Books and Beyond: Favorite Reads of 2020

Whenever the Goodreads "Best of..." voting rolls around, I'm always predictably disappointed. I don't seem to read the same books as everyone else, or certainly not the books the industry pushes the hardest. Which means some books I loved don't even get a nomination, and others which I found meh or meh-plus are semi-finalists. What the heck? And you can only vote for the nominees or else, as in the presidential election, write in a candidate on principle, knowing you are throwing away your vote.

If you suffer from this same frustration, I recommend you start a blog, so you can at least have the satisfaction of putting your choices out there and having 5-10 members of your family read about them.

Since I haven't done this for a while, may I remind my 5-10 readers that I don't at all feel bound to choose books published in 2020 because I often enjoy reading books that have been out a while and are available from the library without six-month waitlists.

So let's get to it.

Favorite "Huh--I never thought about that" Reads:

The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power by Deirdre Mask. My kind of nonfiction. This super-fascinating book explores the history of assigning addresses to people, and the effects it had. Mask travels the world, looking into Empress Maria Theresa having houses numbered in and out of Vienna, to street-naming as revolutionary act in Iran, to buying vanity addresses in Manhattan. She relays eye-opening research on the fate of too many Martin Luther King Jr. Avenues and investigates the difficulties of finding a job or getting emergency medical care if you don't have an address because you're homeless or live in unnumbered slums. A very worthwhile, interesting read.

The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson. This book fascinated me. It combines natural history, fashion history, true crime, and the weird subculture of men who tie Victorian-style salmon flies using exotic feathers of endangered or extinct birds, Johnson dives into a burglary I never heard of and makes me care about it exceedingly. Be careful about giving it to any friends who weep uncontrollably over animal fates because this will likely send them into an emotional spiral.

Favorite Book-Soon-to-Be-a-Major-Motion-Picture:

Actually, the latest movie version was supposed to be out in a couple weeks, and I fully planned on going to the theater to watch it, as a birthday present to myself (since I couldn't get anyone else in the house to read the book). Now we must wait until October 2021, but at least I got to see the trailer on the big screen, when I went to see Tenet with fifteen other brave, adventurous souls.

The Emperor of Some-Silly-Name has given the spice-drug-laden planet of Arrakis to the House of Atreides to run, but there are competing factions in play, and violence and betrayal ensue. Duke Leto's son and his mother the witch-concubine escape. Could they be the fulfillment of prophecy?

May I just say, there are not enough mother-son adventure stories? I loved that part and found myself recommending the book to other mothers of teenage sons. (I tried to hype it up to my own teenage son, but he finally said, "You're not going to tempt me with that book." So stubborn.)

Favorite Series (and latest installment)

I come to sci-fi late in life, having exhausted many favorite genres after decades of voracious reading. Apart from discovering new favorite genre classics (see Dune above), I'm also enjoying some current authors, like Martha Wells and her wonderful Murderbot series. Network Effect is the fifth(?) installment, and the first of novel length. I love the entire series, where Murderbot, a cyborg security unit who has gone rogue and possibly has a murderous past, wrestles with existential questions, relationships with humans, lots of deadly combat, and the age-old question of which TV series to binge-watch next. Funny and exciting. I made my family Zoom book club kick off with All Systems Red, the first in the series, and everyone gave it high ratings except my 17-year-old, who dinged it with a 6 out of 10. Ouch.

Favorite Sports Book, Even for Non-Athletes

This was a walloping good read, and I'm not even a runner and hate running! But this book had me out this morning running little 5-meter barefoot sprints in the dewy front-yard grass (my quarantine equivalent of a Leadville 100) and Googling all sorts of places and people. The side trips into human running physiology and evolution and hunting and shoe-design were super interesting--maybe even my favorite part. Long live the Tarahumara, and everyone else stay out of their canyon.

Favorite True (White-Collar) Crime

I couldn't put this one down. Clearly I've been under a rock because I never heard of Theranos before picking up this book. Carreyrou, a Wall Street Journal reporter, tells the story of the meteoric rise of Elizabeth Holmes and her groundbreaking company, which promised to put quick, convenient, versatile finger-prick blood testing in every Walgreens, Safeway and army base, if not in your very own home.

I was hoping for a little nostalgic visit home, like when I read the also-wonderful The Innovators, but this turned out to be quite the thriller as well. A thriller punctuated with familiar places--the Fish Market! Page Mill Road! Wilbur Hall! Fuki Sushi!

Favorite Mindbender Thriller

My first book by this author, but it won't be my last! A mind-bending, time-bending tale of a scientist who explores the nature of memory and ends up building a Destroyer of Worlds. Quite page-turning, at times. If you like physics and philosophy, you'll find this a good read, though that makes it sound heavier than it is.

I've never been much of a thriller reader, and character development isn't Recursion's strong suit, but I love a good plot, and this book has that in spades. (This was a 4-star read for me, unlike the other 5-stars in this post.)

Two Great Social-Issue Nonfictions, One Encouraging, One Discouraging

(I'll let you read them both and guess which I thought encouraging and which discouraging!)

Dreamland. This 2015 explores the parallel tracks of Purdue Pharma (and its wildly bestselling OxyContin) and a community in Xalisco, Nayarit, Mexico (and its wildly bestselling heroin), which dovetailed to create an addiction epidemic nationwide. Well-researched and compelling, Dreamland is alarming, infuriating, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful. I wish it could have an updated chapter on the introduction of fentanyl to the picture.

Whether you're interested in criminal justice reform or know nothing about it, Brittany Barnett tells a compelling story. Interweaving her own family story of her mother's crack addiction and subsequent prison sentence with the plights of other families in the same situation, Barnett explains how the sentencing mandates put in place by Clinton and upheld until Obama impacted low-level dealers, users, and other non-kingpins unjustly. I remember the "three strikes" law being passed in California and not being aware at all of how such a law would play out across the socioeconomic and racial spectrum. It was a different era, for sure.

I echo what Barnett says of herself at one point, that she wishes there were more of her, so she could both practice the corporate law she loves and also save those unjustly condemned to life imprisonment. Yes--it was a shame she eventually gave up her corporate law career because of how vitally important it is to have more women and POC in the "room where it happens," both to inspire others to achieve and to share their unrepresented perspective.

Favorite Formulaic Harlequin Author

Oh, my goodness! In addition to exploring some sci-fi and fantasy, 2020 marked my first foray into Harlequin romances. My mom recommended an old-timey author named Betty Neels, so I gave her a try and ended up reading maybe five or six Betty Neels books this year. But I can safely tell you that, once you've read one Betty Neels book, you've read them all. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, if you're looking for a comfort read.

All Betty Neels books feature a young, capable English nurse, who is more often plain than otherwise. She falls for a tall, broad-shouldered, brusque, handsome, older Dutch doctor/surgeon, and, at some point in the story, visits the Netherlands and stays with his older female relative, worrying all the while that the hero is actually in love with some pretty Dutch girl in his social circle.

Because Betty just seemed to do Find/Replace on the characters' names as well as the Dutch town visited in each book, and to flip a weighted coin as to whether the heroine would be plain or not, I wonder if I wasn't the only reader to enjoy most the first Betty Neels I picked up, because it was all fresh, that time around. In my case, that first book was Cassandra by Chance, and I really did enjoy it. In this case the capable young nurse meets the Dutch doctor while he's on medical leave for blindness(!) on some Scottish island. A very sweet story. And how pleasant to read romances that don't have the requisite five pornographic scenes! These books can be recommended to family members without a blush. (Caveat: my 21-year-old daughter did not find it as charming as I did. Nor did she go on to read five more variations, as I did. I guess one generation's comfort read is another one's cringe-inducer?)

Favorite Book That Did Make the Goodreads List

A page-turning family story that also manages to be about race, identity, yearning, brokenness, connection, and America. I appreciated the roundness and complexity of all the characters--when one identical twin abandons her sister to pass as white, Bennett digs into what motivates each woman and what that costs. What it costs themselves and their own daughters.

Recently I read Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown, one half-comic theme of which was that the story of race in America is mostly framed as black and white, or black versus white. All other races get the bit parts, the roles of extras in the exciting police drama. It's certainly the case in The Vanishing Half, and I even grinned when a black family moves into the white neighborhood, and the black husband earns his living playing a black cop on TV. But Bennett recognizes that feeling split down the middle, or feeling rootless, or feeling alienated from even large parts of yourself, is not limited to the black experience. Stella Vignes is not the only one going to great lengths to deny and forget who she was born as. There is also Reece, a transgendered young man who binds himself and injects himself with street steroids. Both characters are treated with sympathy by their creator, but the high price of their choices is never overlooked.

I hear HBO is adapting it, though I have no idea how they can ever cast it, and there weren't a lot of topless scenes, which is kind of HBO's bread and butter. Do yourself a favor and read the book, which is sure to be much better. The only drawback of giving it as a gift is that they're probably already sure to have read it.

And finally...

Favorite Historical Regency Romance Series I Wrote

Cheating here, since this is actually the only Regency Romance series I've written. I'm still waiting on the official reviewers, but here are some emails readers have sent me:

"LOVED the Naturalist!! Very well written & loved it. Characters were great & couldn’t put it down."

"Loved the book. Didn’t grade papers for three days since I couldn’t put it down."

"Christina--I finished your book last night at 1am...I really enjoyed it."