Best Reads of 2020
For the “Best Books of 2020” (as in, released in 2020) you’ll want to look elsewhere. This is my top five books that I happened to read in 2020 – regardless of publication date – counting down to my favorite of the year…
#5
The City & The City by China Miéville (2009)
China Miéville’s Bas-Lag series (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council) are among my favorite books of all time. But this one was a DNF for me when I first bought it a few years back. I gave it another shot this year and quite enjoyed it. It’s a detective murder mystery with an Eastern Block and Balkan vibe (the setting is intentionally vague). The catch is that it takes place in two cities that coexist in the same physical space, with certain people/cars/objects/buildings being considered to be in one of the cities and certain people/cars/objects/people in the other (and some locations overlapping). Citizens of one city have to engage in a kind of self-delusion, unseeing people and objects in the other city and only interacting with those in their own. Imaging walking down a crowded street, but your mind is only allowed to recognize the existence of half the people there. Or only being able to “see” some of the buildings on the block. And you better get it right, because interacting with people of the other city (or crossing into an area defined as being part of the other city) is a crime called “breach” that will get you disappeared by the secret police. It’s doublethink on an inconceivable level. So, what happens when a woman is murdered in one of the cities and her body dumped in the other? Detective Borlú must solve the mystery, investigating in both cities without committing breach himself. In no time, he’s down a rabbit hole of conspiracies and secret police. This one turned out to be a good combo of police procedural and Miéville’s urban fantasy/New Weird style.
#4
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)
I didn’t know what to expect going into this one. I was searching the various Best Post-Apocalyptic Novels lists online, and this one kept popping up. First, what it’s not… No zombies. No gritty survivalist stuff (or very little). Of course, the few remaining people have to survive in a tough world – but the story isn’t focused on that. Instead, what it is… Pandemic kills like 99.9% of the population. The remaining survivors live in small enclaves isolated from each other. A troupe of musicians and Shakespearean actors wanders the wastelands of Michigan performing for the last of humanity. Based on the description of the book, I expected quite a bit of focus on the music and theater. But that aspect is really just context and stage dressing for a story that jumps back and forth between several characters before and after the apocalypse, slowly revealing how they all fit together. There’s as much here about their lives before the end of the world as there is about their lives after everything went to hell. It reads more like literary fiction than genre fiction – though I don’t mean that to in any way suggest that it’s highfalutin, just that it feels that way in terms of story structure and themes and character relationships. Bottom line, if you’re jonesing for a Walking Dead fix you won’t find it here. But if you just like a good novel about interesting characters, you may like this one. That said, you’ll need to do one thing to enjoy it: you’ll have to ignore a basic problem with the premise of the book – that a plague killing 99.9% of the population in a matter of weeks created a world of scarcity and decay. It’s just not believable – but that’s ok, accept the premise and get on with enjoying the story.
#3
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing / A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green (2018/2020)
I never would have given these two books a look were they not written by well-known YouTuber Hank Green (brother of John Green). I really enjoy Hank’s work on YouTube, and so I downloaded a sample of the first book for kindle. I was immediately hooked. This is a story about social media and fame disguised as a story about first contact with an alien intelligence. When Transformers-like mech statues show up in a number of random places around the globe, a young woman (April) and her friend (Andy) become social media sensations for their video-taped interactions with one of the mechs. From there, things get pretty crazy – with talking monkeys, shared virtual reality dreams, and cybernetics. I suppose it might be considered YA, but I don’t see any reason it has to be. It’s all very “now” in its sensibilities (if you follow folks like Hank Green and Lindsay Ellis on YouTube, you’ll know what I mean) and very charmingly written with a fairly small cast of characters, all of whom we get to know along the way and who have sufficiently interesting relationships to keep you caring. Highly recommended.
#2
1984 by George Orwell (1949)
Plenty of classics are a chore to read or just haven’t aged well. 1984 is not one of those books. I read it this year for the third time when the e-book showed up on Kindle Unlimited. It’s the ultimate dystopian novel (though not the first), written in the aftermath of WWII as a reaction to Stalinist Russia (and no-doubt Nazi Germany). It’s highly readable (with straightforward prose) and a compelling story about one man struggling to find his humanity within a totalitarian state. The main character, Winston, works in the Ministry of Truth modifying old newspaper stories as required to conform to the government’s latest version of reality (“Who control the past controls the future”). He lives in a prison-like apartment under constant surveillance by the TV monitor. He attends daily sessions where he and his fellow workers watch propaganda films about the endless war against Eurasia (except when the state changes it to Eastasia and everyone must adjust their thinking through “doublethink” to believe it was always Eastasia) — and get worked up into a violent screaming frenzy when presented with images of purported traitors to the state. But Winston’s heart isn’t in it, and he worries about engaging in thoughtcrime and being exposed as a subversive. Then he does the unthinkable, falling in love – an act that threatens to bring about his ruin. Anyone living in the 21st century will find plenty of parallels to our current world in this grim mid-20th century vision of the future: doublethink on the right and left, constant surveillance, the use of endless foreign wars and constant terrorist threats as a means of social control, political rallies of frothing angry maniacs yelling for the destruction of their enemies, and annihilation of the individual in favor of the state. I’d put this one in my top 10 must-read books of all time.
#1
Children Of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2015)
My favorite read of the year was an easy pick. In this classic-style sci-fi, the last remnants of humanity awaken from cryo-sleep on their ark ship to find themselves unable to settle a terraformed planet as expected…because a civilization of giant spiders lives on the surface and the planet is guarded from space by a deranged AI-controlled satellite (the original ship that was sent to terraform the planet). As if this isn’t a cool enough setup, the action takes place over an enormous expanse of time — the main human character keeps being put back into cryo-sleep for long stretches (to avoid aging) and only woken up when he’s needed. Each time he awakens, we find that radical changes have occurred both with the humans onboard ship and with the spiders on the planet (there are spider characters — they’re not just a nameless, faceless enemy). If you like the Revelation Space books by Alastair Reynolds, I’m betting you’ll like this one.
— Lincoln LMN