Liz's Pickz 2022!
I subscribe to a number of newsletters centered around doing cozy things at home and being tired. And, come late in the year in late capital, they issue forth their holiday gift buying guides. I scrolled through eagerly when they began to drop, say around early October and of course bought a gift or two (or dozens) for myself. Then I got into The Wirecutter’s guides and the Black Friday Sales Events and now, a week before Christmas, I am reminded of that saying about drugs: first it felt like magic, then like medicine, then like madness. To compile another list of anything that’s not Naps I Will Take and Tanning Beds I Will Contemplate is indeed an act of madness. But I read some wonderful books this year, old and new, and I want to tell you about them.
These titles all pass an excruciatingly difficult test: do I want to read this book after dinner? When pitted against Bravo’s latest monstrosity Southern Hospitality (this show is a mess in a dress and I highly recommend) would this book reign victorious? I wake up at 5 [NB: although that may sound like a brag it is more like perimenopause/Mennonite genetics and dear goddess, I would trade a kidney to be able to sleep til 7] and do my best reading in that divine 90 minutes before screaming children and the day’s work, and most anything in that hour glitters to me, be it article, monograph, novel. But come 7:30pm I’m thinking about my bedside humidifier and homespun sarcophagus of ear plugs, eye mask, wrist guards, night guard, and klonopin. If I can get it up for these books at that hour, then you know you’re got a hit on your hands.
American Fire by Monica Hesse: I’m teaching a class on true crime in the spring so I spent the summer putting together my syllabus and reading some amazing and demented examples of the genre. This one, on a series of more than 70 arsons that took place in the hinterlands of the Virginia coast, was among the very best and you’ve likely never heard of it, which is a crime in itself. The pacing, the people, the utter weirdness of the crimes and the place, and, above all, the acrobatic reporting Hesse conducted make this book simply unputdownable, the best of all adjectives, IMO.
The Furrows by Namwali Serpell: Sure, it’s a NYT Top 10 book of the year, and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize (does the winner get to learn where JCO is plugged in?). But what about when the author sees it is also a Liz’s Pickz?! This is a book about among other things grief, yes, but what stands out to me are the characters themselves, who are as real and present as my own desiccated hands. I mourn Wayne like I knew him, and think of C as a confidante. An experiment in form that I’ve never seen before or since, Serpell's book provocative and captivating but above else MY GOD the sentences!!!!
NSFW by Isabel Kaplan: A novel that deals with themes of gender and power in the workplace with, dare I say it, complexity, nuance, and a sense of humor?! Kaplan just dropped a barn burner of a viral essay. DRAG HIM!
The Rise of a New Left by Raina Lipsitz: This rip roaring account of up-and-coming lefties is the ultimate accessory at the DSA convention. Lipsitz was telling you girls about AOC before you had a clue, and she has her finger on the pulse of everything that terrifies your conservative uncles, delivered in glimmering prose. Bread AND roses!
A Visible Man by Edward Enninful: In the honorary slot of “book by a man” this memoir is a dishy, big-hearted glimpse into the fashion world and life in exile from Ghana in 80s and 90s Britain. Enninful’s workaholism makes god look lazy for taking a rest on the 7th day, and he dispenses tasty anecdotes about running amok with Kate and Naomi. He’s also a great follow on the ‘gram.
Flight by Lynn Steger Strong: I’m not sure there is a better conveyor of the agony and the ecstasy of family life than Steger Strong. This novel is monumental because it deals with a large cast of characters which would normally require a family tree reference at the beginning of the book but Strong draws her people so clearly that you recognize and feel them distinctly and instantly. The book is a beautiful meditation on the discontents, joy, and paradoxes of family life, along with the hypocrisies of who gets damned and who does the damning when it comes to being a quote unquote good mother.
Mitz by Sigrid Nuñez: I queried friends on IG for a book that goes down easy but is full of beauty and big ideas, and Neil delivered big with this rec. A fictionalized biography of real-life marmoset Leonard Woolf adopted, we get Bloomsbury from a monkey’s eye. Nuñez imagines Mitz’s odyssey from South America to London in a passage that if you are not weeping by the end, you better fog a mirror to make sure you are sentient. This is a strange and adventurous little book, perfect for lifting your pre-solstice doldrums.
Carmen and Grace by Melissa Coss Aquino: I almost feel bad putting this on the list since you hoi polloi can’t read it til April ’23 but you can pre-order now and it will be a great gift to your future self. This is the kind of book that I felt sad when it was over and am deeply envious of people who will get to experience it for the first time. Cinematic in its time and place, Coss Aquino’s gang of girls in the Bronx do all manner of intrigue and subterfuge, sure. But they also mother each other on a spiralic hero’s journey they likes of which I’ve never seen. I would say I miss them now that the book is over, but they live in my heart and head—seriously, I am rarely not thinking about this book!
The Palace Papers by Tina Brown: Never have I read a tome so dense with hot goss that this is more a delightful brick of unattributed hearsay than book in the traditional sense. I binged The Crown, cackled over Harry and Meghan’s inadvertently hilarious infomercial (he first fell in love with her in the dog filter from Snapchat???), and now this, so I consider myself something of an amateur royal watcher. Scott asked me the other day why I care about them, and, gun to my head, I’d say off with their heads—the fact that Kate and Willz got booed in Boston made me beam with homestate pride (the ultimate yuh think yuh bettah than me???). I could give you a highfalutin answer about family dysfunction and modern British history, but in truth it’s like all things that a basic b adores: PSLs, musicals, fuzzy boots—there’s something low stakes and cozy about it (barring colonialsm/racism/inbreeding/tampongate/ad infinitum).
Screaming on the Inside by Jessica Grose: If you haven’t read Grose’s vital dispatches from the frontline of the garbage fire of the past few years, delete this immediately and go do so now. This book is full of them, and you know what else? Grose manages to make me LOL throughout and pirouettes personal storytelling and hard (depressing) data in the deftest of literary ballets. Come here me shout from the rooftops about how great this book and author are at our event on this Thursday December 15!
What did you read this year that touched your heart and head?
From my achy cranky tender heart to yours,
-Liz