2020 Reads

 

The pandemic worked out well for my bookshelves. Without the library, I could burrow into the many books on my shelves that I never read. If I owned a book, I finished it. Library books didn’t fare as well. Too many were abandoned due to weak narratives, intertwining yet uninteresting plots and the occasional stream of conscious mess. 

All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
I had the Calexico version of the traditional song that McCarthy used to name the book. It sounds like a lullaby but runs with deeper, uglier connotations. The travails of our two cowboys south of the river follows a similar path. From tiny villages to the picturesque horse ranch to a raw prison and points between, it’s a rough ride. It’s too easy to forget the main characters in this book are mere boys, as even experienced horseman could fall prey to the traps of this strange land below the river and off the map. You can see some of the brutality coming miles away. This idyllic land for cowboys with nowhere else to go cannot hold, and it collapses into anarch spectacularly.

Beloved, Toni Morrison
Brutal, brutal book that tells of a time in African-American lives when the end of slavery emerged into new terrors. Gradually the layers of Sethe are peeled back and we see why she made such painful decisions. Morrison adds notes of magical realism to the hardship of these freed slaves, and it’s a tough read. I could barely move through 10 pages a day. But I was glad for every word.

How to buy books locally during lockdown

Endurance, Alfred Lansing
For all the complaints about two months of sheltering at home with full refrigerators and two year supplies of toiler paper, Lansing provides a tale too exotic to be real at times – 400 days stuck on the ice, impossible conditions, finding their way to a speck of an island, and one last impossible journey across a island with 10,000-foot peaks and sheets of glaciers. It’s easy to write off Ernest Shackleton as a showboat but his ability to pick talented people saves the day above the Antarctic Circle and beyond. ou will howl at the fate of the dogs intended to mush their way to the South Pole and across the frozen continent. You will be amazed at what these men long given up for dead accomplish. Lansing’s book gives fresh life to a story of survival that at times does not seem possible.

Sing Backward and Weep, Mark Lanegan
I hoped one of my music favorites would hit a high note with a memory akin to the one Jeff Tweedy dropped. But Lanegan’s book at times turned into a slog of grudge-settling, fucking, fighting and dopesickness when all I wanted to know about was the musical process and how players in the Seattle scene fed off each other. Maybe someday that book will arrive, but this isn’t it. While it holds nothing back, what it delivers is more drug-abuse memoir than insight into the music delivered by the always-prolific Lanegan.

Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, Sandra Cisneros
A fantastic set of short stories from the American Southwest that I plan to tackle again to see what else I can pull from their majestic lines.

A Voyage Long and Strange, Tony Horwitz
The late author spends his time traveling to the first stops of European explorers from the Viking colony in Newfoundland to the Dominican Republic and traces seldom-mentioned Conquistador-era expeditions through the Southwest, where their brutality toward Natives was on full display. 

A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin
Reading the first book was as far as I needed to go. I know the character arcs split in later books, but the connections between Season 1 of the show and the book are too tight to ignore. Fantastic read – at least, it would have been, had I not known the outcome I can only imagine first-time readers coming up against the “bad guys win” feeling of the book and series. The only quibble is with the descriptions and ages, where I think the series success. Jorah Mormont is an ugly man in the book, handsome in the series, and more effective onscreen because a young Jorah could have been a Daneyrus suitor. A bald Tywin? Come on. Other characters pop off the page, not surprising given the depth Martin imbues in them. 

Bad Blood, John Carreyrou
A deep-dive into the genesis and downfall of Theranos, the Silicon Valley startup that touted a revolutionary blood analysis. The only problem with the test is it never worked. CEO Elizabeth Holmers charmed the investor class and people like former Secretary of State George Schultz. Ruthless at the slightest hint of skepticism or disloyalty, Holmes even went after Carreyrou, courting Rupert Murdoch to get him to kill the story (Murdoch refused).

Born a Crime, Trevor Noah
With a black mother and a white father, the Daily Show host and comedian came into this world illegally, at least in apartheid-era South Africa. He shows that the end of apartheid turned into chaos, and how he overcame a childhood where he often hid his origins.

Sundog, Jim Harrison
A writer travels to a cabin in rural Michigan to chronicle the story of a man who has built damns around the world and recently fell off a 300-foot one - he survived but his body is broken. The writer, a stand-in for Harrison, weaves his crazy personal life and family history, along with a history of the region. Be warned that the toxic masculinity runs pretty thick.

The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
I have come late to this party, but I read it in a few days. It’s a blistering account of not just slavery but the entire African-American experience. The train is real, but so are the slave-hunting bounty hunters, the abolitionists, the brutal plantation owners, the eugenicists, the segregationists and more. Whitehead’s story is fantastic and an easy addition to the American literary canon.  

Not finished, book on the bottom left

Bazaar of Bad Dreams, Stephen King
A batch of new and rewritten short stories, King’s short fiction often avoids the problems that can sink his novels (endings, for one).

The River, Peter Heller
Two college friends tackle a long Canadian river trip that ends at Hudson Bay. They run into the requisite rednecks (from Texas) and hear a couple arguing in the fog. They also discover a massive forest fire bearing down on their path down the river. I wish there was more time spend on character development than on canoe paddling and gear lingo. Everything technical demanded better balance with the characters. There are moments, but that river is not too deep. 

Alone in the City, Anthony R. Jones Jones stories of African-Americans in Washington D.C. strike a brutal tone, in part from the adversity his characters face and also due to Jones’ skill as a writer. The last line of every story is a knife that cuts to the bone.

Confess, Rob Halford
The Judas Priest frontman does not hold back much, delving into his early life, his shift from trying acting to joining a band, and perhaps most importantly, being the closeted gay singer of one of the world’s biggest heavy metal bands. Halford’s book is conversation, and balances between the musical process, growing fame and the inability to be himself for the longest time. He is really frank at times but has the humor to lighten the mood. 

Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The twist is not much of a twist at all. I get what the author was going for, but it all felt pretty anticlimactic. The sharp Mexican heiress’ attempt to rescue her cousin from marriage into a difficult, insular family whose mansion soars over a dilapidated mining town never really took off for me.

Kingdom of this World, Alejo Carpentier
After 25 years on the shelf, I finally tackled this magical realist take on the series of revolts that led to Haiti’s independence. A series of vignettes takes us through the early revolt leaders, one imagined escape from burning at the stake, the death of a monarch as brutal as the French colonizer and more brutal attempts for civilization to take hold, even a passage in Rome, where a statue brings a former slave’s trauma to the surface. 

The Tender Bar, J.R. Moeringer
I listened to the audio of this memoir. It’s hard to forget the day of the father-son breakfast, when JR’s grandfather, who’s normally dressed in filthy shirts and grumbly, cleans up and charms the whole room, only to revert to his typical state as soon as they return home. Grandpa is just the first in a collection of barflies and people

If I Had Two Wings: Stories, Randall Kenan
Great selection of short stories anchored in fictional Tims Creek, North Carolina. Kenan was quite a storyteller, his characters full of insight and heartbreak. His touches of magical realism elevate the level of storytelling as well. A Black man is mistaken for an old-school bluesman by Billy Idol while wandering New York City as his wife attends a conference. An unexpected road trip rekindles ties between two siblings in King of a Vast Empire. A woman refuses to leave Tims Creek despite an offer t cook for Howard Hughes. The futility of possessions and family land intertwine as a gruff uncle fights efforts to sell his land in I Thought I Heard the Shuffle of Angels’ Feet. A sometimes- visible hog visits a rich, unliked man in Now Why Come That Is?, and a Black mystic refuses to help him. In God’s Gonna Trouble the Water, or Where is Marisol?, an octogenarian’s experience with tropical storms in Barbados then her home in Tims Creek leads her to wonder about the fate of the Mexican woman who helped her around the home. Brutal and touching, sometimes in the same line. Keenan died last year, and I wish I discovered him sooner.

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, Danielle Evans
Evans’ stories run full of beauty, sadness and even everyday horror. Jellyfish finds a father turned out of his Harlem apartment after the roof collapses, while trying to make amends to the adult daughter he barely knows. Wherever You Go, There You Are winds family dram through the travels of a woman and her teenage niece to see her ex-lover’s band and meet his fiancé. Snakes finds an adopted daughter spending the summer with her white grandmother and cousin, perhaps the worst place the young girl could land even as she makes friends with her cousin. Virgins traces a night venturing from upstate down to NYC, and brings pain on too many levels. 

The Party Upstairs, Lee Connell
A struggling artists moves back into her parents’ basement apartment where her father is the longtime building super and has seen the residents gentrify during his tenure. Connell keeps laser-focused on the building and its denizens, especially Ruby’s best friend, daughter one of the chief gentrifier. Voices of past tenants stick with them, and we explore the mundane (unclogging toilets, removing pigeon nests) and the fantastic bowels of the building. There’s also the matter of a family heirloom rhino head that complicates matters for Ruby. I often complain about NYC as a setting, but not when the story built on the Big Apple is this compelling. 

Mary Toft or, The Rabbit Queen, Dexter Palmer
You won’t read many books like Mary Toft. What I thought was magical realism through 2/3rds of the novel turned out to be based on actual 18th century events. But it was a nice entrance into the world of 18th century England during the Enlightenment and the reign of George I, the first German king. No one who reads Mary Toft will forget it quickly.

Spoiler alert - he's not going to read it