2020: the year in books

I thought I was going to read so much during the lockdown, but to my surprise, the stacks and stacks of books to read kept growing higher and higher. Still, I read and these are the books that got me through 2020. I recommend them all.

pre-pandemic reads: 

In the early days of 2020, I read Jami Attenberg's novel, All This Could Be Yours. It is the story of the Tuchman family during the last days of the patriarch's life. Layers of the Tuchman story are revealed in shifting narrative chapters, and it was nice to escape into a different family's upsetting problems for a while. 

My niece recommended Just Mercy by Bryan Stephenson, and moving forward I will use this book in my classroom instead of To Kill A Mockingbird to discuss race and justice in America. With a variety of cases, Stephenson gives face to those hidden from us, incarcerated for being poor, Black, young, female, and vulnerable. His knowledge and use of the law to change the system inspires us all to end the death penalty and find redemption for ourselves and for those behind bars. 

Internment by Samira Ahmed is a young adult book set in a not-so-distant future when Muslims are incarcerated in camps like the Japanese Americans were during World War II. The plot is strong and for young people unfamiliar with our nation's history of internment, this is a good place to start. 

I listened to Colson Whitehead's Nickle Boys by while marathon training and the abuse and racism of this place left me squirming. A fictionalized account of the Dozier School for Boys in Florida where young men picked up for nothing are brought to their knees by a system designed to kill them. These haunting stories stayed with me much like the ones in Whitehead's The Underground Railroad. 

Then, in March, we went into lockdown and these were the books of the spring. 

Attendance by Rocio Carlos and Rachel McLeod are poems and journals reminding me to stay paying attention to the world. Poems of women and of the day to day life of writers. 

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden is a beautiful, haunting memoir from Florida in the 80s and 90s and then brought into the 2000s. Her coming of age in a family, multiracial like myself, but ravaged by addiction and secrets is how I’ll remember April of 2020. 

Kiara demanded to read Pilu of the Woods by Mai K. Nguyen after I sent her and her brother to their rooms one evening. “It’s about feelings. I think you might like it,” she said, and I did. The illustrations are beautiful and the magical realism of this girl stumbling upon a fairy-creature in the woods allowed Kiara and I to have rich conversations about feelings of love and loss. 

Obit by Victoria Chang   These beautiful narrow columns of poem reframe grief and loss. There are so many exquisite lines and new ways of thinking about our parents and letting go of them. Then there are these small poems, little reprieves, sips that allow a break from loss but still sit right next to the grief.  

Pride by Ibi Zoboi is a Bushwick retelling of Pride and Prejudice examining race, class, and re-gentrification. It stays true to the Austen classic in that it is a love story, but also a commentary on what young women experience as they determine their futures in America.

The vignettes in Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House unfold over time like a complicated piece of origami with careful creases made across many years. The author looks back on a relationship brimming with abuse, and hopes to smooth the paper and examine how each fold brought her to the end and to find love again. 

Linked short stories in Once Removed by Colette Sartor capture moments in women's lives filled with

texture and tension. Sartor deftly drops us into the lives of fully-rendered characters and asks us to hang out. We spend a few days with women seeking solutions within themselves and from the world. I haven't read a story collection that kept me this engaged in a very long time.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong is a letter to the narrator's mother. It travels from Vietnam, flashes back to wartime and then forward through the narrator’s (Little Dog) young adult life. There are so many beautiful sentences and haunting moments but my favorite is: “Again and again, I write to you regretting my tongue.” It’s amazing how well he captures the inadequacies of language.

On the Come Up by Angie Thomas was such a good YA book to read post as we grappled with the role of police in our schools and in our world. Thomas captures a young woman coming of age struggling with her identity and artistry within a climate that is so harsh toward her as a Black girl.

Hearts Unbroken by Cynthia Leitch Smith is another YA novel narrated by a young Native woman, new to her Kansas suburb and exploring who she is as a partner, a writer, and a Native woman. I learned about Frank Baum’s racist anti-Native stances which further complicates the idea of there being no place like home.

These are the poetry collections/chapbooks I read as part of the Seeley Challenge this year. I vow to spend even more time with poetry in 2021:

bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward

be/trouble by Bridgette Bianca

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

Love, Love by Victoria Chang

Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora

How to Exterminate a Black Woman by Monica Prince

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Solange

The Long Clot of Love by Lituo Huang

Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff by Sara Borjas 

Death By Sex Machine by Franny Choi

The Blvd. by Jenise Miller

HOMIE by Danez Smith

If I thought the beginning of the pandemic was tough on reads, the end of 2020 brought my reading to a near halt. 

Never Look Back by Liliam Rivera is a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice set in the Bronx. I love these characters and the ways Rivera blends love and politics and the ancient and the modern. 

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson Ok, listening to this epic work of nonfiction over the last few months of quarantine should maybe count as more than one book. I learned so much about the great migration across decades from south to the rest of the US. What a triumph of research and narrative. Mom wanted me to read this. It was one of her last recommendations to me and I’m so glad I finally got to it. 

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay This is another book, a little like Attendance that started the year, that I'm reading in sips for a long while. Another great reminder of how to stay aware of the ways we're seeing the world. 

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Chamber of Secrets, Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling Reading these again but this time with the kid. 

And that is my year in books: