Books of 2020: Best Non-Fiction

In a grand year for reading, my grandest books were non-fiction.  After briefly wrestling with whether I should confine myself to one or two recommendations, I have decided to share in the bounty I enjoyed so much.  Really, I just couldn't bring myself to choose.  I do end with my most engaging and memorable book of the year, but if I hadn't read that one this year, others would have easily earned that title.

Best Memoir*

Maybe you Should Talk to Someone; A Therapist, Her Therapist, and our Lives Revealed, Lori Gottlieb, 2019

As of mid-May, this was the best book I'd read this year.  Therapist Lori Gottliieb has written a most interesting book, weaving together her own story of needing and finding her own good therapist, and the stories of her patients (her term), focusing on four in particular.  A skilled writer, she has crafted a work that touches multiple genres *while creating its own.  She takes the reader on a ride, the joyous and sad parts equally moving.  She doesn't take herself too seriously, and parts of this book really made me laugh.  I appreciated the several surprises and turns in the stories and found myself savoring the book, turning to another book partway through to extend my time with this one.  That other book didn't pull me to reading nearly as much as this one.  As someone who has had several rounds of therapy, I appreciated the confessional peeks behind the curtain.  She's especially effective when revealing herself on both sides of the therapist-patient divide.  Maybe you Should Talk to Someone delighted and moved me deeply.

Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things; A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Coming Home, Amy Dickinson, 2017

Having enoyed Amy Dickinson as a panelist on NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me news quiz and
occasionally read her advice column, the idea of a book behind the advice column grabbed my attention.  This book had sat on my to-read list for a few years, however, before the pandemic hit.  At that last library book grab before they shut down, I focused on that list.  Still, it took me four months to get to this book.  Thank goodness the library doesn't want their materials back in any hurry at present.  

This wonderful book must also be described as a bait and switch.  The title implies that the author will focus on the advice column and show the reader the secret sauce.  Perhaps she reveals that indirectly, but a warning to other would-be readers: the advice column comes up vanishingly rarely in this memoir.  Dickinson advances a thesis about why she can give good advice: because her life has been anything but perfect.  Rather, she has survived through obstacles, crises, and her own mistakes.  She calls that survival the basis of a good advice column.  Instead of advice column inside scoop, the reader gets what the subtitle promises.  Dickinson and her siblings saw rocky patches in their childhood in small-town finger lakes New York.  She's terribly honest about decisions and actions she wishes she'd done differently in young adulthood (although her particular set of actions might differ from what that sentence may imply).  Her tiny hometown and her extended family's generational outsize influence there have played a big role in Dickinson's life and likewise take center stage here.  I found reading this book an intense experience - sometimes too intense.  I could read it during the day but not before bed sometimes because her real stresses come to the fore.  Dickinson writes clearly and engagingly, and I finished the book in large chunks outside.  The backyard lounge chair had to stand in for beach reading in a strange summer lacking a normal family vacation.

Best Personal Essay Collection

What's the difference between a memoir and a personal essay collection?  That may be in the eye of the beholder.  I want to say that the above two books stick closely to a theme and an arc, but that could also describe this collection.  In the below book, the chapters can stand on their own more easily than in the above two, so I'll use that to justify the category distinction.

At the Strangers' Gate, Adam Gopnik, 2018

When an author one has read for years here and there comes to town - in this case as part of a Moth Main Stage event - and tells a delightful story and is then waiting with no line at his book table after, one might go up and buy a book.  I'm glad I did that in 2018.  Gopnik had several books on his table in the lobby of Pittsburgh's Byham Theater.  I decided to ask him which one I should buy.  He picked up At the Strangers' Gate and said "people say this is my best book."  I didn't realize it was the book that was just published, the book that had a version of the story he'd told that night.

I really shouldn't go into all of this preamble.  I really should start with: this essay collection is sublime.  I have railed before about Barbara Kingsolver's self-consciously polished sentences.  Gopnik achieves something Kingsolver apparently cannot: un-self-consciously polished sentences.  Multiple sentences in this book stopped me dead in my tracks with their perfection.  Of course, gem-like sentences rule. The overall arc really matters, though, and Gopnik lays it out both systematically and meanderingly.  Or rather, when the reader detects meandering he is only failing to see the larger system the apparent diversion serves.  At the Stranger's Gate introduces Gopnik and his wife Martha Parker as a young Canadian couple arriving in a rough-around-the-edges megalopolis and traces the development of their bond with the city's places, people, and the higher ranks of its unique culture.  At the Stranger's Gate moved me with its romance and its nostalgia for a grittier New York that I encountered from nearby in New Jersey and Connecticut.  It also made me laugh.  Mostly, it made me appreciate the writer's craft - which Gopnik reduces to "choosing the right words and putting them in the right order" -  honed over decades.

Best History

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of how our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein, 2017

The Color of Law appeared on many people’s "get woke" reading lists in 2020 and for good reason.  Rothstein’s 2017 book encompasses ten years of research and writing on the sadly systematic and pervasive de jure segregation of America in the 20th century.  The polite fiction with which many Americans console themselves is that our segregated neighborhoods and municipalities all result from de facto segregation.  It just happens; like sorts with like.  Rothstein lays out in devastating detail (but with surprising efficiency and clarity) how our segregation is de jure, legally recognized and enforced.  Multiple factors contribute including the racist orientation of the Fair Housing Administration, whose loans built and populated the suburbs, restrictive covenants, the placement of public housing and school catchment boundaries, the passive allowance (or active participation) of police in white mob violence when intact, employed African American families attempted the "sin" of moving into a white neighborhood.  Rothstein tells the stories of these families and individuals to demonstrate the impacts of the hydra that has fought at every opportunity against African Americans specifically living near white people specifically.  It’s hard to face all of these facts.  I had to as a reader, and we must as a nation.  I’m grateful for the succinct summation Rothstein offers.

Best Book on Life 

Breath; the New Science of a Lost Art, James Nestor, 2020

Since I don't love buying or owning books, I don't always get my hands on runaway bestsellers, but James Nestor's interview on Fresh Air piqued my curiosity.  When the library fulfilled my request rather quickly, I cleared the decks and figured out how many pages I'd have to read in a three-week lending period, figuring I would not be able to renew it.  That's a lot of mechanics before I get to: this book could change lives; it's changed mine.  Nestor combines modern science with ancient knowledge and myth about breathing to point out that post-industrial humanity has emerged to become - as a group - the most singularly poor breathers in the animal kingdom.  The book covers complicated material in a straightforward fashion, but it remains difficult to summarize.  Our post-industrialization soft food diet has rearranged our faces to make us breathe through our mouths more when we should be breathing through our noses.  Nestor traveled the world and submitted himself to both mild and radical breathing experiments to provide his personal account of a multitude of ideas and techniques about breathing.  He assembles a fascinating read by weaving together science journalism and his personal experience.  If there's one takeaway from the book, it's that we should all breathe through our noses as much as possible in order to get all of the benefits of that organ.  The nose moderates the temperature of our breath and cleans it.  There are more takeaways and more radical ideas about breathing to different ends.  In the end, it's a quick read that may have you contemplating taping your mouth shut when you go to sleep (like I do now) before you know it.

Honorable Mentions

But What if We're Wrong?  Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past, Chuck Klosterman, 2016

The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, John Mark Comer, 2019

Sick in the Head; Conversations about Life and Comedy, Judd Apatow, 2016

Books of 2020: Best Fiction

Because I believe that warding each other off bad books is a public service, I have already done that for 2020.  That said, I know most people are looking for ideas to add to their list (or confirm items already in the "to read" category).  So, onto the good stuff!

Although I read more fiction than non-fiction this year, and generally liked what I read, one title stood out among all the others.  I consider that making it easy for those whose "to read" list is already overwhelmingly long.

A warning, though: there's a mother lode of non-fiction recommendations coming tomorrow.

Best Fiction

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw, 2020

We've known Deesha Philyaw as an acquaintance for a long time.  We didn't know her when she was a few years ahead of us at college, but we met her when we attended the same church with her and her then husband and their young family.  Social media made us more aware of her work as a writer, and we started hearing about this book weeks before it came out.  I read one of the stories - How to Make Love to a Physicist - months before that, but I can't remember where.  Blah, blah, blah.  The short story collection gets released, gets long-listed for the National Book Award for fiction (!), gets short-listed soon after, and Paige and I can both see why.  (Paige read it before I did.)  Ultimately, it did not win the NBA, but still!  

Deesha writes polished little gems of intimate, revelatory stories, each with at least one African American woman at the center of it.  She shows immense creativity; each story's setting, characters, and plot are distinct.  She peoples a universe, a spectrum of experience, opportunity, aspiration, and perspective that is common among story collections but feels like more of an accomplishment for what one might naively suppose would be a narrow scope of "church lady" characters.  Many of these stories are steamy - secret lives and all.  She does not hold back.   The writing is clear as a bell.  It was a pleasure to read, and we're so happy and proud to know Deesha even a little bit.

Honorable Mentions:

Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wien, 2012

Nothing to See Here, Kevin Wilson, 2019

Books of 2020: Stay-Aways

Say what you will about 2020.  It's all true.  Also, though, 2020 proved a great year for reading.  (Well, not for magazine reading.  Not commuting has put me woefully behind despite some good summer memories of lounging outside with a magazine.)  A grand year for books!  I read 28 books in 2020, which pales in comparison to some fast readers but is the most I've read in a year since I started tracking in 2000.

And good news: Only 21% of those books fall into my Not Recommended category.  That's down from a three-year moving average of 25%. 

And yet, I like to start with the bad news in my annual rundown.  Friends don't let friends read bad books!

Worst of the Year: Fiction 

(nb: I actually have no non-fiction worst pick this year.  Some non-fiction that I read for special interest reasons turned out not to be recommendable to others, but I don't hold that against those books enough to blog about it.)

Golden Hill, Francis Spufford, 2016 

What does one do when one's spouse loves a book and recommends it?  What if said spouse has been reliable before?  What if the cover has promisingly-interesting art?  These are the easy questions.  One reads the book.  What does one do if, having started it, one kinda hates the book?  One persists.  See above.  What if after hundreds of pages, one still hates it?  If one is a completist reader like yours truly, one finished the book.  Then, then one contemplates whether the last x pages can redeem the 299-x pages that preceded them.  I will not reveal the value of x, but if you get to page 50 and hate this book, just stop.  Spufford teases and teases and teases and usually doesn't just not pay off what he has teased; he zags hard into passages that make one read through one's splayed fingers.  In summary, if tedium interrupted by violence and off-putting licentiousness turns you on, by all means, read this steaming pile of poo.  Otherwise, give it a wide berth.

The Awkward Age, Francesca Segal, 2017

You know how the resolution on a high definition TV can be too good?  Although it might make  sense when watching sports or a Marvel movie, that level of pixel perfect detail can overwhelm a sitcom viewer.  I felt that same uncanny, uncomfortable feeling when reading The Awkward Age.  At first, Segal's ability to render characters in startling reality lured me in.  Small descriptions conveyed masses of information.  Her characters' interactions blended the immediate and the layers of relational matter that set up the moment.  The title may refer to the teenagers in the novel, but I suspect that Segal was being more sly than that.  The divorced and widowed middle-aged people evince their own awkwardness, to say nothing of the divorced grandparents who are still each other's boon companions.  After a plot turn that I maybe should have seen coming but did not, the novel got to be anything but the escape I wanted from this pandemic- and violence- and deceit-wracked year.  People of all ages behaving badly in vivid detail repelled my interest and failed to help with sleep.  Segal's writing, hauntingly specific as it is, definitely impresses.  The plot threw me for more than one loop,and I definitely wanted to see where things ended.  Sadly, despite her strengths, including dropping breathtaking turns of phrase into the narrative here and there, Segal has constructed a novel out of people from whom I desperately wanted to look away and a story from which I wanted to get away.

Dishonorable Mention:

Slade House, David Mitchell, 2015

The April/May 2013 Cook's Country: The Best of All Time

When people ask me to name the greatest issue of Cook's Country magazine ever published, I have one answer: April/May 2013.  Yup, the one with the Chocolate Sugar Cookies on the cover.  Need I say more?

I shall. It has the most recipes that quicken the heart and please the crowd.  One could almost stop at the cover and know all one needs to know.  But that one would be a fool.

There will be those who will say that the charter issue with the Green Apples on the cover (and one has to specify because Cook's Country issued at least three undated issues to try to lure people away from - on the one hand - the black-and-white actuarial frigidity of its cousin Cook's Illustrated - and on the other hand - from the thick and glossy supermarket degradation of Cooking Light), but that is a tent pole issue, held up merely by the transcendent weeknight classic Creamy Shells with Peas and Bacon.  Easy Tortilla Casserole may be easy, but it ain't that great to eat.  I digress.  How does one get children to eat peas?  Hide them inside shells, and cover those shells with ricotta cheese and fleck the whole assemblage with crispy bacon bits.  So props to that recipe.

Others pipe up then and say, "Good sir.  Prithee explain why thou dost not view October/November 2015 as the apex of Cook's Country's studied casual charm?"  To that argument, I must concede that any magazine issue that doth bequeath on the humble home chef recipes for both Wisconsin Butter Burgers and Bourbon Balls is a strong issue indeed.  And while those burgers do call forth the drool and those boozey squishies convey upon one most-favored-party-guest status when one shows up with a tray thereof, O/N '15 (as it is called when it is at home) has the same faults as many an NBA team - only two superstars.  If you start talking about the 2019-2020 Lakers, I shall retreat for the consumption of bourbon straight without the formalities of grinding up the vanilla wafers or even getting out the cocoa powder.  This issue, however, has a long tail of single-instance recipes for our household - corn meal drop biscuits = Alex Caruso.  Better than a punch in the gut, but that's damning with faint praise.  This paragraph brought to you by awkward transitions from the King James to...er...King James.

Overhearing that dismissal, a Jack-come-lately might bring up ol' deep bench itself, June/July 2012. Chicken Caesar Salad Wraps, Nebraska Beef Buns, Macaroni and Cheese Casserole. Dinners to keep a middle-class household going, no doubt, but we haven't made a single dessert out of that issue.  Also, these are solid Monopoly board orange and red recipes.  Not a Boardwalk (or even a North Carolina Avenue) among them.  On a desert island with a well-stocked grocery store and some sheet pans, this would be my runner up.

But thankfully, this is America, even now. 

America has given us A/M '13, featuring six recipes that we have recorded making a total of 21 times.  In truth, because we don't record our desserts as well as our entrees, we've probably made the cover star Chocolate Sugar Cookies more than the recorded nine times.  Anyway, it's quality over quantity here.

• These dark, flavorful cookies combine a delicately crispy sugar topping with a tender but toothsome crumb.  Are they better than a good chocolate chip cookie?  No.  I am no a madman. 
• I defy you to find a crowd that won't be thrilled by Sheet Pan Pizza for a Crowd.  It's been a beach house dinner staple since we discovered it; the dough can be frozen and toted in a cooler.  
• A growing family grow on casseroles like Chicken Noodle and the virtuous-sounding Broccoli Macaroni and Cheese.  
• Pulled BBQ Chicken didn't wow us, apparently, but it's good to have a recipe for everyone's third-favorite pulled meat.

    

Greatest Cook's Country Issues Ever

Recipe	Year	Issue	Instances
Chocolate sugar cookies	2013	Apr/May	9
Sheet pan pizza for a crowd	2013	Apr/May	4
Chicken Noodle Casserole	2013	Apr/May	3
Skillet Broccoli Macaroni & Cheese	2013	Apr/May	2
Slow Cooker Pulled Chicken	2013	Apr/May	2
Crock Pot Pulled BBQ Chicken	2013	Apr/May	1
Creamy Shells with Peas and Bacon	apples	Charter	19
Shanghai Chicken Salad	apples	Charter	2
Easy Tortilla Casserole	apples	Charter	1
Chicken Caesar Salad Wraps	2012	Jun/Jul	6
Easy Summer Vegetable Pasta	2012	Jun/Jul	5
Nebraska Beef Buns	2012	Jun/Jul	4
Macaroni & Cheese Casserole	2012	Jun/Jul	3
Beef & Bean Taquitos	2012	Jun/Jul	2
Creamy Cucumber Salad	2012	Jun/Jul	2
Wisconsin Butter Burgers	2015	Oct/Nov	14
Bourbon Balls	2015	Oct/Nov	8
Roasted Chicken Thighs with Creamed Shallots & Bacon	2015	Oct/Nov	2
Baked Mustard Chicken	2015	Oct/Nov	1
Corn Meal Drop Biscuits	2015	Oct/Nov	1
Penne with Butternut Squash & Browned Butter Sauce	2015	Oct/Nov	1
Pork & Ricotta Meatballs	2015	Oct/Nov	1

Update: 2020 Pirates Win Predictions

For the fifth straight year, the hometown nine has rewarded pessimism in our family's win predictions.  It's in the water (three whole rivers' worth).  Disappointing even the bleakest of expectations defines the terroir of Pittsburgh Pirates baseball.  When all else is topsy turvy, pell mell, helter skelter, the Pirates provide the kind of performance you know you can rely on.  They will do worse than you can even imagine.

The competent dad wins two years in a row.  I told you my relentless pessimism would pay off someday, kiddos!

 No doubt, we'll get 'em next year.   

2020 Pirates Win Predictions

Well, we can't let the fact that humanity may not survive interfere with tradition, now can we?  The Pirates shall play only 60 games this year in a season that makes one wonder about the propriety of caring about baseball.  We decided to go ahead and predict how many games the hometown team will win this year.  It's a rebuilding year for the franchise, and the way the union and league negotiated with a global pandemic as the backdrop, even if planet earth lasts another year, Major League Baseball may not.  Heck of a swan song for America's pasttime.

For reference, the 2019 bar on the chart below shows how many games the Pirates will win this year if they repeat last season's forgettable win percentage of .426 (and that's even rounded up using traditional rounding).

 

Impossible Ham & Cheese Pie

If you, like us, have even more leftover ham than after a normal easter, here's one thing we like to do with ours. It's almost a pantry recipe, save for the Half & Half (unless you're a baller) and the scallions.

The beauty for the trepid cook is that you get something like quiche without making a pie crust. I believe the recipe has its roots with Betty Crocker, but this variation comes from Cook's Country magazine.

"Impossible" Ham & Cheese Pie

From Cook's Country February/March 2013

Serves 8

Use a rasp style grater or the smallest holes on a box grater for the Parmesan.

1 tablespoon unsalted butter, softened, plus 2 tablespoons melted 

3 tablespoons finely grated Parmesan cheese

8 ounces Gruyère cheese (or any cheese - we mixed Gruyėre, cheddar, and parmesan), shredded (2 cups)

4 ounces thickly sliced deli ham (read: leftover Easter ham) chopped

4 scallions, minced

1 cup (24 ounces) all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder 

1/2 teaspoon pepper 

1/4 teaspoon salt 

1 cup half-and-half 

4 large eggs, lightly beaten 

2 teaspoons Dijon mustard

1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1. Adjust oven rack to lowest position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease 9-inch pie plate with softened butter, then coat plate evenly with Parmesan.

2. Combine Gruyère, ham, and scallions in bowl. Sprinkle cheese and ham mixture evenly in bottom of prepared pie dish. Combine flour, baking powder, pepper, and salt in now empty bowl. Whisk in half and half, eggs, melted butter, mustard, and nutmeg until smooth. Slowly pour batter over cheese and-ham mixture in pie dish.

3. Bake until pie is light golden brown and filling is set, 30 to 35 minutes. Let cool on wire rack for 15 minutes. Slice into wedges. Serve warm.

Finger Food variation:
To serve our "Impossible Ham and Cheese Pie as an hors d'oeuvre at your next party, forgo the pie plate and Instead bake it in an 8-inch square baking dish. Slice it into 1 inch squares and serve warm or at room temperature:

An Idea for Our Time?: Family Standup

During these trying shelter-in-place times, our family has adopted a habit from my job: a daily standup.  I work on a software development team, and in software development, especially when using agile methods, teams gather daily for a short, structured meeting called a standup.

The format seeks to correct the ills of longer, less frequent meetings.  It gets straight to the point and maximizes shared knowledge.  It's also designed to identify (as a first step to overcoming) "blockers."  A blocker may take many forms, but it does like it's named: it blocks someone from completing a task that they want to/have to/are trying to do.

Also in the eponymous theme, in standup, we stand up.  Not settling into chairs underscores how quickly the meeting is supposed to go.  

The team goes around in a circle and answers three simple questions:

1. What did I do yesterday?
2. What am I going to do today?
3. What (if anything) is blocking me?

It's important that everyone in the meeting, regardless of their role, answers all three questions.  It's about transparency and acknowledgment that we all need to know what we're all working on in order to make individual and shared decisions and to support each other.

So during COVID-19 home confinement, we have adopted this idea for our family.  We read about the idea several years ago in Bruce Feller's The Secrets of Happy Families.  He described a weekly version of the meeting that his family had adopted.  He extolled how the every-person-speaks nature of the meeting gave voice to his children.  Sometimes, kids don't get to talk, and parents don't have to share what's going on with them.  Standup can help.

We've been gathering at 9:30 (30 minutes after the teenagers have to be awake) to step through our version of standup.  Other families might do something different, but here's what we do:

• We go through the form for Family Prayer in the Morning from the brand-new 2019 Anglican Church in North America Book of Common Prayer.  We include one verse of a favorite hymn, and we pray prayers of gratitude or asking for help for ourselves or others. It helps us remember our place in the universe and the source of our hope.
• The boys report on what they did yesterday, and what they plan to do today in self-guided academic exploration and how they plan to get outside.
• We go over household chores that the boys need to do during the day.  Where there are options, they divvy them up among themselves.
• We identify any blockers and very quickly brainstorm the next thing we can do to clear that blocker.
• The parents report on when they will be on calls and video conferences so that everyone knows when wi-fi bandwidth might be both taxed and important. Our kids haven't stated getting school assignments yet, but they will soon, and wi-fi might become the issue for us that it is for others already.
• We review any evening details that need to be discussed like shared dinner prep plans or any plans we have as a nuclear family or to Zoom with family or friends.
• We finish with a group hug.

The group hug wasn't originally part of it.  That's another beauty of standup: the members of the meeting can suggest ways to tweak the meeting to optimize it for everyone.  My Competent Wife proposed that addition.  We also found that we needed to bump our younger son's wake-up time earlier because he eats breakfast slowly.  Standup works when everyone arrives on time and ready to engage.  

And when it's over, we move on informed, unblocked, and ready to go about our day.

Books of the Teens: Top 9 Fiction Books

One conclusion I draw from compiling this list: 2014 was an incredible year for reading fiction for me.  Three of the nine novels I savor from the decade, I read that year.

Here's the best fiction I read last decade in descending order of awesomeness.


Best Fiction

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet, David Mitchell, 2010, read in 2011

I picked up this book because it made a lot of NPR 10-best lists from 2010.  That proved to be a reliable recommendation.  I especially appreciated the quality, long-form novel because I started reading it at the beginning of a 27-hour flight to Asia.  The story’s setting in turn of the 19th century Nagasaki felt appropriate despite the fact that my destination was Vietnam.  Although the plot  keeps the reader interested, that setting in Nagasaki and its Dutch trading post is pleasingly unfamiliar.  Although I have no way of judging its accuracy, it felt historically plausible and educational.  We meet the title character when he is a newly-arriving clerk at the trading post ad follow him as he navigates the machinations of both the half-marooned population of the trading post and the complicated politics of closed, Shogunal Japan.  This is a page turner that achieved an all-too-rare feat - making me wish I didn’t have to participate in real life so I could have more time to just read the book.  This is the book I have recommended more in the teens than any other.  And so, I do it again.

The Interestings, Meg Wollitzer, 2013, read in 2014

The Interestings is the novel about which I raved to people all through the end of 2014.  Although I'd heard Meg Wollitzer interviewed before and was aware of her Ten Year Nap, I'd never read any of her work.  The Interestings tells the story of six teenagers who gather at an arts camp in the 70s.  They somewhat ironically dub themselves "The Interestings".  The novel then goes on to tell their stories and the paths they take after that summer all the way into middle age.  With all of them being artistic, creative types, the path to the future is not clear.  Who will follow their art and live it out?  Who will make different decisions?  Wollitzer writes in an understated fashion that lets the characters come through.  She deftly drops little foreshadowing bread crumbs that pull the reader along in a plot that does not disappoint.  Time, especially, early on in the novel follows an anything-but-linear path.  I read an interview after reading the book that cited the -Up movies (7-Up, 14-Up...) as a point of inspiration.  The comparison I made before reading that was to John Updike's Rabbit novels.  It's fascinating to follow these characters over such a long arc of time and life.  As the novel came to a close, I didn't want to finish it because I would mourn the chance to spend time with the characters and see what they were up to.  At over 450 pages, it's substantial.  Still, I read the last 12 pages in three sittings, delaying the inevitable.  I may be at the perfect age to read this book.  Two late thirties/forty-something friends and I had a conference call book club to discuss it.  In fact, I owe Catherine Christopher a great debt of gratitude for pointing me to this book in a facebook discussion in which she asked *me* for book recommendations.  She and Angelique Bamberg and I had a terrific conversation about it that only enhanced the reading experience.


The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson, 2012- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2013, read in 2014

The Orphan Master's Son is a masterpiece.  Demanding, engrossing and eventually deeply satisfying.  A novel set in what has been called "a hermit state" possibly couldn't be honest without being demanding.  North Korea is a black box for those outside it.  Johnson apparently got some access to this forbidden place because he thanks people who helped him in his travels to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea in his acknowledgments.  The book contains two parts, one focusing on a character called Pak Jun Do, and the second focusing on a character called Commander Ga.  Only people who have read it will understand the significance of the phrase "a character called" such and such.  Three different narrators tell the story - a third person narrator describing events; a propaganda version of some of those events; and a government interrogator trying to make sense of some of those events.  The novel demands much of the reader because it's set in such a strange and walled terrain.  Also, though, one of the points the novel makes revolves around the nature of truth.  Reading through the shifting nature of truth and reality slowed me down at times.  I found myself not always enthusiastic to return to the work of parsing these shifting sands.  Johnson takes on a difficult task with high ambition and fulfills.  I read the last forty pages pretty much at one sitting - something I virtually never do - because the narrative propelled itself that compellingly.  Reflecting on my struggles to read some early and middle part of it, I believe that I would have been happier had I read the entire book in 40-page chunks.  Perhaps that makes this a good beach read.


City of Thieves, David Benioff, 2008, read in 2018

I heard Brian Koppelman talk about this book on Bill Simmons's podcast, and he said something like he'd given it away to 30 people.  On my list, it went, and I'm glad it did.  Benioff is the opposite of prolific.  This is his third and final book, and it was written ten years ago.  He went on to be a Game of Thrones show-runner.  City of Thieves throws together unlikely groups of people during the siege of Leningrad in World War II.  Two in particular go on a surprising quest together.  To say more would be to ruin the story, which is prodigiously page-turning.  The setting is educational without feeling like it.  The characters and plot are a little over-the-top and cinematic, but guess what?  I like movies.  A book that reads like a movie is fine by me.  It's a terrific novel.


The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead, 2019, read in 2019

The Nickel Boys is the most genius work of art I've encountered in 2019, and that's saying something in a year with my first visit to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Boots Reilly's Sorry to Bother You in the theater, Donald Glover's Atlanta, and Hobbs and Shaw.  Well, I should temper that because Hamilton, the biography and musical.  So second.  Or third behind a tie for first.  Whitehead has fictionalized the real, ghastly Dozier School for boys in Florida as Nickel Academy.  A brutal reform school that ruined the lives of generations of young men, the crimes at Dozier only came to light after the school closed in 2011 and decades after the worst abuses had occurred.  The focal point for Whitehead's telling is Elwood Curtis, a promising student who was in the wrong place at the wrong time through no fault of his own and gets sent to Nickel Academy.  Although Whitehead does not hold back from the brutality, what impresses most about this book is the hope and humanity that persist in the face of inhumanity.  There is plenty of unspeakable horror here, but if the book had been only that, it would have only been half of the survivor's tale that Whitehead weaves.  The ending left me speechless but hopeful.


Transatlantic, Colum McCann, 2013, read in 2014

Despite my aversion to hype, I sometimes have to give it its props.  There was a lot of hype around Colum McCann's novel TransAtlantic.  I felt like I heard about it from every quarter for a while.  I believe the first time I requested it from the library, the wait was outlandish.  But since my library buys up tons of copies of bestsellers, no matter how hard it is to get this year's best seller, it's always quite easy to get last year's bestseller.  Having managed to get a copy in time for our beach week, I didn't read it at the beach.  I was finishing a book and a little more interested in another novel I'd brought along - my anti-hype stance kicking in, perhaps.  Thanks to a little summer insomnia and the amazing quality of McCann's writing, I read this book in a week at home.  I can't remember the last time I read a book start to finish in a week at home.  Having read Steph Cha's noir mystery Follow Her Home on vacation - a book in which Cha - as a math teacher would say - "shows her work" in every sentence, I appreciated McCann's reliance on simple language to provide thorough description.  I just opened the book at random and found the first paragraph my eyes settled upon.  Here it is:  "Lily did not know what to say.  She reached out and touched the framed edge of the painting.  Looking into it was like looking out another window.  Clouds.  Fast water.  Geese gunneling through the sky."  It feels like one of those writing exercises in which one is challenged to write with only single-syllable words.  Except the result is perfect.  They're not all one syllable words, obviously; having maintained the reader's attention with straightforward language through the whole paragraph, McCann opens up space to use the specific and rare verb "gunneling".  And the whole book feels that perfectly weighted.

What's it about?  Oh, yeah, three historical trips across the Atlantic form the backbone of the novel.  In the mid-nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass, being an ambiguously free escaped slave in the US traveled to Ireland for a speaking tour among those sympathetic to abolitionism and to buy his freedom.  Just after World War I, flight had advanced to the point that venture capitalists challenged pilots to fly across the Atlantic.  The novel embroiders what history tells us about one such attempt and what McCann thinks happened outside of the known history.  Finally, and most improbably, McCann includes a trip by George Mitchell (or rather three years of trips) to broker peace between Ireland and Northern Ireland in the 1990s.  It doesn't even sound like that good a setup for a novel, frankly.  In lesser hands, it would be hackneyed and tiresome.  In McCann's hands, it's page-turning bliss.


Old Filth, Jane Gardam, 2004, read in 2016

My competent wife loved Old Filth.  Her law school classmate, Cassie Christopher, did too.  Perhaps it's because the eponymous protagonist is an English solicitor who makes his career in Hong Kong.  Filth is an acronym for "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong."  This sublime novel beguiles with elliptical storytelling and well-formed characters.  Gardam depicts her various settings with rich detail in sparse language.  The novel covers a long sweep of time - a lifetime - depicted in bits and pieces with flashbacks and foreshadowing.  Certain aspects of the story we never learn here.  Good thing Old Filth is the first book of a trilogy.  The Man in the Wooden Hat and Last Friends fill in the gaps and extend the story in time and scope.  This is very satisfying novel on its own and the best of the three, but the trilogy is a worthwhile use of time for the story arc with this set of characters.


The Sellout, Paul Beatty, 2015, read in 2017

Marc Maron had Paul Beatty on his podcast and raved about The Sellout without managing to describe it.  Having read it, I now understand why.  This novel is a work of towering satirical genius and social commentary on race whose pages are as crammed with details, ideas, and references as James Joyce's Ulysses.  Early in my reading of the book, I found it took a lot of energy to focus and read it, especially at bedtime.  I noticed a woman reading it in the park near my office and chanced to interrupt her reading and ask her whether it was worth continuing. She immediately said yes, and I used this stranger's reassurance to soldier on.  I'm glad I did.  The Sellout is set in a fictional all-black submunicipality of Los Angeles where the eccentric protagonist was raised by an arguably-more-eccentric single father.  From a whole vein devoted to a character from the Little Rascals to a sly reference to David Sedaris, the book ranges far to depict, confront, and - perhaps most surprisingly - have fun with racial identity.  I loved it, and I'm happy I had the guts to ask a stranger in the park a book question.


Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout, 2008 - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2009, read in 2015

When this won the Pulitzer Prize, it had its moment on my social media feed.  I remember people being excited about the book, and I remember not being able to get a copy at the library.  I just parked it on my list of books to read and waited until the furor died down.  It died down enough that I could not only get it out of the library but also renew it enough times to finish it while reading other books.  I seem to have left my book monogamy ways behind me, at least for now. 

But to the book itself, this is a loose collection of short stories with the Olive Kitteridge character as a throughline connector.   I've become jaded to the short story form in general (too many seem to rely on the supernatural to advance plot).  Refreshingly, Strout does not rely on the supernatural to move her stories forward.  And it's stories, but it's almost a novel.  Also, she strikes a nice balance between introducing new characters and vignettes while keeping enough of the core team together that the reader cares all the way through.  I'm a sucker for big arc of life literature, and Olive Kitteridge fits that mold, although we only really get to know Olive as she gets older.  Strout's writing is not only perceptive, descriptive and humane.  It also feels important. 

Worth the hype, amazingly.

Books of the Teens: Family Fiction

Our sons turned 13 and 17 this year.  We still read as a family in the evening - the remainder of the earliest bedtime reading traditions - into this year.  With no one around to tell any of us that this should stop, we just kept doing the thing that's brought us so much collective pleasure over the years.  We're in a pause right now and might be done forever.  There are fewer evenings when we are all at home now, so reading a book together takes months (see below for an all-time record).

The kinds of things we read changed vastly over this decade, and it makes me sad that I haven't kept records of all of those books like I have of the books I read "for myself."  If I did, I might have more to recommend.  Still, these are solid recs for reading with tweens and on up to teens.

Best Family Fiction 

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, 1868, read in 2018

I discovered and loved Little Women (for credit!) in college.  Rereading books doesn't generally excite me, and I almost never do it.  But we have tried to choose material carefully for our precious and persistent family ritual.  Rereading it, I remembered all of the things I loved about it and some of the parts that I wished were different.  This being the longest book we've read as a family, it was rather a slog.  We had it from the library and we renewed it 13 times, which means it has been in our house for more than 39 weeks.  The characters are interesting, and those who don't start out that way do evolve, which is nice.  Alcott was a prophetess against the bounds of gender roles, and the strictures put on the female characters by their environment still drive me nuts.  The March family's genteel poverty is one of the most romantic things I've ever encountered.  Yes, the ending is bolted on and sad in its own way but this is still the great American novel.


The War that Saved my Life and The War I Finally Won, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, 2015/2017, read in 2017/2018

A simple two-part series, these flawed books appealed to all four of us.

I sometimes had to pass these books on to someone else in the family to read because I got too choked up.  The first novel tells the story of Ada and her brother Jamie, who get evacuated from war-threatened London to a small town in the English countryside.  Their mother is an abusive moron barmaid.  Ada has a club foot and is not allowed to leave the house.  Though the welcome is not always warm in the countryside, their evacuation achieves the goal of saving them from the violence of war.  There are worse fates than war, though, and the evacuation plays a role there, too.  The children are taken in by a gruff woman named Susan, whose stiff-upper-lip practical care reminded me so frequently of my mother-in-law.  It's a touching story that the whole family enjoyed.

This book continues the story of Ada and Jamie, two kids subjected to different levels of abuse by a low-resource barmaid in London.  Ada is the emotional heart of the two books, and I'm very impressed with how Brubaker Bradley depicts the uneven path of a child recovering from trauma and trying to learn how to trust people and situations more.  Her characters surprise the reader in nuanced portraits of evolving behavior.  The books may be accused of anachronistically infusing current social and political mores into World War 2-era England (town and country), but I admit to rooting for that more often than not when it happens in these stories.  And she's not alone.  Exhibit A: Downton Abbey.  If there's a theme in these two books, it is empathy in some people overcoming its lack in others.  Our whole family, with boys aged 15 and 11 at the time, have been completely engaged by the storytelling.


The Incorrigible Children series, Maryrose Wood, 2009-2018, finished in 2019

 I won't attempt to review a six-book series here, but everyone in my competent family also enjoyed these.  They are fanciful and imaginative with good character development and enough plot to keep the readers engaged.  The pace sometimes flags, but they're generally winningly off-the-wall books.  There is winking humor that the boys understood pretty well throughout.  The suspense will grip younger children more than the high schooler and middle schooler who ended up reading the final book, but it's not like they told us to stop reading either.  Might be more of an upper primary read than a series for really young kids.

Books of the Teens: Recommended History, Work, and Life Books

My last bundle of non-fiction recommendations from the expired decade contains the remaining categories of history and what I'm terming work and life books including parenting books.  The teens provided lots of interesting and thought-provoking material in these categories, and their practicality makes them stick with me as we round the decade pole.

Of note: I call out several book-recommenders in this post, and nearly all of them are women.  I know who I shall listen to for book recommendations in the '20s.

Best History

A Kim Jong-Il Production; The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, & a Young Dictator's Rise to Power, Paul Fischer, 2015, read in 2015

A book that includes the word "extraordinary" in its subtitle ought to deliver, and this one does.  Kim Jong-Il loved movies and wanted North Korea to rival the world leaders in filmmaking.  Unable to create an indigenous film industry that was up to his standards, he kidnapped South Korea's best actress and best director to use them to create films in North Korea.  Any story out of the hermit kingdom is very difficult to research, but Fischer did exhaustive research.  What's more impressive is that he tells the story in a gripping way.  Some creative non-fiction authors can't get over the hump of not showing their work.  Fischer tells this story with cinematic detail.  It's just amazing.  Looking back on 2015, I said in 2016: "If you read nothing else this year, read this book."


Hamilton, Ron Chernow, 2004, read in 2019

I came late to the Hamilton party.  Although I knew that people everywhere were going nuts over the musical, I didn't really engage with it until friends had two tickets to share with us when the tour came through Pittsburgh.  I binge-listened to the soundtrack and discovered what all of the fuss was about.  Because of demand for Chernow's massive biography in our library system, I didn't get a copy until after we saw the show.  At 731 pages, this hefty book posed problems for my lifestyle.  I often read right around one page before bed.  It took me around three months to get through, which really suppressed my books-read number for 2019.  A three-week lending period at the library wasn't going to cut it, so I was grateful that my friend Angelique lent me her copy.  But enough about me. Hamilton was a genius; Lin Manuel Miranda is a genius.  Ron Chernow is a genius.  This biography took a staggering amount of research, but if anything, the storytelling is more impressive than the research.  One can easily see how Miranda got caught up in the story and wanted to make his own art from it.  Of course, it's impossible to tell Hamilton's story without telling the broader story of the revolution, and we meet all of the big players in their relationship to Hamilton.  He didn't have a lot of just-so-so relationships.  They tended to extremes of affections, rivalry, and even obsession.  While it's hard to argue that Hamilton would have contributed more if he'd been less passionate - after all, that's what drove so many of his contributions to our system of government - but had he found a way to manage his passion and slow his pace and decision-making in early middle age, he might have survived more of that period, and one never knows what might have happened in a late chapter of leadership of a still-young country.


Hellhound on his Trail, Hampton Sides, 2010, read in 2010

Hampton Sides uncovers what James Earl Ray did in the weeks and months before he assassinated Martin Luther King.  A drifter trying to remake himself after escaping from prison, Ray eventually found meaning in his life via the George Wallace campaign and the racial hatred that opposed the civil rights movement.  Although conspiracy theories abounded, Sides tells the tale of a lonely man stalking MLK and finding his opportunity in Memphis in April 1968.  Most of the narrative tension leads to the moment of the killing, but there is also plenty to tell about where Ray went afterward and what the FBI, Memphis police and eventually other law enforcement agencies did to catch him.  Very gripping read. 


Best Work-Related Books

Switch; How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Chip and Dan Heath, 2010, read in 2011

I got this book (free!) at a conference where Dan Heath gave the keynote speech.  It was a terrific talk and made me really interested in reading the book.  Although Heath used most of the best examples in his speech, it was still good to read through the complete framework and have him reinforce the framework with more examples that help flesh it out.  The framework is that change happens when we engage the rational mind with clear direction, motivate the emotional center with positive things to go for and make the best choice the easy choice by controlling defaults or altering culture.  Although it's informed my work with clients and my own life decisions, just about anybody would get value from this book.

Crucial Conversations; Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, Kerry Patterson; Joseph Grenny; Ron McMillan; Al Switzler, 2002, read in 2017

If I honestly record that it took me a calendar year to finish this book, you might think I didn't like it very much.  Far from the truth.  I pulled this book off the shelf of my friend Karen Dreyer, for whose maternity leave I was filling in at the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank.  She'd read it with her staff in the Southwestern Pennylvania Food Security Partnership.  During my brief tenure there, I read about 30 pages of the book during downtime.  By then, I was hooked on this practical guide to avoiding the kinds of traps that too easily happen in high-stakes conversations at work and at home.  The big theme is that all participants in a conversation should add to a pool of shared meaning.  If anyone is doing things other than that - for instance, silence of violence - the conversation isn't succeeding.  The authors describe well the many ways that conversations break down.  They also prescribe ways to spot our own failings and move conversations back to productivity.  I finished it in bits and pieces over the busy first nine months of my job at Truefit and have found it valuable in my professional and personal life.

Winning the Story Wars, Jonah Sachs, 2013, read in 2013

I learned about this book through my Pittsburgh-native professional acquaintance Susan Finkelpearl.  She worked at Free Range Studios (makers of the Meatrix and the Grocery Store Wars viral videos) with the author.  I read it for work and really enjoyed Sachs's take on stories.  We all have to learn about Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey somewhere; this book is where I learned about it.  He draws a lot on Campbell's seminal work on myths, but he goes on to treat that material in light of a kind of marketing called empowerment marketing - think Nike's Just Do It.  The book runs at both the big idea thought-provoking level and the practical how-to level, which is no mean feat.


Best Books on Life 

Mindset; the New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck, 2006, read in 2015

Having seen and heard references to this book seemingly everywhere, I finally decided to read the source material.  Although I haven't gone back to verify, I'm pretty sure the first reference that struck me was in Nurtureshock, a terrific book summarizing human behavior research that parents should know about.  Dweck's book offers a useful framework about mindsets.  It's so simple that it may not actually need to be a whole book.  That's probably why the references to it elsewhere are so alluring - because they're brief.  Anyway, people either tend to have a fixed mindset - my abilities are fixed - or they have a growth mindset - I can get better (or worse) at something.  The fixed mindset bites you two ways.  First, if you believe you're smart, you don't take on challenges that might harm that impression.  Second, if you think you're not smart, you get discouraged and don't make progress.  In the growth mindset, you chart small progress and you work to make your brain or body grow in incremental ways.  Dweck looks at athletes, business leaders, parents, teachers and coaches through the lens of the mindsets.  These practical applications do help, although shelf life can be a dangerous thing; one of her growth mindset paragons is Tiger Woods.  Oops.  Somehow, Dweck has written a book that's kind of dull and utterly fascinating all at the same time.


The War of Art, Steven Pressfield, 2002, read in 2012

I heard about this book on Marc Maron's podcast (in a somewhat dismissive context) and from our then-Associate Rector, Josh Miller (in a rather reverential tone).  Having read this slim volume, I can understand the latter better than the former.  Pressfield describes what he believes holds writers and other creative people back, a vague internal force he labels "resistance".   In the first third of the book, he describes that many forms resistance may take.  Wily and creeping, this malign enemy will linger and lurk and thwart.  In the second third of the book, he describes what he calls "going pro".  Pressfield believes to be a professional, a writer must write for at least four hours a day.  He doesn't go into as much detail as I would like about how one arrives at the pass wherein one can do that.  The classic question to ask an author is about his or her process.  The audience always wishes that there will be a magic formula to follow.  In describing the pro state so wanly, I believe he hopes to dispel the notion of magic.  It's work, and you do the work by doing the work.  In the final third of the book, he describes the spiritual dimension that he sees in the creative realm.  He believes in angels and muses and God and believes that if we will call on these positive forces, they will help us to overcome resistance.  The book inspires and stimulates and is difficult to describe.  An interesting note: I got excited about the book and wanted to buy it for some friends.  I expected to find used copies of a ten-year-old paperback for cheap.  No such luck.  The market holds the book in such reverence that used copies are priced the same as new.


Best Books Related to Parenting

iRules; What Every Tech-healthy Family Needs to Know about Selfies, Sexting, Gaming, and Growing Up, Janell Burley-Hoffman, 2014, read in 2016

Janell Burley Hoffman got famous at Christmas of 2013 for giving her then-13-year-old son Greg an iPhone along with a contract detailing conditions of his ownership.  They included things like mom and dad always knowing the password, turning in the phone at 7:30 on school nights and 9:00 on non-school nights, and no nude pictures.  Her tour of the talk show circuit - often with Greg - turned into a cottage industry, and she's written about parenting for the Huffington Post and been regularly featured on American Public Media's Marketplace Tech podcast.  iRules is a terrific parenting book for our time.  Burley Hoffman is frank about the possibilities and risks of technology and offers a refreshing take on what to do about it.  She's big on making explicit and simple rules for kids to follow and then sticking to them.  Her kids play no electronic games during the school week, for instance.  One thing she's frank about is her own personal struggle to put her #$%! phone down, experience the world and be available to those around her.  One can't really read this book without trying to be a little less phone-addicted.  We have not gotten to phone ownership but already apply some of these rules to our kids' tech use.  We could stand to improve and also to be better at explaining WHY we have certain rules.  Sometimes it helps smart kids to know that we're limiting something in order to help them be better people.


Excellent Sheep; the Miseducation of the American Elite, William Derresiewicz, 2014, read in 2017

There was a time when we read parenting books about developmental stages and how to parent as children progress through them.  Now, apparently, we read parenting books about how to get kids launched out of the nest.  Excellent Sheep isn't actually a parenting book.  Nor was Cal Newport's How to be a High School Superstar.  Still, they are both extremely relevant to how we parent our high schooler and look ahead to shaping the path of our middle schooler.  Deresiewicz taught at Yale and Columbia and is a cultural critic for a lot of brand name publications.  In Excellent Sheep, he takes on the elite college system and the path high school students take to get there.  He traces the shift from pre-1950s American elite colleges, which were the province of private-school-educated WASPs to the current crop, which are the province of ethnically diverse strivers with startlingly-similar high school resumes.  He asks how a system in which some parents help their kids figure out how to work like hell in a certain way in high school, pack an excessive number of the right classes (APs) onto their transcripts, attain leadership positions in all of the extracurriculars they pursue and score high on the SAT is helping our democracy while state higher education also rises in price at a faster rate than private education.  Unlike a parenting book, Deresiewicz doesn't explicitly flip into prescriptive mode.  Rather, he closes the book in a conflagration of anti-elite barricade-rushing.  His message might be summed up: "Don't kill yourself in high school in order to be a bland and thoughtless Ivy League student on your way to an investment bank.  Have a more interesting (to you) time in high school, go to Kenyon, and become an adult who knows how to think.  Then do something interesting that saves the world from that platform."  We're proud of our Oberlin-bound high school senior and happy with the high school career he was able to have.  He's an interesting person.