Reading in 2020 : The year-end 'best of' list

2020 was/is a year unlike any year we have lived so far for the most of us. In terms of reading,  it was just another year for me though. The only thing I tried to do differently this year was to stay clear of any books or movies related to pandemics or epidemics. As if we don't have enough already.

Since I am not a fan of movies in the pandemic category it was easy not to break down and watch World War Z or Contagion. These would have helped me get an idea about how the U.S. government and CDC mutants in space suits will tackle a global pandemic. Hint:  It is nothing like in the movies. The U.S. government does not watch Hollywood movies as Hollywood is infested by you-know-who, so they had absolutely zero clue as to how to deal with a planet-wide pandemic.

I also gave up on a book half-way through, Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World by Steven Johnson. It was not solely because of the subject - the cholera epidemic of 1854. While it was interesting to read how this epidemic changed the urban geography of the city of London to what it is today, the narrative became repetitive and started straying in different directions. My attention, as usual, was faltering. I will attempt it again next year, once I get vaccinated for my ADHD.

Here are the books-worth-my-time I read in 2020 in no particular order. Only 3 out of the 8 listed below were published this year.

1. Paying tribute for keeping the U.S.A number one in 2020, I will start off with Mary L. Trump's portrait of her uncle, Donald Trump - Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man (2020.) While the book feels rushed and could have been put together better, it is an intelligent insider's personal view of her family and her uncle - the man / the President who instigated/is instigating many (failed) soft coups at the American democracy. Read it, if you want to smell out the next Donald Trump in the making before it happens.

2. Of the Civil Rights Movement leaders, I empathize more with Malcolm X than with Martin Luther King. MLK, I have always felt, was promoted because he was a 'cleaner' African-American leader more acceptable to the white majority of the country. This year started with Netflix's documentary series, Who Killed Malcom X where historian Abdur Rahman Muhammad traces and condenses his thirty year of investigation about Malcolm X's assassination into a six part series.  This was followed by Autobiography of Malcolm X:  As Told to Alex Haley (1965), which focuses on Malcolm X's evolution as a street hustler to the charismatic speaker and leader of the Civil Rights era. 

3. I am closing out the year with Pulitzer prize winning author Les Payne's 25+ year labor love exploring and researching the life of Malcolm X, the biography The Dead are Arising : The Life of Malcolm X (2020.) The work was completed by the author's daughter and fellow researcher, Tamara Payne, although the final manuscript was ready before Les Payne's passing. I may attempt a separate review sometime later combining all the Malcolm X books, as they and their eminent and intriguing subject rightfully deserve.

4. Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at Time (2012) by Jeff Speck is far removed from the current mental state of the world. It was written at a time when when American downtowns were a bustle of activity, restaurants had not shuttered due to Covid-19 and some people did walk on the streets. But if we were to learn from history and the book that I gave up half-way, Ghost Map, pandemics have the power to upset the status quo which includes the urban way of life among many other things. The effects of it will percolate down to urban planning and how people use spaces. At that time it will be good to have a primer of things we did right and the things we had designed wrong in the past. Speck's works will be worth referring to improve on things when we rebuild our cities and economies after this year's setback.

5. I choose "Asian" when I have to choose my race while filling out forms and applications. Yet I do not identify myself as Asian. Like the rest of the United States, when I think Asian it is the people of east-Asian descent who are Asian. But like Cathy Park Hong points out in her book of essays - Minor Feelings (2020), United States immigration has for centuries barred entry of Asians from the entire continent of Asia, starting from the Naturalization Act of 1790 which made sure that only 'free white persons of good character' where allowed to immigrate to the U.S. While not all of Park Hong's essays from the collection resonated with me, it helped me understand another PoV from a representative of the same racial minority that I am also part of.

6. The Giver (1993) was one of my kids' middle school reading projects that was recommended to me by my kid. YA fiction is not usually my cup of tea, but for sharing the experience of a book with someone I love, I gave it a try. For young readers 10-13 who are the book's primary audience, Lois Lowry's The Giver is thought-provoking, intense, disturbing and engaging at the same time. I am glad I read it, it is a perfect book to discuss with your tween or teen. I appreciate Lowry writing such a powerful book for young audience. It is an oft-banned book, so I am glad for our schools choosing it as reading material for kids at that right age when they need to understand the importance of compassion and altruism, to understand there are many shades and colors between black and white.

7. Voices from Chernobyl : The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich (2006) - I read this in Jan '20 while watching HBO's Chernobyl as a companion piece. The HBO show was 'inspired' by the book and had some excellent performances. The book is composed of verbatim interview material, the voices of common people who were at Chernobyl or thereabouts when the disaster struck. Chernobyl did make a big impression on my mind as a kid, when it had happened in 1986. Then it faded out till the aughts when I chanced upon a website by a girl who documented Chernobyl on a motor bike - Elena Filatova - an Ukranian photographer and biker. Then it went dormant again till HBO came out with the TV show in 2019. Like the title says, the book is an oral history, a much-needed documentation of one of the most suppressed disasters in human history. Don't go looking for a complex literary masterpiece. What it is a simple and stark portrait of a section of humanity, during a dark and senseless hour, in their own words. Kudos to Svetlana Alexievich!

8. How do kids living in affluent western societies get taken by radical Islamic ideologies? Asne Seierstad's documentation of two Somali-American teenage girls from Norway who go to wage jihad in the Middle East is one window to the mysterious realm of teenage and what goes on there, making the kids act like they do. While Two Sisters : A Father, His Daughter and Their Journey into the Syrian Jihad (2018) offers no easy answers, it is a book just like the Trump one, that can be used to pick up the warning signals.

My Best Books Lists from the past

• 2019 Best Books List
• 2018 Best Books
• 2010 Best
• 2009