Risikat's top reads: 2020

Reading for pleasure during a high-stakes election year is nearly impossible! However, despite work weeks that sometimes claimed nearly 100 percent of my waking hours, I happily worked my way through 18 books. Here are my top 8 picks for the year:

The Terrible, by Yrsa Daley-Ward
This memoir is best devoured in one sitting. It's familiar, halting, and a perfect read for when you want to feel something. 
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"You love that boy, do you? Do you? Granddad was shouting. "Hear me, and hear me well. Don't you ever. In this life. Push yourself up on a boy. Don't you ever write a note like that again...to anyone! You hear me?" Grandma was softer, but only a little. "If a boy sees you and likes you, he will tell you. Don't you ever. In this life. Approach men. It is not nice, it is not good, and they will not thank you for it. A man gets to see what he likes and asks for it. That's the way it goes."

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The Night Diary, by Veera Hiranandani
Read this if, like me, India's Partition wasn't covered in your education and you want a starting point to make sense of things. It is deliberate, velvety storytelling.

"At the end. the character always dies. We try to make the death worse every time. The worse the death, the funnier we find the story. We try to laugh quietly, which makes it even funnier. We would have never made up stories like this before. And we would've never found them funny. Amil says it's because nothing's real right now. I know what he means."

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The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump, by Andrew McCabe
This memoir dives deep into what happened immediately before and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. McCabe's insider perspective is at once upsetting and motivating. The stories alone are worth the price of admission. 

"All the way to sentencing. In 1997, he refused to admit any guilt for anything. "I am not in a church," he told the judge. I have no need to make a confession."

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That Mad Ache, by Franç​ois Sagan
If the French had reality television in the 1960's, the characters in this book would become fast favorites. This indulgent, opulent - and perhaps even a bit shameless piece of art is why I keep returning to Sagan. 

"All day long he kept on thinking. "This is crazy. Sooner or later, every woman goes through this - they all have babies, they all have money problems - that's just life. She's got to understand this. All it is is selfishness on her part. But then each time he looked at her again, saw that bright face, carefree and unreflective, he suddenly started feeling that all of this wasn't some shameful defect in her character but actually a deep and hidden animal power in her which deflected her from engagement with life's most natural flow. And he couldn't keep himself from feeling a curious kind of respect for the very thing that, only ten minutes earlier, he had found contemptible."

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What is Not Yours is Not Yours, by Helen Oyeyemi
I'm still not sure how I feel about contemporary gothic literature, but these short stories are intriguing. They were playful and mystical, if a bit unsettling. 

"MURDER? IMPOSSIBLE. Not Safiye. Lucy walked backward until she found a wall to stand behind her. She rested until she was able to walk to the train station, where she bought train tickets and a newspaper of which she read a single page as she waited for the train to come. She would go where the map in her purse told her to go, she would find Safiye, Safiye would explain and they would laugh. They'd have to leave the continent, of course. They might even have to earn their livings honestly like Safiye wanted, but please, please please please."

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Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, by Blaine Harden
I was in seventh grade the first time I heard about concentration camps in North Korea. Years later, the books and articles and podcast episodes about the atrocities are plentiful. How is it that we all know about these places and have for years, but a global intervention seems out of reach? I listened to this on audiobook and immediately wished I hadn't. Sobering, meticulous, and brief. 

"He had been trained by guards and teachers to believe that every time he was beaten, he deserved it - because of the treasonous blood he had inherited from his parents. The girl was no different. Shin thought her punishment was just and fair, and he never became angry with his teacher for killing her. He believed his classmates felt the same way."

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Trenton Makes, by Tadzio Koelb 
This is the first book I've read with a transgender protagonist. Set in 1946, it is gritty, startling, and excellent. 

"Art felt his family well up within him, wanting desperately to be spoken. Jacks was the only person he had seen since the argument who knew his father, who knew what it meant to be cowed by him and yet for some reason hopeful of the mystical and unknown blessing that was his approval. In that way, it occurred to him now, they were more like brothers, and for a moment he felt almost desperate to talk about the thing they shared, especially when Jacks said suddenly with an attempt at indifference that was as close as he ever came to guile, "So how's your pop? Is he bald like me yet?"

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Friday Black, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
I read these striking short stories in a bewildered haze. The writing is so good I couldn't read it all at once. This is a book that demands your full commitment. 

"When I realized I was faster and stronger, at first I didn't know what to do. I thought that maybe I was supposed to be on top now. I thought I was getting rewarded. And so I did what I wanted. Before the Flash, Carl was not nice to me. He liked to call me "nappy-headed bitch" or "dumb-ass cunt." He liked to make me cry back when we still had school. Then, when my mother left us, when I saw him, he said, "Guess your mother didn't want to be alive, knowing she made you." That, well, I know he regrets saying that. Because after the Flash, once I realized what I could do, I hunted him. He was the first person I ever killed. He was the first person I'd kill every day. The hurt I've pulled out of that boy could fill the universe twice over."

Which books topped your reading list in 2020?