2020 in books and highlights This year I‘ve read more than I ever have in my life (which is still largely unreflected on my sad Goodreads log). Two reasons for this: first, more time and space – to digest books and truly understand them. Second, I wanted to write better, and the calibre of what you read enhances the calibre of what you write. This is undoubtedly true.
2020 was the year I started to write prose (I had previously only written poetry). Yanagihara writes this about math but it rings true for writing as well: We talk about a beautiful summation, or a beautiful judgment: and what we mean by that, of course, is the loveliness of not only its logic but its expression. Finding this balance between logic and expression is pretty unintuitive. The only way to improve is to read the works of those who have largely figured it out :)
In this list, I included the books I enjoyed the most this year and some accompanying quotes (the books are not listed in order of enjoyment). What did you read this year?
Fiction
1. Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse I discovered Hesse through another book of his that I enjoyed immensely called Siddartha. This book was very different – much darker, but still very enjoyable.
The thing he most compulsively desired, most stubbornly searched and strove for, was granted to him, but more abundantly than is good for a human being. Initially all he dreamed of and wished for, it later became his bitter lot. Those who live for power are destroyed by power, those who live for money by money;
service is the ruin of the servile, pleasure the ruin of the pleasure-seeker.
We live to fear death, then to love it again, and it’s precisely because of death that the brief candle of our lives burns so beautifully for a while.
2. The Little Virtues + A Place to Live by Natalia Ginzburg Gorgeous essay collections. Her prose is beautiful and sharp with a signature detached/aloof voice.
We think we’ll be spending our whole life freeing ourselves from shyness , learning to move under the gaze of others with the same confidence and nonchalance as when we’re alone.
For poetic beauty is a composite of ruthlessness, arrogance, irony, carnal love, imagination and memory, of light and dark, and if we cannot achieve all of these together, our result will be impoverished, precarious, and scarcely alive.
3. Self Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle . I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal , than that it should be glittering and unsteady.
4. Make it Scream, Make it Burn by Leslie Jamison She had a deep desire to understand her life as something structured by patterns, woven through with signs and signals and voices. She was hungry for a logic that might arrange all the isolated points of her experience into a legible constellation.
5. Fear of Flying by Erica Jong Being loved by the world is no substitute for having been loved by one person when you were small, and besides the world is a lousy lover.
One’s body is intimately related to one’s writing, although the precise nature of the connection is subtle and may take years to understand. Some tall thin poets write short fat poems. But it’s not a simple matter of the law of inversion. In a sense, every poem is an attempt to extend the boundaries of one’s body.
6. American Originality: Essays on Poetry by Louise Glück Every period has its manners, its signatures, and, by extension, its limitations and blindness . And it is particularly difficult, from the inside, to recognize such characteristics: omnipresence makes them invisible. If they are noticed at all, they are taken as marks of progress; the limitations we have been trained to see as limitations are no longer evident.
Part of his (Rilke's) genius was his perception of the way we transform what is at hand into something sufficiently remote, immaterial, to be re-created as the focus of longing.
7. Stoner by John Williams This book is about a life that doesn't live up to potential. Love that was lost and prevented, a man disconnected from his family and friends, and not reaching the academic prowess he wants to achieve due to rivalry. It doesn't try to paint a rosy picture of life, it presents all of life in sorrow and in beauty. The writing is clean, impactful, and despite the 'lack of plot' I found myself empathizing with Stoner deeply, and couldn't put the book down.
If the novel can be said to have one central idea, it is surely that of love, the many forms love takes and all the forces that oppose it. "It [love] was a passion neither of the mind nor of the heart, it was a force that comprehended them both , as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance."
He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire ; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance. And what else? he thought. What else?
8. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara This book was hauntingly beautiful and sad. Absolutely recommend it, but it is definitely emotionally turbulent.
Beneath their imperturbable calm, that somewhere within them ran a thin stream of quick, cool water, teeming with delicate lives, minnows and grasses and tiny white flowers, all tender and easily wounded and so vulnerable you couldn’t see them without aching for them.
We talk about a beautiful summation, or a beautiful judgment: and what we mean by that, of course, is the loveliness of not only its logic but its expression.
9. Madness, Rack and Honey by Mary Ruefle Choice, and all its attendant energy, is a characteristic of youth. It is before one chooses that one feels desire and longing without fulfillment, which gives an edge to any artistic endeavor.
In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time , a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again.
10. Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly , but very slowly.
11. What Light Can Do + The Apple Trees at Olema + Form and Meaning (poems) by Robert Hass (one of my absolute favorite poets) Language was a kind of moral cloud chamber/through which the world passed and from which/it emerged charged with desire.
12. Interior States by Meghan O'Gieblyn Awareness is not the same as perspective; sometimes the former is an obstacle to the latter.
13. Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Wang Some people dislike diagnoses, disagreeably calling them, boxes and labels, but I've always found comfort in preexisting conditions; I like to know that I'm not pioneering an inexplicable experience.
Forgiveness, as it turns out, is not a linear prospect. Neither is healing; both flare up and die down.
14. Object Lessons by Eavan Boland That’s the dream: infinite attention, infinite regard.
I understood then, as any human being would, the difference between love and a love which is visionary. The first may well be guaranteed by security and attachment; only the second has the power to transform.
15. The White Album by Joan Didion We tell ourselves stories in order to live... We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
16. On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound . I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was . Can you hear me yet? Can you read me?
17. On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry Our desire for beauty is likely to outlast its object because, as Kant once observed, unlike all other pleasures, the pleasure we take in beauty is inexhaustible. No matter how long beautiful things endure, they cannot out-endure our longing for them.
Scarry reminds me heavily of Milan Kundera, this is his line below: “Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.”
18. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek + The Writing Life by Annie Dillard Nostalgia rearranges the rooms of memory : it makes the beds, puts a vase of flowers on the dresser, opens the curtains to let in the sun.
19. Don't Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine Sometimes you read something and a thought that was floating around in your veins organizes itself into the sentence that reflects it.
You always, I notice, feel the same when you are under heavy fire - not so much afraid of being hit as afraid because you don't know where you will be hit . You are wondering all the while just where the bullet will nip you, and it gives your whole body a most unpleasant sensitiveness.
20. Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: The Correspondence When Rilke asks for help on writer's block, Salomé writes: While you are perpetually feeling sick and miserable you are also perpetually finding expressions for that experience , and those expressions, in the distinctive form you give them, would be quite impossible unless somewhere inside you there is a flowing together, an experiencing in unison.
21. Essays on Elsewhere by André Aciman We seldom ever see, or read, or love things as they in themselves really are , nor, for that matter, do we even know our impressions of them as they really are. What matters is knowing what we see when we see other than what lies before us. It is the film we see, the film that breathes essence into otherwise lifeless objects, the film we crave to share with others. What we reach for and what ultimately touches us is the radiance we’ve projected on things , not the things themselves – the envelope, not the letter, the wrapping, not the gift.
Non-Fiction
22. How To Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens Quotes here wouldn't really make sense – but I'd like to implement this notetaking system in my life
23. How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan This book really changed my perspective on psychedelics, without being overly opinionated or pushy on which side to land on. Pollan writes about his own experiences pursuing psychedelic experiences, as well as its potential for therapeutic use.
You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred.
Cohen struggled with the tension between the spiritual import of the LSD experience (and the mystical inclinations it brought out in its clinical practitioners) and the ethos of science to which he was devoted. He remained deeply ambivalent: LSD, he wrote in a 1959 letter to a colleague, had “opened a door from which we must not retreat merely because we feel uncomfortably unscientific at the threshold.” And yet that is precisely how the LSD work often made him feel: uncomfortably unscientific.
24. Caste by Isabelle Wilkerson Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.
25. One Up on Wall Street by John Rothchild and Peter Lynch It takes remarkable patience to hold on to a stock in a company that excites you, but which everybody else seems to ignore. You begin to think everybody else is right and you are wrong. But where the fundamentals are promising, patience is often rewarded
26. Educated, a memoir by Tara Westover Fantastic, and hardly believable, memoir. A story about a girl's experience leaving her survivalist Mormon community. Touches on a lot of important topics – radicalism, loyalty, the importance of education, and family. He was deaf to the raucous music of our lives, and we were deaf to the serene polyphony of his.
27. The Lessons of History by Will Durant The present is the past rolled up for action , and the past is the present unrolled for understanding
A little knowledge of history stresses the variability of moral codes, and concludes that they are negligible because they differ in time and place, and sometimes contradict each other. A larger knowledge stresses the universality of moral codes, and concludes to their necessity.
28. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell no quotes, but a summary: Homage to Catalonia recounts Orwell's time in Spain serving the POUM Militia (Republican, left wing) against the Fascists (right wing). Although it is a historical novel, it is more a novel about the false promises of nobility, purity, and heroism that comes with War.
29. The Radium Girls by Kate Moore A shocking true story about America in the 1920s, where radium was known as a 'miracle element'. Its widespread use eventually lead to disastrous consequences. The book focused on the young women that used to paint radium onto watch dials, often dipping the brush into their mouth in order to be more efficient. What happened to them was the cumulative effect of years of radium poisoning - leading to their horrific deaths.
"Radium eats the bone,” an interview with Grace later said, “as steadily and surely as fire burns wood.”
30. Travels Through the 20th Century by Gaert Mak Meticulous journalistic style recount of one man's understanding of contemporary Europe in the 20th Century. "Geert Mak crisscrosses Europe from Verdun to Berlin, SaintPetersburg to Srebrenica in search of evidence and witnesses of the last hundred years of Europe."
no quotes, but a remarkable amount of historical material is condensed in this book, paired with narrative and personal testimony.