Reading Roundup 2020

2020 was supposed to be a year of vision.  The first year of a new decade; an election year; a census year.  And of course the name itself 20-20.  Vision.

Like they say ...the best laid plans of mice and men.  And while I was mostly confined to my couch, there was still quite a view.

At the onset, I wanted to push myself to read more diverse voices.  Step outside the fiction genre confines.  To read more women, more people of color, histories of the non-western world.  Given, there was still plenty of sci-fi to scratch that itch, but much of it was from an outside perspective.

I finished a total of 46 books.

I was interested in leadership at the outset - the qualities and attributes of true leaders in contrast with those currently in charge.  Goodwin's Leadership in Turbulent Times is a character study of four presidents (Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR and LBJ) during inflection points of American history.  She picks out bullet points gleaned in the trenches of the stories of these men, but to me, the biggest thing was an uncompromising vision and will to fight for an ideal bigger than self.  Grant is another long character study of a man thrown into the crucible of American history.  The white hot fires of the Civil War.  The treachery and tragedy of Reconstruction, leading into the greed of the Gilded Age.  This dovetailed with other things I was reading as the George Floyd protest begain in earnest (The Color of Compromise, How to be an Anti-Racist). The cry of "I can't breathe" is nothing new, but has been going on for hundreds of years.  For a moment there, in 1865, the mood and political will of the country was strong enough to make lasting change.  Perhaps Grant was too lenient on the traitorous Confederacy, many of whom took to the hills as the Klan, to burn and terrorize for decades to come.  Grant hunted down the Klan, but the deep seed of America's sin was never rooted out, it just festered and evolved.

There were other sobering reads: Uncanny Valley is a personal journey through the false promise of silicon valley startups. Imperial Twilight a fascinating exploration of the causes of the opium wars, the first trade war between the west and China.  At the Existentialist Cafe bounced around the lives of the thinkers, writers and philosophers who came out of the Paris salons of the 20s (Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger).  The strength of their convictions on the human spirit would be challenged as the world devolved into global war.  And perhaps most sobering of all was The Sixth Extinction: a globe trotting survey of all the biodiversity that has been and will be lost.  The scope of the book is breathtaking and puts into perspective the age of some of these ecosystems (millions of years in the case of Coral Reefs).  Even if the west curbs emissions and pulls back climate change, there are still poor farmers cutting into pristine rainforests every day.  At its core, humanity is expansive and destructive, and we have little hope of surviving in a closed ecosystem, as Homo Deus illustrates.

Female and diverse voices were also a highlight of the journey this year.  Outline by Rachel Cusk is a travelogue of a divorced woman in Greece.  Instead of Eat, Pray, Love hedonism, sampling food and sun and lovers, the narrator is deflated by the nature of approaching middle age, coming to grips with the disappointments of children, marriage and failed dreams.  The most fascinating difference with Dawn, by Octavia Butler, is the protagonist isn't a conquering hero who simply grows powerful enough to defeat all obstacles (Luke Skywalker), but instead someone who has to learn to live under subjugation, in quiet compromised defiance.  There's a lot of analogues here to slavery, "house slaves", cross-breeding, miscegenation.  On one end, there's "love stories'' of Jefferson and Sally Hemmings.  On the other, the horrors of the Face Huggers and Alien Xenomorphs, who enslave human bodies purely as flesh vessels.  The aliens in this tale are somewhere in between.  

1Q84 and Death's End are science fiction tales by Asian men (Japanese and Chinese, respectively).  1Q84 is nothing new for Murakami, and the book has been somewhat criticized for its meandering plot and interminable length.  But there's always something meditative about reading his soothing prose, especially in the beautifully bound hardback.  Death's End is the final novel in the Three Body Problem trilogy.  The hallmark of the series has been the absolute ruthlessness of the universe in contrast to human society.  There's even a scene where a low level alien worker, the equivalent of a security guard or street sweeper, nonchalantly destroys an entire solar system on a bored whim.  None of the characters have any sort of spiritual or emotional hope.  They reside in the cold world of physics and facts.  The books sometimes feel like an excuse to run thought experiments in theoretical physics. Contrasting these two novels, where a man and woman cross vast distances of spacetime to find some sort of peace and happiness, you can get a feel for the cultures in which they arose (consumer capitalism vs state-run authoritarianism), but the dreams of the people themselves are universal.

Florida and Orange World are standout short story collections by young female writers.  The sentence by sentence writing is solid enough to land them in the New Yorker, but the world building is what sets these books apart, particularly the sun-soaked mangrove mazes of Florida.  I drive down a few times a year to Florida, and while most of the time is spent in manicured golf course lawns and screened-in pools, there's always that overgrown gator pond just a few yards away.  It’s the contrast of America: sprawling pavement and swimming pools, yet the ferocity of nature mere yards away.

Big genre books were my palate cleanser.  For me, the fantastical follows certain familiar arcs.  The Silmarillion and Fire and Blood are collected tales of lore and pure world building.  Narnia and Hogwarts had their place as well (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; Prisoner of Azkaban and Voyage of Dawn Treader), all British pluck and polite magic.  Red Mars has all the hard sci-fi engineering of the Martian with the sociology of 100 colonists on top.  There's some spectacular imagery here: a space elevator crashing to the surface of the red planet, burning hotter than a nuclear bomb, a vast flood filling the canyons for the first time in a billion years. And Dune, in anticipation of a film that never came, is the legendary space opera, all the thrill of Star Wars with R-Rated psychedelic dressing.

Camus' the Plague was the most prescient. So many of the passages ring true to me in these days: the reaction of government authorities debating lives vs economic well-being; the number crunching and the graphs; the depression and imprisoned mentality that coincides with lockdown; the overriding sense of hopelessness, the feeling that the future is erased; and how various types of people cope: either immersing themselves in work, or seeing suffering as a source of spiritual purpose.

At year's end, one book I keep thinking back on is one of the first I read, pre-pandemic. Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. I'd wanted to read it for over ten years, since I first saw it sitting foreboding on someone's shelf in a tiny East Village apartment. It’s the most wide-ranging Pynchon novel I've read, but still has all the same hallmarks - long sing-songy alliterative lists of stuff, dark humor, irreverence, labyrinthine plots and vague references to shadowy organizations. Dozens of creatively named characters. Like a Bond film, the characters bounce around all the iconic locales of the age: the "closing" of the wild west (when the adventure gives way to moneyed interests exploiting the natural resources), the bustle of New York and Chicago, jazzy nightclubs in New Orleans, the allure of the Himalaya and Shangri-La, even a Jules Verne-like journey to the center of the hollowed out earth in a dirigible.

One image that sticks with me: the Chums of Chance (a sort of jolly band of proto-Boy Scouts), riding in on their gleaming zeppelin over Chicago towards the fabled "white city" of the World's Fair, watching vast herds of dark cattle routed through maze like barriers into the slaughterhouse. It's a perfect visual metaphor for that time period, and potentially the destiny of man.

Wolf Parade released a song titled Against the Day this year.  In a jaunty four minutes, they capture the core feel of the thousand page novel:

"Friend, isn't it so strange?

How the only things that change

Are the ones upon the surface

All is gone now

Seconds fade but our hearts will still remain

We are standing

Against the day"

Full List:

The Language of God
Against the Day
Silmarillion
Outline
Big Book of Science Fiction
New Testament - Paul's Letters
Elric Of Melnibone
Leadership: In Turbulent Times
Storm Tossed Family
Homo Deus
Electric Acid Koolaid Test
Dune
Uncanny Valley
Managing Humans
The Hope of Glory
Ride of a Lifetime
Fire and Blood
Strange in the Woods
Deathbird Stories
Armageddon's Children
Orange World
Elegant Defense
Dawn
The Sixth Extinction
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Grant
Red Mars
How to be an Anti-Racist
At the Existentialist Cafe
Imperial Twilight
Florida
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Full Throttle
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Plague
Measure What Matters
1Q84
The Color of Compromise
Death's End
Mountains of Madness
The Fifth Season
Notes from Underground
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Pastoralia
Forgotten Realms: Homeland
Trajectory