It's something of a cliche among critics that whenever a stranger on a plane or at a coffee shop asks them to name their favorite book, they freeze up. Memories of hundreds upon hundreds of books, many of them beloved, vaporize in an instant. We're left gurgling something like, "Well, Joyce Carol Oates has a new book out," which is undoubtedly true but doesn't answer the question, and the only JCO book you liked all that much was them., but that was ages ago and wouldn't it read a little problematically now, and besides this person probably isn't asking to read a 600-page novel about Detroit race riots because, sheesh, they're just making conversation and the last book they read was The Shack and they didn't even finish it.*
Point is, though I'd like to say that titles instantly spring to mind around this time of year, when everybody is publishing book-of-the-year lists, I have to consult the record. The record is a thick black notebook that since---let's see here---December 6, 2012, I've filled with notations of each book I've read. The notebook is 250 pages, and in the nearly seven years since I started I've filled 70 pages; if the gods, actuarial and otherwise, are with me, I should be able to fill the whole book. A representative page:
I gather that Pamela Paul, editor of the New York TimesBook Review, not only keeps a similar log but has written an entire book about it. I have kept this information at arm's length because the idea of mining my own notebook for something that could fill a whole book seems impossible to the point of comedy. Clearly I have fallen short in my capacity to apply my imagination to this homely, falling-apart Moleskine. Scanning through it is largely a reminder of how much OK-ness one must sift through to get to the good stuff. If I were leading a different life, I might spend more time with just the good stuff---I'd certainly read more classics. But I like this life too, the sifting and sorting, the recognition of mediocrity, the better to recognize the stuff that tops it.
Now that much of my time is spent on 2020 books, here are the fiction and nonfiction titles that stuck with me during the year, in rough order of preference. Links to reviews where I wrote them.
Fiction:
Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift
Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys
Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive
Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
Ben Lerner, The Topeka School
Sally Rooney, Normal People
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Tim Murphy, Correspondents
Nell Zink, Doxology
Howard Norman, The Ghost Clause
Nonfiction:
Naja Marie Aidt, When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back: Carl's Book
Lydia Davis, Essays One
Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror
Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic
Benjamin Moser, Sontag
Aleksandar Hemon, My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You
Mira Jacob, Good Talk
Lia Purpura, All the Fierce Tethers
Jess Row, White Flights
* I've found it useful to swing the question around on the person asking: "What do you like?" It helps you tailor a response, and, more importantly, buys you time.
*
I reviewed Michael Powell's Canyon Dreams, his chronicle of a year following a high-school basketball team on Navajo Nation in Arizona, for the Washington Post.
Amy Silverman discusses finding the right words to talk about mental disability. Carlos Lozada fillets that anonymous tell-some about the Trump administration. Charles McGrath connects Roth and Updike. Michael Chabon contemplates Star Trek from his father’s deathbed. Amanda Petrusich makes the case for Steely Dan (I've never been sold, but it's a fine piece anyway). Lauren Elkin catches up with French literary provocateur Virginie Despentes.
Thanks for reading. I'm on Twitter. I wrote a book. Email me: mathitak@gmail.com.