Every Monday at 1:30 p.m. a group of my women friends and I used to meet for coffee, pre-pandemic. Our conversation for the next couple of hours ranged far and wide. Though there was always a lot of art and politics under discussion, book talk dominated. We are all readers who reviewed, loaned and borrowed books from each other and the library endlessly. Until a few of us were able to meet socially distanced this summer (below), I put books out on the bench by the front door for pickup. One of the group would pull into the driveway, hop out and grab my book and leave one of hers for me. My copy of "The Splendid and the Vile" by Erik Larson was read by so many of us it finally fell apart. But better the book than us.
I have spent the pandemic reading, when I wasn't in the garden. I wrote a lot of book reviews back in my newspaper days, which is when I got into the habit of keeping a list of everything I read during the year with mini descriptions/reviews. I knew I would need that info when we would compile a list of our favorite titles for a year-end roundup. I have lists of everything I've read going back more than fifteen years. Once a list maker, always a list maker.
When our coffee group was Zooming last Monday, we decided we should all compile our top ten titles from 2020. This is a dozen of my favorites, mostly non-fiction. Most of these are quick notes to myself rather than polished reviews. (I will cover garden books in another post.)
- Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. Set in Milwaukee, the book follows eight families struggling to pay rent to their landlords during the financial crisis of 2007–2008. One of my husband's all time most memorable reads. I started to get bogged down with all the names and stories near the end of the second section and took a bit of a break. But I am very glad I went back as the last two sections of the book were really critical to putting the stories in much broader political and social context and putting the author in the story as well. Superb book, if disturbing.
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A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists 1854-1967 by Rachel Cohen. I started this two different times in the years it’s been on my bookshelves. Not sure why I stopped other than the fact that it is book crammed full of information, stories, musings, reflections by the author and her subjects on art and literature. Beautiful writing and a brilliant concept. A slow read but endlessly satisfying at every turn. The book opens with the very young Henry James having his photo taken, along with his father, by Mathew Brady in NYC in 1854 and ends with Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell at the March on the Pentagon. In-between we meet Whitman, US Grant, Twain, Steichen, Steiglitz, Stein. Everyone to-ing and fro-ing in the most amazing dances across the years.
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Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars by Francesca Ward. A title I got from a favorite UK book blog which meant a special order. Mecklenberg Square in London between the wars was home to five radical female writers: mystery novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, poet Hilda Doolitte (more widely known as HD), classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power and Virginia Woolf who needs no introduction. Quirky take on a group who mostly did not know one another or live in the Square at the same time; but life in this bohemian neighborhood deeply affected them and helped them make their mark in society.
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The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby. (Published in different eras by two famous feminist presses: Virago and Persephone.) The title is from a verse by Vera Brittain. A young woman who is not married by age 30, being driven crazy by life with her parents, her rural community etc. She thinks she wants to be married but ends up being talked into helping a friend (ostensibly modeled after Brittain) who is involved in social work. Turns out this is what she was looking for all along: A challenge, a career, something worthwhile. She says no when she’s finally asked to marry. I was afraid it might go the other way. Holtby was writing in 1924, in the era after WWI, when marriage was essentially what women aspired to. The book’s conclusion is that "the thing that matters is to take your life into your own hands and live it, accepting responsibility for failure or success. The really fatal thing to do is to let other people make your choices for you, and then to blame them if your schemes should fail and they despise you for the failure." (I read this on the iPhone/Kindle, something I'd never done before, but I was desperate for books while the public library was closed.)
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The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline B. Cooney. A teenager, goofing at lunch with classmates in the cafeteria, looks at one of those missing children pix on a milk carton and realizes it is a photo of her as a little child. How could that be? Are her beloved parents kidnappers? A brilliant premise and a great read straight through. YA on my phone.
Whatever Happened to Janie. Turns out there are 6 books about Janie. This one continued as engaging and suspenseful as book one. But I felt it had an ending where you could stop reading and be satisfied. Started book three and stopped as it “jumped the shark” for me.
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The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow. (an actual book from the library when it allowed you to order books and do curbside pickup). Amy Heckerling’s deft reprogramming of Jane Austen’s novel “Emma” into the movie, “Clueless,” in the late 20th Century, spawned an entire Austen industry. Austen’s brief output continues to be mined for every genre of book and film; no doubt causing her to spin non-stop in her grave.
But among all the silliness, gems like Janice Hadlow’s novel, “The Other Bennet Sister,” do appear. Hadlow takes a clever look at Austen’s famed novel “Pride and Prejudice.” She notes that the two older girls, along with the two youngest daughters, are all neatly paired off in the story and their lives. Only the bookish, glasses-wearing, socially-inept middle child — Mary — remains at home: unloved, unappreciated and ignored.
Hadlow brilliantly imagines what direction Mary’s life might take. She creates a character who engages our interest and empathy as she grows, learns and slowly is transformed into a fully-rounded adult. Along the way we are immersed in 19th century life in the country and in London, learning about everything from manners to clothing to the English landscape and relations between the sexes. Since Mary is an avid reader, she and we are deeply ensconced in the books of the era, especially Wordworth’s poetry.
Hadlow never sets a foot wrong; the setting, behavior, conversation and denouement of the story all ring true to the era and to Austen. A vastly satisfying literary endeavor and a delight to read.
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And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain: The heartbreaking true story of a family torn apart by war by Elisabeth Asbrink, translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel. Otto Ullmann (above with his family) was 13 years old when his family sent him to Sweden from his home in Vienna. It was the eve of WWII and the Swedes only allowed a small group of Jewish children, including Otto, into the country on the condition that they convert to Christianity. Otto and his family assumed they would be reunited, but while he was away from home they wrote to him daily to maintain contact. A cache of 500 of these letters is the basis for this story that revolves around anti-semitism, what happens to families separated by war and politics and the hidden stories that emerge long after the fact.
The book also looks at Otto’s close friendship with Ingvar Kamprad, the son of the family who owned the farm where the teenage Jewish boy worked. Ingvar would grow up to found IKEA; but when he was friends with Otto, he was deeply involved with Swedish Nazi organizations, biking 60 miles by himself to attend party meetings. Ingvar’s greatest hero, however, was Per Engdahl, the face and voice of Swedish fascism at the time and who continued to be a key figure in the post-war international Nazi network as well.
In 2010 the author interviewed Ingvar Kamprad, questioning how he could be friends with a fascist knowing what happened to his friend Otto’s family as a consequence of that ideology. Ingvar told the author, “There was no conflicts for me. Per Engdahl was a great man, that I will maintain for as long as I live.”
Though the revelations about Ingvar Kamprad are shocking, Otto and his family are the main story here. Reading his parents’ and relatives’ letters to him, it is almost reminds one of letters to a child at sleep-away camp, asking Are you getting enough to eat, what are you doing, have you made any friends? Only a few of the letters are from the boy; the rest tell the story — between the lines — of what is happening to his family back in Vienna. The last ones come to him from Theresienstadt.
As the author asks: “Who can expect to be remembered? And who can remember everything? In reply, these five hundred letters . . . sing in chorus, harmonizing with themselves; a fugue that ends in murder.”
NOTE: This book was published in Swedish in 2011, the year after the author interviewed Ingvar Kamprad. It was not published in an English translation until 2020.
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Hamnet. A Novel of the Plague by Maggie O’Farrell. The title of this book gives a hint to its contents: Hamnet is the name of William Shakespeare’s only son, a boy who dies at a young age, and the story takes place during the plague years in England. Those mere facts don’t begin to suggest what an enthralling read it is. The kind that has you captured by the end of the first page, keeps you up late at night and won’t leave your mind or memory once you reach the end.
The first book I read this year was Bill Bryson’s slender volume about Shakespeare. I noted then that so little is known about the famed author and yet the best writers find so much to say that is of interest and import. O’Farrell offers us an opulent slice of Elizabethan life, richly embroidered with food and fashion, herbals and history, politics and pestilence; all of it knitted into a tale that feels so plausible you think she must have discovered long lost Shakespeare family documents.
In retrospect, the novel is like so much of Shakespeare’s own work: a story full of life and confusion with wise and witty repartee. There is unexpected love and passion and the deadly missed connection. All of it unfolding inexorably toward an end that neither the characters in the tale nor the reader wishes to reach. A book that will grow richer with each re-reading.
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The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore. Kind of like Susan Orlean’s “The Library Book” where tons of strange info is revealed in a tangled web. Who knew the writings of Margaret Sanger were the inspiration for this cartoon character as a feminist?
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Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains by Cassie Chambers. The female version of Hillbilly Elegy. The critical difference is that Cassie, a family lawyer, goes home to Kentucky after Wellesley, Harvard, Yale and other experiences to try to help the mountain communities cope with all their troubles.
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We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence by Becky Cooper. I got this based on the NYT review and it was well worth it. Back cover has blurbs from Ron Chernow and Patrick Keefe, two of my faves. This is very much like Keefe’s “Say Nothing.” A crime committed a long time ago with interviews conducted 40+ years later among a wide cast of characters for the book. It jumps around from the author’s thoughts, to bio sections about the victim and the main suspects. There is a fair amount about archeology especially that department at Harvard where the victim was a student. A great deal of the book looks at the treatment of women at Harvard and the archeology department in particular. Given that the author is writing as the “MeToo” movement is happening, this 50-year-old murder feels relevant. After ten years of research and writing by Cooper and other amateur sleuths, MA State Police open the case again and look at DNA evidence — which reveals the killer. A book I could not put down; constantly engaging and informative with a completely surprising ending. The only downside of this big book is the lack of an index. There is a huge section with sources for everything, but that does not make up for no index in a book with so many characters, places and events.
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The Boy in the Field by Margot Livesey. Three siblings find a seriously injured young man abandoned in a field on the way home from school. The children save his life with lifelong repercussions in theirs. Lovely characterization, scene setting and just all around satisfying.
