2020 in Books

As in 2018 and 2019, I logged the books I read. Here's the 2020 list, with some brief comments at the bottom of the post.

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1. Ghost Wall — Sarah Moss | 1.3
2. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything — Graham Harman | 1.9
3. Taking Control of 1Password — Joe Kissell | 1.11
4. Don’t Call Us Dead — Danez Smith | 1.14
5. Why Poetry — Matthew Zapruder | 1.16
6. Semiosis — Sue Burke | 1.22
7. Of Hospitality — Jacques Derrida & Anne Dufourmantelle (Trans. Rachel Bowlby) | 1.22
8. Lost Hills — Lee Goldberg | 1.28
9. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running — Haruki Murakami (Trans. Philip Gabriel) | 2.1
10. The River Twice — Kathleen Graber | 2.4
11. The Iowa Baseball Confederacy — W.P. Kinsella | 2.17
12. Departure, Arrival, Return: Becoming and the Crisis of Subjectivity (Master’s Thesis) — Jeroen Kortekaas | 2.19
13. Missing Person — Patrick Modiano (Trans. Daniel Weissbort) | 2.24
14. The Problem with Everything — Meghan Daum | 2.25
15. Bilder Deiner Großen Liebe — Wolfgang Herrndorf | 2.27
16. The Air Raid Killer — Frank Goldammer (Trans. Steve Anderson) | 2.28
17. True — Karl Taro Greenfeld | 3.1
18. The Body — Jenny Boully | 3.7
19. The Rise of Superman — Steven Kotler | 3.7
20. Lost in Arcadia — Sean Gandert | 3.13
21. It’s Kind of a Funny Story — Ned Vizzini | 3.14
22. The Special Power of Restoring Lost Things — Courtney Elizabeth Mauk | 3.16
23. No Fixed Abode — Marc Augé (Trans. Chris Turner) | 3.19
24. Shine of the Ever — Claire Rudy Foster | 3.22
25. The Five Senses — Michel Serres (Trans. M. Sankey & P. Cowley) | 3.23
26. The Great Passage — Shion Miura (Trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter) | 3.24
27. Sweet Days of Discipline — Fleur Jaeggy (Trans. Tim Parks) | 3.25
28. Memoir American — Benjamin Hollander | 3.26
29. Make Your Bed — William McRaven | 3.27
30. Emma — Jane Austen | 3.28
31. The Body Artist — Don DeLillo | 3.29
32. Questions of Travel — Elizabeth Bishop | 3.30
33. Creditocracy — Andrew Ross | 4.2
34. A Fist or a Heart — Kristín Eiríksdóttir (Trans. Larissa Kyzer) | 4.5
35. Negative Capability — Walter Jackson Bate | 4.10
36. Until the Debt is Paid — Alexander Hartung (Trans. Steve Anderson) | 4.12
37. Finding Ultra — Rich Roll | 4.14
38. A Change of Time — Ida Jessen (Trans. Martin Aitken) | 4.17
39. Be With — Forrest Gander | 4.18
40. Acid for the Children — Flea | 4.18
41. Finish — Jon Acuff | 4.23
42. The Emigrants — W.G. Sebald (Trans. Michael Hulse) | 4.23
43. Joyland — Stephen King | 4.26
44. The Sweet Indifference of the World — Peter Stamm (Trans. Michael Hofmann) | 4.26
45. The Witches are Coming — Lindy West | 4.28
46. Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology — Tom Sparrow | 4.30
47. Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation — Rachel Cusk | 5.1
48. The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems — Charles Simic | 5.3
49. How to Do Nothing — Jenny Odell | 5.5
50. A Dream in Polar Fog — Yuri Rytkheu (Trans. IlonaYazhbin Chavasse) | 5.10
51. Totality and Infinity — Emmanuel Levinas (Trans. Alphonso Lingis) | 5.12
52. Prince of Thorns — Mark Lawrence | 5.13
53. The Back Chamber — Donald Hall | 5.17
54. Changing Planes — Ursula K. LeGuin | 5.17
55. The Living Mountain — Nan Shepherd | 5.18
56. The Friend — Sigrid Nunez | 5.22
57. Sidewalks — Valeria Luiselli (Trans. Christina MacSweeney) | 5.22
58. The Happy Runner — David Roche & Megan Roche | 5.24
59. Dept. of Speculation — Jenny Offill | 5.24
60. King of Thorns — Mark Lawrence | 5.26
61. Betwixt and Between — Jenny Boully | 5.26
62. The View from Flyover Country — Sarah Kendzior | 5.28
63. The Man Who Saw Everything — Deborah Levy | 5.28
64. The Bell Jar — Sylvia Plath | 6.7
65. A New Selected Poems — Galway Kinnell | 6.8
66. Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World — Stephanie Springgay & Sarah Truman | 6.11
67. Schadenfreude: A Love Story — Rebecca Schuman | 6.16
68. Mean — Myriam Gurba | 6.16
69. Interpreter of Maladies — Jhumpa Lahiri | 6.19
70. Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë | 6.27
71. Consider This — Chuck Palahniuk | 6.28
72. Just Kids — Patti Smith | 7.1
73. Old Mr. Flood — Joseph Mitchell | 7.1
74. Suttree — Cormac McCarthy | 7.3
75. Redshirts — John Scalzi | 7.3
76. My Year of Rest and Relaxation — Ottessa Moshfegh | 7.7
77. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime — Bruno Latour (Trans. Catherine Porter) | 7.9
78. The Sellout — Paul Beatty | 7.9
79. Walk on the Beach: Things from the Sea, Volume 1 — Maggie Williams & Karen Overbey | 7.10
80. Troubling Love — Elena Ferrante (Trans. Ann Goldstein) | 7.12
81. Theory is Like a Surging Sea — Michael Munro | 7.13
82. K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches — Tyler Kepner | 7.14
83. Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen — J.K. Rowling (Trans. Klaus Fritz) | 7.14
84. My Year of Running Dangerously — Tom Foreman | 7.21
85. All Days Are Night — Peter Stamm (Trans. Michael Hofmann) | 7.22
86. The Southpaw — Mark Harris | 7.27
87. A Very Punchable Face — Colin Jost | 7.28
88. Cosmos — Witold Gombrowicz (Trans. Danuta Borchardt) | 7.31
89. Failure is an Option — H. Jon Benjamin | 8.2
90. Love — Roddy Doyle | 8.5
91. The Vixen — W.S. Merwin | 8.5
92. Hollow Kingdom — Kira Jane Buxton | 8.7
93. Exit West — Mohsin Hamid | 8.13
94. October — China Miéville | 8.16
95. The Leaving of Things — Jay Antani | 8.26
96. And Their Children After Them — Nicolas Mathieu (Trans. William Rodarmor) | 8.29
97. Emperor of Thorns — Mark Lawrence | 9.2
98. My Vanishing Country — Bakari Sellers | 9.5
99. Hiding in Plain Sight — Sarah Kendzior | 9.11
100. No Country for Old Men — Cormac McCarthy | 9.12
101. The Year of Magical Thinking — Joan Didion | 9.13
102. Everything is Fucked — Mark Manson | 9.20
103. Autumn — Ali Smith | 9.21
104. Cherry — Nico Walker | 9.24
105. Der Fotograf von Mauthausen — Salva Rubio, Pedro J. Colombo, & Aintzane Landa (Übersetzung: Leo Gürtler & Milena Merkac) | 9.26
106. Topics of Conversation — Miranda Popkey | 9.30
107. Ego is the Enemy — Ryan Holiday | 9.30
108. How to Pronounce Knife — Souvankham Thammavongsa | 10.5
109. Dreyer’s English — Benjamin Dreyer | 10.15
110. Bad Feminist — Roxane Gay | 10.15
111. How to Write a Sentence — Stanley Fish | 10.24
112. Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens | 10.25
113. Almost Interesting — David Spade | 11.1
114. The Witch Elm — Tana French | 11.2
115. Clap When You Land — Elizabeth Acevedo | 11.4
116. How to Live: A Life of Montaigne — Sarah Bakewell | 11.6
117. Maigret and the Good People of Montparnasse — Georges Simenon (Trans. Ros Schwartz) | 11.6
118. I Am The Brother of XX — Fleur Jaeggy (Trans. Gini Alhadeff) | 11.10
119. The Discomfort of Evening — M.L. Rijneveld (Trans. Michele Hutchison) | 11.24
120. The Queen’s Gambit — Walter Tevis | 11.27
121. Momo, oder Die seltsame Geschichte von den Zeit-Dieben und von dem Kind, das den Menschen die gestohlene Zeit zurückbrachte — Michael Ende | 11.29
122. The City We Became — N.K. Jemisin | 11.30
123. Dressed: A Philosophy of Clothes — Shahidha Bari | 11.30
124. We Germans — Alexander Starritt | 12.1
125. Nothing to See Here — Kevin Wilson | 12.8
126. What a Plant Knows — Daniel Chamovitz | 12.11
127. Little Gods — Meng Jin | 12.14
128. Sigh, Gone — Phuc Tran | 12.19
129. The Great Railway Bazaar — Paul Theroux | 12.21
130. The Unbearable Lightness of Being — Milan Kundera (Trans. Michael Henry Heim) | 12.22
131. Agency — William Gibson | 12.25
132. Nutshell — Ian McEwan | 12.26
133. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects — Jeffrey J. Cohen (Ed.) | 12.30
134. Age of Legend — Michael J. Sullivan | 12.31
135. The Plague — Albert Camus (Trans. Stuart Gilbert) | 12.31

I had hoped to read at least one book in Norwegian this year (Erlend Loe's Naiv. Super.—I read it English in 2019). I didn't get around to it but I'm looking forward to doing so in 2021.

My German reading was kind of plodding along in the winter and spring, but I had a total breakthrough in the fall. I had started Momo earlier in the year, then put it down for a few months. When I picked it up again, I zoomed through it. I'm reading most things now with excellent comprehension. AnkiApp tells me that I've done almost 100,000 reviews of my German vocabulary flashcards, and it was like all that accumulated effort finally just clicked. I think 2021 will be a very good year for reading in German.

I started learning Russian after the fall semester ended, so maybe I'll read my first book in Russian in 2025?

There were some strange resonances between pairs of books, randomly selected and read at the same time. For example, Nunez and Luiselli complemented one another well. Jenny Boully (Betwixt and Between) and Jenny Offill (Dept. of Speculation) have similar names, similar styles, and similar paragraphing. Each has a chapter on the Voyager records, too. I found one Jenny much more profound than the other.

Here are a few books that stood out, for a variety of reasons:

• Sweet Days of Discipline — Fleur Jaeggy (Trans. Tim Parks)
• Jaeggy's prose is sharp and precise and haunting, and Parks's translation is masterful. I don't really recommend books, but if you asked me to identify the one book that was a revelation in 2020, it's this one (which I liked much, much more than Jaeggy's short story collection, which I read later in the year).
• The Witches are Coming — Lindy West
• I've been reading and loving Lindy West since she wrote regular columns for The Stranger. This didn't disappoint.
• Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation — Rachel Cusk
• I guess there's a whole group of literati that positively hates Rachel Cusk. I don't know why, nor do I care. She's one of my favorite contemporary writers.
• The Friend — Sigrid Nunez
• One of the most important characters in this book is a dog—need I say more?
• The Man Who Saw Everything — Deborah Levy
• Levy's prose is fantastic, and there's some interesting narrative work in this one.
• The Sellout — Paul Beatty
• Holy hell this book is a trip.
• Exit West — Mohsin Hamid
• I had picked this up and read the first chapter in a bookstore at the end of 2019 but didn't buy it. When I finally read it, I regretted not doing so sooner.
• Autumn — Ali Smith
• The first great Brexit novel?
• Topics of Conversation — Miranda Popkey
• Popkey builds tension so well that I will probably end up going back to this book several times to see if I can figure out how she does it.
• The Discomfort of Evening — M.L. Rijneveld (Trans. Michele Hutchison)
• This is one long punch to the gut, a pain you want to endure.
• The City We Became — N.K. Jemisin
• I didn't know anything about this book, and only a little about Jemisin's work. This is a fantastic commentary on America, circa 2016–2020, dressed up as multiversal science fiction.
• Agency — William Gibson
• I never realize how badly I need a new Gibson novel in my life until I finally get around to reading a new Gibson novel.
• Nutshell — Ian McEwan
• I grabbed this as a Kindle deal because I like McEwan's work. I knew nothing about the book and was blown away when I realized what McEwan was doing here.

I'm looking forward to reading more in 2021!