Best Books of 2020

As much of a roller coaster as 2020 was, there was no stopping the publishing of great books. The following are the ones that I would definitely recommend. This link on Bookshop will give you purchase links for these books. Without further ado, in no particular order:

Sky Beyond the Storm by Sabaa Tahir

Memorial by Bryan Washington

Network Effect by Martha Wells

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

A Promised Land by Barack Obama

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrel

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel 

The Awkward Black Man by Walter Mosley

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

A Peculiar Peril by Jeff VanderMeer

Survivor Song by Paul Tremblay

Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley

December Thoughts

There’s a lot of looking out of windows from my side of the couch these days. A tuxedo cat nuzzles into a fuzzy white blanket, pausing sleep only to vigorously scratch her face. Cars speed as if the street was a track and time was running out. The sun is light playing on the houses across the street. The stillness is in the magnolia trees, bent over in minutes as the Santa Ana winds make their descent upon the valley.

It is getting cooler now. I descend the stairs and check the AC thermometer, making silent bets with myself. 65 degrees? 68? Sometimes the weather will trick me, playing along with my game. I’m grateful for its trickery. The mornings are cool and clean and even when the sun rises highest in the sky it doesn’t hit our apartment. Instead, it highlights the concrete but leaves us in shade. The apartment remains indifferent to the climbing heat. The cats look for warmth around our human bodies.

I miss the sound of constant airplanes now. The helicopters still search the mountains, hover like a fly over the interstate. But I cannot follow the paths of the metal birds anymore. Occasionally a cargo jet will land at an airport, low and loud, but it is nothing like the sound of bodies being thrust into the sky. I miss being in the sky. The clouds outside the window where I traced their shapes on the plexiglass.

The year ends with more of the same but we are here. We’ve kept most of our sanity. Built the necessary barriers around ourselves to keep the mischievous depressive elves at bay. Somewhat. They still find a way to sneak in when we least expect it. Baking banana bread loaves. Checking the mail. Waking up to zero notifications. They watch us. We take another moment to make ourselves resilient against the onslaught of circular thought. What better time than now? we ask. Now that we have nothing but time?

It’s December where every day is Monday, is Thursday, is the weekend. 3 pm is midnight and waking up to go back to bed. How will we be—who will we be—once things resemble normal? Will we be humans with armor or travelers lost in the woods, finally escaping after three months, sleeping on beds of twigs?

We will know soon. Hang in there.

Revisions

I am thinking a lot of revisions. Not only because I am in the third draft of my first book. It extends even further. I am at the stage where I compare life to writing, which is old hat by now. Cheesy and obvious. But that is what we writers do, isn’t it? Everything is a chance at comparison. Love is like a river. Eyes are like diamonds. A life is like a first draft that can only benefit from revision.

There is something to be said about holding your book in your hands. Or, in my case, within the electronic memory of a Kindle because save the trees and all that. It feels that much more real. Even when the book needs a major amount of work. Ignore that part for a bit. It is a feat. A miracle, almost. That we can do anything at all. Take an idea and see it to the end. That we can take something out of our head and put it out into the physical world. It’s almost unbelievable.

After reading books like Memorial by Bryan Washington and On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, I am reminded that there are so many fiction books that toe the line of non-fiction so closely that we believe it. No matter what genre shelf we find that book in. It’s incredible how we can be so willingly tricked as a reader. How we can so easily believe the architects of these books. If you were to tell me those two books, from cover to cover, were not essays, were not parts of a memoir, then it would take me a second to believe you. As a writer it is our job to manipulate—in a positive way—so much that the lines of reality are completely blurred. Once you are in our world you’ll be able to touch the walls, hear the music, see the sky, and taste the food.

Is it common for a writer to take their life, fictionalize it just a bit, and publish it as their first novel? It is the simplest way, it seems. If you have a story to tell that is true to you, that you’ve lived, why not share it? And once that first draft is done you go in with a small chisel and change the form, just enough, to make it fiction. But you haven’t taken the breath out of it. The life. After the second, third, fourth, and subsequent drafts, it may only be a skeleton of the original, but it is still just as true. In revision you’ve only opened a small gap between nonfiction and fiction. Otherwise the story is still there. You’ve still lived it.

Sometimes I wonder if fiction is only taking your past mistakes and giving yourself a second chance at making another decision, just to see if the outcome is better. Usually it isn’t. Just… different. But sometimes it can be surprising how much of a butterfly effect is created when you don’t answer the call. When you don’t meet the girl. When instead of pulling the trigger you never buy the gun. We all wish we could go back in time and do things differently. Is that all that novels are? Time machines?

In every book is a chance for the writer to engage with the reader. To share their truths, to deliver a particular message. With each draft those truths may shift so that at the end, when the book is headed out into the world, you’ve forgotten who you’ve written the book for. All you know is that you captured a moment in resin and looked at it from all sides. You’ve created a character that took that moment and did the things that you couldn’t do. With each revision we will try and make this clearer to the reader and sometimes we will fail. But that’s all a part of living. If we are kind we give ourselves a million chances to revise ourselves, even despite the deadline looming.