Note: If you’re gonna buy any of these books, get them on IndieBound, Bookshop, Thriftbooks, or Better World Books. The first two support local bookstores, the others are usually secondhand and pretty affordable. Jeff Bezos made $90 billion off of the pandemic, fuck that guy, don’t give him another dime.
I mostly abandoned social media in 2020. My wife and I both work, and trying to work from home during the pandemic while raising two kids under the age of three and with extremely limited support was stressful to say the least, and did not leave me a lot of mental space for flamewars with conservatives and centrists. At some point during the sustained mental health crisis that was this year, I made the decision to set my bar a bit lower than Marie Kondo, and jettison from my life anything that sparked seething fury and outrage. Facebook and Twitter made the list, and Instagram was set to private.
The only salvation for my year on the social internet was Instagram Stories, which automatically deletes your posts after a day, and allowed me to sporadically type up my thoughts or dumb jokes in between caring for my kids. In particular, I really enjoyed writing little mini-articles about the latest books I’d been reading, and my thoughts on them. I did one of those Instagram “30 day challenge” posts for books I’d read, and the small group of friends who follow me on Instagram seemed to like them (one rave review: “They were usually good!”), so I decided that once I got more time, I’d convert some of my book writing into blog posts.
Given that everyone does “Best of 2020” lists in December, I figured I’d do the same. I even drew a little graphic for it.
Note: These are books I read this year. Like, maybe three of them came out this year. This might make this list virtually useless to most, but I get most of my book recommendations not from “definitive best of” lists, but either from friends or from writers whom I enjoy. If I don’t fit into either of those categories, then I can’t be held responsible for your choice to read further.
My Favorite Book of the Year
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
The great nonfiction writer John Higgs claims that one of the main reasons the 20th century was such an incredibly confusing time was because that, over the course of a hundred years, everything that western civilization thought it knew about the universe, from science to economics to culture to art to climate to math, was upended and undermined. We thought we were near a complete understanding of all things, only to discover that, in all probability, we lacked the capacity to understand just about anything in a comprehensive way.
One of the earliest authors to understand this horrifying new state of things was a pulp horror writer named H.P. Lovecraft, whose monsters were not malevolent demons bent on human destruction, but were immense creatures who could care less about human affairs, and might crush us in the way a toddler would step on an anthill.
In the first paragraph of his most famous story, The Call of Cthulhu, he wrote:
“The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
It is a remarkably prophetic sentence, one that’ll take you a long way in understanding our current political moment here on the edge of climate change and civilizational decline.
The problem with Lovecraft is that he mourned the loss of our collective ignorance, and with it, the hierarchy of nature that put him and white men like him at the pinnacle of God’s creations. So along with his truly excellent bestiary of cosmic terrors like the cephaloid giant Cthulhu, his stories also found horror in things like, gasp, race-mixing.
Horror writers have grappled with this for decades, because, racist asshole that he was, Lovecraft was a crazy good horror writer, and left a profound mark on our modern culture. No Lovecraft and there’s no Stephen King, no Guillermo del Toro, no Stranger Things or Twin Peaks or Alien or Ghostbusters.
The most prominent recent story to grapple with Lovecraft’s legacy is Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, which has been adapted into a TV show by Misha Green and Jordan Peele. That story asks, “what if RACISM is the real monster?” And look, it works. It’s good. The answer is obviously yes, but that’s worth saying.
But it pales in comparison to Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom. LaValle’s premise is simpler in that it accepts Lovecraft’s premise, that the racial minorities are in fact doing something sinister and evil and world-ending. The question LaValle asks is darker: why might some people in this civilization want and actively work towards its collapse?
It’s great horror, it’s a great book, and it’s my number one pick for 2020.
Best Satire for the Nightmare That Is the Trump Era
Only Americans Burn in Hell by Jarett Kobek
A few years back, an unknown Turkish-American writer named Jarett Kobek wrote and self-published the surprise hit I Hate the Internet, which makes the case that, uh, maybe dunking on Nazis on social media platforms that directly profit off of promoting Nazi content isn’t the subversive act people think it is.
I Hate the Internet was a great book, but it was also one of the most misanthropic books ever written, so it did not take off in the era of Hope and Change America. It found audiences in the UK and also Serbia, where pessimism was more the order of the day.
But boy, is Kobek the voice for the Trump era. Only Americans Burn in Hell was not published in the United States, possibly because Kobek spends a good chunk of the book ripping into how all of the major modern publishing houses have profited off of war criminals and right-wing hate-mongering. It’s also possible no one thought a book with that title would sell here. Also, it does this thing where it starts telling a fantasy story but gives up after a bit because what’s the fucking point of telling stories when Donald Trump is president. A snippet, from the climax of the novel:
And if this were a book written by someone who still had the ability to build suspense or cared about meaningful plot resolution, there’d be about three-to-four-thousand words about how Celia went in the building and found Fern and discovered what Fern was doing in Los Angeles.
And it would be so dramatic.
Your heart would be in my hands.
But this book isn’t being written by that kind of someone.
I’m burnt out.
Donald J. Trump was elected to the Presidency of the United States.
So there’s really no point.
Stop hoping books will save you.
Stop pretending.
Everyone else has.
It’s the best satire to come out in years, and that’s probably why it hasn’t caught on in the United States. Good satires are always despised in their time.
Best Horror
If I had to pick one genre, it would be horror. I did a long Instagram Story for people who had never gotten into horror writing, which I will eventually adapt into a blog post, but on the heels of that, I realized how many of my recommendations were by white men. So I checked out a bunch of horror that was written by women or people of color.
Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez
Horror works best in short story form. This seems to be universally true — Stephen King, the master, is known for writing thousand page epics like It or The Stand, but a lot of his best work is only a few pages long (The Mist, Shawshank Redemption, and The Body, which became the movie Stand by Me are all short stories/novellas).
The best collection of horror short stories I’ve read in a while is Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire, which is sometimes outright horror, and at other times is just spooky fiction. It has characters who see and hear things, characters who disappear, who stumble into horrible slums and find things worse than poverty there. Enriquez is Argentine, and given her country’s recent history — violent dictatorships, economic crashes, capitalist exploitation — there’s a lot of horror to pull from. In particular, her story “Under the Black Water” is the best entry into Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos I’d read in a long while, before I stumbled on Black Tom a few months later.
The Changeling by Victor LaValle
I discovered LaValle this year and now I plan on reading everything he’s written. The Changeling is a novel where Black Tom is a novella, and it exists not in Lovecraft’s world, but in our own. It is the story of a bookseller named Apollo Kagwa, who meets a woman, falls in love, gets married, has a kid, and then has something truly terrible happen when his wife becomes convinced their child has been swapped out for a fake.
I really don’t want to give away too much, but a lot of books have tried to turn dark corners of the Internet into good horror, and most have failed (“What if ‘unfriending’ meant YOU DIE?”). LaValle’s internet horror is the first in my mind to actually succeed. An internet troll is a terrible thing.
Books That Made Me Cry
This happened twice this year. It usually happens, like, maybe once every five years. This is in part because we were all just quivering raw nerves in 2020, but also I was trying to be a bit more emotionally open because I had a son this year and don’t want him to be another generation of male that can’t healthily process emotion. Anyway, these books are beautiful:
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy got famous back in the 90’s for her brilliant debut book The God of Small Things and then, to the majority of the literary press, “disappeared” for 20 years. She actually didn’t disappear at all: she was doing incredibly important political work as an activist and writer fighting both the capitalist poisoning of India and also the rise of Hindu fascist nationalism in the form of current President Narendra Modi. Also, she wrote one of the best pieces of early journalism on the pandemic. But this was not newsworthy to the mainstream press, which has also totally missed the astoundingly huge general strike that occurred this year in India (250 million strong! That’s like if 80% of the US population participated in a strike! What the actual fuck! Why is Trump’s palace intrigue more interesting than this?).
Roy has been doing good work for decades, and in the 20 years since her first book, she also managed to write another beautiful novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. It is good, it made me cry, but I love Arundhati Roy more for the other stuff. This is what a writer should look like.
A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson
In 2013, Kate Atkinson wrote a book titled Life After Life, which follows a single British woman, Ursula Todd, over the course of the 20th century. The core idea — which would have been a gimmick in the hands of a worse writer — was that each chapter ends with Ursula dying. Each chapter represents a different path her life could’ve taken. In many chapters, she dies in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, in many more, she dies in the Blitz. It’s a great book.
Its sequel, A God in Ruins, follows her brother Teddy’s life. Teddy flew for the RAF in World War II. When he gets out of the RAF, he realizes that he did not, in fact, die in a ball of fire as he thought he would, and is now expected to live a normal life for perhaps decades and decades, which is not as clearcut as dodging flak and German fighters and dropping bombs. It does not share the same gimmick as Life After Life, but it has an astoundingly good ending that caught me off guard and had me an emotional puddle for the rest of the week.
Best Comics
I buy comics for our local library, so I read a butt-ton of them to try and be able to advise local comic lovers on what to read. Turns out, I’m not great at that, because I just don’t like superheroes that much and also am not a teenager, so you guys will be the only people to benefit from my efforts. Yay!
Little Bird by Darcy Van Poelgeest
I am a little burnt-out on dystopias, and I don’t love gore. If I am being honest, I cannot remember much of the plot of Little Bird, but Ian Bertram’s art in it is astoundingly cool. And guys, I literally never recommend comics for their art, I am a story guy. But just look at some of this shit:
For the record, the plot is good, I just have been thinking about the art since I read this in March.
Buy from IndieBound | Buy from Bookshop
Your Black Friend by Ben Passmore
I first came to Passmore through the excellent political cartoon site The Nib. He’s an anarchist, and he is an uncomfortable read for most Americans — some of his comics discuss assaulting police — but he’s an incisive and interesting comic artist. His takes, especially on political and racial issues, are an interesting glimpse into the antifa brain, which, frankly, most people have made zero effort to understand. You guys all rushed out to read fucking Hillbilly Elegy to understand Trump voters, why don’t you give the guys saying “Fascism is bad” the same attention?
Buy from IndieBound | Buy from Bookshop
Here by Richard Mcguire
I am ten years late on this one — Here is a very simple idea executed brilliantly. It is the same corner of the same room, drawn over the entire course of history. It has some recurring characters, but it is rare that the story and the setting are one and the same, and it will make you think about the nondescript corners of the homes you’ve inhabited. What has been done in those corners over the course of history? What dinosaurs stalked prey in your living room? Were lives conceived on that couch? Did fights, breakups, holiday dinners occur here before you arrived?
It’s a quick read, find it at your library and check it out.
Buy from IndieBound | Buy from Bookshop
Best Nonfiction
If I’m being honest, a few books have been left off this list solely because I waited until December 31st to write the bulk of this article that makes no sense if published in 2021 (kids are a lot of work, okay?), but I figured books like Between the World and Me by Ta-Nahisi Coates, In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, and How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell got enough of a boost by ending up on recent best-of lists to not need my help. Those books were good, okay? These ones felt more essential in 2020.
Operation Chaos by Matthew Sweet
Imagine: You’ve been drafted and are in Vietnam. You suddenly decide this isn’t for you — for moral reasons, political reasons, or possibly just your basic cowardice — and you decide to desert.
This happened to a group of GIs during Vietnam, and if they made their way to the right channels, they were spirited out of the country by Soviet agents and leftist activists, who settled them in Sweden. There, they began the revolution. Or they tried to, rather — instead, they collapsed into a truly bizarre world of paranoia, drug use, cults, and intrigue. Some of it may have been encouraged by the CIA or the KGB, but in the end, many of these exiled deserters, who faced arrest if they returned to the US, ended up in the clutches of a charismatic madman named Lyndon LaRouche.
This story is, to put it lightly, fucking bonkers, but what was most interesting about it was what it ended up saying about the early days of what would become the alt-right. If you’ve never understood conspiracy theorists or how people manage to get into these impenetrable political echo chambers, Operation Chaos is required reading.
Bullshit Jobs by David GraebeR
If you don’t know David Graeber, you’ve heard his most famous slogan: he coined the phrase “We are the 99%” during the Occupy Wall Street movement. By night, he was an anarchist activist, but by day, he was a world-renowned anthropologist whose Debt: The First 5000 Years entirely dismantled the notion of debt being something shameful that the debt-holder should peaceably bear and just pay off. His most recent book is the excellent Bullshit Jobs, which is required reading for the COVID era.
You may have noticed, back in March, when the whole country shut down, that “essential workers” were not the people who worked in the advertising industry, or who made big bucks off of corporate law and lobbying, but in fact were some of the least appreciated people in society, from garbage collectors to grocery store workers to janitors, teachers, and nurses.
Graeber’s book, based off of his 2013 viral blog post, asks the question: if a free market capitalist society is supposed to be so efficient, why do so many people work jobs that are utterly useless? Given that so much meaningful work needs to be done (particularly when it comes to climate change), it feels like an enormous societal misfire that so many of us are spending our lives doing things that we consider pointless.
This was, sadly, Graeber’s last book — he died suddenly in September of internal bleeding, the day I finished Bullshit Jobs.
Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher
If Graeber’s book asks the question, “Why is our economy this terrible?” my next book answers with what a better economy could look like.
Over the next couple of decades, the world is going to come to terms with a simple fact: it is eternal economic growth, not just carbon emissions, that is driving the ecological crisis. When people do start realizing this, they’re going to start looking for alternative economic theories to our current “growth is good” orthodoxy, and they would do a lot worse than Ernst F. Schumacher’s 1973 essay collection Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.
Schumacher’s economic approach is inspired by the work of Gandhi, and could conceivably be called anarchist economics, in that it focuses on human need rather than abstract concepts like efficiency and profit, and endeavors to keep human economic activity to a small, sustainable scale. If we adopted this type of economic system, it would mean drastically changing the world we live in, but… well, that’s gonna happen anyway, isn’t it?
The book is a bit wonky, so the whole thing might not be required reading for people who aren’t interested in economics — if you’re interested but not down for the wonkishness, check out the essay “Buddhist Economics” for a sense of what he’s saying.