Last March, as the nation moved into quarantine, I decided to read everything anyone recommended to me, no matter how appallingly boring it sounded. Without naming names, recommendations came from friends who major in math and last read a novel in 2013, the AI recommendations from my library app, someone whose idea of a good time is a gallon of beer and an anthology of Raymond Carver, and even the occasional Twitter thread of a stranger.
Each book on this list surprised me; many expanded my worldview; all of them occupied my free time, accompanied me on walks and into conversations, and gave me a precious gift: the rediscovery of childish curiosity. I’ve presented ten of them below in the thematic order of this exceptionally odd year, one whose moods and twists I was happy to navigate in their pages.
March and April: A Sudden Abundance of Time and a Sudden Desire for Escape
- “Someday I Will Write About This Place” by Binyavanga Wainaina:
“There is an ache in my chest today, sweet, searching, and painful, like a tongue that is cut and tingles with sweetness and pain after eating a strong pineapple.” From those words on, I was all in. The late Binyavanga Wainaina had a gift for images, and his memoir about growing up in Kenya is fizzly, punching, and lyrical in turns.
Wainaina begins with a Joycean conceit: his child self’s memories are told in a child’s voice, simple and alive with the kind of metaphor no adult would think of. In tandem with his personal development, he sketches out Kenya’s socio-political and cultural changes. The book weakens slightly in the second half, as the adult Wainaina moves to South Africa, realizes he wants to be a writer, and is amazed to discover how Kenya’s tribal and ethnic politics have shifted in his absence. But Wainaina ultimately pulls off an impressive balancing act, managing to engage with Kenya as both a political entity and as the place of his childhood.
I picked this book up by accident in a used bookstore right before lockdown thanks to the gruff and incomprehensible directions of the owner. This turned out to be a real stroke of luck, probably the only stroke of luck I experienced that month. Every time I picked it up, I got to wholly inhabit Wainaina’s language, and the panic, fear, and boredom of the early-pandemic faded away.
- “Cannery Row” by John Steinbeck:
This is my uncle’s favorite book ever, and I started it somewhat dutifully. Then I cancelled my dinner plans and read the entire book in one sitting. The plot is so simple as to hardly merit description: a group of ne’er-do-wells throw a party for their friend Doc, a marine biologist, during the Great Depression. Things go poorly. Many, many, many frogs are involved.
Cannery Row is beautiful and also extremely funny. It slots neatly into the trope of location novels, written out of nostalgia for a very particular place, a neighborhood full of capital-C Characters that also happens to be a Character all on its own. The marine biologist character is a love letter to Steinbeck’s beloved friend Ed Ricketts, and also serves as a representative of Steinbeck’s conceit: Cannery Row is a rich ecosystem, swimming with history and description.
I bore a deep grudge against Steinbeck in high school and would never have expected that I’d be calling him a master of American letters. But I’ve got to acknowledge the simple power of his writing: reading this book made me miss, intensely and almost feverishly, a place I have never even seen.
May, June, and July: Records of Political Turmoil
- “Eugenie Grandet” by Honore Balzac:
Effectively, Eugenie Grandet is a Victorian moral tale of a miser’s familial troubles. The characters are little more than archetypes (Naïve Girl, Dandy Love Interest, Controlling Father, Tragically Ill Mother, Loyal Servant), and Balzac clumsily signals the tragic ending from the first page. I dreaded reading it, but my library app — which rarely imposes this sort of dictate — insisted that it was a “Book You Might Like.”
Well, as you can guess from his inclusion on this list, Balzac surprised me. Yes, Eugenie Grandet is a bit of a relic. But it’s also a stunningly sad critique of what money, and the accumulation thereof, does to a person’s soul. The French countryside here is its own character, and a palpable sense of its imminent dissipation fills the book. Despite all the foreshadowing, the exact nature of the tragic ending is slippery throughout the novel, and the sense of fading anticlimax is killer. There’s an awareness of what-happens-after-the-party, of lives lived out under the shadow of missed opportunity. I think that’s a feeling that might resonate with a lot of people this year.
- “The Black Jacobins” by C.L.R. James:
A friend of mine runs a Black Radicalisms reading list, and an excerpt from The Black Jacobins was one of her daily mailings a few months into quarantine. Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James’s history of the Haitian revolution was published in 1938 and is as fervently relevant as a text written yesterday. Toussaint L’Ouverture — genius, leader, and political thinker — is the central figure of the volume; James evokes both the brutality of slavery and the brutality of Western-dominated narratives of the Haitian Revolution. He re-centers the history of revolution from France to Haiti and discusses not only the influence of Enlightenment thought on the Haitian revolution but also the absolute necessity of including Black people in any analysis of “permanent revolution.” Black Jacobins is a gem on this list not just as a document of Black liberation, as relevant as ever in the present moment, but also as a masterpiece of history and storytelling.
- “Tao Te Ching” by Lao Zi, trans. Ursula K LeGuin:
Okay, I’m cheating a little bit here, since I was actually forced by my Classical Chinese teacher to read the Daodejing in its original tongue. I figure most HPR readers might be willing to settle for a translation, though, and let me tell you — Ursula K. LeGuin does it like no other.
LeGuin’s translation skips over the intricacies of the Warring States philosophical context, which I can reliably inform you are really quite intricate, and the long tradition of Chinese scholarly interpretation, which I can also reliably inform you is really quite long. Instead, she reveals to the Western reader the profound paradox and the utopian political vision that characterize this foundational Daoist text as simply as possible. LeGuin includes a few personal annotations which demonstrate her long and close spiritual relationship with the “Daodejing.” In her hands, it becomes a sweet and deep well of wisdom from which everyone can draw.
At the same time, LeGuin avoids the pitfalls of Orientalist translation. The book is neither the stilted over-foreign translation most Chinese classics have been subject to, nor is it chock-full of generically mystical Pinterest quotes. In my view, it’s as close as a non-Chinese speaker can get to experiencing the original. This is best illustrated with an example:
“Hollowed out,
Clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not
Is where it’s useful.”
LeGuin’s annotation: “One of the things I love about Lao Tzu is he is so funny. He’s explaining a profound and difficult truth here, one of those counterintuitive truths that, when the mind can accept them, suddenly doubles the size of the universe. He goes about it with this deadpan simplicity, talking about pots.”
August and September: Long Walks and Long Reads
- “The Mathematics of Life” by Ian Stewart:
Many of my friends were surprised to hear I was reading “a biomathematics book” – and quite reasonably so, since I barely passed 8th grade algebra. Luckily for me, Ian Stewart makes it his business to explain math to the clueless. The book is organized in essay form, and each essay takes you through some of the history of biomathematics and then some recent progress made in the field. Reading it forced me to ask questions I’ve never asked myself before: I know what DNA is, but I have no idea how the information contained in DNA actually becomes a fetus. I know how evolution works, but I’ve never stopped to consider exactly how it happens – after the first monkey is born with, say, blue fur, how does that mutation become widespread across a population?
Stewart reminds readers of the miraculous and beautiful complexity of life and also of the power of mathematical thinking. Topology proves unexpectedly useful to understanding DNA; network mapping to neurobiology; 1one-dimensional geometry to viruses. Don’t be intimidated if you don’t know what half of those words mean – Stewart’s writing explains everything, succinctly and with brilliant clarity. In the process, he opened my eyes to a whole new world.
- “Long Walk to Freedom” by Nelson Mandela:
I’m probably not the only person who read “Long Walk to Freedom” in lockdown. But I am probably the only person who read it because my aunt told me a story about my grandfather ripping a fence down and marching onto a rugby field in protest of the 1981 South African Springbok tour of New Zealand. (Historians, take note of possible exaggeration — I suspect he may not actually have single-handedly ripped the fence down.)
This inspired me to pick up what I think can fairly be called the defining book of the 20th century. This decade, Nelson Mandela looms ever larger in historical importance and in moral message. What I most enjoyed about “Long Walk to Freedom,” though, were the early segments, before Mandela goes to prison and becomes the symbol of the anti-apartheid movement, when he’s just a young activist. Mandela is sharp as a tack in his analysis of the politics of the early movement – tribal interests, Colored and Indian groups, and the intra-group squabbles with which anyone in activist spaces is familiar.
For me, this book was a reminder that we cannot rely on tales of individual heroism in place of analysis of the systems they’re fighting against. Mandela is brutally honest about what young activists faced and are facing. He is also an icon of moral fortitude and perseverance, and his writing presents two much-needed things: a path forward, and a reminder of the people — grandparents, community elders, thinkers and activists scattered across time and around the globe — on whose shoulders we’re standing.
- “Foucault’s Pendulum” by Umberto Eco:
“Annelisa,” you say. “This list is so far pretty good, and already has a few novels on it. But I feel an urge to read a novel by an Italian. Maybe … a 600-page magnum opus that is mostly a satire of esoteric conspiracy theories and 1970s radical politics, but is also kind of about semiotics, and also, against all odds, is a really enjoyable adventure.” Well, I have got the book for you.
“Foucault’s Pendulum” is not at all what it says on the tin; French theorist Michel Foucault doesn’t come into it at all, and French physicist Léon Foucault (and his pendulum) only really gets, like, one scene. After you read this book, you will know a lot more about the Knights Templar, Kabbalah, and Brazilian religious syncretism than you ever really wanted to, and you will sort of suspect that most of what you know is fictional. The friend who recommended Eco to me is a charmingly eccentric high-math high-theory quasi-genius, and the book is as thought-provoking and experimental as that description suggests, but (much like the aforementioned friend), it is first and foremost quite a lot of fun.
October, November, and December: A Desolate and Beautiful Winter
- “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” by Carlo Rovelli:
An acquaintance’s family friend’s favorite science podcast let me in on this quick and dirty secret: you actually don’t have to spend eight to twelve years in higher education to learn a little bit of physics. In fact, you can read professional physicist Carlo Rovelli’s book in an hour, and I will bet you that hour will be the best hour of your week.
“Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” outsold Fifty Shades of Grey in Italy, and in my opinion it deserves to outsell Fifty Shades of Grey in every other country in the world (sorry, E.L. James). In less than 80 pages, Rovelli gently unfolds Einstein’s theory of relativity, several basic facts about black holes, time, and probability, the theoretical promise of quantum gravity, and a few hard-hitting revelations about the human race. This book made me feel exactly the way I felt as a child when someone first told me, on some late starry night, that every star I was looking at was just a ball of fire, and all of it had come from a mysterious quantum fluctuation called the Big Bang. It’s beautiful, it’s simple, and it’s as close to a miracle as you’re likely to get.
- “H is for Hawk” by Helen MacDonald:
My mom told me that this book was “trendy among the eco-friendly types a while back” and that I would probably like it. Although I resent this blatant stereotyping (c’mon, just because I’m an environmental science major?), she was right. “H is for Hawk” is part moving elegy for MacDonald’s late father, part love letter to vicious wild things, and part psychoanalysis of B-list English author T.H. White. After I read this book, I spent weeks sitting by the river, looking for that elusive flutter of wings. I called my parents a lot. I listened to bird calls on my phone and tried to match them to what I heard on my morning walks.
The book is as smart as it is touching, and MacDonald doesn’t hesitate to critique falconry, bound up as it is with Englishness, imperialism, and class. It’s more relevant than ever, politically, in an age where climate change awareness is turning into climate despair. The clearest image with which this book left me was the falcon Mabel, incongruously perched in an English suburban living room, bating from her roost in helpless, wild fear.
Image Credit: “Book” by Kamil Porembiński is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
