My 2020 Year in Reading
I love the Goodreads challenge thing (I don’t really hit the target, but that’s not the point). This year was more theory dense than entertaining, probably a consequence of honing in on the end of thesis. But my recommends for you all are as follows:
Random observations in lieu of actual reviews:
Read everything by Madeleine Miller (Circe, The Song of Achilles). Her books are so good it hurts.
In fact, as always, lean into the Trojan Cycle. Stephen Fry’s Troy is a good retelling. Anne Carson’s translations of the Oresteia is funny and clever and modern (picking up Aeschylus’ vengeful Agamemnon, Sophokles’ political Elektra, and Euripides’ comic Orestes — the move through these modes is *perfect*, described by one critic as the move from dawn to dusk via the harsh light of noon).
I made a conscious effort to read more black writing this year and that has been a very, very good decision.
The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf is Ambelin Kwaymullina’s first novel in a sci fi YA series and it is so imaginative and compelling. It shows you how Australian literature has a deep well of myth and magic from which to draw: one that makes the Dreaming as rich a tapestry as anything imagined in Greece.
Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth) and Bu Dois (The Souls of Black Folk) write sparkling prose on the colonial experience: Fanon’s rage tracing the formation of African national identity and Du Bois’ elegant reason leading the reader through the double bind of black identity in post-slavery America. Complement Du Bois with Jill Lepore’s political history of the USA, These Truths.
Did anything I read help me to understand our present political condition? No, I don’t think so. The closest may have been Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, but even that refers to what feels like a different age.
Arundhati Roy — writing for the Financial Times — described the pandemic as a portal to another world and I think that sense of hope for what we might leave behind is the best way to describe the books on this list that relate to the world as it is:
Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists warmed my cold pragmatic heart (though I would argue it’s less for ‘realists’ than he would like). It’s a good read for thinking about other ways for society to be. I love Martha Nussbaum in general, and Creating Capabilities, an older book, describes perhaps a better way of thinking about our measures of human rights and development around the world. I wouldn’t recommend Mouffe’s For A Left Populism except that it is a briefer account of her agonistic approach to politics, which I think is a nice way forward for those of us interested in such things (but she says it better elsewhere).
Those are books that focus on society, but what about the hope and development of the personal? I love Aristotelian virtue ethics as a model for how to be in the world, and Schwartz & Sharpe’s Practical Wisdom is a neat way of showing how phronesis is relevant to our life, work, and world today.
Julia Baird’s Phosphorescence is so pretty and sparkly and wonderful, so I really recommend it. It pairs nicely with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu in conversation in The Book of Joy — something I’ve been picking at for a few years and finally finished in 2020.
Finally, the fun part, what are the DO NOT READ books?
Before I criticise a book of his, I must say that Don Watson is a brilliant writer and I cannot recommend enough Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, his biography of Keating. But Death Sentence, like Weasel Words and Gobbledygook, is a repetitive and borderline unreadable catalogue of annoying managerial language. I agree with his thesis, but the execution is pretty sloppy which is surprising for such a gifted wordsmith. I had to slog through this (maybe that’s the point? That the language he is criticising is so deadened as to make you want to give up?). If you want to criticise managerialism, DM me.
Clare Land’s Decolonising Solidarity is one of a genre of decolonising books but I got part way in and thought ‘this reads like a white person’s PhD’. It turns out that is exactly what it is — it hasn’t been sufficiently re-written, in my humble opinion, for popular format so the language is a weird mixed of contrived and explicit academic prose, lacking in life and lightness. (It makes me sad that my own thesis is probably going to conform to the habits of academe than I would like, but you do as you must).
