My Favorite Books of the Year: Part I
Counting down 10-6
It’s that time of year when Spotify Wrapped blooms on social media timelines to remind us of those songs we listened to for 24 hours straight in April and then never again.
While I do enjoy the nifty output from a year’s worth of musical data, I prefer the more manual and subjective ranking of the books that comprised my year. My baseline goal is 52 books per year and though each book doesn’t neatly fit into one week, there is a kind of visual soundtrack to looking back at the books that colored my days.
There are plenty of well-regarded titles that I couldn’t get into for one reason or another, and you may take exception to some of the ones that did resonate with me. Let me know which of my loves you hated as well as any standouts from this year that I should add to my pile for next year, and as always, remember to adopt (your local independent bookstore), don’t shop (at Amazon).
Editor’s Note: Not all of these books were published this year, but the majority are from 2020-21.
10. Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
Written in the format of a screenplay that weaves scripted scenes with fourth wall-breaking outtakes, Interior Chinatown takes on what it means to aim higher than the pinnacle of role models before you. As Willis Wu attempts to climb from Generic Asian Guy to Kung Fu Guy on TV, he also struggles to find his role in his family and community.
9. Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman
I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, but this replay of the WeWork collapse reads like a thriller.
At one time the most valuable private company in the US, the fall of WeWork and its former co-founder and CEO is more entertaining than most cautionary tales. Wiedeman expertly weaves firsthand accounts from employees and investors with the state of the real estate industry and the larger economy, and sheds light on the many enablers of Adam Neumann.
If you like to see egomaniacs fall hard as a result of their own hubris (well, as fast as a parachute into a pile of money will let them), this one’s for you.
8. Zorrie by Laird Hunt
Zorrie is the story of a woman who spends almost all of her life in a small farming community in Indiana. While not much in the way of Michael Bay action can take place in these limited square miles, the portrait of Zorrie, her interior life, and the community that’s shaped it is powerful enough to drive this taut book.
7. Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
You might remember this making news as the first Co-Booker Prize Winner back in 2019 (she split with Margaret Atwoods’ The Testaments despite the prize’s bylaws explicitly forbidding this type of result). It’s every bit as good as half the prize committee thought!
If you like Zadie Smith’s tangled webs, you’ll enjoy this sprawling, modern, multi-generational look at 12 Black British women in and around London. Evaristo effortlessly drops us into today’s multicultural Britain while simultaneously dredging its colonial past for perspective.
6. The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories by Danielle Evans
Evans’s magic is the ability to develop characters over a short number of pages by letting us in on a moment where their fears or desires or prejudices are laid bare to themselves.
Six stories that deal with politics, racism, marriage, and motherhood set the stage for the title novella, a twisting tale of race relations that chillingly feels like it was ripped from the headlines.
Stay tuned for 5-1 and let me know your favorite book of the year in the comments!