My favorite book of 2020
The following are the books I read in 2020. They are grouped in categories. There are links to the comments of those I already wrote about.
Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen -- My favorite book of 2020. Essay here.
Fiction
I wrote a separate post about books of fiction here. I added more about Decameron and The Great Divorce. The rest of the list is below.
Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio -- This year was my second reading of Decameron, but my first reading during a pandemic! It was more vivid this time, reading about a group of young men and women escaping the plague at its epicenter to feast and tell stories. The plague was so bad in Florence it was referred to as the Florentine Plague at the height of the Black Death in Europe. Seven of ten Florentines died in the middle of the 14th Century.
The book itself was more intriguing this time. I have read and re-read the 100 Cantos of the Divine Comedy but until this year was in thrall to Dante and not so interested in Boccaccio. But this year as I read the Decameron I thought how the 100-story form could be re-created in our own time of plague. The New York Times magazine devoted an issue to Decameron stories from many writers. One Hundred stories while under various forms of quarantine seems like a wonderful idea.
The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis: The book has nothing to do with marriage ending happily. This short book begins at a bus stop in Hell where many residents catch a bus for a day trip to the edge of Heaven. The journey follows Dante's Divine Comedy both in the route from Hell to Heaven and in the book's focus on the people the Pilgrim (narrator) meets along the way.
One huge difference is the geography of Hell. Dante climbs down from the surface of the Earth through the center of our planet and up to the other side and Mount Purgatory. Dante's trip is vertical.
The journey in Lewis' book is flat. Hell is a flat, ever-expanding disk in which people build houses, fight and move further and further apart. The smoky wraiths from Hell seem to be rising on the bus tour, but are actually expanding to allow them to tour the edge of Heaven.
The book ends by underlining the underlying point of the Divine Comedy: Free Will. Lewis makes a good attempt at talking about how we can perceive predestination and free will and how both can be true though the lens of Time.
Both books are brilliant. The Great Divorce is something of a tribute. Lewis loved the Divine Comedy.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Head of Professor Dowell by Alexander Belyaev
Memoir from an Antroof Case by Mark Helprin
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire, #1 and
A Clash of Kings, #2 by George R.R. Martin
21: Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey
Blue at the Mizzen
The Commodore
The Hundred Days
The Nutmeg of Consolation
The Thirteen-Gun Salute
The Truelove
The Wine Dark Sea
The Yellow Admiral by Patrick O'Brian
Il Etait une Fois by Francoise Savigny--every year I re-read this French children's book just to practice reading French aloud without hesitating.
History, Philosophy, Psychology, Politics, Memoir
Bookshelf by Lydia Pyne -- one of several books interesting books in The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series. The book is a 100-page history of bookshelves from the Ancient world to what to call a "shelf" of ebooks. I have read several. Another I read this year is Silence by John Biguenet. It is a history of who has the privilege of silence and the place of silence in our world and past worlds: from First-Class Lounges in airports to monastic life.
My favorite so far in the series is Free Will by Mark Balaguer -- I re-read the book this year with my ESL Book Group. I love the way the book presents the issues around Free Will.
I am currently reading Paradox and Irony and Sarcasm. The series includes more than 30 books on Food, Artificial Intelligence, fMRI, Recycling, and Science Fiction to name a few. Check them out here.
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning and On Tyranny by Timothy -- I re-read both this year while waiting for the coup d'etat that ultimately failed because the former President is a coward. Here is what I wrote about these books four years ago.
Ally by Michael B. Oren -- This memoir by the Israeli Ambassador to the US during the first term of President Obama made me wish Romney had won in 2012. It would have made Trump impossible. I wrote about the book here.
The Art of War by Sun Tzu or Master Sun -- My first reading of this classic book of advice to warriors. It was fun. The second book we read for the World Conquest Book Club.
The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen -- Written in 1899, this book describes so much about the actual problems of living in a culture obsessed with money and power and with how to show off how successful and powerful we are.
Why Arendt Matters by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl -- I have read most of Hannah Arendt's major works, but had not read a book about her. This year I read an overview of her works before participating in the Virtual Reading Group at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. We finished The Promise of Politics in January 2021 and this week start on my favorite of Arendt's works The Human Condition.
The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols -- I loved the book. We read it for the ESL Book Discussion Group. The title explains premise of the book, but it is entertaining and sad. Here is part of my reaction to it: I am delighted reading The Death of Expertise. Chapter 3 is about the changes in higher education in the last half century and how these changes led to many people getting degrees that merely indicate sustained breathing with inflated grades. Chapter 4 is a detailed examination of how the internet makes us stupid. Tom Nichols says that accumulating random facts you don't understand on the internet and thinking you have done research is like saying you can swim when you simply get wet. In the same chapter, Nichols talks about the actress Gwyneth Paltrow recommending her legions of fans get their vaginas steamed instead of seeing a gynecologist. A gynecologist replied in a long, delightful rant that is in Chapter 4. It's worth the price of the book.
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli -- When I re-read The Prince this summer for the first meeting of the World Conquest Book Club, it was my 11th reading since 1980. I read a new translation and loved the discussion. I wrote about my 10th reading here.
White Fragility by Robin Diangelo -- My responses were "Amen!" and "Guilty!"
The Virus in the Age of Madness by Bernard Henri-Levy -- I have read several of Levy's books. In the faith section at the top is my favorite. This one is short and a timely of how crazy the world gets when the richest people are in danger.
Fascism and Democracy by George Orwell -- An Orwell essay published with a few other essays as a book. I picked it up in Paris. It was a good reminder of how bad things can get by a brilliant pessimist.
(((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump by Jonathan Weisman -- Trump unleashed a host of flying monkeys with his candidacy and election. Weisman lived through how bad it could get for a journalist.
Talking to Strangers by Malcom Gladwell -- We had a delightful discussion about the premise of the book and the critics of the book. ESL Book Discussion Group.
Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel's Classroom by Ariel Burger -- I read this book for the Writers in Residences series at F&M College. It was interesting to see Wiesel through the eyes of one of his students.
Tell Me Another One by Judith Newman -- This book was just fun. I wrote about it here.
Science
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. this year was my third reading of this wonderful book.
Sex At Dawn by Allyson Johns and Jonathan Davis -- Two species are closest to humans on a genetic and evolutionary basis: Bonobos and Chimpanzees. Bonobos are cooperative and have many ways of organizing their communities, but tend to matriarchies. Chimps are hierarchical, patriarchal and murderous. Linking this book to Sapiens, our species had a chance to be follow either and before agriculture we did. After wheat tamed us, not so much.
Universal Constants in Physics by Gilles Cohen-Tannougji -- This short book is about G, c, h, and k. It could be Sesame Street. But it is about the four constants in physics that are the limits of what we can comprehend on the grandest and smallest of scales.
G, the gravitational constant, allowed Newton to give physics a rational basis for describing the universe.
c, the speed of light, is the absolute number--the speed limit of the universe--that allowed Einstein to define Special Relativity. General Relativity considered G and c simultaneously.
k, Boltzman's constant, is the fundamental unit relating energy to temperature. It is the basis of thermodynamics and it predicts the existence of a quantum of information.
h, Planck's constant, marks the lower limit of what we can know at the atomic level. With k, h defines the limits of certainty.
I read this book every few years to remind me how beautiful science is.
Books on Faith
Evangelicals at the Crossroads: Will we pass the Trump test? by Michael Brown--The Worst book of 2020.Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs--a lovely meditation on what we can learn by reading authors no longer living. Jacobs ranges over three millennia of those departed. I loved the book.
Beyond the Binaries by Thomas L. Horrocks. This book advocates people talking together about abortion and not being absolutists in either direction. Horrocks is an Evangelical who seems to think Jesus meant all that stuff about caring for widows and orphans and detesting power and money. The book was an interesting tilt at one of America's biggest political windmills. I admire Horrocks. In the theocracy that most Evangelicals wish for, Franklin Graham would burn Horrocks as a heretic on the DC Mall.
The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy. -- When I began my Jewish journey after Charlottesville, Levy was one of the first writers to show me I really am a Jew. Jews themselves fight over who is a Jew. Gentiles, less so. Every white supremacist and Nazi in America hates me even if my mother is not Jewish. Levy showed me what an amazing tribe I am a part of.
I wrote this about my first reading of the book in 2018: The book explicitly on faith that moved me the most was The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy. This book looks at the history of the Jewish people and Israel through the lens of the Book of Jonah. Levy shows us Judaism and his view of the Jewish world by his interactions with “Nineveh” in the form of modern-day enemies of Jews and Israel. One modern Nineveh he visits is Lviv, Ukraine. I knew my trip last summer was to visit Holocaust sites would center on Auschwitz, but this book led me to pair Lviv with Auschwitz as two sad extremes of the Holocaust. Auschwitz is the most industrial site of slaughter, Lviv is the most personal. At Auschwitz, the Nazis built a place of extermination. In Lviv they simply allowed the local population to act out their own anti-Semitism. Lviv was the most personal of the sites of Holocaust slaughter. Neighbors killed neighbors and dumped their bodies in ditches. Levy went to Lviv to make peace with this site of unbridled hate. He seems to have succeeded. I did not. Ukraine tried to kill my grandparents. Ukraine remains a cauldron of anti-Semitism.
Overall, the book left me wondering about my identity as a Jew. The book helped me to decide that I could reconnect with the Jewish part of me in a positive and growing way, a process that began last spring and is still going on as the New Year begins.
The Question of God by Armond Nicholi, Jr. -- A book about a course at Harvard comparing the lives and beliefs of C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud. Lewis comes off looking a lot better than Freud. Since I knew nothing of Freud, I learned a lot from that part of the book. I have read a dozen biographies of Lewis and all of his books, so that part of the book was familiar, but good.
