Favorite Books of 2020

Happy New Year 2021!!

I haven’t written any kind of newsletter in months but I finished my Goodreads challenge (75 books and counting!) and got to 82 books total (23,791 pages!!!) so I thought I’d list out my top 10 books of 2020, 5 nonfiction and 5 fiction, in no particular order because while I can pick my favorites, I can’t rank them.

Nonfiction:

Untamed by Glennon Doyle

I think there’s a real disdain for sincerity and earnestness in our world today, which is exemplified by social media and the cruelty therein. In other words, you get a whole lot of likes for dunking on designated villains including but not limited to: Hillary Clinton, Taylor Swift, and any other woman over the age of 30 who shares an opinion that threatens the social order we were raised under. Untamed by Glennon Doyle really pushes back on the idea that meanness and spitefulness and unceasing anger and outrage are morally superior to genuinely caring about the world and people around us.

Doyle has been called unapologetic by critics but I feel like a better word is “accepting” in that she accepts the way she feels even if it doesn’t sit well with others. The thing about being unapologetic is that it’s almost saying “I dare you to challenge the way I feel” and Doyle doesn’t do that. Instead, she puts herself out there and I get the impression she actually doesn’t care if some people don’t like her because she loves herself, even when she doesn’t like herself, and millions of others do as well. And that’s the goal, isn’t it?

Know My Name by Chanel Miller

I cried a few times when reading Know My Name, which surprised me because I’m not someone who cries when reading memoirs. The thing is, I feel like so many memoir and personal essay authors devolve into the maudlin and trite, embodying an almost “woe is me” tone. This perhaps reflects badly on me but when reading a lot of personal writing online and in published books, I feel uncomfortable, as if I’m intruding on something private and embarrassing to the extent that even when I feel genuine sympathy for them, I can’t cross over into empathy. Chanel Miller is an exceptional writer because she maintains her dignity even when discussing the most undignified aspects of her life. She has a real self-respect in the Didion-sense and the beauty of that sort of self-respect is that once you have it, nobody can take it away from you.

The end of the book when she talks about her meeting with Dr. Christine Blasey Ford got to me as well because like Anita Hill before her, Dr. Ford knew she would be publicly smeared and derided and would most likely fail and she did it anyway for the good of the country. Chanel knew that by revealing her identity and writing this book, she was sacrificing the hope of a quiet life, of forgetting the worst things that ever happened to her and putting herself at risk for backlash and even retribution and she did it anyway so that maybe she could help other survivors. She must have been terrified and she did it anyway and that’s the only thing that matters in the end.

Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World by Olga Khazan

I’m a very odd person. I used to be a socially awkward child, I’m still a socially awkward adult, and I don’t think I’ll ever be entirely at ease in social settings the way I feel like I’m supposed to be. I used to read alone during recess in elementary school and would walk around the perimeter of the playground balancing a book on my head when I’d finish my book mid-recess because I didn’t have any friends to play with. It was over a decade and a half ago but reading Weird brought me back to that time and not necessarily in a bad way.

Some part of assimilation was practical self-care to me: I would practice my American accent in the mirror in the 2nd grade, watching how my mouth formed the words, because I was ridiculed for having an Indian accent and I didn’t enjoy being bullied since I knew even then that derisive comments could escalate in time. But another part of me couldn’t assimilate no matter how much I tried, no matter how many books I read and imitated the behavior of the characters within them, no matter how much time I spent planning outfits and making my hair sit just a certain way, I couldn’t manage to fit in. But, reading Weird made me realize that despite my hang-ups, I’ve made my peace with who I am and who I was and the only way to go is forward and that gave me a semblance of relief that I hadn’t felt before.

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones Rogers

This book was fascinating and very intelligent. Jones-Rogers's thesis is that white women have undeniably been abject malefactors in furthering white supremacy in small and large ways and their so called empowerment has come at the expense of people and especially women of color. As she writes, white women in the American south were unequivocally complicit with chattel slavery and benefited financially from the sale of black men, women, and children and for a long time, did not face any condemnation for doing so even from historians.

However, the thing is, modern feminism has began to rightfully condemn the malevolence of white women throughout history but the issue is that in doing so, so many modern self-proclaimed feminists, predominantly but not solely white women, inadvertently absolve white men in the process. The thing is, while white women definitely falsely accused black men of rape, it was white MEN that did the lynching and in fact, they often abused both white women and women of color, therein lies the paradox of white women and men of color for that matter, who are often the first but not the last abusers of women of color.

Oh and since it was an election year, so many people have been discoursing about the patterns of white women voting and how about half of them vote Republican but they definitely don’t hold the same anger or outrage at the supermajority of white men who voted for Donald Trump. I’m not absolving the white women who vote Republican but I just find it obnoxious that a lot of so called leftists have more anger at suburban women who vote and phone bank for Democrats while cross-stitching #BlackLivesMatter on their nieces’ Christmas sweatshirts than they do at white men who actually voted for Trump. Just some food for thought!

Intimations by Zadie Smith

For every contemporary writer who drinks the Kool-Aid that they’re the next Joan Didion, the only living writer who can carry on Didion’s mantle is Zadie Smith. She’s a genius, and I don’t say that lightly.

Smith has always been excellent at toeing the line of critical and empathetic, of condemning the deserving while empathizing with the necessary and I feel like that quality is underrated in a lot of modern literary criticism, which veers towards sensationalistic cruelty. For instance, I don’t care for Jia Tolentino and I find her overrated but Lauren Oyler’s critique of Tolentino was rooted in jealousy and a desire to go viral to the extent that the validity of even Oyler’s valid commentary on Tolentino was diminished. But, Zadie Smith never falls prey to the allure of pettiness, she knows that being mean is not the same as being intelligent, and that’s why she’s one of my top 5 living writers and probably always will be.

Fiction:

A Rogue of One’s Own by Evie Dunmore

I unabashedly love romance novels simply because it is a genre predominantly by and for women and A Rogue of One’s Own is possibly even better than its predecessor Bringing Down the Duke, which was very good.

Tristan is an A+ romantic hero and the cameo by my birthday twin Oscar Wilde made me laugh out loud in excitement but the thing I loved about this book is that Lucie was very relatable to me in a way I didn’t expect from the rough sketch of her character I read in the book summary. She’s independent and feisty but let’s call a spade a spade she’s also just plain difficult and cantankerous and I love her for it. The paragraph where she details her fear that there is a vast, hardened part of her with all the reasons she was unlovable engraved on it punched me in the stomach. As I’ve said before, I’ve often felt unnatural, simultaneously too much and not enough and it was a relief to read that I’m not alone in feeling this way and still wanting to be loved.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The best thing about this book is that it’s just the right amount of literary without being remotely pretentious. It’s elegant and intelligent but also a real page-turner and just plain good fun, like an Old Hollywood version of People magazine. I feel like there’s a real disdain for readability and I appreciate that this book was accessible without talking down to its readers, which a lot of contemporary fiction absolutely does.

And, I think we all deserve books like this which are human and empathetic and profound in their moments of happiness and sadness, of love and despair, but neither patronizing nor schmaltzy. I’m so utterly done with that brand of sentimentality and have been for years now and I’m sure you are as well.

I don’t usually care for any of the big “lit fic” books and I wasn’t nearly as impressed with Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & the Six but I loved this book and I’d recommend it to anybody with a pulse, especially women looking to be not just seen but understood. And yes, I cried.

Her Night With the Duke by Diana Quincy

Her Night with the Duke was published in 2020 but it has strong “pre-2010 romance novel” vibes in the best way possible. We all know I love 2006’s Devil in Winter by Lisa Kleypas but like, I understand that book’s level of problematique would not fly in 2020, given how much discourse there is about Bridgeton, the Netflix adaptation of the much tamer The Duke and I by Julia Quinn.

But conversely, so many of modern romance novels, especially written in the last 2-5 years are just objectively terrible. The art style and the way a lot of those books are written feels like they’re subliminally saying “these books aren’t those gross lame romances the pathetic cringe women read which ~romanticize problematic things~, we’re for COOL PROGRESSIVE women” and it’s just yet another iteration of the Cool Girl™️. And, the romance genre’s appeal to women everywhere has been that they depict stories where women and POC and LGBT people are loved and respected and sexually satisfied without being brutalized and dying and with the sex being almost entirely off the page, it feels like so many of the books are just more staid and downright paler versions of the classics. 

But Diana Quincy is a great writer because she knows how to speak to her base of romance readers without talking down to them. She fixes the actual issues with the romance genre pre-2010, the bodice rippers so to speak, without taking away the appeal of those books to begin with and for that, I’ve got to commend her.

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

American beauty culture is high key dominated by things like Instagram influencers and the Kardashians, who are not not Instagram influencers, but this book was a harsh reminder that beauty so to speak is a universal obsession.

I've had family tell me in a somewhat disappointed tone that I'm darker skinned than I was as a baby (before I went out in public) so I always knew non-Western cultures were no picnic in terms of beauty standards but my knowledge of Korean beauty standards primarily came from what I've read in magazines concerning the prevalence of Korean beauty products (see: the 10-step Korean skin care regime) with a certain subset of the population, namely those who have the disposable income to afford those products. Beauty is exclusionary in that sense but the so-called beauty Kyuri or any other woman possesses is never their own since the so-called power a woman gets from her appearance can be instantly liquidated, seen in this novel through Kyuri's relationship with Bruce.

Personally though, beauty stresses me out. I want to be beautiful but I want to be beautiful on my own terms, which is impossible as a woman (of color) to be. I want to pick and choose who can perceive me and when they can do so, which is a pipe dream, I'm well aware, but I can't help but wish I could just remove myself from the equation altogether. But I can't.

Honorable Mention:

Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld

I couldn’t get through this book not because I don’t like Sittenfeld or because I don’t like Hillary Clinton but because my biggest fear is being Hillaried and I’ll just get unreasonably angry on her behalf and that of every other woman ever.