5 Books I Loved in 2020
Upon the new year, I made a resolution to read one book every month. Where this goal is an annual one, written each January first for as long as I can remember on the page in my journal marked “resolutions”, it has never been something that I have actually achieved. Little did I know that I would have the time this year to work toward this goal in a way that I have not before. And now I just find myself wishing I had worked harder in all those previous years to read more because I am loving the things I am discovering in literature right now. Some of what I’m reading is “old news”, books that have risen and fallen from the best sellers list. Some of the books are timeless. And some are new, just finding their way into the mainstream. I am a firm believer that no matter what the book, it should only be read if it is going to be enjoyed (this is not the same as agreeing with the book or even understanding it fully). I have struggled through many books before because I thought it was the thing I “should” be reading. But what I know now is that we derive from literature only what we are able to absorb and appreciate, and this comes much more easily if the book is something we enjoy. These are the books that I have recently or presently enjoyed.
“The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, decades after its first publication, the essential portrait of America―particularly California―in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.”
In uncertain times, Joan Didion has long been who I turn to not in order to gain a sense of certainty, but rather to feel less alone it its absence. As Didion explains, where Slouching Towards Bethlehem does document the chaos of the late 1960s, particularly in California and more specifically in San Francisco, in her preface she acknowledges that she was trying “to get through to many of the people who read and even liked the piece…to suggest that [she] was talking about something more general than a handful of children wearing mandalas on their forehead.” This is to say that at some point, in each of our existences, things seem to fall apart. Although she is recording facts of history, there is so much to discern about the universalisms of the human experience and its imperfections. And in today’s age, that feels all the more true.
“Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by a longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into a wealthy and insular art community.As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love -- and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle. The Goldfinch is a mesmerizing, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention. From the streets of New York to the dark corners of the art underworld, this "soaring masterpiece" examines the devastating impact of grief and the ruthless machinations of fate (Ron Charles, Washington Post).”
This book is sad and chaotic. Although it follows a relatively linear storyline, tracking Theo his years from age 13 through his late 20s, there is seemingly nothing linear about it. In fact, this book contains no clear lines anywhere especially those between good and evil, suffering and healing, happiness and despair. Beautifully written with philosophical undertones, I couldn’t put it down!
“In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.”
“One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but. As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients' lives -- a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can't stop hooking up with the wrong guys -- she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell. With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.”
Read my full thoughts on this book here.
“On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.”