January 22, 2020

Releases I'm Ready For, Winter 2020

Whatever else happens in 2020, it's set to be another great year for books. These are the novels I've been most anticipating reading over the next few months:

INTERIOR CHINATOWN by Charles Yu (January 28): Yu's previous novel was HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE, a moving family story that takes a metaphorical, meta-fictional approach to time travel. His new novel, described as "a send-up of Hollywood tropes and Asian stereotypes," sounds just as unusual, clever, and thoughtful.

MAZES OF POWER by Juliette Wade (February 4): I know Juliette from FOGcon and have been following her writing journey for years, so I'm thrilled that she's publishing her first novel. The book, which begins a series, is set in a richly constructed world with a strict caste system. The story involves a political struggle and maybe an epidemic, and it's been getting rave advance reviews.

88 NAMES by Matt Ruff (March 17): I'm a longtime fan of everything Ruff has written. His most recent book was LOVECRAFT COUNTRY, a story of supernatural and racist horrors that's currently being adapted for TV. 88 NAMES features a virtual reality game world and a mysterious figure who might be Kim Jong-un, so it's sure to be wild.

THE GLASS HOTEL by Emily St. John Mandel (March 24): Mandel's last novel, STATION ELEVEN, remains one of my favorite apocalypse stories (and is also getting a TV adaptation). The new book has a complicated jacket description that Mandel sums up as "a ghost story that's also about white collar crime and container shipping." I'm certainly intrigued.

WE ARE TOTALLY NORMAL by Rahul Kanakia (March 31): I loved Kanakia's smart first novel, ENTER TITLE HERE, which follows an ambitious high school senior on a shameless quest to manipulate her way into Stanford. Her new book also stars a high school student with a plan -- one that's thrown off track when he hooks up with his guy friend and has to reconsider his sexuality and identity.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Eater, Jaya Saxena interviews Jasmine Guillory about celebrating food in her romance novels: "In my books, I really wanted to have people eating meals together and not feeling like there was something wrong with them. To a certain extent, that is a little bit of a fantasy. But I do know plenty of women who love to eat and don't have a source of anxiety with food. I want food to be joyful and fun no matter what it is." (Thanks, Book Riot!)

January 13, 2020

2019 By The Books

Since it's January, I can now safely reflect on my favorite books of last year without the risk of omitting something wonderful I read right at the end. My practice of waiting for the new year was even justified this time around, since one of my picks captivated me during the final week of 2019.

Last year I established that my reading patterns have become fairly consistent, and that remains the case, though my count of 39 books is an uptick from previous years. Two-thirds of those were 2019 releases, many that I was eagerly awaiting. I only read two books published before 2000, both toward the end of the year. I may continue the trend of mixing in older books with the recent stuff, but I'm also excited about a long list of books coming out in 2020, so I don't expect a major shift.

As tends to be the case, about a third of what I read stands out as exceptional. Rather than trying to narrow the list, I'm going to include them all, each with a pointer to the monthly recap that contains my original, fuller recommendation.

If asked to name a single favorite book of 2019, I'd go with THE OLD DRIFT by Namwali Serpell (July/August) for containing so much of all the things I love to read about. This epic tale of families tied together across generations details the history of Zambia, speculates on the technology of the future, takes mysterious and fantastical turns, plays with language, and throws wonderful characters into love and conflict. While THE OLD DRIFT does it all, these sorts of elements also recur in my other top books of the year.

Families entwined by past events are central to YOUR HOUSE WILL PAY by Steph Cha (December). In present-day Los Angeles, a Korean-American family and a black family are shaped as well as linked by the racial tensions and unrest of the early 1990s.

Race relations are given careful consideration throughout GOOD TALK: A MEMOIR IN CONVERSATIONS by Mira Jacob (March). In collages of drawn characters, photographs, and speech bubbles, the author attempts to answer her biracial son's questions while reflecting on her own upbringing with Indian immigrant parents.

Trying to make sense of family is a big concern for the narrator of THE DUTCH HOUSE by Ann Patchett (December). The story charts the bond between a brother and sister for decades as the rest of the family and relationships in their lives come and go.

January 7, 2020

December Reading Recap

I closed out 2019 with a great reading month. In my next post, I'll look back at my whole reading year.

YOUR HOUSE WILL PAY by Steph Cha follows a Korean-American family and a black family in present-day Los Angeles, uncovering their connections to the city's unrest in the early 1990s. Grace works at the pharmacy owned by her immigrant parents and wishes her older sister would reconcile with their mother, or at least explain why she stopped talking to her. Shawn has been putting his life back together ever since the violent death of his older sister and hopes that his cousin's release from prison won't bring further turmoil to the family. Grace and Shawn are just trying to get along in their very different lives until a shocking crime impacts them both and raises questions about the past.

This is a masterfully crafted novel at every level. The characters, situations, and difficult topics are all presented with realistic nuance. The plot is a tense page-turner, and Cha draws on her experience writing detective novels to set up a compelling mystery. She also draws from history, basing the story's catalyst on a real event that happened around the time of the Rodney King beating, and I was fascinated to learn about it. I highly recommend this novel to all readers.

THE DUTCH HOUSE by Ann Patchett: Danny is eight and Maeve is fifteen when their father first brings Andrea to the Dutch House for a tour. The house, Dutch because of its original owners, is a grand home outside Philadelphia that Danny and Maeve's father purchased in 1946 for their mother, who left when Danny was too small to remember. By the time Danny is fifteen, he and his sister no longer live at the Dutch House, but Andrea does. The siblings begin a habit of parking on the street outside the house to observe and discuss, a tradition they continue for decades. As Danny grows up and makes a family of his own, his bond with Maeve remains central to his life, and for good or bad, so does their past in the house.

I loved this book and the brother-sister relationship at its core. Patchett is a master at crafting distinctive, fully realized characters, and I now feel like I've known Danny and Maeve personally all these years. The portrayal of a long span of time with the aid of quick jumps forward and back is similar to Patchett's equally excellent COMMONWEALTH, though this novel's approach is more methodical. The confidently rendered characters and structure, the engrossing story, and the subtle humor place THE DUTCH HOUSE among my favorite books of the year and confirm Patchett as one of my favorite authors.

GIOVANNI'S ROOM by James Baldwin opens with the narrator alone in a house in France. David's girlfriend is on a ship back to America (it's the 1950s) after understanding that he never really loved her. Giovanni, who he may have truly loved, is sentenced to die at the guillotine in the morning. From this shocking start, the novel goes back to tell of David's first sexual encounter with a boy in Brooklyn, his move to Paris to find or escape himself, and all that occurred between meeting Giovanni and Giovanni committing his crime.

This is an emotionally intense story, beautifully written but difficult to read. The setup imbues every event with foreboding, and David's conflicted feelings about his sexuality prevent him from finding happiness in his love for Giovanni. As a result, this isn't quite the celebration of gay love that I anticipated, but it's a nuanced, compassionate portrayal of several midcentury gay experiences. I hadn't read Baldwin before, and I'm glad I finally spent some time with his exemplary prose.

THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder: The housekeeper narrating this novel is hired to look after a retired math professor, who lives an isolated existence with only his beloved numbers for company. While math may have always been an overwhelming focus of his life, it's now one of the sole subjects accessible to him, because he suffers from anterograde amnesia and can't form any new memories. Every morning when the housekeeper arrives, she's a stranger to him again, a situation she handles with far more kindness than his previous housekeepers. When the professor displays his love of children, she starts bringing her son along, and the two of them become eager students of the professor's number theory lessons. Despite the limits of his memory, the three create a sort of family until the outside world intrudes.

This is an interesting but frustrating story. The characters are all charming, and when things took a bad turn, I was definitely concerned and invested in everyone's fate. The math is explained well, and there's personality in how both the professor and the housekeeper think about numbers. However, for much of the book, I felt the amnesia barely impacted the plot, and a similar story might have been told if the professor's eccentricities lacked this contrivance. There were also a few places when secrets were uncovered but raised more questions than they answered. These issues made me wish for a somewhat different story, but the reading experience was mostly enjoyable.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Literary Hub, Lincoln Michel describes the Many Different Engines That Power a Short Story: "I'm interested in what devices--engines let's call them, since surely the author is always the driver (even when they're crashing their story into a ditch)--can supply power to the rest of story.... In my own writing, I typically find that plot and character are not enough and that my stories are inert until I find a different kind of engine--a thematic engine perhaps or a structure engine or a linguistic engine--that makes the thing get up and running."