Brittany´s Top Books of 2019

(Note: my keyboard is stuck in Spanish, so pardon any typos)

By The Numbers

• 67 complete books read (18 young adult, 14 romance novels not including Pride and Prejudice rewrites, 6 Pride and Prejudice rewrites, 12 non-fiction books including 5 memoirs, 5 short story collections, 2 graphic novels, no audiobooks, 1 reread, and 1 reread in a translated language)
• 61 authors (the repeats include Alyssa Cole, Jasmine Guillory, Helen Hoang, Meg Medina)
• 12 men, 49 women, and 0 nonbinary or genderqueer authors
• 60 living and 1 dead (RIP Gloria E. Anzaldúa)
• 20 authors who are white, 41 authors who are not
• 11 books with queer main characters
• 6 stories with main characters who are disabled or have disabilities (although I would not recommend Everything, Everything as its problematic plot fails to pass The Fries Test) 

Compared to previous years, my number of books is back on the upswing. I have only been tracking my reading since 2013, and since most of the last 6 years have been spent either in reading-intensive graduate programs or recovering from said programs, it´s hard to say what is a ´normal´ amount of reading for me as I have had years as low as 20 and as high as 73.

In 2013 only 42% of my authors were women (shoutout to my MA in English program), and since realizing that Ive made a concentrated effort to read more women. For 2019 I’m up to 80% (when will there be enough women on my reading list? to quote Ruth Bader Ginsburg: when there are 9.)

This year, as usual, two thirds of my authors were people of color. Although I have always read a lot of LGBTQ stories, this is the first year I am tracking it. I have never gone out of my way to read books featuring people with disabilities, but I’d like to read more to try to combat the very few and very problematic depictions that exist in mainstream media, so I’m starting to count now.

Top Books

It was a rough year to do this because I didn’t do any book reviews, and all I had to go off was tiny hearts I drew next to some books in my bullet journal reading log. This may not be an accurate list of my actual top books in their actual order, but I tried my best.

1. The Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

I saw Valeria Luiselli do a powerful performance piece called The Courtroom which included excerpts from the novel, questions from the credible fear interview that asylum seekers answer, and details from reports of migrants who died in the desert near the border. Valeria herself has volunteered as a court interpreter helping children making their case for asylum, and those experiences clearly influenced this novel. 

The Lost Children Archive opens with a couple (who each have a child from a previous relationship) embarking on a road trip for their respective research. The husband is interested in traveling to the lands that used to belong to the Apache to record sounds there while the wife is researching unaccompanied children refugees and looking for two specific children at the request of a friend. The family road trip builds the frame of the novel which is interspersed with sections from the (non-existent) book Elegies for Lost Children, lists of contents of boxes, map details, and other little bits. It’s an ambitious novel about marriage, family, road trips, immigration, refugees, children, archives, and maps, and it does a beautiful job. 

2. Good Talk by Mira Jacob

This book was recommended on the Spring Books 2019 episode of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend. In the interview, Mira Jacob shares an anecdote that inspired this graphic memoir which is comprised of conversations (many between her and her son). Her son, after observing the differences in Michael Jackson´s appearance across different albums, asks, ¨Are you going to turn white?¨ No. ¨Am I going to turn white?¨ No. ¨Is dad going to turn white?¨ ¨Daddy´s already white.¨ ¨But was he always?¨ This charmingly funny conversation turns serious when he asks ¨Are white people afraid of brown people?¨ 

I read this book after a trip to Washington, D. C. The book covers the time period of the 2016 election, and the author´s in laws are supporters of Number 45. So, yes, I spent a lot of time crying (which was awkward because I was on an airplane). But the book is also very warm and funny, so I also spent a lot of time laughing (again, awkward, airplane). The memoir vividly captures this moment of time, particularly for people of color, particularly for families that are mixed racially or politically. 

3. The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez 

The novel opens on teenager Maribel and her parents Alma and Arturo Rivera arriving to a Delaware apartment complex from Mexico. Maribel has a traumatic brain injury, and her dad seeks employment in the US so that Maribel can go to a school that specializes in TBI and other disabilities. Most of the novel is told with alternating chapters from the perspectives of Alma Rivera and Mayor Toro (a teenage neighbor who instantly falls in love with Maribel). However, almost every Latinx immigrant who lives in their apartment complex gets a chapter to tell their story. Im almost always a fan of interconnected stories, and the topic of this particular novel makes it an easy sell for me (I am the daughter of a Mexican immigrant married to a son of an Okinawan immigrant). It captures so many different perspectives of why people come to the US. 

¨We´re the unknown Americans, the ones no one ever wants to know, because they´ve been told they’re supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we´re not that bad, maybe even that we´re a lot like them. And who would they hate then?¨

4. Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

I did not love every story in this collection, but the ones I loved I loved so much that the book earns its spot on my top 5. As a whole, the collection is solid. The stories center topics like racism, violence, white supremacy, the apocalypse, etc., so it´s not an easy read or a pleasant read, but it´s a necessary read.

Three stories are particularly strong. The Finkelstein 5, which opens the collection, starts with Emmanuel dialing his blackness down to try to get a job while thinking about the latest brutal act of violence committed by a white man against 5 black children. It is a horrific and powerful story. The best story is Zimmer Land which is the name of a theme park with immersive experiences where players can engage in different ´justice´ scenarios. The reader follows Isaiah who works in a fake idyllic neighborhood that players enter in order to confront him, a Black youth. I read this on my annual camping road trip, and was so impressed by the execution of the idea that I read it aloud to my husband while he drove. The last story Through the Flash was so interesting to me that as soon as I finished it, I flipped back to the start and read it again. It details a world stuck on a loop where every day ends with a nuclear apocalypse, but only some people realize they are stuck in the loop. It’s an interesting exploration about what people would do when every single day doesn’t matter. 

The collection has something for everyone - Christopher specifically didn’t like Through the Flash while I felt meh about one of his favorites (The Hospital Where). We both disliked the eponymous story and its two companion stories (Friday Black, In Retail, and How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing), but many reviewers consider these anti capitalist tales to be the strongest. 

5. The Leavers by Lisa Ko

Two accidental themes of my reading year were adoption and immigration, and this National Book Award finalist is about both. It’s hard to describe the novel without revealing too much. The story is deliciously revealed over shifting points of views across different time periods (the novel covers two generations worth of time). At its core, the novel is about a Chinese American boy, Deming Guo, being adopted by two Nice White People after his biological mother disappears, leaving him behind. The NWP rename him Daniel Wilkinson and attempt to raise him as an assimilated All American Boy. It is an expansive novel that covers adoption, trauma, race, culture, family, immigration, friendship, etc. but still manages to be a fairly quick read.

6. Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship by Kayleen Schaefer

¨Prioritizing friendship is sometimes tricky; society often indicates to women that it´s not on the same level as the other relationships in our lives, such as the ones with our romantic partners, our children, or even our jobs. Devoting ourselves to finding spouses, caring for children, or snagging a promotion is acceptable, productive behavior. Spending time strengthening our friendships, on the other hand, is seen more like a diversion.¨

This book (which is another recommendation from the podcast Call Your Girlfriend) gave me so much life. I was raised by a couple who didn’t have any friends and instead focused all their energy on their family or their jobs. Schaefer centers a lot of her book in pop culture media depictions of friendship which I enjoyed because honestly that´s how I learned about what friendship could look like. 

I’m proud of my career, my relationship, and my education, but I am most proud of my friendships. I believe that people get the community they create, and I have worked really hard to build a community of amazing friends. Shoutout to the Special Ladies! instagram chat, the Consummate Rascals messenger chat, documentary film club which is 26 months strong, trips to Los Angeles and Pahrump and trips from Atlanta and Missoula to connect with friends, the parties we throw each other, and the lives that we have built together.

7. What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah

I was lucky enough to see Lesley Nneka Arimah twice last year as part of the Believer Festival in Las Vegas. The first time she charmed me by reading a part of an unpublished story that was brilliant and the second time she inspired me by patiently explained to the white woman interviewing her that she doesn’t write for a white audience. It’s difficult to describe this collection of short stories because some take place in the US, some take place in Nigeria, some are magical, some are post-apocalyptic, some are fableesque. The stories are all over the place, but one consistent motif is relationships between mothers and daughters, so I would definitely recommend it to anyone who, like me, has a complicated relationship with a parent. Out of the 5 short story collections I read this year, this one was the most solid collection with the most consistent quality throughout. 

8. Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram

The only young adult novel on my top list this year! Much of the plot can be discerned from the title. Our main character is Darius, and he is not okay. His depression seeps into every part of the novel, as well as his feelings of inadequacy both as a son and as a Persian American. His grandfather falls ill which kicks off a family trip to Iran and an opportunity for him to connect with his family history. I really enjoyed watching Darius´s relationship with his family in Iran develop over tea, food, and tourist adventures and his friendship with Sohrab develop over soccer. The only downside of this novel is the incredible depictions of Persian food. I am now on a quest to find and eat faludeh.

9. Citizen Illegal by José Olivarez

I accidentally picked up this book of poems thinking that it was a graphic novel because of the intensely gorgeous cover. I breezed through this book during a read-a-thon. The entirety of the collection is solid. It was particularly interesting for me because I think this is the first text Ive read (and definitely the first poetry collection Ive read) written by a Chicano author.

Honorable Mentions

• Gabi: A Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero: I wish I had read this as a teen. Gabi is a fat Mexican American teen poet who has one best friend who is pregnant and another best friend who is gay and a drug addicted parent which covers enough of my own teenage experiences to make my heart both beat faster and break throughout the novel. ¨I don’t want us to be ashamed anymore...This picture was taken after we sent out our college apps...Who can say they did most of it on their own? Not a lot. So we have to be proud and always remember who we are and when we make it to college, who we were.¨
• Sorry Please Thank You by Charles Yu: I didn’t love every story in this collection, but I really enjoyed a few. The opening story Standard Loneliness Package was one of the best things I read all year. Wealthy people from developed countries pay employees in a call center to experience pain on their behalf. Instead of feeling the emotional pain of the death of a cousin or the physical pain of a broken arm, people pay others to feel it for them. I also enjoyed First Person Shooter (zombie in a supermarket) and Yeoman (about our favorite destined-to-die red shirts). 
• The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory: It’s impossible to go into an airport bookstore without seeing 50 copies of Jasmine Guillory´s novels starting back at you. I, like most women in America, could not ignore their call. I grew up reading romance novels (because my mom read romance novels and I read literally anything I could get my hands on in the house), but as an adult my only romance reading has been YA novels and Jane Austen. After reading and loving The Wedding Date, I went to romance Twitter to get recommendations for books that had the same elements I enjoyed in this novel: must have people of color, main characters must have interests beyond the love interest, main characters must have relationships beyond the love interest. I got a tone of great recommendations, but I’d like to also give honorary mentions to The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang which I cried my way through; Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston which is the perfect blend of sex, romance, and politics; and the Reluctant Royals series by Alyssa Cole. 
• Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal: I read 6 versions of Pride and Prejudice this year, and this novel was my favorite one. It takes place in Pakistan and focuses on the Binat family, specifically Alys who teaches English literature at the local school for girls. One of the things I loved about this adaptation is that its totally self aware - the novel opens on Alys asking her students to rewrite the opening line of Pride and Prejudice and Alys references Austen throughout. ¨“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” Alys said, “that hasty marriages are nightmares of bardasht karo, the gospel of tolerance and compromise, and that it’s always us females who are given this despicable advice and told to shut up and put up with everything. I despise it.”
• The Day the World Came to Town by Jim DeFede: I was randomly gifted tickets to see the touring Broadway show Come From Away. I literally knew nothing about the show, and when I realized I was watching a musical about the September 11 terrorist attacks, I was not exactly excited. I ended up becoming obsessed with the true story behind the play (TLDR: the FAA wouldn’t let any planes land in America in case there were more terrorist attacks coming so they decided to make it the rest of the worlds problem which is how Gander, Newfoundland ended up taking in 38 planes with over 6000 people who didn’t have access to their luggage and needing to be accommodated in a town with a population of about the same size). As part of my obsession, I read this non-fiction book. It definitely isn’t objectively a top book and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but for anyone who is deeply interested in the story it's a satisfying read.