Unranked: The 65 books I read or re-read (to completion) in 2020
I felt weird about the idea of ranking the books I read this year. Some of them are old. Some are new. Some I chose to read. Others I had to for classes. Some I read for the first time. Some I was re-reading or ended up reading twice this year. There are only a couple books here that I don’t recommend, so I didn’t want to be mean. (I guess I’m somewhat easy to please?)
This list does not include the many books I only read one or two chapters, stories, essays, or poems from. It doesn’t include the handful of books I intended to read to completion but gave up on 1/3 or 1/2 of the way through (again, not trying to be mean). It does include a couple plays and screenplays (and the realizations that I don’t read enough plays and that screenplays can make for compelling reading were big ones in my reading life this year). I will confess: a few of the essay collections here I did not read absolutely 100% of but more like 80–95%.
I’m probably forgetting some books. This was really hard to do, and it makes me realize I need to keep better track in 2021 and try to always take at least a few notes per book. Adding that to the resolution pile.
I’m *starring* some of the works that immediately felt most influential and relevant to me as a writer. These are works which I love and feel jealous of; want to steal from and emulate; have tried to break down the structure of or plan to study at the chapter, paragraph, and sentence level; or feel no choice but to incorporate their ideas into my own work.
A major thank you goes out to Kate Zambreno, my professor at Columbia whose new book Drifts is definitely in my top 5 of 2020. She prescribed quite a few of the books on this list and got me into Hervé Guibert (French, gay writer who died in ’90s from AIDS). He’s quickly become one of my favorite writers; I now recommend him to everyone.
Sorry (not sorry?) if this makes you feel illiterate. Everyone can and should read more. Not reading—or reading only super corny, careerist stuff with a self-helpy twist—is very 2010s!
Happy for you if this makes you feel smarter than me. I’m aware that many of these are pretty basic MFA reads!
So now…. without further ado…. the list, anti-alphabetically to represent those end-of-the-alphabet folks like me.
(Stupid question, because I haven’t posted here in years, but do we comment on Mediums? If so, leave notes below, and I can respond with more specific info on each one. Maybe next year I’ll get it together to write about what I’m reading as I go and start to do more blurbs and reviews.)
Kate Zambreno
*Drifts
Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
David Wojnarowicz
*Close to the Knives
Anna Wiener
Uncanny Valley
Frank B. Wilderson III
*Afropessimism
Edmund White
Forgetting Elena
Wendy Walters
Multiple/Divide
Robert Walser
The Walk
Yūko Tsushima
*Territory of Light
W. G. Sebald
Rings of Saturn
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Carmilla
Claudia Rankine
Just Us
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
Citizen
David Rabe
Streamers
Darryl Pinckney
Busted in New York
Cathy Park Hong
Dance Dance Revolution
Jordan Peele
Get Out
Ursula Andkjær Olsen
Third-Millennium Heart
Otessa Moshfegh
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Eileen
Toni Morrison
*Playing in the Dark
Jay McInerney
*Bright Lights, Big City
Anthony Minghella
Talented Mr. Ripley (screenplay)
Janet Malcolm
*Forty-one False Starts
Carmen Maria Machado
In the Dream House
Ling Ma
*Severance
Kiese Laymon
Heavy
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
Austin Kleon
Steal Like an Artist (lol)
Raven Leilani
*Luster
Nathalie Léger
*The White Dress
Chris Kraus
Summer of Hate
Anne Kawala
Screwball
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Gloria
Adrienne Kennedy
*Funnyhouse of a Negro
Jeremy O. Harris
Slave Play
Daddy
water sports; or insignificant white boys
Elizabeth Hardwick
Sleepless Nights
Hervé Guibert
*To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life
*Ghost Image
*Gangsters
Crazy for Vicent
Garth Greenwell
*Cleanness
Heike Gessler
*Seasonal Associate
Anne Ernaux
The Years
Andrew Durbin
Skyland
Joan Didion
The White Album
Lydia Davis
*The End of the Story
Susan Choi
Trust Exercise
Truman Capote
Answered Prayers
Sophie Calle
Exquisite Pain
Christian Bök
Crystallography
Eula Biss
On Immunity
Notes from No Man’s Land
Thomas Bernhard
Woodcutters
Aase Berg
Hackers
Paul Bass + Douglas R. Rae
*Murder in the Model City
Elif Batuman
The Idiot
Roland Barthes
Mourning Diaries
Camera Lucida
James Baldwin
Notes of a Native Son
Go Tell It on a Mountain
Giovanni’s Room
