ny times book review 10 best books of 2020

The New York Times Names Their 10 Best of 2020

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Kelly Jensen

Kelly is a former librarian and a long-time blogger at STACKED. She's the editor/author of (DON'T) CALL ME CRAZY: 33 VOICES START THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and the editor/author of HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD. Her next book, BODY TALK, will publish in Fall 2020. Follow her on Instagram @heykellyjensen .

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The editors of The New York Times Book Review have named their top ten books of 2020.

  • A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet
  • Deacon King Kong by James McBride
  • Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
  • Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
  • The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
  • Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker
  • A Promised Land by Barack Obama
  • Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro
  • Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
  • War by Margaret MacMillan

The first five titles on the list showcase the best in fiction — all which might be categorized under the broad label “literary” (though arguably, Deacon King Kong lies closely within mystery and crime fiction) — while the second five titles are all nonfiction, including a memoir, an Oprah’s Book Club selection, an insider’s story of life inside Silicon Valley, and two histories.

Forty percent of the choices are by authors of color.

Amazon released their best books of 2020 last week, and among their top 20 are three on the New York Times list: The Vanishing Half , Hidden Valley Road , and Deacon King Kong .

To read more about why these were the New York Times selections for 2020, dig into the editors’ commentary on their site. Readers who have access can also enjoy the New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2020 .

ny times book review 10 best books of 2020

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The Best Books We Read in 2020

By The New Yorker

“ Cleanness ,” by Garth Greenwell

An abstract watercolor shape on a book cover.

The casual grandeur of Garth Greenwell’s prose, unfurling in page-long paragraphs and elegantly garrulous sentences, tempts the vulnerable reader into danger zones: traumatic memories, extreme sexual scenarios, states of paralyzing heartbreak and loss. In the case of “Cleanness,” Greenwell’s third work of fiction, I initially curled up with the book, savoring the sensuous richness of the writing, and then I found myself sweating a little, uncomfortably invested in the rawness of the scene. The cause was a story titled “Gospodar,” in which the narrator, an American teacher living in Bulgaria, hooks up with a man who begins by play-acting violence and then veers toward the real thing. The transition from fantasy to horror is accomplished with the deftness of a literary magician, and Greenwell repeats the feat even more unnervingly in a later story, “The Little Saint,” in which his likable narrator takes the role of the aggressor rather than the victim. These stories are masterpieces of radical eroticism, but they wouldn’t have the same impact if they didn’t appear in a gorgeously varied narrative fabric, amid scenes of more wholesome love, finely sketched vistas of political unrest, haunting evocations of a damaged childhood, and moments of mundane rapture. Tenderness, violence, animosity, and compassion are the outer edges of what feels like a total map of the human condition. —Alex Ross

“ Stranger Faces ,” by Namwali Serpell

A line drawing of a face on a book cover.

In an age of totalizing theories, it’s nice to watch someone expertly pull a single idea through a needle’s eye. “Stranger Faces,” by Namwali Serpell, is one such exercise. The book’s catalytic inquiry—“what counts as a face and why?”—means to undermine the face, the way its expressive capabilities give it the cast of truth. We seek meaning in a shallow arrangement of eyes, nose, cheeks, and mouth, despite how often faces lie, or how often they cloak the world-ordering phenomena of race, gender, and class. Rather than depress or shame readers with these facts, Serpell delights in them. Unencumbered by truth, the face becomes interesting, motile—a work of art. (“Unruly faces” are especially intriguing, according to Serpell, because they invite viewers to sever ties with the placidity of an ideal.) Serpell, a Harvard professor and critic capable of close-reading people just as well as novels or films, includes a dancing range of examples. Her first essay considers the moniker given to Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, whose features aren’t, in fact, so elephantine; another essay, on Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man,” becomes a study of Keanu Reeves’s himbo appeal. Serpell can reanimate any subject, be it Hitchcock or emojis, and her bright, brainy collection is a model for how to surface the fun in a critical question. —Lauren Michele Jackson

“ Want ,” by Lynn Steger Strong

A colorful abstract painting on a book cover.

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

New York novels are as various as the city they describe. But “Want,” a subtly glorious new entry in the genre by Lynn Steger Strong, is set in a town whose qualities—unaffordable, unrelenting, unquittable—many readers will recognize. The book’s narrator is a writer who lives with her husband and two young daughters in a cramped Brooklyn apartment; to keep them in it, she teaches at a charter school by day and in an M.F.A. writing program by evening, though her half-hearted hustling doesn’t stop the family from capsizing into bankruptcy. (The husband quit a job in finance to become an artisanal carpenter, a phrase that would fit nicely on a Green-Wood Cemetery tombstone.) The virtue of this life is its being defiantly chosen. To counteract the claustrophobic privacy of subway commutes, and the slights of rubbing up against the city’s rich and oblivious, we get sticky memories of Florida, where the narrator grew up in a repressive, bourgeois household. There, her closest friend was Sasha, a beautiful, daring girl a year older, whose fate has been uncomfortably linked with hers ever since. Strong uses the friendship as a tether, returning to it to mark time’s passing; her technique is so sophisticated that the murk of the present and the sharply remembered past hold seamlessly together. Her biggest triumph is the transmission of consciousness. I loved the tense pleasure of staying pressed close to her narrator’s mind, with its beguiling lucidity of thought and rawness of feeling. There is much anxiety and ache to be found here—but also, when it is most needed, radiance, humor, love, and joy. —Alexandra Schwartz

“ On Anger ,” edited by Agnes Callard

A scribble under the word anger on the cover of On Anger.

Unless you’re dealing with a hard-line Stoic, most philosophers tend to consider anger a morally justifiable response to being wronged—though too much anger, for too long , they might say, could start to hurt you or your community. In the explosive essay that kicks off this anthology, the philosopher Agnes Callard writes that such caveats defang the very point of anger. If anger is a valid response to being wronged, she argues, and if none of the ways we hold people accountable for wronging us—apologies, restitution, etc.—actually erase the original act, doesn’t it follow that “once you have a reason to be angry, you have a reason to be angry forever”? Cue the clamor of a dozen-plus philosophers debating the cause, function, and value of our most jagged emotion. There’s Myisha Cherry, whose work is always so marvelously elegant, on the irrelevance of virtue to the anger that fuels the anti-racist struggle—an anger she describes as “Lordean rage,” after the poet and writer Audre Lorde. Elsewhere, we get Judith Butler on anger as a medium: “[W]e view rage as an uncontrollable impulse that needs to come out in unmediated forms. But people craft rage, they cultivate rage, and not just as individuals. Communities craft their rage. Artists craft rage all the time.” I’m resistant to the idea that moral philosophy is just self-help dressed in tweed, but as this year lurched from one outrage to the next, and as I found myself becoming hoarse (metaphorically, but often literally) from what felt like shouting into a void, this collection became something of a workbook: a tool for parsing the more unwieldy parts of myself, and my loved ones, and the world. —Helen Rosner

“ Mexican Gothic ,” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

A woman wearing a red dress and holding flowers on a book cover.

In the fall, I cracked open Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Mexican Gothic” in the bath and found myself reading until the water turned cold. “Mexican Gothic” is Moreno-Garcia’s sixth novel but the first to break through as a major hit. (It has already been optioned for television.) This is a function both of its timing and of its addictive prose, which is as easy to slurp down as a poisoned cordial. The book follows a glamorous young socialite with champagne taste named Noemí Taboada, who lives in Mexico City, in the nineteen-fifties, when women were not yet able to vote. Noemí intends to study at university, but her father has other plans: he wants her to check up on a distant cousin, Catalina, who’s living in a crumbling manse with a British man, in a small village, called El Triunfo, where the family operates a silver mine. Catalina has written a distressing note claiming that the house is suffocating her; the family assumes that she’s hysterical, but Noemí is meant to investigate the situation. What she finds is more shocking than she ever expected—the house is an entropic catastrophe, where something sinister (that I won’t spoil here) is literally growing under the baseboards. What makes “Mexican Gothic” so fresh is not only its cramped, crawly ambience—comparisons to “ Jane Eyre ” are not too generous—but also the fact that it’s steeped in a deep colonial history that haunts the narrative. Is the house in El Triunfo really sick? Or is it just tainted by colonizers who want to strip the land down to its bones? Moreno-Garcia deftly raises these questions and then brings them all together in a gory, monstrous, and utterly satisfying twist. —Rachel Syme

“ Blindness ,” by José Saramago

The word blindness written hundreds of times on a book cover.

José Saramago’s “Blindness” came by mail, last winter, one month after COVID came to the U.S. It arrived in a box, with a half-dozen other books, including Camus’s “ The Plague ” and Defoe’s “ Journal of a Plague Year ,” about the literature of infection, for an assignment . I read the Saramago in a cabin in the woods, a sugarhouse, while tending a fire, boiling sap. I’d get lost in the story of a plague of blindness and then put the book down to throw another log in the fire. The pages of the paperback got hot in my hands. I started to sweat, reading about the blindness that fell upon everyone, so that they could see only white, and then I’d stare into the flames and at the sap, bubbling, and the steam, rising, a cloud of white. I took one last trip after that, to Rutgers, the first week of March. I remember being worried about the virus on the train, wearing winter gloves and a scarf, thinking I should have cancelled. I gave a lecture and went out to dinner with a dozen people, professors of English and history. We sat at a long table by a fire, a last supper, and I happened to ask if anyone had ever read “Blindness,” and, weirdly, everyone had. So we went around the table, sacramentally, talking about our favorite lines, characters, moments: the doctor’s wife, the story of the dog, how the infected escape, blindly, from the lunatic asylum where they’ve been quarantined, and the part where they find soap and, finally, wash themselves, naked, on a balcony, with buckets of rainwater. And then, it was all over. —Jill Lepore

“ Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings ,” by Neil Price

The dramatic front of a viking ship as seen from below on a book cover.

Reading the archeologist Neil Price’s beguiling book feels a little like time travel—and who, in 2020, didn’t feel tempted to drop into another epoch? Price achieves this feat with an accumulation of sensory detail, along with a grounded but game approach to conjuring the inner worlds of people whose cosmology, for starters, is utterly different from our own. (As he writes, we’ll never really know what it might have felt like “if you truly believed—in fact, knew —that the man living up the valley could turn into a wolf under certain circumstances.”) Not the least of Price’s achievement is to rescue Viking history from the grasp of white supremacists who claim a specious lineage with it. He does so not by asserting any sort of moral superiority for the Vikings—theirs was a brutal society that practiced human sacrifice and slavery, as Price makes abundantly clear—but by restoring their rich and strange particularity. As seafarers who travelled and traded widely, Vikings were, almost by definition, multiethnic. “There was never any such thing as a ‘pure Nordic’ bloodline, and the people of the time would have been baffled by the very notion,” Price writes. The book is full of such insights, but what has stuck with me are Price’s descriptions of a world enamored with beauty. Surfaces, including those of the body, were intricately decorated, tendrilled over with runic inscriptions and tiny pictures. (Vikings do not seem to have been the unkempt beasts of pop culture legend—the archeological record is heavy on, of all things, combs.) I’ll long remember Price’s evocation of the wafer-thin squares of gold, stamped with images of otherworldly beings, that adorned the great halls where visitors drank and fought and recited poetry. Firelight would have animated those static images. Price has done something similar here. —Margaret Talbot

“ Rodham ,” by Curtis Sittenfeld

A photo of a young Hillary Rodham Clinton on a book cover.

I have always been amazed by the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld’s talent for selecting people who we think we already know and convincing us that they are far more complicated and interesting than we ever dreamed. Before I read “ American Wife ,” I had a basic smug liberal contempt for Laura Bush, who I perceived as her husband’s mute appendage. But in Sittenfeld’s telling, the former first lady—or someone quite like her—was a shy but sharp bibliophile with seething guilt and compelling self-doubt. Now I kind of love her. Similarly, a Republican friend told me that reading Sittenfeld’s latest, “Rodham,” caused her to question everything she’d believed about Hillary Rodham Clinton. We were both riveted by Sittenfeld’s brave, passionate, and diligent heroine navigating lust, ambition, Arkansas, the Ivy League, and, of course, Washington. Sittenfeld’s writing is so fine, her characters so vivid, her empathy so profound that she manages to absorb the reader on a level that transcends partisanship. In 2020, that was a remarkable achievement and an enormous gift to her readers. —Ariel Levy

“ The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn ,” by Richard Hamming

A scientificlooking meandering line on a book cover.

Richard W. Hamming was a mathematician by training, but he cut his teeth as a researcher working at Los Alamos, programming the I.B.M. computers that physicists used to solve equations as they worked on the atomic bomb. After the war, he joined Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he remained for thirty years. This was when big corporations such as I.B.M. and Bell led the charge of technological innovation, and Hamming’s fingerprints were all over the period’s advances. He invented so-called Hamming codes, now basic to digital processing, and co-created an early programming language, L2. After retiring, he taught at the Naval Postgraduate School, in California, giving courses in not just how to do things but how to think like a scientist and conduct a fruitful creative career. (He called it “style.”) In the mid-nineties, a few years before his death, Hamming turned his lecture notes into a book, “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn,” which has been republished by Stripe Press—a young publishing house, created by the eponymous payment-software company, that brings out interesting left-brained books in beautiful, right-brain-friendly editions. Parts of “The Art” get technical enough to include equations, but Hamming is interested mostly in the big picture, and his subjects range from the limits of mathematics (and of language) to the slipperiness of data (“You cannot gather a really large amount of data accurately. It is a known fact which is constantly ignored”). “The Art” would be a great gift for a young scientist-to-be, yet I also loved it as someone on the fuzzy side of things, who always enjoyed science but lost daily touch with it when I left school. His chapter on “creativity,” which draws not just from his field but from history and art, is both stirring and humane. “My duty as a professor is to increase the probability that you will be a significant contributor to our society,” he writes. He was one of the last geniuses who believed in innovation as a shared public project, and, when he imagined the future for which he was preparing students, he looked to the year 2020. He’d be pleased to find his lessons are still urgent here today. —Nathan Heller

“ Balzac’s Lives ,” by Peter Brooks

A statue in a dark room on a book cover.

Honoré de Balzac’s “ La Comédie Humaine ,” grand in both ambition and scope, comprises approximately ninety titles, over whose course the occasionally intersecting stories of nearly two thousand five hundred characters form a portrait of France in the first half of the nineteenth century. In “Balzac’s Lives,” Peter Brooks—a professor emeritus of comparative literature at Yale—turns to nine of these characters to explore the author’s writerly obsessions with money and power, love and desire. To treat fictional characters as so-called real people, with their own lives and behavioral patterns, Brooks notes, has been considered a naïve, even gauche critical approach—at least since the time of the Russian Formalists, who encouraged us to analyze characters for their function as literary devices, rather than for their adherence to the rules that might govern flesh-and-blood individuals. But for Brooks, Balzac’s energetic, almost fevered attitude toward his characters—evident in their emergence and reëmergence over the course of many books, and in their dizzyingly varied social backgrounds, from courtesan to banker, baron to pauper—demands a closer critical look. As I read the book, I enjoyed Brooks’s sharp insights, which suggest the ways in which Balzac’s proto-modern world is not so different from our own. But I also felt a more basic, visceral pleasure. Though I consider myself a Balzac fan, I’ve read only a fraction of the author’s works, and so to be able to discover—or, in some cases, recall—what fates befall certain characters reminded me of the not unprimitive joy of tearing into a juicy morsel of gossip. In this case, it’s the kind that sends you on a mission to find out more—which means picking up a Balzac novel. —Naomi Fry

“ The Year of the French ,” by Thomas Flanagan

A feather is featured on a book cover.

I’m not a recreational reader. I need a reason—usually, it’s something I’m writing—to read a book. But the semi-lockdown last spring seemed to me, as it did to many people, a reason to read a book for no reason, other than pleasure or distraction. So I pulled one off the shelf: “The Year of the French,” by Thomas Flanagan. The novel, published in 1979, is about the invasion of Ireland by the French in 1798. France was revolutionary France, and Ireland was effectively a colony of Britain. The French were hoping to combine forces with an Irish insurrection and liberate the island in the name of liberté, fraternité, and égalité. It didn’t quite work out. I was lucky that I knew nothing about this invasion, not even that it had happened, because Flanagan’s method is to plunge the reader into a strange, wild, poetic, cruel, and finally hopeless world of Irish peasants, absentee British landlords, revolutionary terrorists, and men and women trying to hold on to what they have in a universe threatening to turn upside down. You have to make your own way through this landscape, so the stranger everything is for you, the more adventurous the experience. The story Flanagan tells makes our own dark times seem eminently manageable. I wanted to be taken somewhere else by a book, and I was. And there: I’ve written about it, too! —Louis Menand

“ So Long, See You Tomorrow ,” by William Maxwell

A prairie scene with houses and big clouds on a book cover.

During these long months of hiding out at home—of being thrown back upon recollections of the past, in place of new experience—I’ve been thinking about how to make literary use of memory. How might one capture the way that images or encounters lodge in the imagination and become, over time, layered with meaning? The title of William Maxwell’s short, stunning novel, “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” is a phrase that is said lightly but that comes to be freighted with tragedy; the book itself, which was published in 1980 after being serialized in The New Yorker , is a virtuosic blend of memoir and fiction. Maxwell, who was a fiction editor at this magazine for some four decades, and who died in 2000 at the age of ninety-one, drew in this book, as in a number of others, upon recollections of his hometown of Lincoln, Illinois. In part, it is a true-crime narrative: a jealous husband murders his wife’s lover, who is also his best friend. But the book is also about how that crime stays alive in the narrator’s memory, and how it becomes a means for him to explore his own experience of loss and of guilt. This is a book filled with passages that I wanted to transcribe in a hedge against the failings of my own memory, among them this pronouncement, about midway through: “If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it. I would be content to stick to the facts if there were any.” As well as encountering Maxwell on the page, I recommend listening to the audiobook, which was recorded in 1995. It’s beautifully read by the author, whose voice a listener can hear cracking with emotion upon reaching the novel’s final, breathtaking sentence. —Rebecca Mead

“ Corregidora ,” by Gayl Jones

A book purple cover with various spots of yellow and pink paint.

When Toni Morrison first read the manuscript for what would become Gayl Jones’s début novel, “Corregidora,” she immediately heralded it as a turning point for fiction. “No novel about any black woman could ever be the same after this,” Morrison, then an editor at Random House, wrote. “Corregidora” was published in 1975. Set primarily in the late nineteen-forties, the novel follows Ursa Corregidora, a twenty-five-year-old Black blues singer from Bracktown, Kentucky. Ursa navigates tumultuous, occasionally violent relationships and works to carve out a place for herself as an artist. Following an unwanted hysterectomy, she also confronts her ancestors’ entreaty to “make generations,” which is key to continuing an oral tradition that can preserve, undiluted, the realities of slavery. (Her family carries the name of the Portuguese slave owner who fathered both Ursa’s mother and grandmother.) Storytelling, in this mode, becomes an intergenerational act—a way of maintaining evidence of violence, incest, and erasure. Jones’s writing resists self-conscious ornamentation in favor of casual, knowing vernacular, and her structure is unconventional but tightly controlled. Dialogue is often interrupted by memory or fantasy, and time turns in on itself. On a visit to Bracktown, Ursa’s mother offers an elliptical, bracing account of her own mother’s sexual abuse by Corregidora; later in the novel, which closes in the late nineteen-sixties, Ursa moves closer to reconciling with what has gone unsaid. And yet, despite this panorama, the novel’s actual spaces are intimate—relationships play out in bedrooms, kitchens, bars. Jones’s great achievement is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them. —Anna Wiener

“ Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World ,” by J. R. McNeill

A landscape filled with wind turbines on a book cover.

J. R. McNeill’s “Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World” came out in 2000, but it’s just as relevant now as it was when it first appeared. It’s one of those rare books that’s both sweeping and specific, scholarly and readable. McNeill looks at how humans have, over the past hundred years, altered the atmosphere, the biosphere, and what he calls the “hydrosphere.” What makes the book stand out is its wealth of historical detail. The changes we have wrought, McNeill argues, have mostly been the unintentional side effects of economic growth. They’ve ushered in “a regime of perpetual ecological disturbance,” which will strain many species’ ability to adapt. How people will deal with this new “regime” will determine what the world looks like not just a century from now but for millennia. —Elizabeth Kolbert

“ The Known World ,” by Edward P. Jones

A family rides a carriage down a road on a book cover.

My reading life in 2020 was mostly distinguished by how hard it was for me to read. But my skittering stopped sometime this spring, when I opened “The Known World,” Edward P. Jones’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, from 2003. Reading it was like dropping anchor. My brain stabilized, and it felt like the only thing I could do, for a change, was focus in. This was the work of a genius. The clarity of Jones’s lines, the beauty of his descriptions, the mesmerizing character sketches: all of them were a function of the extreme specificity and intricacy of the world he had created. In a way, he’s a kind of cartographer. The book’s title is a reference to a map: “a browned and yellowed woodcut of some eight feet by six feet” that hangs behind the desk of a sheriff in antebellum Virginia. The seller of the woodcut—a Russian “with a white beard down to his stomach”—claimed it was the first time the word “America” had appeared on a map. The novel, which tells the story of a Black slave owner and his family, is also an account of territory—that marked out by the institution of slavery, which extends into the brains, bones, and souls of everyone it touches. After reading, I immediately picked up Jones’s other two books, both story collections, and raced through the more recent one, “ All Aunt Hagar’s Children .” I didn’t think it was possible for me to like a book as much as “The Known World,” but I began to think that I liked these stories even more. Now, the other collection, “ Lost in the City ,” is on my bedside table—a down payment on my next escape. —Jonathan Blitzer

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NYT Unveils Its Top 10 Books of 2020

BY Michael Schaub • Nov. 22, 2020

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The New York Times unveiled its list of the 10 best books of 2020 on Monday, with former President Barack Obama, Brit Bennett, and Ayad Akhtar among the honored authors.

ny times book review 10 best books of 2020

The top 10 list was announced during a live online presentation introduced by actress and author Mindy Kaling and hosted by Pamela Paul, editor of the New York Times Book Review .

Other nonfiction books making the list were Robert Kolker’s Oprah-approved Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family , James Shapiro’s Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future , Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley , and Margaret MacMillan’s War: How Conflict Shaped Us .

Bennett’s The Vanishing Half   and Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies   were among the five fiction books cited by the Times . The newspaper called Bennett’s book “a provocative meditation on the possibilities and limits of self-definition” and said that Akhtar’s novel “can read like a collection of pitch-perfect essays that give shape to a prismatic identity.”

The other fiction books to make the list were James McBride’s Kirkus Prize finalist Deacon King Kong , Lydia Millet’s National Book Award finalist A Children’s Bible , and Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet .

The Times list is short on surprises but long on books released by the Big Five publishers: Only one of the books, Millet’s novel, was published by an independent press.

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.

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ny times book review 10 best books of 2020

The 10 Best Book Reviews of 2020

Adam morgan picks parul sehgal on raven leilani, merve emre on lewis carroll, and more.

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The pandemic and the birth of my second daughter prevented me from reading most of the books I wanted to in 2020. But I was able to read vicariously  through book critics, whose writing was a true source of comfort and escape for me this year. I’ve long told my students that criticism is literature—a genre of nonfiction that can and should be as insightful, experimental, and compelling as the art it grapples with—and the following critics have beautifully proven my point. The word “best” is always a misnomer, but these are my personal favorite book reviews of 2020.

Nate Marshall on Barack Obama’s A Promised Land ( Chicago Tribune )

A book review rarely leads to a segment on The 11th Hour with Brian Williams , but that’s what happened to Nate Marshall last month. I love how he combines a traditional review with a personal essay—a hybrid form that has become my favorite subgenre of criticism.

“The presidential memoir so often falls flat because it works against the strengths of the memoir form. Rather than take a slice of one’s life to lay bare and come to a revelation about the self or the world, the presidential memoir seeks to take the sum of a life to defend one’s actions. These sorts of memoirs are an attempt maybe not to rewrite history, but to situate history in the most rosy frame. It is by nature defensive and in this book, we see Obama’s primary defensive tool, his prodigious mind and proclivity toward over-considering every detail.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Merve Emre on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ( The Point )

I’m a huge fan of writing about books that weren’t just published in the last 10 seconds. And speaking of that hybrid form above, Merve Emre is one of its finest practitioners. This piece made me laugh out loud and changed the way I think about Lewis Carroll.

“I lie awake at night and concentrate on Alice,  on why my children have fixated on this book at this particular moment. Part of it must be that I have told them it ‘takes place’ in Oxford, and now Oxford—or more specifically, the college whose grounds grow into our garden—marks the physical limits of their world. Now that we can no longer move about freely, no longer go to new places to see new things, we are trying to find ways to estrange the places and objects that are already familiar to us.”

Parul Sehgal on Raven Leilani’s Luster ( The New York Times Book Review )

Once again, Sehgal remains the best lede writer in the business. I challenge you to read the opening of any  Sehgal review and stop there.

“You may know of the hemline theory—the idea that skirt lengths fluctuate with the stock market, rising in boom times and growing longer in recessions. Perhaps publishing has a parallel; call it the blurb theory. The more strained our circumstances, the more manic the publicity machine, the more breathless and orotund the advance praise. Blurbers (and critics) speak with a reverent quiver of this moment, anointing every other book its guide, every second writer its essential voice.”

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Constance Grady on Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ( Vox )

Restoring the legacies of ill-forgotten books is one of our duties as critics. Grady’s take on “the least famous sister in a family of celebrated geniuses” makes a good case for Wildfell Hall’ s place alongside Wuthering Heights  and Jane Eyre  in the Romantic canon.

“[T]he heart of this book is a portrait of a woman surviving and flourishing after abuse, and in that, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall feels unnervingly modern. It is fresh, shocking, and wholly new today, 200 years after the birth of its author.”

Ismail Muhammad on Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley ( The Atlantic )

Muhammad is a philosophical critic, so it’s always fun to see him tackle a book with big ideas. Here, he makes an enlightened connection between Wiener’s Silicon Valley memoir and Michael Lewis’s 1989 Wall Street exposé, Liar’s Poker.

“Like Lewis, Wiener found ‘a way out of unhappiness’ by writing her own gimlet-eyed generational portrait that doubles as a cautionary tale of systemic dysfunction. But if her chronicle acquires anything like the must-read status that Lewis’s antic tale of a Princeton art-history major’s stint at Salomon Brothers did, it will be for a different reason. For all her caustic insight and droll portraiture, Wiener is on an earnest quest likely to resonate with a public that has been sleepwalking through tech’s gradual reshaping of society.”

Breasts and Eggs_Mieko Kawakami

Hermione Hoby on Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs ( 4 Columns )

Hoby’s thousand-word review is a great example of a critic reading beyond the book to place it in context.

“When Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs  was first published in 2008, the then-governor of Tokyo, the ultraconservative Shintaro Ishihara, deemed the novel ‘unpleasant and intolerable.’ I wonder what he objected to? Perhaps he wasn’t into a scene in which the narrator, a struggling writer called Natsuko, pushes a few fingers into her vagina in a spirit of dejected exploration: ‘I . . . tried being rough and being gentle. Nothing worked.’”

Taylor Moore on C Pam Zhang’s How Much Of These Hills Is Gold ( The A.V. Club )

Describing Zhang’s wildly imaginative debut novel is hard, but Moore manages to convey the book’s shape and texture in less than 800 words, along with some critical analysis.

“Despite some characteristics endemic to Wild West narratives (buzzards circling prey, saloons filled with seedy strangers), the world of How Much Of These Hills Is Gold feels wholly original, and Zhang imbues its wide expanse with magical realism. According to local lore, tigers lurk in the shadows, despite having died out ‘decades ago’ with the buffalo. There also exists a profound sense of loss for an exploited land, ‘stripped of its gold, its rivers, its buffalo, its Indians, its tigers, its jackals, its birds and its green and its living.’”

Grace Ebert on Paul Christman’s Midwest Futures ( Chicago Review of Books )

I love how Ebert brings her lived experience as a Midwesterner into this review of Christman’s essay collection. (Disclosure: I founded the Chicago Review of Books five years ago, but handed over the keys in July 2019.)

“I have a deep and genuine love for Wisconsin, for rural supper clubs that always offer a choice between chicken soup or an iceberg lettuce salad, and for driving back, country roads that seemingly are endless. This love, though, is conflicting. How can I sing along to Waylon Jennings, Tanya Tucker, and Merle Haggard knowing that my current political views are in complete opposition to the lyrics I croon with a twang in my voice?”

Michael Schaub on Bryan Washington’s Memorial ( NPR )

How do you review a book you fall in love with? It’s one of the most challenging assignments a critic can tackle. But Schaub is a pro; he falls in love with a few books every year.

“Washington is an enormously gifted author, and his writing—spare, unadorned, but beautiful—reads like the work of a writer who’s been working for decades, not one who has yet to turn 30. Just like Lot, Memorial  is a quietly stunning book, a masterpiece that asks us to reflect on what we owe to the people who enter our lives.”

Mesha Maren on Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season ( Southern Review of Books )

Maren opens with an irresistible comparison between Melchor’s irreverent novel and medieval surrealist art. (Another Disclosure: I founded the Southern Review of Books in early 2020.)

“Have you ever wondered what internal monologue might accompany the characters in a Hieronymus Bosch painting? What are the couple copulating upside down in the middle of that pond thinking? Or the man with flowers sprouting from his ass? Or the poor fellow being killed by a fire-breathing creature which is itself impaled upon a knife? I would venture to guess that their voices would sound something like the writing of Mexican novelist Fernanda Melchor.”

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ny times book review 10 best books of 2020

New York Times 10 Best Books of 2020

Hamnet By Maggie O'Farrell Cover Image

Hamnet (Hardcover)

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait delivers a luminous portrait of a marriage, a family ravaged by grief, and a boy whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time.

A Children's Bible: A Novel By Lydia Millet Cover Image

A Children's Bible: A Novel (Hardcover)

Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction One of the New York Times ' Ten Best Books of the Year Named one of the best novels of the year by Time , Washington Post , NPR, Chicago Tribune , Esquire , BBC, and many others National Bestseller

Homeland Elegies: A Novel By Ayad Akhtar Cover Image

Homeland Elegies: A Novel (Hardcover)

This "profound and provocative" work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and American Dervish follows an immigrant father and his son as they search for belonging—in post-Trump America, and with each other ( Kirkus Reviews ). "Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable." —Salman Rushdie ​ A deeply

Deacon King Kong (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel By James McBride Cover Image

Deacon King Kong (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel (Hardcover)

Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction   Winner of the Gotham Book Prize One of Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of the Year" Oprah's Book Club Pick Named one of the Top Ten Books of the Year by the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly and TIME Magazine A Washington Post Notable Novel

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family By Robert Kolker Cover Image

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family (Hardcover)

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • ONE OF GQ 's TOP 50 BOOKS OF LITERARY JOURNALISM IN THE 21st CENTURY • The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir By Anna Wiener Cover Image

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir (Hardcover)

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2020.

Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future By James Shapiro Cover Image

Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future (Hardcover)

One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • A New York Times Notable Book A timely exploration of what Shakespeare’s plays reveal about our divided land.

War: How Conflict Shaped Us By Margaret MacMillan Cover Image

War: How Conflict Shaped Us (Hardcover)

Is peace an aberration? The New York Times bestselling author of Paris 1919 offers a provocative view of war as an essential component of humanity. NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

The Vanishing Half: A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel) By Brit Bennett Cover Image

The Vanishing Half: A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel) (Hardcover)

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST *  NPR *  PEOPLE * TIME MAGAZINE* VANITY FAIR * GLAMOUR  2021 WOMEN'S PRIZE FINALIST

A Promised Land By Barack Obama Cover Image

A Promised Land (Hardcover)

A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making—from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINEE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

ny times book review 10 best books of 2020

Locus Online

The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field

ny times book review 10 best books of 2020

The New York Times Best Books of 2020

ny times book review 10 best books of 2020

  • The Death of Jesus , J.M. Coetzee (Viking)
  • The Death of Vivek Oji , Akwaeke Emezi (Riverhead)
  • Red Pill , Hari Kunzru (Knopf)
  • A Children’s Bible , Lydia Millet (Norton)
  • Tokyo Ueno Station , Yu Miri, translated by Morgan Giles (Riverhead)
  • Earthlings , Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Grove)
  • Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 , Cho Nam-Joo, translated by Jamie Chang (Liveright)
  • Little Eyes , Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell (Riverhead)
  • Sharks in the Time of Saviors , Kawai Strong Washburn (Farrar, Straus, Giroux)
  • Memorial , Bryan Washington (Riverhead)
  • How Much of These Hills Is Gold , C Pam Zhang (Riverhead)

A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet (Norton) is also among their ten best books of the year . For more information, see  The New York Times  website .

©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.

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Tim Sollén Sweden

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Can You Find the 10 International Thrillers Hidden in This Text Puzzle?

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In the mood for some globe-hopping from a comfy chair? This month’s Title Search encourages you to discover 10 thrillers with settings around the world. The titles of the novels are hidden below within an unrelated text passage. As you read along, tap or click the words when you think you’ve found a title. Correct answers stay highlighted. When you uncover each title, the answer section at the bottom of the screen grows to create a reading list with more information and links to the books.

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IMAGES

  1. THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2020

    ny times book review 10 best books of 2020

  2. New York Times 10 Best Books of 2020

    ny times book review 10 best books of 2020

  3. The 10 Best Books Of 2020 The New York Times

    ny times book review 10 best books of 2020

  4. The Complete List of New York Times Fiction Best Sellers in 2020

    ny times book review 10 best books of 2020

  5. The 10 Best Books of 2020 (Published 2020)

    ny times book review 10 best books of 2020

  6. Times Critics’ Top Books of 2020

    ny times book review 10 best books of 2020

COMMENTS

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    The editors of The New York Times Book Review have named their top ten books of 2020. A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet Deacon King Kong by James McBride Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker A Promised Land by Barack Obama

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    The editors of The New York Times Book Review choose the ten best fiction and nonfiction titles of 2020. Also browse the most recent list (announced November 30, 2021): THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF 2021 - The New York Times Book Review Deacon King Kong (Oprah's Book Club) James McBride $18.00 $16.74

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    115 weeks on the list KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON by David Grann The story of a murder spree in 1920s Oklahoma that targeted Osage Indians, whose lands contained oil. Buy Read Review 180 weeks on...

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    The New York Times unveiled its list of the 10 best books of 2020 on Monday, with former President Barack Obama, Brit Bennett, and Ayad Akhtar among the honored authors.. Obama's A Promised Land, which was published to near-unprecedented hype last week, was one of the five nonfiction books on the list, with the Times praising the former president as "an easy, elegant writer."

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  12. The 10 Best Book Reviews of 2020 ‹ Literary Hub

    The word "best" is always a misnomer, but these are my personal favorite book reviews of 2020. Nate Marshall on Barack Obama's A Promised Land (Chicago Tribune) A book review rarely leads to a segment on The 11th Hour with Brian Williams, but that's what happened to Nate Marshall last month. I love how he combines a traditional review ...

  13. New York Times 10 Best Books of 2020

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    Here are all the New York Times fiction bestsellers from 2020. Instead of just the current best seller list, which you can find all over the place, I've compiled a list of every book that has appeared on the New York Times Fiction Best Sellers list in 2020 for Hardcover Fiction. Note: The week count in this list stops on the last week of 2020.

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