2020: A Year in Books

A wise meme said that life is just a series of obstacles preventing you from reading your book. I must be really living, because my "read" list has been a travesty since college. Gone are the days when I could sit with a book for a day and a night and take down doorstopper fantasy series like pan dulces.

Work/life demands in the time of rona being less outrageous, I made it a mission to read at least an hour a day last year. I failed, but hey, at least I did better than a book a month. 
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And so here are the books I read in 2020, and a little bit about why I think they’re worth picking up. Read more

BG art by Blake Foster, sydwox.com

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Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shae - The Illuminatus Trilogy

This book is many things. It is revealing, bewildering, appalling, empowering. It is myth and prophecy, a treatise for confusing times (times like 2020-the fourth year after the multiverse diverged and reality became less reliable, and by when the space squid carcasses really began to rot). Yes, it was published in 1975, but like that post-Nixon era I expect the story becomes more resonant when the world’s architecture of unseen enigmas is (fnord) most Discordant. 
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More specifically, the trilogy is a 1,000 page acid trip spanning decades and dimensions and connecting every major conspiracy theory from Atlantis to the Rosicrucians to John Dillinger; the Foucault’s Pendulum of psychonautic interdimentia. I loved how cleverly the eternal struggle of conservatism and counterculture could be depicted on this stage, with many of the big-name authoritarian ghouls and conflicts of the mid-century doused in LSD and wrapped in mysticism and somehow making more sense than textbooks ever did. Now with 2020 hindsight, I think even the most bodaciously insane caricatures of mid-century sociopolitics were probably right on the money, and I can better appreciate how bizarre our little slice of the multiverse really is.

Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness

An ornate vision of humanoid society evolving from a different roll of the cosmic dice, of course devastatingly revealing of our own social constructs, particularly gender and relationships. It’s a brutal wintery journey of a soul far from home, trudging through anthropologically rich and sociologically complex environments and devoid of sci-fi tropes (save for those that developed in its wake). Which makes it sci-fi at its best, I’d say, simply putting the traditional human in the role of the observer, asking a big What If? and letting the dendrites of story squiggle and unfold. I’ve read just a few of her hits so far (Left Hand, Earthsea, The Lathe of Heaven, and a translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching) but it only takes one to ken Le Guin’s reputation as a SF grandmaster.

Aldous Huxley - Crome Yellow
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One day I looked through the free audiobooks on my app as my car rolled to the exit gate. I tapped something by Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World is foundational sci-fi and one of my favorites. Crome Yellow, I found, is not sci-fi. It’s actually Huxley’s first novel, published in 1922 and featuring an heirloom country mansion and the society of poets and flappers who dwell in and around it. It reminded me of Gatsby, with its detailed depiction of society in this slice of life and its satirization of the leisure class. And poor Denis, the aspiring poet, smoldering creative spirit, ennui-stricken intellectual, sensitive piner for the ladies of leisure but forever alone. I guess young authors have enjoyed skewering their self-inserts throughout the centuries. 

The ornate prose was savory in narration, like a well-set English breakfast table and polite conversation. Recommended if you’re interested in subtle symbolism and satire or just the timbre of fine early-century writing. I also recommend giving random picks like this one a chance, because how else will you discover that you’re into those things?  

Neil Gaiman - The View from the Cheap Seats

I had a phase as a writer in my early 20s where I aspired to be Gaimanesque. I don’t think I’m the only one; Gaiman has sort of become a genre of his own. His characteristic New Weird / SF novels and adaptations populate bookshelves, movie racks, comic bins and Hot Topics around the world. I think creatives love him because it makes it look so easy, scribbling stories into notebooks by hand in his woodland sanctuaries, traveling nonstop for talks and appearances, blogging prolifically and providing introductions to what, 40% of all genre fiction published in the last 10 years? His style is so easy-going, so English, and so appetizing to the Harry Potter generation, even in nonfiction.

​This collection is full of wild stories and enduring work from throughout his career, always with the perspective of a bemused writer of speculative fiction contending with the uncanny situations and general weirdness of success. One could do worse than emulate the Gaimaneque.

Frank Herbert - Dune

Speaking of foundational sci-fi. I bought this rad copy of Dune in 2015 or so, and every year I told myself this is the year I read Dune. This year it was true. My love of vintage sci-fi is partly a fascination for tracing the roots of genres and artistic movements through their waves and webs and cultural contexts. Understanding the time and place a story was written in is as interesting as the story itself. Reading Dune, I could instantly see why it’s a genre-defining classic, and recognize its genetic heritage in so many of its descendents. It was like finally listening to The Clash and realizing half of all EDM songs sample them, which I also recently did. 

Carl Sagan - Contact

I found this first edition in a little bookshop in Idyllwild and thought it was a steal. I’d never read Sagan and I’d only seen the movie once in film class, and I think I slept through a lot of it. Though the book didn’t turn out to be quite as collectable as I’d hoped, the story blew away all expectations. Sagan’s passion for science is infectious; Ellie is one of the best-rounded and well-written protagonists in the genre; and the ideas are top notch hard SF. I left the book tripping on the yin and yang of science and religion, and inspired to share the love of scientific literacy in a time when that seems to be in short supply . (Along those lines, I highly recommend Alan Lightman’s Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, a collection of an astrophysicist’s meditations on life, God, physics, reality, all the good stuff.) 

Greg Sestero - The Disaster Artist

My reading of Contact was peppered by giggles and full-on laughs from Lizett as she read The Disaster Artist nearby. Even if you’ve seen the movie, and The Room itself, you’re not ready for how funny this book is. The movie is just the tip of the ice-berg. The whole scenario is the most baffling, entrancing product (or perfect storm) of money, passion, naivete, and an entrepreneur from another planet. 

Ram Dass - Be Here Now

I’ve been trying to describe this book for half an hour now. Each time I take a line and decide the words are inadequate and return to the beginning. I guess it’s hard to capture one’s experience with any holy book; endeavors of the spirit are personal and concern feelings for which language can only produce a pale imitation. This book, with its unconventional presentation and illustrations, speaks to those feelings, disheveling the strictures of text and language like a drop of acid to facilitate sincere reflection and deeper connection. 

It’s a book about spiritual journeys, and a pan-denominational tool for those embarking on their own. The first part is an autobiography detailing how psychologist Richard Alpert journeyed to the ends of the earth and the depths of the mind to find enlightenment, and returned as the yogi Ram Dass. His story is far out. 

The second part, the weird brown pages that make up most of the length, “is a free-form collection of metaphysical, spiritual, and religious aphorisms, accompanied by illustrations.” That’s the wikipedia version. The section is meant to be a tool for meditation, a doorway into the self. Approaching this kind of thing honestly, or “doing the work,” is not a commitment to occultism or anything weird; it’s just a tool to re/connect with one’s spirituality. To regain awareness of the world and the self and the inseparability of the two. To consider your body as you haven’t done since you were a child, rediscover the presence of it, and the wholesome unity of spirit and form. You might think thoughts that usually only form under the influence of substances, but people have been getting high this way for a very long time.

The third part is a more functional guide for following your spiritual path, with tips and techniques and inspirational quotes from the Bible, the Baghavad Vida, Bob Dylan, and more, and the final part is a list of books for further reading. 

Anonymous - Go Ask Alice

The immortalized diary of an anonymous teenage girl on a journey of addiction and destruction. I thought it was moving, but now that I’ve looked it up on wikipedia and learned that it was probably not authentic, I feel kind of disillusioned. If it was actually written by a 15-year-old girl on a spiral of lost innocence and self-destruction at the end of the psychedelic era, it is fantastic. If it was written by a 50-year-old Mormon therapist and youth counselor as anti-drug propaganda, it is wackalicious.  

Jack Karouac - On the Road

It was a summer of journeys, here in my apartment amid the pandemic, and On the Road felt like a natural next step after Alice. The steps that followed, riding with Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty and a revolving cast of vagabonds as they crisscrossed the country from the 1950s to the 1960s, were grinding, exhausting, and somehow refreshing. 

The romance of the endless road and compulsion to fly down it night and day, year on year, trading one life for another at each juncture was part of the new spirituality of post-war America, an indelible part of the emerging beat/hippie movement and counterculture. It was a time and place like no other, and again I was as fascinated by the context and the connections to literary canon and world events that the writer drew from as the story itself. Reading from a yellowed paperback (though not quite original vintage) helped invoke those bygone days, the ephemeral America that Karouac bummed and worked and hitchhiked his way through. That world seems mostly vanished, or at least, a group of charismatic nomads couldn’t get away with the things these characters got away with anymore.

Though I didn’t come away compelled to hop a box car or drive aimlessly into the heartland reliant on hitchhikers for gas money, I was in awe of the whole freeform jazz and drug-fueled era and the people who lived in it. Now learning that most of the characters are stand-ins for the Beat Scene pantheon (Ginsberg, Cassady, Karouac himself) makes it that much crazier.   

John Updike - In the Beauty of the Lilies

Do you ever browse the shelves of your AirBnB, maybe take a couple books down and see how your hosts have curated the literary character of their inn? No? Well I do. I’ll spend some hours in the corner chair with a random volume of Roman history or Hindu wisdom, or in this case, a prosaic-looking piece of Americana by an author whose name rung a bell as Highly Literary and which I probably would never have glanced at otherwise. I don’t expect to find a lot of reading time with friends in a cabin, but being programmed to rise early, I had my coffee and bore my hangover each morning with In the Beauty of the Lilies, and the early chapters’ elegant account of a minister suddenly and devastatingly losing his faith had me shook enough to order a copy when I got home and put it next in line. I also resolved to buy at least one of the books I find on the shelves at each place I stay from now on.

Lois Lowry - The Giver
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How did they let me graduate middle school without reading The Giver? I pulled Lizett’s copy off the shelf for a short read after finishing Lilies and realized I’d been missing a critical piece of adolescent education. It’s one of those stories you can reference in conversation for the rest of your life, part of the literary heritage of a generation. Personally, though, I coveted the story for its beautiful simplicity and flawless execution, qualities I will spend the next 100 years trying to emulate. 

Susannah Clarke - Piranesi

One of the only books I’ve ever pre-ordered in advance of publication. Susannah Clarke’s debut Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is my favorite stand-alone novel, the absolute GOAT of rainy, Romantic literary pastiche, and though Piranesi is entirely unrelated to that book, I’m pretty much committed to reading anything Clarke puts out. In contrast to Strange & Norrell, which is massive and complex, Piranesi’s story is (deceptively) small and simple, yet somehow no less a labyrinthian neo-Goth M.C. Escher painting of a story. 

Carl Sagan - The Demon Haunted World

​With so much bad faith politics and science and media illiteracy dominating the public conversation this year, Carl Sagan’s treatise on scientific investigation felt like the antidote to a slow-acting brain poison. With the goal of sharing scientific literacy with a non-science audience or those who haven’t benefited from a science education, Sagan deconstructs many of the myths and superstitions of history (witches, demons, astrology, UFOs) while wisely and respectfully identifying the failures of logic that keep them around. It’s empowering, reassuring, and sometimes horrifying, but a skeptical, scientific mindset and a “baloney detection kit” are tools every high school graduate and congressperson should have. 

JRR Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings
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Long has the tale called me. I recently found and ordered the same mysterial one-volume edition that I first checked out from my middle school library, and Foundations of Stone plays in my head with every glance of it on the shelf. As a kid, this massive tome was an object of fascination, a daunting and addicting quest that I availed myself of off and on, never penetrating much further than the Breaking of the Fellowship until high school. Those early chapters are like the eternal summers of childhood, when the world’s conflicts are still just far-off rumors and the need for haste does not yet drive the heart. 
 
Returning to Middle-Earth as an adult in our darkest winter, I felt much more heavily the weight of the ringbearer’s errand, and recognized the real servants of darkness proliferate in our own age. The later chapters are rife with evil, grotesque transgressions of a faithless legion, creatures driven solely by a malicious will to power, heedless of the ruin that lies in the wake of their toadying, or of the encroaching blight that would consume orc and man alike.
 
It was all too familiar, and uncannily I identified with Gandalf’s apprehensions, his worries of having watched and waited too long, his horror at revelations of the enemy’s muster, his knowledge of a gathering darkness that but for the barest hope will surely overwash our world for an age of man, if another age there should even be. 
 
“I wish it had not come in my time.” 
 
“As do I, but we must do what we can with the time that is given us.”
 
The soot and smoke of industry were only just beginning to choke the horizon when Tolkien wrote. Though he dreamed the saga from the trenches of the second world war, Tolkien maintained that any resemblances to real persons, politics or conflicts were just a reflection of man’s enduring struggle with wickedness, a fantastic projection of the conflicts in the hearts of men. But art reveals truth, and Tolkien may have been more prescient than he knew. I see a lot of orcs when I check my Twitter feed. 
 
A fell culture of callowness and malice again emerges from dark places, driven by power-hungry charlatans who bewitch and exploit otherwise good people in their pursuit of dominion. A cloud of fear and ignorance bruises the sky and demoralizes those who stand for justice. Our institutions are infiltrated by people who stoke fear and hatred and abjure wisdom, who use deception and bad faith to inflame grievance and grow their hoard. Age on age, maybe it is always thus, but it feels like we are coming to a precipice after which another age may not follow. If the forces of ignorance and malice come to full power, then the muster of the wise may fail to stop the destabilization of our world, and a blight will fall that may never lift, certainly not in the age of men, and increasingly it seems we have but a Hobbit’s chance of averting doom.
 
Still the GOAT.