2020: Reviewing a Year in Reviews

This column originally appeared in Late Last Night Books on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2021.

In a year like no other in living memory, many of us turned to the comfort that books can offer when the world is too much. Unlike many of my friends and social network connections, I continued to go into an office every workday throughout the year, so I never found myself with the kind of enforced leisure time that so many encountered during 2020, but I still found myself burrowed in books—either reading them or listening to them—whenever possible, and I will own up to using them as an escape mechanism. Most I read to review, either in my bimonthly column for Late Last Night Books or for my regular reviewing gig for the Washington Independent Review of Books.

In the hotly contested election year that was, my reviewing skewed heavily political, starting with Unmaking the Presidency, which was released on the first day of the January 2020 impeachment trial—and before virtually any of us had heard of the other issue that would consume our year, namely covid—and ending with What Were We Thinking, my review of which came out on election day. For the Independent’s “Best Book I Read in 2020,” I made a hard choice and said mine was OMG WTF Does the Constitution Actually Say?, “because America needs to re-learn its civics, and this is a great place to start.”

In a bit of serendipity, I read three books in row that fit neatly together in a feminist trio of echoed themes: Recollections of My Non-Existence, Too Much, and Why Fish Don’t Exist. In other parallels, The Doctor of Aleppo reminded me of earlier Elliot Ackerman novels, while Ackerman’s latest novel, Red Dress in Black and White, had stunningly eerie parallels to the moment into which it was released, at the start of this summer’s protests for racial justice.

So not even the fiction I read this year was exactly escapist. Let us hope that 2021 doesn’t need as much of an escape, that we can emerge from our protective crouch and rejoin the world around us as vaccines take hold and help us to beat back the darkness. And, as this column is posted on Inauguration Day, I also send out thanks for a speedy return to empathy, understanding, and competence. And may your 2021 reading bring you joy just for itself, just as it should be.

Books I read to review, with links to the reviews:

What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era, Carlos Lozada

Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi

The Boy in the Field, Margot Livesey

OMG WTF Does the Constitution Actually Say? A Non-Boring Guide to How Our Democracy is Supposed to Work, Ben Sheehan

It Was All A Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, Stuart Stevens

Nothing is Wrong and Here is Why: Essays, Alexandra Petri

Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman

Red Dress in Black and White: A Novel, Elliot Ackerman

Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings, Valerie Trouet

Galileo and the Science Deniers, Mario Livio

Why Fish Don’t Exist, Lulu Miller