The books I read in 2020
To escape the painful reality of the pandemic, I read a lot of novels in 2020 –including one about a pandemic.
It was a bad year for many things, but it was a good year for reading. I finished 19 books — 10 nonfiction and nine fiction. They ranged from a sand-in-your-toes beach book called Hello Summer (one character was based on a Florida congressman I used to write about) to serious books about politics and the media.
My favorite was Anxious People, a wonderful Swedish novel about a failed bank robbery. I loved it because it has twists and turns, but at its core it was a novel about anxious people, which is to say, all of us. I usually like a simple linear story, but I loved the sneaky way that author Fredrik Backman used flashbacks to reveal his characters and the story. It was warm and funny and really struck a chord.
I also loved A Promised Land, Barack Obama’s memoir. It was 700 pages long and was like watching 100 episodes of The West Wing except the president is cooler and funnier and swears more than you would expect. What made it work, like all great memoirs, was its honesty. Obama was candid about the strains on his marriage and his kids and his disagreements with aides and other politicians. It was fascinating, except for a few boring parts about Afghanistan.
Other books I liked a lot: The Vanishing Half, a thought-provoking novel about twin Black girls who run away to live very different lives, and Rodham, a novel that imagines how Hillary Clinton’s life would have turned out if she hadn’t married Bill. I read Rodham and several other books with my students over the summer, which made for great discussions.
I also re-read two books I loved from long ago, Rabbit is Rich by John Updike, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. The Eggers book, now 20 years old, is a masterpiece that still inspires me about how inventive writing can be.
In the why-did-I-read-this-again? category, I read Lawrence Wright’s prescient-when-he-wrote-it novel, The End of October, about a deadly virus not unlike the coronavirus. I guess I hoped to find some kind of satisfaction in seeing how smart Wright was in predicting the pandemic, but I read it too early and I found his bleak book was too dark. (He has said he wrote it at the suggestion of Ridley Scott, who mused what might have led to the apocalyptic first scene in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. So I was warned, but still read it anyway.)
In nonfiction, I liked my colleague Margaret Sullivan’s concise overview of the newspaper industry’s problems, Ghosting the News, and Brian Stelter’s full-throated takedown of Fox News, Hoax. I also read just about any book that had “lying” in the title, to prepare for a book I’m writing about lying in politics.
My goals for 2021: More novels and lots more books about lying.
