After a very (very) long hiatus, I’m back blogging on Percival Henry, this time to sum up my year in reading. After a few years of feeling I haven’t read as much as I should, this year I deliberately tracked what I read and pushed myself to complete more books. And while the 18 I read still isn’t all that impressive a total, it’s an improvement over last year. As you’ll discover, I’m not particularly strategic about what books I acquire, and I’m willing to take chances on a book based on the author’s reputation, or the jacket design or because it is cheap. I have huge stacks of unread books, some which I’ve lugged from city to city (or country to country) for decades, so part of my project is whittling away the unread books in my life. When possible, the cover images below are from the edition I read.

Here the are the books, in the order I read them, with a brief review.

1, The Scavengers Guide to Haute Cuisine, by Steven Rinella (2006)

I read this in January, as part of my research for a feature I wrote for Quartz about Rinella, host of the Netflix series Meateater, which you can read here. Rinella is a big personality and a talented writer and both come across in this book, a light-hearted odyssey describing his attempts to hunt, fish, and gather all the ingredients for a 45-course feast. As I mentioned in my article, while it was obvious that Rinella is a much better hunter than I am, it was unsettling to discover he is probably a better writer, too.

2, Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance (2016)

I picked this up last year at our local library’s annual used book sale, in part because it got a lot of attention after Trump’s election and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. Vance is his most effective as guide to the the pathologies of multi-generational rural white poverty and the forces that sustain it, although it doesn’t do much to explain Trump’s election, as some have claimed and which subsequent scholarship has refuted. He’s less effective at weaving a narrative, and his weaknesses as a untrained writer are often apparent.

3, The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Isihigiro (2015)

I read Ishigiro’s The Remains of the Day years ago and loved it, so when he won the Nobel Prize in 2017 I thought I would try him again. I picked up a used copy of The Buried Giant at the Strand bookstore knowing nothing more about about than the dust jacket but the idea of turning the tropes of a fantasy novel into literary fiction intrigued me. The premise—a quest to slay a dragon set in Arthurian England amidst warring Celts and Saxons—has lots of promise. Ultimately, though, it was a disappointment. The book is really an extended allegory about memory and loss, and its characters are never fully realized but instead serve mainly to stretch out the story so Ishigiro can make his thematic points.

4, The House that Ruth Built, by Robert Weintraub (2011)

Another book purchased for $2 at our local library sale. Nominally a book about Babe Ruth and the 1923 Yankees, it’s actually much more. It’s an account of the founding and early years of the Yankees; a profile of the incumbent baseball power in New York, the Giants, and their ferocious manager John McGraw; and a fun tour of the speakeasies and nightclubs of early 1920s New York City. More than a baseball book, it’s a cultural history and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it.

5, Sword and Citadel (Book of the New Sun parts 3 and 4), by Gene Wolfe (1981 and 1982)

Perhaps my proudest accomplishment in this year of reading was finishing Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun quadrilogy. Widely recognized as among the greatest works of science fiction (and I think justifiably), these books are intricately plotted, densely written, sophisticated in their ambition, complex in their themes, and absolutely absorbing. Broadly about the adventures of an apprentice of an executioner’s guild, the books take place in an unrecognizably distant future, on a earth that became a space-faring civilization before forgetting its achievements and descending into feudalism, with the occasional relics of science surfacing as magic. The series has a cult following that has spawned websites and even a podcast dedicated to unraveling them, and I read these books with a dictionary next to me to help decipher Wolfe’s archaic vocabulary. I recommend them wholeheartedly but they are not casual reading.

6, The Girl from Kathmandu, by Cam Simpson (2018)

One of my ambitions this year was to read the books of my friends and colleagues. I think I put off reading them out of an irrational jealousy of their accomplishments, but I have vowed to overcome my pettiness. I this case, I’m really glad I did because Cam, my former colleague from Bloomberg in London, wrote a magnificent book based on reporting he began when he was at the Chicago Tribune about the deaths of migrant workers in Iraq after the US invasion. The level of reporting on display here is breathtaking, and Cam’s almost anthropological examination of family life in rural Nepal is fascinating. Unfortunately the narrative doesn’t resolve itself with the satisfying resolution we hope for, but as Cam well knows, life can be more complicated than fiction.

7, The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber (1964)

Probably the worst book I read in 2020. Leiber has a big reputation in science fiction and fantasy, the book won a Hugo, and the cover looked really cool, so it seemed like a good bet it would be worth my time. Dear reader, it was not. This story of how a scattered assortment of humans react to a new planet showing up in earth’s orbit is painfully dated, often sexist, and borderline racist at points. The narrative bounces among various groups of characters, none of whom solidify into real people, and while the premise is promising, the story goes completely off the rails at the end when the aliens appear and engage in intra-species sex with one of our heroes. It’s worse than it sounds.

8, Truman, by David McCullough (1992)

I have been lugging this huge book around ever since I acquired it in the early 90s (I’m assuming it was a gift, but sadly I don’t recall from whom). I remember starting it when I was in my 20s but abandoning it early, since I had no patience for McCullough’s slow unwinding of Truman’s family history. But perhaps I just wasn’t ready for it; McCullough’s books are written for middle-age dads -—there’s a reason they always appear in the weeks before Father’s Day—and I am now the target demographic. It’s a great, fascinating book about a great fascinating man. Truman is perhaps our most accidental president. His life, in many ways, was a series of occasions of falling up and if it wasn’t for his stint in the Army during World War I —which stamped him as a leader and problem solver—he might never had left his family’s farm in rural Missouri. McCullough is really a master of this sort of writing. It’s an admiring biography without ever being hagiographic, and is awash with anecdotes and Truman’s own letters that enliven the story.

9, We were Eight Years in Power, by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017)

I bought this collection of essays to read “The Case for Reparations,” perhaps Coates’s most well-known work, as background for a project I edited for Quartz about How to do Reparations, but went on to read them all. The book flickers around the autobiographical, and through the introductory notes before the essays Coates charts his progression from a marginally employed blogger to one a leading public intellectual invited to the White House. The Obama presidency looms large in this book, as Coates seems to wrestle between fury at Obama’s unwillingness to really grapple with the evils of racism, and grudging respect for the man’s ability to operate in a white man’s world, in a way that is alien to Coates. Coates’s seething anger at injustice is never far below the surface, and it’s bracing, sometimes startling, to have the world’s cruelty explained so plainly.

10, Mr. Miracle, by Tom King and Mitch Gerads (2019)

I read a lot of comic books and graphic novels this year, but Mr. Miracle was the only one that felt novelistic in its scope and ambition. The book, which collects a 12-issue limited series, concerns itself with the bifurcated existence of Scott Free, an escape artist and occasional superhero, who has fled the horrors of his youth on the planet Apokolips to settle into middle-class existence in Los Angeles with his wife, the warrior Big Barda. The story draws heavily on a rich web of characters and stories created by comics legend Jack Kirby in the early 1970s, and writer Tom King has fun playing off the cosmic grandeur of Kirby’s Fourth World with the banal existence of raising a family in contemporary America. But there’s a lot more going in here as Free, the ultimate escape artist, wrestles with depression and suicide, and struggles to extricate himself from his brutal past and the shadow of his monstrous adoptive father, Darkseid. King and artist Mitch Gerads take full advantage of the visual medium to play with our perceptions, and we’re never quite sure how solid a grip Free has on reality. Mr. Miracle is a book that rewards a familiarity with the characters and their backstories, so it’s unclear to me how a new reader would take it all in, but I found it both entertaining and thought provoking.

11, Finders Keepers, by Stephen King (2016)

After decades spent snobbishly dismissing Stephen King, I’ve gradually come to respect and enjoy his books. This is the second in a trilogy of crime novels centered around Bill Hodges, a retired detective, but the real star is the villain, a creepy loser obsessed with the works of a Salinger-esque novelist. The book has a lot to say about authorship and fandom, territory King probably knows better than most, but it never feels didactic.

12, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King (2000)

I read this more-or-less at the same time as I read Finders Keepers, and it was fun to see King’s thought process at work. The autobiographical elements of this book were more appealing to me than the writing advice, in part because his story as a self-made writer is legitimately fascinating, and in part because his writing guidance is geared more toward aspiring novelist than jaded journalists. But I enjoyed it all.

13, Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather (1927)

Another book that I’ve carted around most of my adult life. The account of a French cleric’s molding of the Santa Fe diocese in the years after the Mexican-American war, it’s a lyrical portrait of faith, character, and most of all, landscape. There’s no real plot, but a series of vignettes that trace the lives of Bishop Latour and his faithful companion, Father Vailland, as they navigate the complex world of Native Americans, Spanish Mexicans, and the new Americans pouring into the territory. With spare, elegant writing Cather describes life on the vast frontier and a community that seems perched on the very edge of the known world.

14, Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke (1973)

The literary equivalent of comfort food. This was either the second or third time I’ve read this science fiction classic, which I bought for my son, but read on my own when he lost interest. In many ways it’s a perfect sci-fi story: an unknown vessel enters the solar system and a plucky band of astronauts is sent to investigate against a backdrop of political maneuvering back home. I remember loving it when I first read it as a teenager, and while it’s a bit dated (the casual sexism of the astronauts is ironically old fashioned) overall it holds up remarkably well. I think it’s no accident I read it in the weeks leading up to the presidential election when escapist nostalgia was very appealing.

15, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016)

The Underground Railroad got a lot of attention when it came out, and its marriage of the brutal realities of slavery and the fanciful creation of a literal railroad buried beneath the antebellum south offers a lot. Yet for me the book was never more than the sum of its parts. Whitehead’s depiction of life on a plantation was both horrifying and unfortunately familiar, and the book only really picks up when escaped slaves Cora and Caesar find themselves in South Carolina in a situation too good to be true. I wished Whitehead had more fully embraced the alternate history aspect of his story and investigated the origins of the railroad, but it feels like he shied away making that leap, not wanting to trivialize history by turning it into fantasy.

16, Gigged, by Sarah Kessler (2018)

Another book by a former colleague which I put off reading far too long. In this case, my procrastination did Sarah’s book a disservice, because it feels we’ve already passed moment she captures in her book, when the gig economy seemed new and different, and poised to upend the traditional arrangement between management and labor. Very few people today are excited about the potential of the gig economy, and at best it seems away for workers furloughed by the pandemic to scrape together extra money, and at worst another way for Silicon Valley to siphon money from the rest of us. Sarah does a great job of rounding up characters who represent different facets of the gig economy—an Uber driver who feels suckered, a housewife hacking out a living on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a rural social worker matching workers and with opportunities— and smartly observes that gig work isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition. By the time Sarah’s book came out in 2018, it was already pretty clear who the winners and losers of the gig economy, and perhaps no one should be surprised the one gig worker who flourishes in her book is the tech bro who was doing just fine before he left his full-time job.

17, Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand (2010)

Another volume picked up at the local library’s used book sale. I didn’t know a whole lot about it, other than it was by the author of Seabiscuit, it was about an Olympic distance runner, and the movie adaption (which I haven’t seen) was directed by Angelina Jolie. As perhaps might be expected from those clues, the book is a an stirring story about, you guessed it, someone overcoming some serious adversity. In this case, it’s Louis Zamperini, the misfit son of Italian immigrants who discovers a gift for distance running in the 1930s, races in at the Berlin Olympics, becomes a bombardier on a B-24 in World War II and becomes first a castaway, then a prisoner of war in Japan. The story, which oscillates between heroic, harrowing, and horrifying, is amazing and told 60 years later with a remarkable level of immediacy and detail that might raise the eyebrow of a more skeptical reader (or seasoned reporter). No matter how it came together, it was a riveting story to read and I learned a whole lot about the Pacific theater of World War II and probably more than I wanted to about the suffering endured by POWs.

18, Black Betty, by Walter Mosley (1994)

I think I’ve had this book since it was first published. I spent a summer as an intern at W.W. Norton & Co in 1992, right when Mosley was beginning to experience some success (if I recall correctly, he was still working in IT, not having had the breakthrough that would allow him to quit his day job). He had published two books by then, and I remember how excited we were when it was revealed that Bill Clinton was a fan. Black Betty is his fourth book, and continues the story of Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, an occasional amateur detective scuffling his way through a noirish Los Angeles in 1961. Mosley borrows heavily from Raymond Chandler, and like The Big Sleep, Black Betty features misunderstood dames, a hero struggling to stay afloat, and a hopelessly convoluted plot. The big difference, of course, is that Mosley’s hero is Black and so Rawlins has to navigate two worlds, that of black Angelenos, and of the whites who employ and exploit them. Rawlin’s world weariness gets a bit tedious, but despite its age and historic setting (26 and 59 years ago, respectively) the story and its concerns are remarkably contemporary.