I read many good books this year, so my list is longer than usual. As in previous years, these are not all books published this year but are the books I read this year.
Fiction
I have (at least) two “best novels of the year.” Barbara Kingsolver’s stellar achievement in using the model of Dickens’ David Copperfield to depict the life of a boy in a poor Appalachian family in Demon Copperhead clarifies the overwhelming odds against the poor and working classes in that part of the nation. We have indeed demonized people like her main character.
Elif Shafak, a Turkish woman who lives in England, has long been one of my favorite writers. Her new book, There Are Rivers in the Sky, interweaves the ancient history of Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the birthplace of Western civilization, with a contemporary story in that region and one about contemporary uses and abuses of water in England. There are two principal English characters: a woman with a Turkish background who is a hydrologist and, in a section about the 19th century, a man from a desperately poor background who becomes the first modern-day westerner to read cuneiform, the ancient language of Mesopotamia (he’s based on a real person). There is also a section about a contemporary girl and her mother who are caught up in the so-called Islamic State’s persecution of the Yazidi people, who practice an ancient religion.
I love novels that tell about aspects of history that we don’t often hear about.
Janika Oza’s A History of Burning tells the story of Southeast Asian people who became merchants in Africa, especially about how Idi Amin brutally drove them out of Uganda in the 1970s. The family in this story came to East Africa in the first place because the great grandfather, whose family in India was starving, signed a document he couldn’t read presented by an Englishman who promised him a job. The Indian man was taken on a months-long journey in a small boat and forced to work on the Kenya railroad, a dangerous and exhausting project; many of the men who worked on it died. He finally ran away, met the woman he would marry and walked to Uganda.
Daughters of Shandong by Eve J. Chung is the story of a woman and her daughters from a landlord family who were left behind by her husband and mother-in-law when the Communists were taking power in China. After the 14-year-old eldest girl is severely beaten by cadres as a substitute for her father, the mother and daughters flee to find the family members who deserted them. Starving and struggling, they finally make it to Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s treatment of refugees made them wish they had stayed in north China.
Birnam Wood by Elizabeth Catton is a novel about a contemporary collective of young New Zealander ecologists who grow vegetables on land that they don’t own. The political dynamics are realistic. The world outside the collective doesn’t stay outside.
Mona Susan Power’s A Council of Dolls is a story about several generations of Indigenous American women whose lives were disrupted by being forced into a boarding school that tried to stamp out their culture.
The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel tells about a woman research scientist whose work is minimized by her male peers. She takes her two daughters with her on a fossil-hunting trip to Siberia. The daughters find the long-preserved corpse of a mammoth. The mother takes a DNA sample.
In The Women, Kristin Hannah writes about nurses who served amidst the carnage in the Vietnam War. She writes with empathy without endorsing the war.
Elizabeth Graver’s novel Kantika is the story of a Sephardic Jewish family from Turkey that moves to Spain because the Republican leftist government wants to restore Spain’s Jewish population that was expelled under Queen Isabella. But Franco soon rules and is not so welcoming.
Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is a story about small town in Ireland in 1985. A coal merchant with a wife and five daughters discovers that the convent in his town is mistreating pregnant young women who are staying there. But the convent runs the only good school his daughters could attend, so he must make a choice about whether to do anything.
Jodi Picoult’s By Any Other Name is a story that shifts from New York City to England in Shakespeare’s time, moving from a contemporary woman playwright who doesn’t get respect to Emilia Bassano, a Jewish woman who Picoult suggests wrote some of “Shakespeare’s” plays.
Whimsey
I mostly read serious books, but I do read some books just for fun.
This year, my most fun books were Claudia Gray’s Austen-themed mysteries: The Murder of Mr. Wickham; The Late Mrs. Willoughby; and The Perils of Lady Catherine de Bough.
Lesbian Fiction
My favorite lesbian novels this year are Cindy Rizzo’s books about a United States divided into blue and red countries: The Papercutter and The Border Crossing. The main characters are Jewish teens who manage to connect despite the prohibition against going into each other’s countries. Many Orthodox Jews had chosen to live in the God-Fearing States.
Dianna Hunter’s novel Clouded Waters is an ecological suspense novel set in Minnesota that is indeed about water. I found the characters very realistic.
Her Last Secret by Renee Bess is the story of a young Black lesbian journalist who travels to Paris in the 1930s to visit her lesbian aunt. It shows the Nazis taking over France. Some characters resist. The journalist falls in love with a Jewish woman.
Victory, Virus, Votes: 1917-1920, the fourth book in Ellen Levy’s Deborah and Miriam’s Boston Marriage Series about a Jewish lesbian couple in the early 20th Century, shows the impact of World War I and the flu pandemic on her characters.
Marianne K. Martin’s The Liberators of Willow Glen tells about women working in the defense industry during World War II. There’s a sensitive love story and a rescue of a young woman in troubled circumstances.
Sheree L. Greer’s Once and Future Lovers is a compilation of short stories, mostly about a young Black lesbian who takes care of her invalid grandmother and struggles in love relationships.
The Hum of Bees by Patricia Spencer has unusual protagonists: a lesbian bishop and a woman so traumatized she has become a recluse. The bishop (of an imaginary denomination) is being challenged because she has uncovered child abuse in her church.
Just Like That, a novel by Karin Kallmaker, is a clever take-off on Pride and Prejudice with lesbian characters.
I finally discovered the Jane Lawless mysteries of Ellen Hart, which are set in Minnesota. I find them addictive. There are many of them, starting with Hallowed Murder. They are very much lesbian novels. Both the main detective, restaurant owner Jane Lawless, and her extremely theatrical best friend Cordelia, the artistic director of a theater, are compelling lesbian characters. I particularly like it that romance generally takes a backseat, but homophobia is often a major subject.
Memoirs
I don’t generally read many memoirs but some really struck me this year.
In Solito, Javier Zamora, now a poet, recounts his journey without any relative from El Salvador to the US when he was nine. His parents had emigrated earlier, also outside the law. Fortunately, in his case the coyotes were relatively good people who really tried to get their passengers into the US, but the passage was nevertheless harrowing. I’m worried about what will happen to people like Zamora and his family, even though he’s a US citizen now.
Speaking of harrowing, Britney Griner’s memoir about her imprisonment in Russia, Coming Home, shows how terrible Putin’s prisons are. I hadn’t realized that Griner still needs protection: There are people in this country who harass her because they didn’t think a Black lesbian deserved to be rescued.
Layma H’s Hijab Butch Blues is the memoir of a religious Muslim lesbian. Because of the impossibility of being out in her native country, which sounds like Saudi Arabia or one of the Gulf States, she goes to the US to study and stays in New York to work because she finds other queer (her word) Muslims there. She develops her own version of Quran stories that are also Bible stories. I wonder whether she will have difficulty staying.
Poet Tahir Hamut Izgil’s Waiting to Be Arrested at Night tells what it was like being a Uighur in Xinxiang when the Chinese government suppressed the people’s culture. He and his family finally managed to emigrate to the US.
Sandra Gail Lambert’s My Withered Legs is composed of essays by a lesbian writer in her seventies who had polio as a child and has learned to cope brilliantly with life in a wheelchair. In this sequel to her book A Certain Loneliness, Lambert tells about falling in love in her sixties, dealing with aging, and kayaking with alligators.
In The Delilah Journal, lesbian playwright Carolyn Gage tells about her discovery late in life that she is autistic and reflects on the additional perception that autism can bring.
In When I was thirty-five years old, I became Black, singer Ruth Anne King writes about being raised for some years by her white maternal grandparents who told her she was not Black but that her birth had ruined their lives because they could not stay in the military town where they had been living. It took King a long time to get beyond those experiences.
Nonfiction
I knew I needed to learn more about Israel and Palestine. I have always had strong positive feelings about Israel because of the Holocaust.
My Promised Land by Ari Shavuot, a descendant of one of the founders of Israel, early member of the peace movement and liberal journalist, digs into Israel’s past. He became deeply disillusioned as he learned more about uprooting Palestinians. He now believes there should be a Palestinian right of return as well as a Jewish one. A scholarly Jewish friend told me this was the best book for me to learn about the history of Israel and the Palestinians.
Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama tells about Israel’s wall and road construction in the West Bank and how that has affected Palestinians, giving the example of how difficult it was for Palestinian rescue services and families to reach children after a school bus accident in which children were injured and died.
Longtime lesbian novelist, playwright and activist Sarah Schulman, a founder of Act Up and Lesbian Avengers, wrote an account of her work for justice in Israel, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, which was published in 2012. Schulman, a secular Jew, became concerned about Palestinians, traveled to Israel to meet with Palestinians, especially queers, and queer Israeli Jews. She worked to bring queer Palestinians to the United States to speak about boycotting goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which she saw as the nonviolent way of pressing Israel to conform with international law prohibiting the creation of settlements in occupied zones.
Nature
This year I read some particularly delightful books about nature.
Catherine Raven, an instructor at a Yellowstone learning center, wrote Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship. A woman who prefers to live alone as much as possible in a wild Montana area north of Yellowstone, Raven developed a friendship with a wild fox. She tried to treat him respectfully, as an equal, and was angry when people suggested he was a kind of pet.
In Eavesdropping on Animals, George Bumann, also an instructor at Yellowstone, has written about how to try to understand and even connect with what he names the more-than-human world of animals and birds. He urges us to be as attentive, unobtrusive and respectful as possible. We can even learn their language, much of which he says all creatures except us understand.
(For instance, most species can understand a warning cry.) He notes that binoculars often frighten off the creatures we are trying to watch. I’ve come to realize that myself, but I generally use them anyway.
Novelist Amy Tan learned to draw at age sixty-four to help her understand the birds in her backyard. The Backyard Bird Chronicles provides drawings and narratives about the actions of her avian neighbors. Both her writing and her art don’t just portray birds but show their actions and interactions.
Fiction
I have (at least) two “best novels of the year.” Barbara Kingsolver’s stellar achievement in using the model of Dickens’ David Copperfield to depict the life of a boy in a poor Appalachian family in Demon Copperhead clarifies the overwhelming odds against the poor and working classes in that part of the nation. We have indeed demonized people like her main character.
Elif Shafak, a Turkish woman who lives in England, has long been one of my favorite writers. Her new book, There Are Rivers in the Sky, interweaves the ancient history of Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the birthplace of Western civilization, with a contemporary story in that region and one about contemporary uses and abuses of water in England. There are two principal English characters: a woman with a Turkish background who is a hydrologist and, in a section about the 19th century, a man from a desperately poor background who becomes the first modern-day westerner to read cuneiform, the ancient language of Mesopotamia (he’s based on a real person). There is also a section about a contemporary girl and her mother who are caught up in the so-called Islamic State’s persecution of the Yazidi people, who practice an ancient religion.
I love novels that tell about aspects of history that we don’t often hear about.
Janika Oza’s A History of Burning tells the story of Southeast Asian people who became merchants in Africa, especially about how Idi Amin brutally drove them out of Uganda in the 1970s. The family in this story came to East Africa in the first place because the great grandfather, whose family in India was starving, signed a document he couldn’t read presented by an Englishman who promised him a job. The Indian man was taken on a months-long journey in a small boat and forced to work on the Kenya railroad, a dangerous and exhausting project; many of the men who worked on it died. He finally ran away, met the woman he would marry and walked to Uganda.
Daughters of Shandong by Eve J. Chung is the story of a woman and her daughters from a landlord family who were left behind by her husband and mother-in-law when the Communists were taking power in China. After the 14-year-old eldest girl is severely beaten by cadres as a substitute for her father, the mother and daughters flee to find the family members who deserted them. Starving and struggling, they finally make it to Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s treatment of refugees made them wish they had stayed in north China.
Birnam Wood by Elizabeth Catton is a novel about a contemporary collective of young New Zealander ecologists who grow vegetables on land that they don’t own. The political dynamics are realistic. The world outside the collective doesn’t stay outside.
Mona Susan Power’s A Council of Dolls is a story about several generations of Indigenous American women whose lives were disrupted by being forced into a boarding school that tried to stamp out their culture.
The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel tells about a woman research scientist whose work is minimized by her male peers. She takes her two daughters with her on a fossil-hunting trip to Siberia. The daughters find the long-preserved corpse of a mammoth. The mother takes a DNA sample.
In The Women, Kristin Hannah writes about nurses who served amidst the carnage in the Vietnam War. She writes with empathy without endorsing the war.
Elizabeth Graver’s novel Kantika is the story of a Sephardic Jewish family from Turkey that moves to Spain because the Republican leftist government wants to restore Spain’s Jewish population that was expelled under Queen Isabella. But Franco soon rules and is not so welcoming.
Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is a story about small town in Ireland in 1985. A coal merchant with a wife and five daughters discovers that the convent in his town is mistreating pregnant young women who are staying there. But the convent runs the only good school his daughters could attend, so he must make a choice about whether to do anything.
Jodi Picoult’s By Any Other Name is a story that shifts from New York City to England in Shakespeare’s time, moving from a contemporary woman playwright who doesn’t get respect to Emilia Bassano, a Jewish woman who Picoult suggests wrote some of “Shakespeare’s” plays.
Whimsey
I mostly read serious books, but I do read some books just for fun.
This year, my most fun books were Claudia Gray’s Austen-themed mysteries: The Murder of Mr. Wickham; The Late Mrs. Willoughby; and The Perils of Lady Catherine de Bough.
Lesbian Fiction
My favorite lesbian novels this year are Cindy Rizzo’s books about a United States divided into blue and red countries: The Papercutter and The Border Crossing. The main characters are Jewish teens who manage to connect despite the prohibition against going into each other’s countries. Many Orthodox Jews had chosen to live in the God-Fearing States.
Dianna Hunter’s novel Clouded Waters is an ecological suspense novel set in Minnesota that is indeed about water. I found the characters very realistic.
Her Last Secret by Renee Bess is the story of a young Black lesbian journalist who travels to Paris in the 1930s to visit her lesbian aunt. It shows the Nazis taking over France. Some characters resist. The journalist falls in love with a Jewish woman.
Victory, Virus, Votes: 1917-1920, the fourth book in Ellen Levy’s Deborah and Miriam’s Boston Marriage Series about a Jewish lesbian couple in the early 20th Century, shows the impact of World War I and the flu pandemic on her characters.
Marianne K. Martin’s The Liberators of Willow Glen tells about women working in the defense industry during World War II. There’s a sensitive love story and a rescue of a young woman in troubled circumstances.
Sheree L. Greer’s Once and Future Lovers is a compilation of short stories, mostly about a young Black lesbian who takes care of her invalid grandmother and struggles in love relationships.
The Hum of Bees by Patricia Spencer has unusual protagonists: a lesbian bishop and a woman so traumatized she has become a recluse. The bishop (of an imaginary denomination) is being challenged because she has uncovered child abuse in her church.
Just Like That, a novel by Karin Kallmaker, is a clever take-off on Pride and Prejudice with lesbian characters.
I finally discovered the Jane Lawless mysteries of Ellen Hart, which are set in Minnesota. I find them addictive. There are many of them, starting with Hallowed Murder. They are very much lesbian novels. Both the main detective, restaurant owner Jane Lawless, and her extremely theatrical best friend Cordelia, the artistic director of a theater, are compelling lesbian characters. I particularly like it that romance generally takes a backseat, but homophobia is often a major subject.
Memoirs
I don’t generally read many memoirs but some really struck me this year.
In Solito, Javier Zamora, now a poet, recounts his journey without any relative from El Salvador to the US when he was nine. His parents had emigrated earlier, also outside the law. Fortunately, in his case the coyotes were relatively good people who really tried to get their passengers into the US, but the passage was nevertheless harrowing. I’m worried about what will happen to people like Zamora and his family, even though he’s a US citizen now.
Speaking of harrowing, Britney Griner’s memoir about her imprisonment in Russia, Coming Home, shows how terrible Putin’s prisons are. I hadn’t realized that Griner still needs protection: There are people in this country who harass her because they didn’t think a Black lesbian deserved to be rescued.
Layma H’s Hijab Butch Blues is the memoir of a religious Muslim lesbian. Because of the impossibility of being out in her native country, which sounds like Saudi Arabia or one of the Gulf States, she goes to the US to study and stays in New York to work because she finds other queer (her word) Muslims there. She develops her own version of Quran stories that are also Bible stories. I wonder whether she will have difficulty staying.
Poet Tahir Hamut Izgil’s Waiting to Be Arrested at Night tells what it was like being a Uighur in Xinxiang when the Chinese government suppressed the people’s culture. He and his family finally managed to emigrate to the US.
Sandra Gail Lambert’s My Withered Legs is composed of essays by a lesbian writer in her seventies who had polio as a child and has learned to cope brilliantly with life in a wheelchair. In this sequel to her book A Certain Loneliness, Lambert tells about falling in love in her sixties, dealing with aging, and kayaking with alligators.
In The Delilah Journal, lesbian playwright Carolyn Gage tells about her discovery late in life that she is autistic and reflects on the additional perception that autism can bring.
In When I was thirty-five years old, I became Black, singer Ruth Anne King writes about being raised for some years by her white maternal grandparents who told her she was not Black but that her birth had ruined their lives because they could not stay in the military town where they had been living. It took King a long time to get beyond those experiences.
Nonfiction
I knew I needed to learn more about Israel and Palestine. I have always had strong positive feelings about Israel because of the Holocaust.
My Promised Land by Ari Shavuot, a descendant of one of the founders of Israel, early member of the peace movement and liberal journalist, digs into Israel’s past. He became deeply disillusioned as he learned more about uprooting Palestinians. He now believes there should be a Palestinian right of return as well as a Jewish one. A scholarly Jewish friend told me this was the best book for me to learn about the history of Israel and the Palestinians.
Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama tells about Israel’s wall and road construction in the West Bank and how that has affected Palestinians, giving the example of how difficult it was for Palestinian rescue services and families to reach children after a school bus accident in which children were injured and died.
Longtime lesbian novelist, playwright and activist Sarah Schulman, a founder of Act Up and Lesbian Avengers, wrote an account of her work for justice in Israel, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, which was published in 2012. Schulman, a secular Jew, became concerned about Palestinians, traveled to Israel to meet with Palestinians, especially queers, and queer Israeli Jews. She worked to bring queer Palestinians to the United States to speak about boycotting goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which she saw as the nonviolent way of pressing Israel to conform with international law prohibiting the creation of settlements in occupied zones.
Nature
This year I read some particularly delightful books about nature.
Catherine Raven, an instructor at a Yellowstone learning center, wrote Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship. A woman who prefers to live alone as much as possible in a wild Montana area north of Yellowstone, Raven developed a friendship with a wild fox. She tried to treat him respectfully, as an equal, and was angry when people suggested he was a kind of pet.
In Eavesdropping on Animals, George Bumann, also an instructor at Yellowstone, has written about how to try to understand and even connect with what he names the more-than-human world of animals and birds. He urges us to be as attentive, unobtrusive and respectful as possible. We can even learn their language, much of which he says all creatures except us understand.
(For instance, most species can understand a warning cry.) He notes that binoculars often frighten off the creatures we are trying to watch. I’ve come to realize that myself, but I generally use them anyway.
Novelist Amy Tan learned to draw at age sixty-four to help her understand the birds in her backyard. The Backyard Bird Chronicles provides drawings and narratives about the actions of her avian neighbors. Both her writing and her art don’t just portray birds but show their actions and interactions.
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