My favorite books of 2020
2020 was a year with lots of time for reading, but overall, I did not read as many books as I perhaps had wanted to. A few are worth sharing:
The first book I want to highlight, and the one I have definitely talked most about this year, was Julian Jackson’s biography of Charles de Gaulle — “A Certain Idea of France”. In many ways this was not a very “2020” book to read but based on recommendations and wanting to learn more about recent European history I ended up starting it. At 800 pages it is not a quick read, but I was completely enthralled by the portrait of De Gaulle in all his idiosyncrasies — a deeply fascinating character even if probably not someone to be emulated as a leader. It also covers 50 years of French and European history in a way that made me want to read more.
It remains strange to me that Madeline Miller’s “Song of Achilles”, which was published in 2012, has not fully come to my attention before. Once I started reading it, though, I went through it in a day or less. Miller re-tells the Iliad through the eyes of Patroclus, Achilles’s companion, and while it is (naturally) extremely different from Homer’s version it also felt very true to the original which was not something I had expected. The story has the same solemn beauty of Homer’s epic while still feeling completely modern, bringing out the tragic love story of Achilles and Patroclus in a very tender way.
I started reading Isabel Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns” in the middle of the BLM protests that engulfed New York City (and the rest of America) in June, and I was completely mesmerized by it. Wilkerson’s great strength as an author is to bring the personal into the historical. Her sweeping overview of the Great Migration of black people leaving the South of the Unite States between World War 1 and the 1960’s is magisterial, and the way she combines it with deep, intimate portraits of three individuals is just incredibly well done. She is a spectacular writer, and everyone should read this book which highlights a part of American history that is far too little known.
Over the course of the year, I had a project with some friends to read (and discuss) some of the Russian classics, alongside Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lectures on Russian literature”. I had mixed feelings about some of them but not about Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”. It feels trite to say that Tolstoy was maybe the greatest novelist who has ever lived, but I found the book fresh and intensely captivating even though it is not immediately obvious how the infidelities of a Russian noblewoman in the 19th century is relevant to me today. That is probably the sign of truly great literature, and I was completely absorbed in it. Oh, and Nabokov is great on Tolstoy (and great in general — although some of his “notes” say more about himself than about the books he writes about, I thought).
One classic that definitely felt appropriate this year, was Boccaccio’s “The Decameron”. Unfortunately, I was not able to do what his protagonists did and spend the time of the plague in an Italian villa gorging myself on food and sharing stories of love and human folly with friends. Maybe that is what we all should have done? I was grateful, though, to be distracted from a city beleaguered by COVID-19, even if that was New York in April 2020 instead of Florence in 1348. It was also a good reminder of all the things that haven’t changed — some of the stories naturally felt a bit like reading old fairytales, but overall I was struck by how accessible they were. I read it in Magnus Ulleland’s neo-Norwegian (nynorsk) translation, which I will say felt quite dated although it is certainly both poetic and clever.
This was another year where US politics took up a disproportionate share of my mental space, and the best book I read on this topic was Ezra Klein’s “Why we’re Polarized”. Having been a faithful listener to his podcast over the years many of his arguments were not new, but the book summarizes his thesis in a very clear and compelling way, and draws uncomfortable, but probably correct, implications for why this leaves the US political system in a very problematic place, regardless of the (thankfully sensible) outcome of the 2020 presidential election. This should be obligatory reading.
My day-to-day job involves thinking about strategy for the International Rescue Committee. This is an important and enjoyable job, but the sweep of it is not always quite the one of John Lewis Gaddis’s “On Grand Strategy”, which starts with Xerxes at the Hellespont and ends with Churchill and Roosevelt. It is useful to raise one’s gaze, though, and try to see if there are lessons from history’s great strategic moves in how we are approaching things. I certainly felt educated after reading it. The book is based on a class that Gaddis has taught at Yale for decades, and you feel that in the book — for better and for worse I would say.
Very different, but no less important, was Gael Faye’s “Petit pays”, where he tells the story of growing up in Burundi in between two cultures and experiencing from afar (but still closer than most others) the repercussions of the Rwandan Genocide. That is not a new story, but I have not read anything quite like this book before — forsaking the big numbers and the geopolitical sweep for the dynamics of kids playing in the street and the taste of the food you grew up with. It is a little book about a little country (as the title says), but it had a huge impact on me.
Something lighter that I highly enjoyed was my friend Sebastian Abbott’s book “The away game” which came out a few years ago — about Qatar’s crazy project to search all the African continent for the best future football players and put them through an FC Barcelona-type academy. It is a wild story, and the book is hugely entertaining, especially for those among you with some interest both in football and Africa.
Finally, a book that should not be on my 2020 list since I finished it yesterday (one of the first reads in 2021), but which I would still like to shout out, is Mohsin Zaidi’s “A dutiful boy”, about growing up as a gay Muslim in the United Kingdom and going from a working-class part of East London to Oxford University. The story is full of challenges and pain but also has a ton of kindness, nuance and ultimately hope, and I could not put it down.
That is my top 10. Other good books if you need more included Peter Pomerantsev’s “This is not propaganda”, Kim Ghattas’ “Black Wave” and Gogol’s “Dead Souls”. Here’s to more reading in 2021!
