A year in books

I was thinking about doing a gift guide but I don’t really have any opinions about gifting. I tend to think of it as really personal. There’s little things people love and little quirks they have. Last year my coworker who sits three feet from me every day gave me a pair of those Hot Hands handwarmers because I am chronically freezing (low blood pressure, iron deficiency, grew up in California). it was a funny little gesture but it also felt surprisingly intimate. You learn so much about someone else from sheer physical proximity. Anyway if you want a gift guide, Rayne Fisher-Quann did a really good and extensive one with a lot of thoughtful and creative suggestions and ideas.

Instead, I decided to do a books list since about 50% of what I write about here is contemporary fiction.1 This isn’t a “best books” list. It’s a list of books I loved and largely think are criminally underrated. This is my personal National Book Award longlist if you will.

• Central Places by Delia Cai (Ballantine). This was pitched to me as what would happen if Jenny Zhang wrote a Hallmark card and that is exactly what it is. It’s funny and tender and romantic, a Christmas rom com for discerning readers.

• Y/N: A Novel by Esther Yi (Astra). I’m obsessed with this book. Olivia Kan-Sperling wrote a beautiful essay about it in n+1 that says more than I could possibly say about it.

• Hangman by Maya Binyam (FSG). This book is incredibly harrowing with its themes of loss, displacement, and life after genocide, and it’s haunted my thoughts, especially in recent months. But it’s also savagely funny and weird and immersive and totally brilliant.

• Hanging Out by Sheila Liming (Melville House). I wrote about this one already here. It’s a manifesto for unstructured social time, a blueprint for girls with jobs that involve a lot of chitchat like me.

• Out of the Sugar Factory by Dorothee Elmiger (Two Lines Press, translated from the German by Megan Ewing). My friend Amanda told me I should read this because it was about being “obsessed with a man.” It’s also about the history of capitalism and writing and reflexivity and is smart and beautifully written.

• The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut (Penguin Press). This is by a man! It may sound strange to call Labatut underrated but I don’t think this book got the reception it deserved, especially given its weird incidental overlap with “Oppenheimer,” the movie of the summer. The Cleveland Review of Books ran a really good essay that compares and contrasts them.

• I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel (Graywolf). I had a very professional work meeting with someone once who at the end was like, I have a book for you, and sent me a copy of this. It is also all about being *obsessed* with a man.

• The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein (Verso). This came out in May but was relevant then and is even more relevant now. It’s about models of weapons dealing, surveillance, permanent incarceration, and ethnic cleansing, and how they are trialed in Palestine before being exported around the world.

• The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (Other Press, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud). This isn’t new but it’s new to the US. Quite simply one of the greatest books of our time.

• Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü (Transit Books, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely). This is like if The Bell Jar was set in 1960’s Istanbul, sex, electroshock therapy, cultural revolution. As an added plus, it’s less than 100 pages and will fit in a tiny purse.

If there are other books you loved this year that should have been on all the year end lists, please let me know! This is obviously not a gift guide but on the bright side you can gift all these books if they remind you of your friends and loved ones. I’ll leave you with this passage from The Hundreds by Lauren Berlant (rip) and Kathleen Stewart. I heard Berlant read it at a launch for the book in 2019 and whenever I think about giving gifts, this is also what I think of. Friendship is a beautiful thing.