10. Stranger Faces (Namwali Serpell)
Namwali Serpell’s Stranger Faces wasn’t the kind of book that sent me pinwheeling off in a hundred different directions, excited to counter theses and research new avenues of thought. It wasn’t the kind of book that frustrated deeply-held assumptions and developed new critical pathways for me.
It was one of the purest personal joys of reading I had all year. Both to read it, because it is so full of delight and curiosity in the language, but also as an act of joyful reading itself.
A rough precis is that Serpell uses a handful of texts that focalize non-normative faces – from ephemera about Joseph Merrick to Hitchcock to emoji – as a way to theorize stranger faces. These are positioned against the "ideal face," which Serpell reads in ethical, aesthetic, and evolutionary traditions. In this juxtaposition, Serpell finds visual pleasure in the non-normative using the frame of racialization and disability.
I place it at the bottom of this list because I can't really speak to the arguments, I don't think, or at least not alone. Maybe in conversation I could, but this is not a conversation on its own. I read it for the pleasure of its tone, for the way it reads like an intimate seminar with a facilitator who cares, who wants to be engaged with. I read it because of how much it loves to read, and because I love to read, and I loved it for both the leaps it takes and the joy it radiates in taking them.
9. Pen Pal (Tiyo Attallah El-Saleh)
One of a handful of nonfiction audiobooks I listened to this year (including Oak Flat by Lauren Redniss and The Dead Are Arising by Les & Tamara Payne, both interesting books in their own rights) that helped me supplement some of my other reading. This collection of letters from Tiyo, an incarcerated abolitionist who formed an abolitionist organization in the 90s from behind bars, to (mostly, at least) Howard Zinn, is pretty engaging. Tiyo's analysis is sharp, his complaints quotidian in the heartbreaking way. And his voice is powerful, full of moments of pride and frustration and fierce love and occasional triumph.
The dude did some real organizing work over his life; not just as an abolitionist, but as a teacher who established a program to help prisoners get their GEDs. His documentation of that process is kind of invaluable; certainly not the only document that covers that ground, but unique in its content.
8. Disability Visibility (Alice Wong, ed.)
In the little black notebook with red pages that I catalogued the books I read in 2020, I wrote "Disability Visibility (Alice Wong) (unfinished)" after the first day I started reading it. I was convinced I wouldn't complete it; not because I wasn't interested or was turned off by it, but because there were so many things and something always falls away. I didn't even borrow it from work; I simply took it out with me on breaks, reading it in three or four five minute chunks a day. After about a week I struck through that (unfinished), because it was clear I was all in.
I don't have a ton to say about this collection of essays, honestly. Some essays opened my eyes, others had them shifted to the side. Some days I think that if I had a better background in disability justice I would find this quaint, other days that I would love it even more as a whole. I am no expert, though, and can only say that it impacted me both interpersonally and politically.
This year has, I would hope, reinforced to everyone the importance of mutual aid. This book helped me clarify the importance of disability justice alongside that. Networks of care are crucial, fragile things.
7. Black Sun (Rebecca Roanhorse)
When I blurbed this book for the store I work at, I wrote that "If Roanhorse keeps this level of lush worldbuilding, compelling character interactions, and strong narrative voice going through the rest of the trilogy, we might be looking at another Broken Earth Trilogy level of success." I stand by that: this book brings to mind Jemisin's epic in scale and scope, in delicate, serious interactions, in histories simmering just below the surface. It's fucking hardcore.
According to the jacket it is "inspired by the civilizations of the pre-Columbian Americas," it tells the story of what happens in a holy city when a Winter Solstice meets a total solar eclipse in a society where a dead God has come to rise again and take revenge on their oppressors.
I've talked a lot over the course of these two lists about the prose of the novels I'm writing about (and I'll be talking about it more to come!) because that tends to be what I primarily come to novels for. I'm not generally particularly interested in plot; characters have grown on me over the last half decade or so, but they're still secondary. I read most things similarly; I watch movies more for images and their juxtaposition than I do progress along a narrative, I make music for contrasting sounds, listen to it for the ways it presses on the body, moment to moment.
Sometimes, though, the prose doesn't have to be brutally moving; sometimes it's good, but not particularly notable in turns of phrase or sentence-by-sentence construction and deconstruction. Sometimes someone comes along and tells a really fucking cool story, with really deep characterization and interpersonal dynamics that evokes brilliant images and is twined together with really smart themes and ideas, and that rules.
6. The Butterfly Lampshade (Aimee Bender)
Way back in 2013 I read and wrote about Aimee Bender's The Color Master, a book that still lingers in the back of my brain even as I explicitly remember almost nothing about it. When I picked up The Butterfly Lampshade, I knew to expect a sort of low-stakes Magical Realism (having forgotten entirely about the Slipstream genre with which I was so preoccupied back when I reviewed her last book I read, befitting of the total irrelevance of that genre) and wonderful sentences. I wondered how that latter would fare in a novel - I've still yet to read The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake - and was excited to find out.
The Butterfly Lampshade is written almost in the style of a memoir. Our narrator, Francie, is a woman in her thirties who basically runs an eBay shop. She spends her time scouring garage sales and finding ways to zhuzh up items that are suffering not from uselessness, but only a little neglect and bad presentation. Outside of this, she hangs out with her cousin who she was raised with as a sister, erects a tent on her patio in which she can have memories, and occasionally visits her mother in the institution she has been in since Francie was a child.
The titular event references one of those memories which the novel revolves around: with her mother newly institutionalized, a young Francie is left with a babysitter until her aunt and uncle can adopt her. She develops a fascination with a lamp that has butterflies on it. Just before she goes to live with her new family, she sees that there is a butterfly that looks exactly like one of the patterns on the lamp, dead in a glass of water. She swallows it before the babysitter can see. There is a small pattern of this in her childhood: representations of simple things - a beetle, a butterfly, roses - become the presence of those things. Abstractions materialize, inconsequentially.
The novel is magical realist because it doesn't ask how this could be true or false; it simply is. It is good magical realism because something simply being does not preclude it from reflection, from inquiry, from interpretation.
We are talking about an Aimee Bender book, here, though. The what is way less important than the how. How she tells this story, the sentences themselves, are breathtaking.
I read this back to back with Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police, which was a nice double shot of that particular kind of mundane magic where the world is simply different, and the emphasis is only partially on that difference. Both are prose-first, with The Memory Police building a symphony out of fundamentally sound blocks and Lampshade luxuriating in fecundity. I recommend both of them, but there is a specific something to Lampshade that put it over the top, for me.
That something is a little hard to explain. I can only speak to it in very personal terms. The best I have been able to manage is: Aimee Bender writes like I dissociate. It's not, exactly, the way she represents interiority, or the way that the world bleeds between reality and surreality. It's not the point of view; Lampshade is written in first person, and in my worst dissociative episodes - which I've only learned to name in the last few years as being dissociation, but which certainly preceded being able to name myself as trans - I am in what you might call a close third; I've analogized it, to friends, as like being in one of those dreams where you are floating just behind yourself, watching yourself act, sitting where the camera might in a third person shooter. It's not, in other words, representation or identification, not mimesis or ethics. It's lyricism.
Aimee Bender writes the way I dissociate with words alone, the way that they balloon into short sentences, overfull. She writes the way sentences tumble over themselves, nonsensical but utterly coherent, on a rainy train ride home after a show. She writes like language has long been abolished, and all that is left of it is a love felt.
It is baffling to me that I read a novel whose prose I more admired this year.
5. Beyond Survival (Ejeris Dixon & Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Perez, eds.)
Beyond Survival is one of those books that would either be much higher or entirely off this list if I had read it later in the year, I think. Although that's hard to say, because reading it fleshed out so many discussions I've had over the course of 2020, and it's hard to imagine not having read it exactly when I did. It's the kind of book that I don't really believe came out in 2020; not because January was decades ago (I promise that's the only "time is weird! Covid!" joke I'll make here) but because it seems like it must have been around for a decade or more.
Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Perez bring together a bunch of voices who have been active in the transformative justice movement to tell stories and share skills.
There are some stinkers in this collection, of course. As someone who found Emergent Strategy mildly insulting, I didn't care for adrienne marie brown's weird opening salvo in her current crusade against cancel culture much at all. But looking back on the table of contents, I can't say that I remember any others sticking out.
I'd have to reread Kai Cheng Thom's essay "What to Do When You've Been Abusive" to have further thoughts on it, but it stands out, to me, as an example of what I really appreciated about this book when I read it in February. Beyond Survival is a book that takes the task of transformative justice to heart holistically, at least as far as I can tell. I'm sure there are ways it fails in its particulars that I'm unaware of - having been part of a failed community accountability process a decade ago doesn't exactly make me a practitioner, much less an expert - but I really needed something that didn't simply reiterate that we should be better to people to personally understand the real remit and possibility of TJ.
I think it's worth it, especially for those - like me, earlier this year - who have some vague idea of what it would be like to live in a world where we addressed the harm and abuse done without in the total absence of the carceral state, but have had trouble finding a good resource on what that might actually look like.
4. FINNA (Nino Cipri)
I had the opportunity to gush at Nino about how great FINNA is over on Spectology, so you can always give that a listen. The Quarantine Digital Book Tour was very much me stretching my critical legs in a semi-promotional capacity, so for most of them there are issues I have with the book in question that I would include in a review that I don't there. I don't believe that's the case for FINNA.
Maintaining friendships after a relationship ends has been really important to me, especially after I failed to do so with someone I suspect would have continued to add a lot of wisdom and lightness to my life if I hadn't been such an enormous piece of shit. FINNA is so good on the topic of what it takes for that maintenance to happen; up to and including the fact that beyond the work, sometimes it takes some wild shit to happen that you couldn't predict or even imagine. Like finally knowing yourself and coming out as trans after years of studious denial, or a wormhole opening up in the IKEA you work at and some carnivorous furniture and pirate retail zombie escapades. Similar things.
I think in that interview I talked with Nino, vaguely, about the final sequence. I'm going to spoil it here. At the end of the book, Jules has elected to stay behind and Ava is struggling through the return portal to her world, dragging an alternate universe Nouresh along. The wormhole is collapsing, and she can see all of her alternate universe selves failing. Some caught up by pursuers, others valiantly trying and getting smashed by the inexorable multiverse, others simply giving up and crying into the inevitable end. She pushes through. It's a corny moment, described, because you really do need to buy in to the characters. I did, and found it to be one of the more powerful visual metaphors for anxiety and self-doubt that I've ever read.
God, what a good gay book.
3. Mutual Aid (Dean Spade)
After reading the first book in Verso's Coronavirus Pamphlet Series - The Care Manifesto by The Care Collective - I had pretty low expectations for this. I've known Dean Spade's name for a while, but haven't really engaged with his work. I liked The Care Manifesto right up until I didn't (or, to be more specific, until I realized that what I took to be a solid analysis of neoliberalism started showing cracks and eventually chasms as the authors basically reinvent Keynesianism for the millionth time).
I think probably just by ranking you can guess that my expectations were incorrect.
Mutual Aid is a book that should be riven in half. It is a pamphlet, a slight 150 page thing that refuses to focus. There isn't (to my memory at least) a moment of it that doesn't want to engage people new to the concept of mutual aid, people actively engaged in affinity groups and other practices of non-hierarchical organizing, and people who are being exploited by the non-profit industrial complex. It doesn't (again, in my memory) doesn't forget to include the possibility of every potential reader, fucked up or on point. And it doesn't split, doesn't fall apart, doesn't say nothing while trying to say everything. That is one achievement, which is enough. For me, at least. Not, apparently, for Dean Spade.
Because this book doesn't stop at presenting a theory that takes into account the broadest possible variety of practitioners. It actively engages with the practice and its pitfalls. Mutual aid groups can be shot through with burnout-oriented tendencies. Spade provides tools of identification and preventative care to avoid that. There are long sections on recognizing and combating cooptation, with relevant examples. It's a synthesis of theory and practice, of practical and comprehensive.
I think at one point I described reading this at the end of the year, after reading Beyond Survival at the beginning, as a perfect palliative to reading Emergent Strategy the year before. It's maybe a category error on my part to have wanted genuine political theory out of brown's book that was clearly marked Self-Help on the back, just above the barcode. But between Spade's pamphlet and the Dixon/Piepzna-Samarasinha edited collection, I felt like I actually got those takes on facilitation, transformative justice, mutual aid, and burnout-preparedness that were vaguely alluded to and dealt with, by brown, mostly in breathing exercises and advice for potential non-profit gurus.
I don't want to end shitting on Emergent Strategy, but I also feel like I've said most of what I wanted to say here. I guess I'll just sort of reiterate what I feel like I've been saying, and what placing it at this point of the list is meant to mean: This is the highest nonfiction book on this list because it's a triumph. There are problems in it, of course, ways Spade could have been clearer or engaged more deeply with certain aspects of struggle. But I'll be goddamned if I didn't find this book both staggeringly impressive and incredibly useful, and I really, really highly recommend it.
2. How Much of These Hills Is Gold (C. Pam Zhang)
Zhang's debut novel was the last one I added to any of these lists. Partially because it was the last one I finished, because it might have been the only book of 2020 that took me months to read. I say "might" because it was a long year, and there were definitely a few months there (let's say around March, April, just, y'know, theoretically) where I didn't read anything at all, I don't think. I picked it up in late October, I believe, and didn't finish it until late January. It's a hard book, in both subject and style. It's definitely the most rewarding piece of fiction I read this year.
There is, in my mind at least, this critical cliché (or dogmatism) about a book that teaches you how to read it as you do. I cannot think of any concrete examples, but the names Nabokov and Pynchon ring around in the back of my mind when I say it; it's the kind of book that asks that you follow the rules of fiction in general, but also presents you with a subset of rules that it guides you into following. I have an enormous soft spot for this. I love reading. I love reading within reading. I love it largely because I love to learn to read, over and over again, whether books or financial systems or interpersonal dynamics or the signs of failure or the way bodies unconsciously act in public space under different ideological commitments.
There is something to be said, though, for a book that demands you meet it. That offers no space for you to catch up. That does not say "this is how you read me" but simply "read me." How Much of These Hills is Gold is, at least in my experience, that book.
In the year XX62, in the middle of a Gold Rush, two siblings are orphaned when their father dies. They need silver to properly bury his body, and one of them nearly murders a bank teller. They have to run; they are already marked by the color of their skin. Structurally, the book tells the story of their wandering attempts to bury their father, flashes back to an earlier childhood where they were being raised by both parents, and then forward again to them meeting when they are older and deciding what their futures hold. It's a curious thing: described right, you have an obvious Book of the Month contender on your hands.
But then you read it. And it gives you nothing.
No pretty frame narrative that guarantees a happy ending, no pithy tumblr-adjacent slang to ground you, no in media res to propel you back to. There is simply a dead father and the whole miserable, freeing weight of that. There are simply two children, ready to do what they think they must. There is simply the whole structure of an imperialist ("pioneer") nation, each of its edicts and temperaments, weighing down on these children who only have bits and pieces of understanding. And every sentence bends under that weight.
It gives you nothing because it refuses to offer anything less than everything.
I want to say that there isn't a single bad sentence in this book, but that's a fairly meaningless statement. I want, instead, to say that there isn't a sentence in this book that doesn't build, doesn't produce more potential outcomes and thematic resonances and maneuver feelings, but that's not something you can say honestly having read a book once. What I can do, honestly, is say this: I opened this book five times, at random, and typed out the first sentence I focused on. One I omitted, because if the only context you know is that these are preteen kids then it reads poorly; another I included all of the lead-up because I couldn't help myself:
"Ba's face is torn between fury and fear as the red jackal drags Lucy to the door."
"A man couldn't grow rich on coal, or use it to feed his eyes and imagination."
"The parts she keeps are her weapons."
"She washes in the stream and considers the finger still in her pocket. Look at it this way, and it again resembles an insect. A talon. A twig. Just to see, she drops it into the mud. A curl of dog shit."
If you're at all like me, you might read these and vaguely think "huh." and move on. If you're more like me, you read the first six words, or maybe the whole first sentence, and decided that this is a bad way to experience sentences - ripped of context, unexplained - and skipped further to find that explanation. Unfortunately you're reading something written by me, Bee. And all I can tell you is that I found those sentences at random, flipping through the book, and even the ones that I don't remember the exact context for bowl me over completely.
Because the only thing this book has to offer is everything. The whole of itself, in each sentence.
1. Mexican Gothic (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)
I've written a bit here and there about how much I love Mexican Gothic (I may have even said it out loud into a microphone once or twice), and I don't know that I have a ton to add (here, at least; I expect I will come back to it someday and be aghast at how little justice I've done it). It's fucking phenomenal. The ending is one of the strongest I've ever read, in image, execution, theme, deconstruction. I love that sapient scream of mushrooms, that particular manor-on-fire.
I don't know that I've ever pushed a book this hard in my life before (even if you're not counting the rando customers I recommended it to) and I don't know that a single person who read it off my recommendation didn't like it. Which is wild. I am terrible at recommending things! My tastes are weird!
It's that good, is what I'm saying.