Christopher's Top Ten 2020

In 2020, I did what I would have considered unthinkable a few years ago: I read 100 books. I think a lot of that had to do with being stuck inside thanks to the global pandemic. I would have rather read fewer books and have no pandemic, but you know what they say about silver linings. Maybe next year my total will drop, but I don't intend to slow down if I can help it.

I was pretty good this year in my continuing resolution to read more women; I've developed a solid habit of alternating books by gender, so a full 50 out of 100 of the books I read were written or co-written by women. In this space I usually count up how many authors of color and non-Americans I've read, too, but a cursory glance doesn't make me very proud. That's something I'm going to do better, and more intentionally, in 2021.

I also like to take stock of the new authors I've discovered, the ones I intend on coming back to. This year that list includes Otessa Moshfegh, John Wyndham, Edna Ferber, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Barry Lopez. But none of them stands out like Kathryn Davis, whose novel Labrador was the kind of book that has made this project worthwhile: a book that comes out of nowhere and grabs you by the shirt collar. After reading it, I immediately went out and bought another of Davis' novels, but I've been holding off on it, waiting for the calendar to turn over. Just three more days, and I'll have a fresh slate.

One of the drawbacks of reading more books is that picking the ten best gets really hard. Some books that I really loved, like Kathleen Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider and Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station, didn't even make the honorable mentions list. But isn't that a wonderful problem to have? Here are the best books I read this year.

Honorable Mentions 2020:

Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich
Giant by Edna Ferber
Home Truths by Mavis Gallant
The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
Eileen by Otessa Moshfegh
Fathers and Crows by William T. Vollmann
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

Top Ten 2020:

10. A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion - A banana republic in the tropics, a world-weary protagonist, a guileless foil who gets mixed up in world politics--sounds like a Graham Greene novel. But Greene's protagonists settle for political intrigue because, while secretive, it's knowable, unlike God. In A Book of Common Prayer, Didion suggests that maybe politics aren't knowable, either, at least in the unpredictable and unexpected ways they uproot our lives. It may be better to go through life like the novel's subject, Charlotte Douglass, who is "immaculate of history, innocent of politics." Common Prayer is spiky, witty, bloody.

9. The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe - A book that cannot be explained, only experienced, and maybe not even that. Is it a parody? Is it a self-conscious formal experiment? A fever dream, grafted on to the language and imagery of pulp fantasy novels? It's all of these, and none; it is only itself. The second novel in the series about Severian, the exiled executioner, starts to fall apart at the seams, just like the dying "Urth" in which the novels are set. I'm excited to read the final two novels in the series, but how can they dissolve any faster, or more completely? The Claw of the Conciliator is theatrical, beguiling, hallucinatory.

8. The Tree of Man by Patrick White - Ah, Patrick White, my longtime antipodal companion. Maybe the greatest author who remains unknown to most Americans. Like the married protagonists themselves, The Tree of Man seems so ordinary on the surface: it's a novel about Stan and Amy Parker, homesteaders in the Australian bush who live simply as they watch a whole country grow up around them. But, perhaps more effectively here than in any of his other novels, and with richer symbolism, White shows how real life goes on inside our private universes. We connect to God there, but tragically, not other people. The Tree of Man is bittersweet, earthy, intimate.

7. Jesus Christs by A.J. Langguth - This novel answers the question that youth pastors have been asking, without success, for decades: what if Jesus was fun? And Langguth suggests, also more effectively than our nation's youth pastor, that Jesus is everywhere: in Jerusalem, in a Detroit parking lot, in a boardroom. The whole novel is a shuffled deck of vignettes that imagines Jesus in various times and places, always struggling with God's mandate for his life, dying over and over, and never quite bringing about redemption. How can a book that is so silly in conception be so sad? Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani? Jesus Christs is epigrammatic, inventive, funny.

6. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante - These books are just the greatest social novels of our lifetimes; I don't know how you can argue anything else. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is the point at which the story of Lenu and Lena fully forsakes the interpersonal for the grand view. I mean, just compare the titles: My Brilliant Friend becomes Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay--not just those who are loyal to their friends, but those who make it out of the community and those who don't. It's also when the novels' feminism begins to grow real teeth. Ferrante's depiction of the upheaval of Italian culture and politics in the 1960s is horribly engrossing; it's a novel I literally could not put down. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is epic, Dickensian, ferocious.

5. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather - It's funny to see this book, the story of Nebraska homsteader Alexandra Bergson, next to Ferrante in the list. They have so much in common on the surface: two novels about women navigating overwhelming social change, cast onto immense landscapes to be navigated. But despite its epic-seeming exclamation point, O Pioneers! is simpler, smaller; it gives one the feeling of being alone on the prairie, rather than in the tumult of a sweltering city. And I think I've never been less prepared for a novel to punch me right in the gut than this one does. Is it possible that Willa Cather has the purest prose in the English language? O Pioneers! is heartbreaking, windswept, flawless.

4. Suttree by Cormac McCarthy - Is Suttree McCarthy's best novel? Blood Meridian might tap into the horrible inscrutability of a cruel God, but Suttree is McCarthy's most human novel. Thomas Suttree drifts up and down the Tennessee River in a dilapidated houseboat, having abandoned a life of privilege and comfort for reasons that are never clear. It's a hard life, but it is life, full stop, rowdy and convivial, filled to the brim with animals and garbage and all sorts of colorful degenerates. What if Huck Finn grew up and decided he never should have left the raft? Suttree is grotesque, picaresque, riotous.

3. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman - The behemoth! It's tempting to call Life and Fate, with its three dozen characters and 900 pages, the War and Peace of the second world war. (And I suppose Grossman wasn't ignorant of the comparison himself, given the title.) And it really is breathtaking, seeing the way these various threads are woven together, some drawn out and some tragically cut short, from the bureaucratic travails of the scientist Viktor to the dead-end hopelessness of the Soviet gulag and the German concentration camp. Life and Fate is remarkably clear-eyed, stripped of pretension to propaganda; it's a novel for human beings living in dehumanizing climates everywhere. Life and Fate is epic, daunting, powerful.

2. Labrador by Kathryn Davis - Like I said, this book came out of nowhere and floored me. How can such a simple, recognizable theme--a young girl's admiration and jealousy of her cooler, older sister--be so effectively drawn in such a weird novel? The angels, the murderous polar bears, the witches of this novel seem like they wouldn't fit in with the simple realism of much of the novel, but they do. You can do anything, I think, when you have the kind of confidence Davis has. Labrador reads to me like a novel that holds no hands, takes no second guesses, and the result is possibly the weirdest book I've read all year, and a real triumph. Labrador is mythic, insightful, shimmering.

1. The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams - I say Labrador is possibly the weirdest book I've read all year because Joy Williams' terrific The Quick and the Dead might be even weirder. Again, I'm struck by the similarities between two books I've put next to each other on this list, and struck because the books don't seem to me all that similar at all, except in superficial ways. There are no angels in The Quick and the Dead, but there is death, elusive and indescribable. There are nursing homes that operate like cults waiting on approaching comets; there are the ghosts of vindictive wives; there are laboratory monkeys that live in people's brains. There are hanged dogs, burning houses, and exploding genitalia. There are a lot of pieces, but somehow they're all brought together into cohesion by the powerful characters, especially Alice, the too-serious teenager and budding ecoterrorist. The Quick and the Dead is comic, enigmatic, haunted. It's the best book I read this year.

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You know, I write these things for myself, mostly. The reviews are my way of thinking through what I read, and this write-up is, for me, like looking back through a photo album or something. But if you're reading it, I appreciate that, too. It's a real pleasure to get to share the experience of reading, which is typically an practice of solitude, with other people. I want to give thanks to my fellow blogmates on the sidebar there for another great year. 2021 comes with a lot of apprehension and bated breath. I don't know what's going to happen, but I do know I'll get to read some books. I'm looking forward to that.