Last year, in what now seems like a grotesque display of hubris, we framed this list as a guide to your summer vacation reading. Little did we know that a mere nine months later, the very idea of a vacation, of any kind of travel, would be so outlandish as to be almost laughable.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha…ha…ha…ha…oh sweet god in heaven when will it end…
Anyway, despite the unceasing nightmare that has been 2020, magnificent literature still abounds.
Below you’ll find the best reviewed fiction and nonfiction—from Garth Greenwell, Jenny Offill, Hilary Mantel, Emily St. John Mandel, James McBride, Louise Erdrich, Rebecca Solnit, and many more—of the past six months: 20 critically-acclaimed titles for your solitary summertime reading consideration.
We heartily recommend purchasing a couple of these recent gems from your local independent bookstore or Bookshop.org.
Happy reading.
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1. Cleanness by Garth Greenwell
32 Rave • 11 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan
“… incandescent … Anyone who read Greenwell’s first novel, What Belongs to You (2016), knows that his writing about sex is altogether scorching. You pick his novels up with asbestos mitts, and set them down upon trivets to protect your table from heat damage … There’s a moral quality to these extended sessions. In bed is where Greenwell’s men work out and reveal the essences of their personalities … Carnal moments are accelerants; they’re where Greenwell’s existential and political themes are underlined, then set ablaze … a better, richer, more confident novel. You intuit its seriousness and grace from its first pages. It’s a novel in search of ravishment … Greenwell is a sensitive writer about the student-teacher relationship … Greenwell has an uncanny gift, one that comes along rarely. Every detail in every scene glows with meaning. It’s as if, while other writers offer data, he is providing metadata … This novel’s second half is not quite the equal of its first. Some scenes end rather than resolve. Greenwell is a brooder. You begin to wonder how his humorlessness will wear over time … Yet there are no failures of equilibrium. This writer’s sentences are so dazzlingly fresh that it as if he has thrown his cape in the street in front of each one. Greenwell offers restraint in service of release. He catches you up so effortlessly that you feel you are in the hands of one of those animals that anesthetizes you before devouring you.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
Read an interview with Garth Greenwell here
2. Weather by Jenny Offill
23 Rave • 21 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Offill takes subjects that could easily become pedantic and makes them thrilling and hilarious and terrifying and alive by letting her characters live on these multiple scales at once, as we all do … fragmented structure composed of short bursts of mundane intensity that make me think of Dalí’s animal sketches, in which a few spare ink strokes evoke the essence of each beast … Offill’s writing is shrewd on the question of whether intense psychic suffering heightens your awareness of the pain of others, or makes you blind to it … part of the brilliance of Offill’s fiction is how it pushes back against this self-deception … If I responded more strongly to Dept. of Speculation than to Weather, it might be a testament to the narrative dilemma the new novel is reckoning with: the scale of its ambition, despite its brevity, in its attempt to tell a story about climate change that carries the same visceral force as our private emotional dramas—that is, in fact, inseparable from them … Offill’s whittled narrative bursts are apt vessels for the daily experience of scale-shifting they document—the vertigo of moving between the claustrophobia of domestic discontent and the impossibly vast horizon of global catastrophe … something like an inverted X-ray: a narrative that illuminates not the obvious bones of the story but its unexpected details; not the bold lines of your femurs but the detritus in your pockets—the crumpled receipts, the pacifier dropped on the sidewalk, the key whose lock you can’t remember … Offill’s fragmentary structure evokes an unbearable emotional intensity: something at the core of the story that cannot be narrated directly, by straight chronology, because to do so would be like looking at the sun.”
–Leslie Jamison (The New York Times Book Review)
Read an interview with Jenny Offill here
3. The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
29 Rave • 11 Positive • 5 Mixed • 1 Pan
“She brings Cromwell’s unlikely, compelling story to a moving close in her brilliant new book … There is much beauty in this book, especially in the luxuries of the court—Mantel’s rich descriptions of meals and fashions will make you want to eat plums and quail and then go shopping for embroidered velvets. More subtle beauties are found in Cromwell’s appreciation of the natural world, of tender dawns and icy nights. Mantel enthralls with her descriptions of royal life, from its bizarre rites and traditions to its practicalities … To both the glories and the gore of Tudor England, Mantel brings an entirely contemporary eye. Her research is prodigious, her skill at complex plotting breathtaking, but her greatest strength is her characters and the dialogue she imagines for them.”
–Colette Bancroft (The Tampa Bay Times)
4. The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
25 Rave • 11 Positive • 6 Mixed
“… may be the perfect novel for your survival bunker. It remains freshly mysterious despite its self-spoiling plot. Mandel is always casually revealing future turns of success or demise in ways that only pique our curiosity. Indeed, the fate of the story’s heroine appears in a brief, impressionistic preface, but you won’t fully appreciate that opening until you finish the whole novel and begin obsessively reading it again … Mandel is a consummate, almost profligate world builder. One superbly developed setting gives way to the next, as her attention winds from character to character, resting long enough to explore the peculiar mechanics of each life before slipping over to the next … The 300 pages of The Glass Hotel work harder than most 600-page novels. When she turns to the art world, to a federal prison, to an international cargo ship, each realm rises out of the dark waters of her imagination with just as much substance as that hotel on the shore of Vancouver Island. The disappointment of leaving one story is immediately quelled by our fascination in the next … The complex, troubled people who inhabit Mandel’s novel are vexed and haunted by their failings, driven to create ever more pleasant reflections of themselves in the glass.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
Watch Emily St. John Mandel in conversation with Maris Kreizman here
5. Writers & Lovers by Lily King
18 Rave • 14 Positive • 3 Mixed
“Yes, both of the love interests are writers, but this smooth, deliberate chronicle of creation keeps the men in their place and Casey firmly rooted at the center of her own story. Instead of casting her as a woman torn between archetypes of male creativity, Writers & Lovers portrays her as a woman in thrall to her own generative processes, a devotee to the art of (her own) attention … This isn’t an exploration of what it means to be a writer; it’s an exploration of what it means to write. And King’s prose, simple, clear and accretive, mimics in form what she’s conveying—that art is an accumulation of details and that, in the IRL present, close attention is slipping away from us with every swipe of the screen … What’s most refreshing is that after a spate of novels and memoirs that fix a female creator in reference to a great man, Casey emerges as a woman who builds her literary identity out of parts all her own … while describing the intense effort of putting words in order, feels effortless, or at least like an unconscious natural process. King’s sentences are like layers of silt and pebbles condensed into sedimentary rock—distinct from one another but fitted into an indestructible whole. And she pulls off a considerable trick: she convinces us that the miracle of attention, that coveted capability we all imagine slipped from our grasps as the new millennium dawned, must still lie somewhere inside writers, even if their fingers are swiping as often as typing. After all, in the year 2020, she’s produced this, a classic bildungsroman for struggling artists everywhere.”
–Hillary Kelly (The Los Angeles Times)
Read Lily King on writing the novel she needed 30 years ago here
6. Deacon King Kong by James McBride
19 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed
“The sheer volume of invention in Deacon King Kong—on the level of both character (the first chapter alone introduces twenty individuals by name) and language—commands awe. Reading it is like watching a movie in which one’s occasional impulse to ask questions is pleasantly swamped by the need to keep up with the pace of events … And the sentences! The prose radiates a kind of chain-reaction energy. After some chapters, you feel empathetically exhausted, in the way you might feel drained by watching an overtime football game. The experience of traversing a simple flashback paragraph is like trying to leap from stone to stone across a river, except occasionally one of them turns out to be not a stone after all but a lily pad, or a shadow, and into the river you go … A consciously suppressed anger emerges only rarely, but often enough to make you read the comedy differently. It’s as if any sentence in the book would, if allowed to flow all the way to its digressive end, empty into the pool of injustices that put these characters in the Cause Houses to begin with … In Deacon King Kong, narrative omniscience leaves room for despair, as it must, but its over-all energy never flags. Sometimes the most affirmative thing you can do, as a storyteller, is to service that story’s momentum, in the hope that there’s some just reward for everyone in the end.”
–Jonathan Dee (The New Yorker)
Listen to James McBride in conversation with Mitchell Kaplan here
7. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
17 Rave • 10 Positive • 1 Mixed
“… a generous and precise family saga that spans decades while darting from coast to coast, tells a story of absolute, universal timelessness … For any era, it’s an accomplished, affecting novel. For this moment, it’s piercing, subtly wending its way toward questions about who we are and who we want to be … Bennett trades in secrets with the best of them—her plotting, at its juiciest, holds a soapy cinematic pull—but she doesn’t play coy, either. She’s a storyteller in total command of the narrative, her shattered family portrait pieced back together with artful restraint and burgeoning clarity … the book…speaks both to the intimate truths of family connection, and to the ever-complex, ever-enraging story of race in America.”
–David Canfield (Entertainment Weekly)
Read an interview with Brit Bennett here
8. Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
18 Rave • 9 Positive • 1 Pan
“…[an] impressive new novel … Hurricane Season belongs to the Gothic-grotesque tradition of the transnational American South. The novel’s tortured self-deceptions and sprung-trap revelations evoke the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, the neuroses of Marlon James’s Kingston gunmen in A Brief History of Seven Killings In an interview about that novel, James spoke about the need to ‘risk pornography’ in the portrayal of violence—and Melchor certainly does. At times, she enters so deeply into the psyche of sexual violence that she skirts the voyeurism risked by any representation of cruelty … The crime is not an act but an entire atmosphere, which Melchor captures in language as though distilling venom. Sometimes, though, this claustrophobic style breaks like a fever, yielding to flights of mesmerically expansive prose … Offering such glints of transcendence at the edge of an ugly killing, Melchor creates a narrative that not only decries an atrocity but embodies the beauty and vitality it perverts.”
–Julian Lucas (The New York Times Book Review)
9. The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
18 Rave • 7 Postive • 1 Mixed
“In this season of literary wildfires, when cultural borrowings have unleashed protests that have shaken the publishing industry, the issue of authenticity is paramount. Erdrich retakes the lead by offering the reader the gifts of love and richness that only a deeply connected writer can provide. You never doubt these are her people. The author…delivers a magisterial epic that brings her power of witness to every page. High drama, low comedy, ghost stories, mystical visions, family and tribal lore—wed to a surprising outbreak of enthusiasm for boxing matches—mix with political fervor and a terrifying undercurrent of predation and violence against women. For 450 pages, we are grateful to be allowed into this world … I walked away from the Turtle Mountain clan feeling deeply moved, missing these characters as if they were real people known to me. In this era of modern termination assailing us, the book feels like a call to arms. A call to humanity. A banquet prepared for us by hungry people.”
–Luis Alberto Urrea (The New York Times)
10. A Burning by Megha Majumdar
18 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Its characters are at the very front of the stage, and we can feel their breath … [the] spare plot moves with arrowlike determination … Majumdar’s novel is compelling, yet its compulsions have to do with an immersive present rather than with a skidding sequence. Her characters start telling us about their lives, and those lives are suddenly palpable, vital, voiced. I can’t remember when I last read a novel that so quickly dismantled the ordinary skepticism that attends the reading of made-up stories. Early Naipaul comes to mind as a precursor, and perhaps Akhil Sharma’s stupendously vivid novel Family Life … It’s only at the end of this brief, brave novel that one becomes fully aware of how broad its judgments have been, how fierce and absolute its condemnations. Through the gaps that open up among and behind these three characters, a large Indian panoply emerges. The book’s surface realism—that great boon to writers—is abundant and busy and life-sown … But the system that at once supports and undermines this diverse vitality is seen with an unrelentingly cold authorial eye, in all its small and large corruption, its frozen inequality, murderous racism, political opportunism, and unalleviated poverty. At the same time, because societies are complex, and because Megha Majumdar is a sophisticated student of that complexity, her novel gains flight as a tale of competing dynamism. Her three ambitious and intelligent characters are all moving up, out of the class they were born into; Jivan’s plight is that this ambition, forced by circumstance into a desperate resolve, involves a struggle that she seems fated to lose.”
–James Wood (The New Yorker)
Read an excerpt from A Burning here
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1. Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener
10 Rave • 18 Positive • 5 Mixed
“Wiener was, and maybe still is, one of us; far from seeking to disabuse civic-minded techno-skeptics of our views, she is here to fill out our worst-case scenarios with shrewd insight and literary detail … Wiener is a droll yet gentle guide … Wiener frequently emphasizes that, at the time, she didn’t realize all these buoyant 25-year-olds in performance outerwear were leading mankind down a treacherous path. She also sort of does know all along. Luckily, the tech industry controls the means of production for excuses to justify a fascination with its shiny surfaces and twisted logic … It’s possible to create a realistic portrait of contemporary San Francisco by simply listing all the harebrained new-money antics and ‘mindful’ hippie-redux principles that flourish there. All you have to do after that is juxtapose them with the effects of the city’s rocket-ship rents: a once-lively counterculture gasping for air and a ‘concentration of public pain’ shameful and shocking even to a native New Yorker. Wiener deploys this strategy liberally, with adroit specificity and arch timing. But the real strength of Uncanny Valley comes from her careful parsing of the complex motivations and implications that fortify this new surreality at every level, from the individual body to the body politic.”
–Lauren Oyler (The New York Times Book Review)
Read a profile of Anna Wiener here
2. The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes
7 Rave • 19 Positive
“Biographers usually tell the life story of a person with strong name recognition. It’s much harder to pull off the story of those who are largely forgotten. Few people today are likely to recognize Count Robert de Montesquiou, or Dr. Samuel Jean Pozzi, two of the principal figures in The Man in the Red Coat. Yet Julian Barnes succeeds brilliantly in bringing them to life … Pozzi is the main character, but only intermittently, for Barnes’s achievement is to retrace the crossing and recrossing paths of dozens of individuals in a milieu that was once ostentatiously up-to-date … The book is a pleasure to read in every way. Barnes writes with elegance and wit, probes motives with a novelist’s imagination but also a historian’s skepticism, plucking memorable formulations—enhanced by his own deft translations—from letters, journals and newspaper squibs.”
–Leo Damrosch (The New York Times Book Review)
3. Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O’Connell
11 Rave • 11 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan
“This survey of end-times obsessives, from climate scientists to conspiracy theorists, may strike some readers as unnecessarily close for comfort … It turns out that the prospect of the annihilation of human life is a richer mine of comedy than you probably supposed … The variety of end-of-the-world scenarios that O’Connell confronts is sobering … The rough and faintly random material gathered in O’Connell’s ‘notes’ is bound together by his brilliant comic style. To get a handle on his cerebral, neurotic persona it might help to imagine a cross between Bill Bryson and David Foster Wallace … Anxiety, you’ll have gathered, is O’Connell’s natural element … He is richly scathing of the eschatology-evading comforts purchased by the billionaires buying up land in New Zealand … a fidgety, fretful but very funny book.”
–James Marriott (The Times)
Listen to an interview with Mark O’Connell here
4. The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson
14 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan
“There are countless books about World War II, but there’s only one Erik Larson … Over his career, he has developed a reputation for being able to write about disparate subjects with intelligence, wit and beautiful prose … Fans of Larson will be happy to hear that his latest book, The Splendid and the Vile, is no exception. It’s a sprawling, gripping account of Winston Churchill’s first year as prime minister of the United Kingdom, and it’s nearly impossible to put down … Larson’s decision to focus on a wide group of people is a wise one. While Churchill is clearly the main character, Larson’s profiles of his aides and colleagues add valuable context to the prime minister’s role in the war. Many books have been written about Churchill, obviously, but by expanding the scope of his book, Larson provides an even deeper understanding of the legendary politician … And although he doesn’t at all neglect Churchill’s actions and policies, he also paints a vivid portrait of the politician’s personality .. There are many things to admire about The Splendid and the Vile, but chief among them is Larson’s electric writing. The book reads like a novel, and even though everyone (hopefully) knows how the war ultimately ended, he keeps the reader turning the pages with his gripping prose. It’s a more than worthy addition to the long list of books about World War II and a bravura performance by one of America’s greatest storytellers.”
–Michael Schaub (NPR)
Read an interview with Erik Larson here
5. Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir by Rebecca Solnit
8 Rave • 10 Positive • 3 Mixed
“Anyone hoping that this book, which is billed as a memoir, will offer a more intimate glimpse of the writer, might be disappointed in that regard; Solnit does not go in for soul-baring, and even in this personal history she keeps her gaze focused outward, on what her particular encounters can tell us about the prevailing culture of publishing, or the art world, or the environmental movement, or the city at the time … it is a rare writer who has both the intellectual heft and the authority of frontline experience to tackle the most urgent issues of our time. One of the reasons she has won so many admirers is the sense that she is driven not by anger but by compassion and the desire to offer encouragement … That voice of hope is more essential now than ever, and this memoir is a valuable glimpse into the grit and courage that enabled her to keep telling sidelined stories when the forces opposing her seemed monolithic.”
–Stephanie Merritt (The Guardian)
Check out a selection of essays by Rebecca Solnit here
6. Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino
11 Rave • 5 Positive
“… brilliant … Zucchino does not overwrite the scenes. His moral judgment stands at a distance. He simply describes what happened and the lies told to justify it all … The details contained in the last part of the book are heart-wrenching. With economy and a cinematic touch, Zucchino recounts the brutal assault on black Wilmington … Zucchino pulls the story into our present moment … What becomes clear, at least to me, is that memory and trauma look different depending on which side of the tracks you stand.”
–Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (The New York Times Book Review)
Read an excerpt from Wilmington’s Lie here
7. The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping by Samantha Harvey
8 Rave • 9 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Watching Samantha Harvey obliterate the advice that’s so often and so smugly offered to the exhausted…is one of the grim pleasures of The Shapeless Unease … This book seems appropriately messy-haired and wild-eyed … Anyone who has lain awake the night before a big test will recognize such manic flourishes. Harvey captures the 4 a.m. bloom of magical thinking; stories proliferate within stories … One feels deranged, reading it, and part of the book’s disturbia may derive from its refusal to stay confined between its own covers … To read Harvey is to grow spoiled on gorgeous phrases; she’s an author you want to encounter with pencil in hand.”
–Katy Waldman (The New Yorker)
Read an excerpt from The Shapeless Unease here
8. Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker
12 Rave • 1 Positive
“Mr. Kolker’s riveting, compassionate Hidden Valley Road tells the story of a family besieged by devastating mental illness … With the skill of a great novelist, Mr. Kolker brings every member of the family to life … Mr. Kolker describes all this science well, without getting lost in technical details. His chief achievement, however, is an absorbing narrative of persistence, adjustment and exhilaration—followed by repeated disappointment when discoveries fail to replicate or yield effective treatments … Hidden Valley Road vividly conveys not only the inner experience of schizophrenia but its effects on the families whose members are afflicted.”
–Richard J. McNally (The Wall Street Journal)
Listen to an interview with Robert Kolker here
9. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
6 Rave • 10 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Hong’s metaphors are crafted with stinging care. To be Asian-American, she suggests, is to be tasked with making an injury inaccessible to the body that has been injured … I read Minor Feelings in a fugue of enveloping recognition and distancing flinch … The question of lovability, and desirability, is freighted for Asian men and Asian women in very different ways—and Minor Feelings serves as a case study in how a feminist point of view can both deepen an inquiry and widen its resonances to something like universality … Hong reframes the quandary of negotiating dominance and submission—of desiring dominance, of hating the terms of that dominance, of submitting in the hopes of achieving some facsimile of dominance anyway—as a capitalist dilemma … Hong is writing in agonized pursuit of a liberation that doesn’t look white—a new sound, a new affect, a new consciousness—and the result feels like what she was waiting for. Her book is a reminder that we can be, and maybe have to be, what others are waiting for, too.”
–Jia Tolentino (The New Yorker)
10. The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood by Sam Wasson
8 Rave • 7 Positive • 5 Mixed • 1 Pan
“…as Sam Wasson shows in compelling detail in his fine new book The Big Goodbye, the makers of Chinatown were simply too young, too ambitious, too controversial, and their movie, while undeniably brilliant, was like a brash finger stuck in the eye of the Hollywood establishment … While Towne’s screenplay won an Oscar and has long been hailed as a modern classic, Wasson makes a strong case that its brilliance is really due to Polanski’s shrewd and uncompromising decisions … The Big Goodbye excels at such insider insights, gleaned from a thorough canvassing of the relevant archives and from interviews with most of the principal players. The core of the book is an engrossing history of the film’s development … what this book offers at its heart is a rich and enthralling account of one of the finest movies ever to come out of Hollywood. Chinatown is a melancholy and savage film that repays repeated viewings, especially when armed with the penetrating insights and fascinating details Wasson has marshalled here with such loving care.”
–Rob Latham (The Los Angeles Review of Books)
Read an excerpt from The Big Goodbye here
