Reads 2020

Each year since I began this blog (except 2019 when both personal reading and writing played second fiddle to full-time teaching and a trip), I’ve posted a list of my reading highlights.  Covid did and does offer lots of time for reading.  Here are the highlights, fiction first, as it insulated me somewhat from what sometimes seemed like my masochistic consumption of news and news analysis in all its forms.

Fiction

 

To my surprise, perusing the highlights roster, these books share a theme.  The characters manage trauma that manifests differently both in its nature and in its consequences.  How fascinating, that, in a year replete with crises, random novels would ask how human beings deal with unexpected challenges or, even more aptly, insidious life events that infiltrate bit by bit, and manifest suddenly to threaten the very soul of these proverbial frogs in boiling water.

 

Il pleuvait des oiseaux (And the Birds Rained Down) de Joceylne Saucier.  

Top fiction read, and it’s not even close.  Strange, maybe, because I first came across this work as a film.  Each managing his own unique trauma, three men have chosen to live a hermit life deep in the forest of northern Québec.  Their idyllic life is upended when two women, each with her own reality, interrupt their routine.  This film / book provides a unique insight into the impact of trauma in its different forms.  Even more significant for me, as I age, it shows that, whether or not they ever existed at all for people in their youth and maturity, joy, love, and fulfillment can not only exist for the first time in old age, they can surpass anything life might have offered before.  Check out the trailer in French here and in English here.  I saw the film, and just had to buy the book.

 

In the same vein, the next books are inspirational stories of survival in diverse situations, none of which the main character could anticipate.

·      A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute, a perennial favorite since I stumbled on it in high school, and which I purchased in Alice Springs itself during a visit to Australia just before Covid a year ago.  Jean, a young typist working in Malaya in the late 1930’s, emerges as a leader when the Japanese army takes a group of British women prisoner and sends them on a forced march across the country.  Patience—the story begins after the war, and flashes back as it moves forward.  Heads-up—the narrator’s life mirrors that of a few of the characters in Il pleuvait des oiseaux.

·      The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah and

·      My Abandonment by Peter Rock (check out the film version, Leave No Trace; trailer here), two stories of the effects of lifestyle choice on people in one’s bubble and the decisions those people are forced to make in the wake of those choices.  Very compelling both, if disturbing in parts.

·      A Heart in the Body in the World, by Deb Caletti, one of the best novels I’ve read.  This story tells a difficult and timely story within a sophisticated and effective structure. Best not to include any details at all, for fear of giving away anything that might detract from the reading experience.  I couldn’t put the book down.  I also read a few more of Caletti’s books:  Wild Roses and The Secrets She Keeps, both good reads but not in the same league as A Heart in the Body in the World.

 

For light(er) fare, you might enjoy

·      The Gown by Jennifer Robson, a story of one of the seamstresses who crafted Princess Elizabeth’s wedding gown (available on Hoopla);

·      The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn, a psychological thriller that will keep you turning the page.  Check out the trailer for the recently released film. 

·      La bonne de Chagall by Karen Olsen.  Based on the decisions of a woman who worked for the artist Chagall, this novel is written by a former French consultant for Regina Public Schools.

 

Non-Fiction

 

For those of you, like me, who have absorbed the distressing political reports along with the Covid bulletins, these reads might entice you.  They illuminated my understanding of issues in our world.  Ah-ha moments on every page.

·      Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent (2020), by Isabel Wilkerson, whose thesis is that racism is at the core of the polarization in the United States.  She explores this idea by comparing and contrasting race in India, Nazi Germany, and the United States, with astounding conclusions.  A startling statement at the end of her book presages the January 6 assault on the US Capitol.  She quotes Taylor Branch, a historian of the civil rights movement: “‘If people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?’” (p. 352).  For me, this book was a page-turner.

·      The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (2020), by Vincent Bevins.  I stumbled on an essay version of this book quite by accident while preparing a unit on the Cold War.  I ordered the book immediately.  If you’ve ever wondered about the extent of American involvement in the politics of other nations, this book will strip any illusions you may ever have had.  It left me horrified.  Bevins says that the story is for “people who want to know how violence and the war against communism intimately shaped our lives today.” (p. 3)

·      Shrewed:  A Wry and Closely Observed Look at the Lives of Women and Girls (2018) by Elizabeth Renzetti.  Funny and insightful, this is a book I could have used forty years ago.  It spoke to me in its irreverence and unsparing honesty.  “It’s in the chaos that we find ourselves,” Renzetti says (p. 143), and my senior head nods in agreement.

 

Happy reading.  I would enjoy any comments on any of these books, at any time, as well as suggestions to enhance my own 2021 reading life.