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* Actually, 11 books. No wait, 12 books.
** Not including anything Tolkien related, because the would be unfair.
*** Read for the first time, no rereads.
1. North Woods by Daniel Mason
The book exceeds the hype. The prose is gorgeous - lyrical and toothsome. Within the first few pages, I was deliriously happy about how the author was describing both the physical landscape and the one of human emotion. The book focuses on a single location in western Massachusetts, telling a story of place through the voices of the people and creatures who live or pass through there, including two lovers feeling the repressive Puritan colony, a soldier and his two daughters who plant and raise apple trees, a two horny beetles doing what nature intended, a painter longing for love, a family torn apart by mental illness, and even spores brought in by the wind. The interplay between the landscape of the woods, the people living there, and the ghosts of everything that has gone before, highlight the drama of the world around us, even if we can only catch glimpses of it, with only slivers of true understanding. When I think about one particular part of the story, I still tear up. If you like historical fiction books about New England, ghosts, apples, environmentalism, and landscape and memory, I recommend this book.
2. Midnight in the Century by Victor Serge
It is strange to call a book focused a town of captive political prisoners internally exiled to a remote Russian village during Stalin’s rule as a hopeful book, yet Serge is telling us that in the greatest darkness, a pinprick of hope shines brightest. The story’s point of view shifts from individual to individual, giving us their internal truths and lives, as they exist in an overwhelmingly brutal political system. The best parts, however, are the conversations. Serge’s characters talk constantly about their ideological beliefs; no, they don’t talk - they argue, they declaim, they pontificate, they have Socratic dialogues, they banter - and it is never sterile or dull, it is humanity itself. Love, wonder, idealism, resistance all may be thwarted or destroyed singularly, but can never be stamped out entirely. People who enjoy political literature, anarchist philosophy, and European history from the first half of the 20th century may enjoy this book.
3. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Yes, yes, I had never read this book before. The error has been corrected. What can I write about this masterpiece that has not already been written? Only its effect on me, as an individual reader. I read this book while commuting on the train and I could only go a few pages at a time, sometimes only a few passages, before I had to stop and breathe. I felt that I was being filtered through the text. I became hyper-aware of my own stream of consciousness and the absurdity of trying to engage with this level of art while tired or exhausted, struggling in a crowd of people, on a vehicle galumphing along uneven tracks. I kept thinking about the author herself, how her life turned out, and about the cost it takes to write, and the cost not to write. And I thought about my own “wedge-shaped core of darkness” - that place where everything that I would call ‘me’ disappears and I can become truly myself. Everyone should at least try to read this book.
4. The King Must Die by Mary Renault
Earlier this year, I got into a bit of a snit about some of the retellings of Greek myths that clog bookshelves and review pages and booktok. In fact, it was more than a snit - it was a full-on panty-twisting petulance. One of my problems is that the plethora of Greek-myth inspired dreck spring mostly from someone’s vague ideas of what the myths are, not from any actual knowledge of the text. Mary Renault is one of the antidotes to this phenomenon. She understands that if the past is a foreign country, then fiction set in the past requires us to travel there, not the other way around. She puts forward a strange and sometimes grotesque setting for the myth that many of us know, Theseus and the Minotaur. The modern voices that plague these types or retellings do not speak here. Theseus is a flawed hero - but his flaws change whether you look through the eyes of his world or ours. Where I expected to root for him, I didn’t, and where I expected to hate him, I understood. This a story about power, patriarchy, religion, force, and the true nature of leadership. After reading this book, I walk around with the thought that perhaps sacrificing our leaders to a hungry god or goddess might be a better test of leadership than whatever we have going on right now. If you like retellings of myth, historical fiction, or speculative fiction concerning religion and power, then you would like this book.
5. Threads that Bind/Hearts that Cut by Kiki Hatzopoulou
Full disclosure, this is actually a duology, but the story needs both books to be complete. Kiki Hatzopoulou (a Greek writer) uses elements from the Greek myths (and other culture’s myths), to tell a vibrant, new story, about a world that is falling apart in the most interesting ways. In this world, there are people who are descended from mythological entities, like fates, muses, and furies, walking through the streets, shaping society, but mostly trying to get by every day. The main character, a descendant of the Moirai (the fates), can see the threads that connect people to each other and the place they are from. She uses this skill to work as a detective and ends up investigating a series of supernatural crime in order to save her growing city and her own family. If you like young adult novels with inventive dystopian societies, Greek myths, or plucky heroines, check these books out.
6. War and the Iliad by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff
I often joke that I am never not reading the Iliad. It’s truly amazing how multiple times I year, I end up reading books that are based on the Iliad, which then means that I go back to the source text (Lattimore translation, thank you very much). This book is actually two essays from the middle of century discussing the Iliad. The first, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force is written by Simone Weil in 1939 and published in 1940. The second essay is Rachel Bespaloff’s On the Iliad, written between 1939 and 1942, and published in 1943. The essays, written within a year of each other share other remarkable similarities - both are written by women, both in French, both who have Jewish roots, both in response to the circumstances of World War II and the Third Reich, and both looking at the Iliad as a meditation on the use of force and its effect. Weil argues that the central figure of the Iliad isn’t one of the characters, but is Force itself, and that anyone who uses Force is ultimately conquered by it, everyone is ultimately victimized. Bespaloff instead focuses on Hektor as a resistance-hero who must use force to save what is worth saving. Bespaloff, however, does analyze the scene between Priam and Achilles to illustrate, as Weil also does, that Achilles is as much a victim of force as the men he kills. If you like thinking about ancient texts in modern contexts, these essays are well worth your time.
7. The Hurricane Wars by Thea Guanzon
Epic fantasy novel with a great enemies to lovers slow burn romance. Full disclosure: I read a version of this book before it was a book (iykyk) and I adored it then, so there is no way I wouldn’t adore it now. Thea Guanzon has created a phenomenal world inspired in equal parts by Philippine mythology and Star Wars. The political intrigue is top-notch, the emotions of the main characters are beautifully drawn, the magic system is fascinating, and the interactions between the main couple are electric, particularly the . . . fight scenes. (What did you think I was going to say? Yeah, yeah, those scenes are great too.) It’s the first part of a trilogy, the second book is out and high on my TBR, and I have no fear that it will be just as good, if not better. For romantasy fans, fans of cool world building, and fans of the Star Wars trilogy.
8. The Fallen Star by Claudia Gray
We’ve moved from a Star Wars-inspired novel to a full on Star Wars novel. I don’t care what people say, a media tie-in novel can most certainly make the top 10 books of the year. And this is no ordinary media-tie in novel. The Fallen Star is one of the final books of Phase One of Star Wars: The High Republic (a transmedia story telling tour de force set centuries before the events of the movies, showing the Republic as it expands through the galaxy and the Jedi at the height of the Order’s power, but also showing the beginning of what will lead to the destruction of both). Without spoiling too much, this book is about failure, failure on a personal level and on a galactic level. It ends in destruction. But it is also a book about what it means to be a Jedi - the sacrifices, the duties, and above all, the hope. If you like Star Wars, read the High Republic, and when you get to The Fallen Star - brace yourself.
9. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
This book is part of what I like to call “administrative fantasy.” Yes, there are elves and goblins and stuff that looks like magic, but mostly this is about the inner workings of imperial courts and the bureaucracy necessary to run a large empire. And it’s brilliant. The central character is a half-elven, half-goblin prince who is fourth in line for the imperial throne and basically forgotten by everyone, that is, until his father and three older brothers are suddenly killed in what appears to be a freak accident. The prince is suddenly elevated to emperor, despite having little to no exposure to the imperial court. While the outward struggle is him trying to navigate venomous court politics while solving the possible assassination of his family, the real conflict is his attempts to be an effective ruler without sacrificing his own ideals of kindness, fairness, and goodness. If you like ‘The Traitor Baru Cormorant, ‘A Memory Called Empire’ or ‘The Hands of the Emperor’, give this a try.
10. The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
Do you like monster movies (like Godzilla), dinosaur movies (like Jurassic Park), or kaiju movies (like Pacific Rim)? Do you like hilarious stories about ordinary people getting caught up in ridiculous scientific projects? Do you like stories where the real enemy is corporations? Then you should read this bok. The plot starts when the main character loses his job and becomes a delivery driver in order to have some income during the COVID-19 shutdown. He jumps at the chance to take a mysterious job in Greenland with little to no understanding of what the job entails. Imagine his surprise when he learns that his new job is to travel to a parallel Earth to monitor the inhabitants, huge creatures called kaiju who survive because they have their own internal nuclear reactors. If you want to know more, read this book.
11. Last Days in Plaka by Henriette Lazaridis
Set in modern Athens, this story follows an unlikely friendship between a young Greek-American woman trying to find her artistic voice and connect with her roots and an older Greek woman living on the edge of poverty and telling tales about a happier past. The book is languidly paced, but the contradictions, hopes, and self-delusions of the two main characters draw you in immediately as you try and tease out who they are and what their future holds, either alone or together. I was entranced by the characters, how familiar they felt in some ways, but how uncomfortable they made me. I loved the descriptions of the modern Athens, taking us far from the tourist areas, into the neighborhoods with crumbling houses covered in graffiti. If you like books by Elena Ferrante and post-war European films, please give this book a chance.
** Not including anything Tolkien related, because the would be unfair.
*** Read for the first time, no rereads.
1. North Woods by Daniel Mason
The book exceeds the hype. The prose is gorgeous - lyrical and toothsome. Within the first few pages, I was deliriously happy about how the author was describing both the physical landscape and the one of human emotion. The book focuses on a single location in western Massachusetts, telling a story of place through the voices of the people and creatures who live or pass through there, including two lovers feeling the repressive Puritan colony, a soldier and his two daughters who plant and raise apple trees, a two horny beetles doing what nature intended, a painter longing for love, a family torn apart by mental illness, and even spores brought in by the wind. The interplay between the landscape of the woods, the people living there, and the ghosts of everything that has gone before, highlight the drama of the world around us, even if we can only catch glimpses of it, with only slivers of true understanding. When I think about one particular part of the story, I still tear up. If you like historical fiction books about New England, ghosts, apples, environmentalism, and landscape and memory, I recommend this book.
2. Midnight in the Century by Victor Serge
It is strange to call a book focused a town of captive political prisoners internally exiled to a remote Russian village during Stalin’s rule as a hopeful book, yet Serge is telling us that in the greatest darkness, a pinprick of hope shines brightest. The story’s point of view shifts from individual to individual, giving us their internal truths and lives, as they exist in an overwhelmingly brutal political system. The best parts, however, are the conversations. Serge’s characters talk constantly about their ideological beliefs; no, they don’t talk - they argue, they declaim, they pontificate, they have Socratic dialogues, they banter - and it is never sterile or dull, it is humanity itself. Love, wonder, idealism, resistance all may be thwarted or destroyed singularly, but can never be stamped out entirely. People who enjoy political literature, anarchist philosophy, and European history from the first half of the 20th century may enjoy this book.
3. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Yes, yes, I had never read this book before. The error has been corrected. What can I write about this masterpiece that has not already been written? Only its effect on me, as an individual reader. I read this book while commuting on the train and I could only go a few pages at a time, sometimes only a few passages, before I had to stop and breathe. I felt that I was being filtered through the text. I became hyper-aware of my own stream of consciousness and the absurdity of trying to engage with this level of art while tired or exhausted, struggling in a crowd of people, on a vehicle galumphing along uneven tracks. I kept thinking about the author herself, how her life turned out, and about the cost it takes to write, and the cost not to write. And I thought about my own “wedge-shaped core of darkness” - that place where everything that I would call ‘me’ disappears and I can become truly myself. Everyone should at least try to read this book.
4. The King Must Die by Mary Renault
Earlier this year, I got into a bit of a snit about some of the retellings of Greek myths that clog bookshelves and review pages and booktok. In fact, it was more than a snit - it was a full-on panty-twisting petulance. One of my problems is that the plethora of Greek-myth inspired dreck spring mostly from someone’s vague ideas of what the myths are, not from any actual knowledge of the text. Mary Renault is one of the antidotes to this phenomenon. She understands that if the past is a foreign country, then fiction set in the past requires us to travel there, not the other way around. She puts forward a strange and sometimes grotesque setting for the myth that many of us know, Theseus and the Minotaur. The modern voices that plague these types or retellings do not speak here. Theseus is a flawed hero - but his flaws change whether you look through the eyes of his world or ours. Where I expected to root for him, I didn’t, and where I expected to hate him, I understood. This a story about power, patriarchy, religion, force, and the true nature of leadership. After reading this book, I walk around with the thought that perhaps sacrificing our leaders to a hungry god or goddess might be a better test of leadership than whatever we have going on right now. If you like retellings of myth, historical fiction, or speculative fiction concerning religion and power, then you would like this book.
5. Threads that Bind/Hearts that Cut by Kiki Hatzopoulou
Full disclosure, this is actually a duology, but the story needs both books to be complete. Kiki Hatzopoulou (a Greek writer) uses elements from the Greek myths (and other culture’s myths), to tell a vibrant, new story, about a world that is falling apart in the most interesting ways. In this world, there are people who are descended from mythological entities, like fates, muses, and furies, walking through the streets, shaping society, but mostly trying to get by every day. The main character, a descendant of the Moirai (the fates), can see the threads that connect people to each other and the place they are from. She uses this skill to work as a detective and ends up investigating a series of supernatural crime in order to save her growing city and her own family. If you like young adult novels with inventive dystopian societies, Greek myths, or plucky heroines, check these books out.
6. War and the Iliad by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff
I often joke that I am never not reading the Iliad. It’s truly amazing how multiple times I year, I end up reading books that are based on the Iliad, which then means that I go back to the source text (Lattimore translation, thank you very much). This book is actually two essays from the middle of century discussing the Iliad. The first, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force is written by Simone Weil in 1939 and published in 1940. The second essay is Rachel Bespaloff’s On the Iliad, written between 1939 and 1942, and published in 1943. The essays, written within a year of each other share other remarkable similarities - both are written by women, both in French, both who have Jewish roots, both in response to the circumstances of World War II and the Third Reich, and both looking at the Iliad as a meditation on the use of force and its effect. Weil argues that the central figure of the Iliad isn’t one of the characters, but is Force itself, and that anyone who uses Force is ultimately conquered by it, everyone is ultimately victimized. Bespaloff instead focuses on Hektor as a resistance-hero who must use force to save what is worth saving. Bespaloff, however, does analyze the scene between Priam and Achilles to illustrate, as Weil also does, that Achilles is as much a victim of force as the men he kills. If you like thinking about ancient texts in modern contexts, these essays are well worth your time.
7. The Hurricane Wars by Thea Guanzon
Epic fantasy novel with a great enemies to lovers slow burn romance. Full disclosure: I read a version of this book before it was a book (iykyk) and I adored it then, so there is no way I wouldn’t adore it now. Thea Guanzon has created a phenomenal world inspired in equal parts by Philippine mythology and Star Wars. The political intrigue is top-notch, the emotions of the main characters are beautifully drawn, the magic system is fascinating, and the interactions between the main couple are electric, particularly the . . . fight scenes. (What did you think I was going to say? Yeah, yeah, those scenes are great too.) It’s the first part of a trilogy, the second book is out and high on my TBR, and I have no fear that it will be just as good, if not better. For romantasy fans, fans of cool world building, and fans of the Star Wars trilogy.
8. The Fallen Star by Claudia Gray
We’ve moved from a Star Wars-inspired novel to a full on Star Wars novel. I don’t care what people say, a media tie-in novel can most certainly make the top 10 books of the year. And this is no ordinary media-tie in novel. The Fallen Star is one of the final books of Phase One of Star Wars: The High Republic (a transmedia story telling tour de force set centuries before the events of the movies, showing the Republic as it expands through the galaxy and the Jedi at the height of the Order’s power, but also showing the beginning of what will lead to the destruction of both). Without spoiling too much, this book is about failure, failure on a personal level and on a galactic level. It ends in destruction. But it is also a book about what it means to be a Jedi - the sacrifices, the duties, and above all, the hope. If you like Star Wars, read the High Republic, and when you get to The Fallen Star - brace yourself.
9. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
This book is part of what I like to call “administrative fantasy.” Yes, there are elves and goblins and stuff that looks like magic, but mostly this is about the inner workings of imperial courts and the bureaucracy necessary to run a large empire. And it’s brilliant. The central character is a half-elven, half-goblin prince who is fourth in line for the imperial throne and basically forgotten by everyone, that is, until his father and three older brothers are suddenly killed in what appears to be a freak accident. The prince is suddenly elevated to emperor, despite having little to no exposure to the imperial court. While the outward struggle is him trying to navigate venomous court politics while solving the possible assassination of his family, the real conflict is his attempts to be an effective ruler without sacrificing his own ideals of kindness, fairness, and goodness. If you like ‘The Traitor Baru Cormorant, ‘A Memory Called Empire’ or ‘The Hands of the Emperor’, give this a try.
10. The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
Do you like monster movies (like Godzilla), dinosaur movies (like Jurassic Park), or kaiju movies (like Pacific Rim)? Do you like hilarious stories about ordinary people getting caught up in ridiculous scientific projects? Do you like stories where the real enemy is corporations? Then you should read this bok. The plot starts when the main character loses his job and becomes a delivery driver in order to have some income during the COVID-19 shutdown. He jumps at the chance to take a mysterious job in Greenland with little to no understanding of what the job entails. Imagine his surprise when he learns that his new job is to travel to a parallel Earth to monitor the inhabitants, huge creatures called kaiju who survive because they have their own internal nuclear reactors. If you want to know more, read this book.
11. Last Days in Plaka by Henriette Lazaridis
Set in modern Athens, this story follows an unlikely friendship between a young Greek-American woman trying to find her artistic voice and connect with her roots and an older Greek woman living on the edge of poverty and telling tales about a happier past. The book is languidly paced, but the contradictions, hopes, and self-delusions of the two main characters draw you in immediately as you try and tease out who they are and what their future holds, either alone or together. I was entranced by the characters, how familiar they felt in some ways, but how uncomfortable they made me. I loved the descriptions of the modern Athens, taking us far from the tourist areas, into the neighborhoods with crumbling houses covered in graffiti. If you like books by Elena Ferrante and post-war European films, please give this book a chance.
