books i read in 2020 (part 1 of 5)

Around the end of 2019, I realized I didn’t read much anymore. When I did read, I usually forgot the book within a few weeks. So I decided to change that. I took out a stack of interesting books from the library and started reading before bed every night. I promised myself that if I started a book, I’d finish it. Here’s what I learned:

  • Reading is fun and enriching!

  • It’s also a natural sleep aid.

  • Good books are obviously fun, but there’s a satisfaction in seeing a bad book through to the end.

On that note, I want to share my reactions to all 35 of the books I read this year, starting with….

The Bad

The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin: It’s a classic of adventure literature, and the main characters are like… cowboy anthropologists, I guess? But all the Aborigines talk like children or mystics, and the narrator has this irritating habit of introducing the women’s tits and waistlines before he gets around to their names.

Genesis (Memory of Fire Trilogy, Part 1), Eduardo Galeano: It’s beautifully written and I appreciate the concept of re-envisioning the history of the conquest of the New World, but…  it’s also 336 pages of people getting burned by hot pokers.

Neither Here Nor There, Bill Bryson: I like Bill Bryson. One Summer: America 1927 deserved to be 528 pages long. I liked what he wrote about the Appalachian Trail enough to forgive him for not actually hiking it. His prose carries you away. But in this book… he just gets drunk by himself in various European locations and ogles women’s boobs. Which must have been fun for his wife to read!

The Wallcreeper, Nell Zink: The kind of book the Times would describe as “feral” and “rambunctious.” It’s supposed to be about a pair of bird-loving eco-terrorists. It’s actually about a woman who cheats on her husband and then gets butthurt when he cheats on her, and then she tips some boulders in a river and feels sorry for herself. Because people like reading books that make them feel like shit?

The Rum Diary, Hunter S. Thompson: There’s one female character*. She’s a nymphomaniac who talks like a baby. In retrospect, I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that Hunter S. Thomson is an alcoholic misogynist.

*Actually, that’s not true. The protagonist bangs a bunch of nameless women and, in an act of true heroism, narrowly avoids banging a woman he refers to as “my pig.”

Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens: Ostensibly, I might like this story. Strong, independent woman meets sensitive ornithologist and they fall in love (but not without a few missteps, including an unsolved murder). But like… the main character is an orphan who raises herself in a tarpaper shack after Maw runs off and Paw dies, and… I mean, come on! Someone would have called child services, right? And if they didn’t, she’d probably have developed a mental illness from isolation. And you know there’s not a shower in that tarpaper shack, so how is her hair so perfect? And if Delia Owens describes her as “wasp-waisted” one more time, I’m gonna slap her. Can you imagine what that would look like?

Anyway, Wasp-Waist somehow becomes rich off the sales of books of paintings published by a small university press, which… is… nonsense. Then, if you can believe it, she has a misunderstanding with Birdman, so she tries to date this guy who basically has Date Rapist tattooed on his forehead, and then he mysteriously dies, and Birdman comes back and they live happily ever after. The last line of the book is, “As Birdman thought about his lost love, he gazed out over the water… where the crawdads sing,” and I screamed in fury and hurled the book into the sun. There should be a law against books that end with the title.