite such a mixed reaction as this, film director Charlie Kaufman's first novel. His films are astonishingly weird and deeply intelligent; and so is this.

It is, often, extremely funny, and Kaufman references such a wide range of philosophers and filmmakers with so many different names that I stopped being able to tell which were real and which were made up. (Schlegel, it turns out, is real.) The neuroticism of the main character, a self-loathing sort of person with a number of strange, obsessive fixations, is fodder for a great deal of humor; on the other hand, thon's aspirational victimhood and insistence on thon/thonself pronouns, though occasionally quite funny as a searing bite at performative allyship, equally is sometimes deeply unfunny and discomforting.

Written in first-person, that central voice -- B. Rosenberger Rosenberg -- and your ability to tolerate it will determine how much you enjoy it, because it is that voice that is always returned to, even though there are so many digressions and tangents that one is left wondering maybe the real plot was the digressions we made along the way. (And there are some magnificently funny digressions.) Some of the digressions and subplots become tiresome -- the novel gets bogged down in the middle with a vaudeville duo Mudd and Molloy, and there's a particularly uncomfortable clown fetish sequence -- but largely the novel was funny enough and weird enough to keep me reading to the end.

At 700+ pages long, though, it does sometimes become wearisome. It's overstuffed, and while there's a great deal of entertainment to be found in that, there's also some tedium. And yet -- I can't tell you if it's brilliant or not; if it needs editing or not (...consensus seems to be that it probably does); if it's good or not. Only that it made me think, that it sometimes entertained me and sometimes bored me. Make of it what you will.

The Grace of Kings (Dandelion Dynasty #1)
Nr. 134 (Nov. 10 - 21)
The Wall of Storms (Dandelion Dynasty #2)
Nr. 139 (Nov. 22 - 29)
Ken Liu

I've had a copy of the first book on my shelves for some time, but it's not until this year that I finally got around to reading it -- and I enjoyed the first book and really enjoyed the second. The first does take some adjusting to: the worldbuilding is hefty, the prose almost poetic at times -- not in the lush sense of Peake but in a quiet, sparse, deliberate sense -- and it jumps from character to character frequently, even though, as time goes on, two characters -- Mata Zyndu and Kuni Garu -- emerge as the lead characters. Whether or not this works will depend on the reader. I found it drew me deeper into the world, even though it deliberately holds you at a little bit of a remove.

The second novel is considerably better than the first, which is merely solid and distinguished by its style and Chinese influence. The schools of learning often mentioned in the first book get names here; and while there are still many viewpoint characters, the novel overall focuses primarily on a select handful, and therefore comes off as a much tighter read and better-paced read, even though it is actually longer than the first. 

I'm very much looking forward to the last two, which are coming in 2021 and 2022 pretty close together.

Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal
Jay Parini | Nr. 135 (Nov. 12 - 18)

This biography of Gore Vidal -- novelist, essayist, wit -- kickstarted a Vidal kick (alongside, a month or so earlier, a documentary about the same) that I am still in the midst of.

It's both enjoyable and informative. Vidal was the sort of person who cultivated a certain image of himself, and Parini -- a friend of Vidal's in life that refused to write the biography while Vidal was alive, knowing that it would ruin their friendship -- undermines that image at every turn and with the greatest sympathy for the subject. And while the conceit of the "empire of self," of Vidal cultivating friendships and writing so prolifically for that purpose, feels a little lofty, Parini's description of Vidal's psychology is genuinely quite good, and though undoubtedly critical, it's equally obvious that Parini loves his subject.

Even better, though, is this: Empire of Self brings Vidal's life to life. (And a good thing it did; managing to achieve only a third of the title would be very sad indeed.) And what a life Vidal lived! Traveling across the world, meeting Senators and Presidents and Hollywood actors and playwrights and writers; talent in scriptwriting, novels, essays, plays, even occasionally wading in to act (though generally, one gathers, in a supporting role where he performs as himself) -- he lived a varied, multifarious life, and it's to Parini's credit that he captures it.

Definitely one of my favorites of the year.

Messiah
Gore Vidal | Nr. 138 (Nov. 21 - 24)

So of course having read the biography I inevitably had to read some of the novels that Parini spoke more highly of, and I'm tempted to say that I couldn't have chosen a better one than this. This is tight, and taut, and intelligent: it's hard to believe that this novel predates the cults that would emerge decades later, yet the novel is stunningly prescient of such. 

The novel is remarkable also in that you can get out of it exactly what you want: an intelligent reader will find an intelligent novel to spark thought; while a reader who wants something well-paced will find exactly that, because it's utterly enthralling -- and find themselves thinking in spite of themselves. (Lest I repeat myself, yet another novel that will reward rereading.)

Or What You Will
Jo Walton | Nr. 145 (Dec. 4 - 7)

Another beautiful work from Walton, whose love of the Renaissance shines through in this work, half set in a world created by the main character wherein the Renaissance kept on going and half set inside that character's head where her Muse lives and narrates the book. Thus we the reader dip in and out of Sylvia's history, of the novel she's working on, of the Muse's plan to make sure that they don't die, and interspersed throughout are parts of Renaissance history.

As a tribute to imagination, it's lovely; but what struck me the most were the meditations on death, Petrarch, and the Black Plague in one of the chapters. Walton's deft ability to capture the joy and sorrow of human life is as effective with real people as fictional -- arguably even more so. I want her to write a history book now. (And I want to learn more about Petrarch and the Black Death.)

Crooked
Austin Grossman | Nr. 147 (Dec. 8 - 15)

This delightful novel repaints Nixon as exactly the grimy, low individual he was, but a hero half because of and half in spite of that as a result, setting himself as a sorcerer-President -- the last sorcerer-President -- against a Cold War in which the Soviet Union, though lagging behind the nuclear arms race, has raced far, far ahead of America in the supernatural arms race. There's lots of wacky and delightful ideas -- Eisenhower as abdead either-more-or-less-than-human thing; Henry Kissinger as 1000-year-old sorcerer; and Watergate as deliberate act covering up for a supernatural action happening right beneath it. The heart of the novel, though, is Richard and Pat Nixon's marriage, and while it occupies a central role in the narrative, I was, at the end, still left wishing there had been more focus on it and less on the supernatural hijinks (fun as those supernatural hijinks are). Still, an entertaining read.

These Violent Delights
Micah Nemerever | Nr. 148 (Dec. 10 - 14)

Bit of a recency bias, perhaps. This is a thrilling novel of a toxic, obsessive, identity-consuming relationship between two teenage boys that couldn't be more different in temperament, yet fall for each other regardless -- even though it poisons them both. It's mesmerizing in much the same manner as train crashes -- or so I am told -- are. We see only Paul's point-of-view (excepting the prologue), and he is as likeable as unlikable. Most crucially, though, he is interesting, and being interesting is a far more valuable quality in a protagonist than likability.

 

I want to note that these aren't all the books I read this year. They're not even all the books I enjoyed or which made me think this year. They're simply the ones that I chose to pen a few words about. I want to note also that I am still reading books -- presently, Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, Vast Alchemies: The Life and Work of Mervyn Peake, and Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing -- and expect to finish at least Vast Alchemies before the end of the year.

My goals, reading-wise, for next year, are to begin making a legitimate dent in the many books on my bookshelves and on my Kindle -- over two hundred! -- that I haven't read thus far. Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota (I read the first book) and Kameron Hurley's Worldbreaker Saga are on my reading list, and so is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I would like to read more poetry as well (the writing of it being something I've accidentally taken up this year). Besides these I have no aim loftier than pleasure.

 

I am deleting most of my social media for the new year -- sort of a "digital housekeeping" -- and for 2021 I am going to focus more on artistic pursuits: on the writing of poetry, of song lyrics, of short fiction; on composition; and upon drawing, as I have taken up pencils this year (after a "break" of nearly a decade) and have discovered, to my surprise and delight, that I do have a visual imagination, and there are many pieces I wish to bring to some sort of life.

May the new year be better than this one: on the world level it has been shit, on the personal level it has been decidedly mixed in a wide variety of ways, though overall not, I think, any better or worse than any other year, just more complicated. 

A happy Yuletide to you the reader; and may your new year be better, too.