The books I read last year were:
- Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, by Javier Marías
- Little Fires Everywhere, by Celest Ng
- North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell
- Butchers Crossing, by John Williams
- Night Train to Lisbon, by Pascal Mercier
- Severance, by Ling Ma
- Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney
- Outline, by Rachel Cusk
- Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri
- Circe, by Madeline Miller
- Bruno, Chief of Police, by Martin Walker
- Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages, by Manuel Puig
- Devil on the Cross, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
- The Underdogs, by Mariano Azuela
- Transit, by Rachel Cusk
- Kudos, by Rachel Cusk
- Chess Story, by Stefan Zweig
- The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- The Sea, by John Banville
- Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman
- The Conservationist, by Nadine Gordimer
- The Dark Child, by Camara Laye
- This Is How it Always Is, by Laurie Frankel
- Celestial Bodies, by Jokha Alharthi
- The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante
- The Hollow of Fear, by Sherry Thomas
- The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead
- The Sellout, by Paul Beatty
- Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, by Ishmael Reed
- There There, by Tommy Orange
- Breath, Eyes, Memory, by Edwidge Danticat
- Party of Two, by Jasmine Guillory
- Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, by James Baldwin
- Behold the Dreamers, by Imbolo Mbue
- Monastery, by Eduardo Halfon
- The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy, by Antal Szerb
- Romance in Marseille, by Claude McKay
- Emma, by Jane Austen (re-read)
- The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
- Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata
- The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead
- Grove: A Field Novel, by Esther Kinsky
- How to Travel without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America, by Andrés Neuman
- Milkman, by Anna Burns
- Disoriental, by Négar Djavadi
- Death and the Dervish, by Meša Selimović
- Luster, by Raven Leilani
- The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel
- Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan
- The Last Policeman, by Ben H. Winters
- Love, by Elizabeth von Arnim
- The Constant Gardener, by John le Carré
- On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong
- The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain
- Roseanna, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
- Bosnian Chronicle, by Ivo Andrić
- The Queen's Necklace, by Antal Szerb
In fun stats: I read books from 26 different countries last year, including six countries I had not read previously (Cameroon, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Northern Ireland, and Oman). I read 28 books authored (or co-authored, in the case of Maj Sjöwall) by women, which puts me at just under half. This has got to be a personal record. I also tried to read more Black writers last year, and I ended up reading 15 books by Black authors (if you accept Alexandre Dumas as one). As I did the prior year, I read four works of non-fiction last year and really enjoyed them all. Also, as in the prior year, most of them fall into in the memoir/travel journal genre, so maybe this is just a sub-genre I like. (The Camara Laye is a memoir, the Andrés Neuman and Szerb's The Third Tower are travel journals; Szerb's The Queen's Necklace would be the one novelty here genre-wise.)
I refuse to choose a single favorite, so I will give you two:
Meša Selimović's Death and the Dervish is the highest rated book on Goodreads that I read in 2020, and with good reason! (Interestingly, in looking back at my stats from 2016, which was the year I read Selimović's The Fortress, I found that was the highest rated book on Goodreads I read in that year.) It's a dense, slow book and (hardly a spoiler at all) kind of a downer. But it was filled with beauty. I marked it up like I never do. I pulled it out yesterday to take a picture for a visual year-end review and there were scraps of paper sticking up all through it to indicate passages I know I'll want to go back to. Since finishing it, I've pulled it out again and again (yes, in part this was because I decided to read another Bosnian tome -- Ivo Andrić's Bosnian Chronicle) to remind myself of little pieces.
My other favorite book from last year was Camara Laye's The Dark Child. As I wrote at the time, I've had this book since 1995, when it was on the syllabus for an African Religion class I took at Oberlin College. I was always just getting by academically in my first attempt at college (I spent 3 semesters at Oberlin before dropping out) and never kept up with my reading. Another book we were assigned for that class that I didn't read at the time was Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Weep Not, Child. I read that book a couple months later in 1996 when I was studying in Zimbabwe and found a copy at the library and I loved it so much. Maybe that's why I kept holding on to The Dark Child. I knew only the roughest outline: that it was a memoir of a childhood in Guinea during French colonial rule. I think what was keeping me from this book for all those years was an assumption that, knowing approximately the material it covered, it couldn't be a happy book. But actually it is. The bulk of the book takes place during Laye's childhood in a remote village and it gives a glimpse of life untouched by colonialism (clearly it was not untouched, but you get a sense of what that could have been). After his rural childhood, Laye moved to Conakry to continue his education and then to France for university. The book ends on his flight to France.
I'll close with some other notable mentions: I read all three books in Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy and they blew my mind. I felt like I was thinking in Cusk's voice while reading them. They affected how I observed my life. I definitely want to go back to them. With Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone I felt I was filling a last gap in my reading of Baldwin and I was so glad I picked it up; it couldn't have been more timely. Esther Kinsky's Grove was a slow, meditative, gorgeous book about Italy that got me writing. Eduardo Halfon's Monastery got me thinking about the type of writing I'd like to do (i.e., his type of writing; I love it). The Javier Marías did NOT disappoint; this might even be the perfect example of his style. My love for Antal Szerb has only grown.
