Laura M's Top 10: Hindsight Is 2020
2020 was such a strange, difficult year, and its tumultuous highs and lows are ingrained in our collective memory. So often books are an escape and a balm for whatever is happening in my life, and if I had to relive this year, Groundhog Day style, I would want these books by my side.
JANUARY
Perhaps a foreboding start to this list, but for all of its darkness, this book was actually surprisingly funny. We follow an old woman in a remote Polish village, who is both entirely unreliable and strangely endearing. The stark, isolated setting makes for the ideal winter read.
FEBRUARY
Ah, the before times. I can't think of a better ode than Writers & Lovers by Lily King. A hopeful, buoyant novel that explores the places where grief, creativity, and romance intersect. It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me swoon.
MARCH
This is a meditative, lush novel about writing and motherhood, but it's also a beautiful encapsulation of what it's like to untangle the web of your own thoughts. I was mesmerized by this book.
APRIL
Not only is this book incredibly relevant to everyone's sourdough craze during lockdown, but it's also the perfect escapist read. Robin Sloan explores the future of food and tech in this weird, rollicking look at human ingenuity. It repaired my faith in humanity when it was at its lowest.
MAY
Aimee Bender has blessed us all with her first novel since The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. At this point in 2020 we were all in limbo, unsure how long any of this would last and feeling the effects of being isolated for so long. This weird, quiet book is a beautiful compliment to that feeling - full of interiority and strangeness, the mundane and the fantastic. It made me see the beauty in the details.
JUNE
This bright burning star of a book mixes the harsh realities of Black life in America with magic in a dystopian-esque future. In spare, unflinching prose Onyebuchi explores a world that is frighteningly similar to our own and a future that is imminent if we don't act to create a better one.
JULY
This is classic Hiaasen but with a 2020 twist. We follow Angie Armstrong, a Florida wildlife wrangler who gets unwillingly caught in a web of hijinks involving several Burmese pythons, a privileged group of high society matrons, and even the President himself. If you need escapism that hits all the right satirical notes for our time, this is the book for you.
AUGUST
Who knows where August went? I for one don't remember it. In the Lake of the Woods is an older novel, but I'm so glad I discovered it this year. This is an eerie, meditative book about a man whose wife goes missing, and we spend the majority of the novel following his disjointed memories of their life together, trying to figure out where it all went wrong. There are so many fascinating layers to this book, and it's the perfect book to get lost in over and over again.
SEPTEMBER
If you read one book on this list, it should be this one. This book follows Wallace, the only Black student in his biochemistry grad program, over the course of one weekend as he navigates tense relationships within his friend group and the racial minefield of academia. Taylor's stunning prose is both expansive and intimate, and I could open it to any page and find a sentence that takes my breath away. You know those books that completely rearrange how you see the world? Yeah, that's this book. Read it. That's all I have to say.
OCTOBER
Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, but I wasn't feeling anything too dark and intense this year. Enter, Bunny. This book is what would happen if Mean Girls was a horror flick set in a creative writing program. Funny, biting, and weird. I loved it.
NOVEMBER & DECEMBER
Here we are, in the final slide into the end of the year. I wanted to end on one of those books that pulls you entirely into its own world, the kind of book that you can't put down because you are reluctant to abandon the characters and their story. Addie La Rue is the story of a young woman in the 18th century who makes a deal with the devil to live forever... but is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. This is V.E. Schwab's masterpiece, a story spanning centuries that touches on art, inspiration, and what it really means to be seen, loved, and remembered.