Year In Review: The Four Seasons Landscaping of My Discontent

2020 was up on the ain't shit wasn't it? A year that felt like a decade rolled into 12 months. A year filled with plot twists, protests, and fascistic fuckery --- and that was just the pure insanity swirling around the 2020 US election season. A pandemic persisted, and was idiotically politicized to disastrous, and deadly results. A revolution to put an end to legalized genocide on Black American bodies was televised and TikTok'ed live across several nations, making for one of the largest civil rights uprisings in modern history. And for the season finale, a slow-moving coup happened in real time to a soundtrack of seditious screams, drunken slurs, and the nauseous gases of crusty, over-entitled white men in power. Every day, here in the winter of America, it was a test of endurance to look at a news feed and not let out a string of expletives. Saying "wtf" every day was my new cardio, the only exercise to fight off the quarantined pounds. On the personal front, I was laid off, contracted a terrible hybrid migraine/sinus infection situation that kept me bedridden, got my first grey hair witch hair this year, and the long-awaited Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries film was terribleawful...so yes, 2020 can fuck right off. 

What kept my four seasons landscaping of discontent from eroding into a further mental and physical shitshow were the books (and music --- thank you Spotify subscription, the only subscription I could afford this year -__-) that I consumed. Escapism was a must. 

At the beginning of the year, I planned on reading 20 books for 2020 (me trying to be 'cute'), and in a way with being quarantined and laid off, you'd think I'd have 'time enough at last' to read past that point, but that wasn't the case. Same with blogging. To coincide with the theme of this year, things just didn't go as planned and derailed with sparks flying BUT I'm attempting to put a positive spin on the fact that I DID reach my reading goal and I DID blog about 45% - 55% more than I did last year, and that IS progress, and progress I can build on into the new year. *throws confetti* So enough with excuses and defeatism...

By now I've accepted that my reading patterns can be scattershot as much as it can be variations on a consistent theme. My reading practice is akin to spinning a globe and letting my finger drop on a random portion and that's where I will "go". In short, I didn't choose the book, the book chose me. Often choosing me in the right hour, right moment to bring some sort of clarity or solace amid the chaotic spin.

I began the year with E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime which felt prophetic a choice as it does cram a whole era into a fictionalized context defined by a varying swath of characters (revolutionaries, politicians, murderers, bigots, immigrants, businessmen, sex symbols, entertainers) that represent America in a time of serious transition. Just super fitting for how "era defining" and character driven this year felt. I can bet that some Ragtime-esque novels to describe this tumultuous era will be making their way to shelves in the near future. Who knows maybe yours truly will write one of those books... <--- yes, let's put that energy out there, shall we? *wink* 

When the pandemic hit, my mood reflected the reads, taking dark turns into books about insidious sexual grooming (Kate Elizabeth Russell's My Dark Vanessa) and about cheating murderous couples from a true crime perspective (Ron Hansen's fictional reimagining of "The Dumb Bell" Murders A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion) and a classic realist literary perspective (Emile Zola's Therese Raquin). If the pandemic wasn't unnerving enough, I faced a 'haunted quarantine' by delving into modern horror classics (Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby, Laura Purcell's The Silent Companions, and Herman Raucher's Maynard's House) that felt claustrophobic in their nature as did I. And since I was still living under the ketchup and feces smeared hand of -45, a few autocratic dystopian reads found their way into the pile (Joan Samson's The Auctioneer and Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police), and their eerie elements of cult of personality and surveillance scare tactics blurred fiction and reality.

Plans for reading in 2021? Rare it is that I apply reading goals for the following year as scheduling a particular book or reading through one set genre seems so limiting and unnatural to me. I did take mental notes to improve upon some areas that I lagged in this year, as I need to add more plays and/or poem collections into the mix. Also these past four years watching our Constitution get used as hoarded toilet tissue has taught me more about civic government and constitutional law than any social studies teacher I've ever had (apologies to Mr. Grissom, who was the best of the bunch), but I still feel there is much I need to know to stay vigilant, so some more political and historical books will probably be added into the mix. So like the new Biden Administration (my, that has such a nice sound to it...) I've got a lot of work (and reading) to do!

Be safe, be well, be excellent to each other in 2021 (and wear a damn mask!). 

Favorites 

Fiction 

The Neon Bible, by John Kennedy Toole (1989) [Review]

Still in a state of awe how an unfinished manuscript that took some unethical turns towards publication, ended up being one of the best books I've read this year. Toole wrote, at such a tender age, a coming-of-age tale that forever will haunt me with its raw realism and ruminations of fractured families.

The Silent Companions, by Laura Purcell (2017) [Review] 

Sometimes you just need a good-old fashioned gothic ghost story that wears its tropes unapologetically, but still gets the job done in spooking the hell out of you. Thanks to this book, I never will I look at carved wood the same way again...  

Maynard's House, by Herman Raucher (1980) [Review] 

Raucher's lone horror novel got there before Adrian Lyne's 1990 film Jacob's Ladder did in exploring the nightmarish spiral of PTSD after the Vietnam War --- and it stirs an even more macabre web of what-the-fuck.

Non-Fiction 

Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing, ed. by Stephanie Stokes Oliver (2018)

A fantastic anthology of essays that celebrates the evolution of the Black word, fittingly beginning with Fredrick Douglas and ending with President Barack Obama. Some of the more 21st Century choices felt a bit...juvenile? among the astute timeless words of W.E.B. DuBois and Toni Morrison, but it's a really good starting place if you want to read the further words and wisdom of some of Black greatest authors and orators. Inspiring and essential collection for me. 

Marylin Monroe: The Private Life of a Public Icon, by Charles Casillo (2018) [Review]

This biography surprised me. It made me re-think about a celebrity that I never thought much about in the beginning, reassessed all the rumors and conspiracy theories, and made me a fan. Maybe I should go out and buy a throw pillow with Marylin's face airbrushed on it now?

 

Fails

Fiction

The Vanishing Act, by Britt Bennett (2020) [Review]

Quite trashed this book in my review, but I still stand by the fact that it was an overrated pile of tone-deaf literary bile that makes a simplistic soap opera out of racial passing and trivializes the transgender experience. Shocked, really, how beloved this was when it went against a lot of what we're striving for in diverse literature. Guess I'll be in the minority on this...

The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa (1993) [Review] 

Fantastic premise that really goes...nowhere. Was quite disappointed in how this just withered, considering it creeped along in a quiet brutality, and had flashes of poignancy concerning autocratic societies and the insidiousness of surveillance. A proper descendant of 1984 this is not.

Ghachar, Ghochar, by Vivek Shanbhag (2013) [Review]

Well-written boredom spoken from the words of a manchild... 

Non-Fiction 

The Skincare Bible: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Great Skin, by Dr. Anjali Mahto (2018)

Gorgeous cover, useless book. It's not a total waste considering a real derm doctor wrote this and there is valuable skin science within in its pages, but this book was several St. Ives Apricot scrub incidents and a 90-step Asian skincare routine too late for me. I bought this off of ASOS (back when they used to carry books...good times) and I got sucked in by that gorgeous cover, forgetting that a) I shouldn't order books online without looking within their contents first, and b) that self-help books rarely "help" me, in fact, they make me over-think everything --- and I do that enough on this blog and when I watch old school Unsolved Mysteries episodes. Also ASOS being a fashion company based in the UK means their products lean quite Union Jack, thus the statistics and medical advice here was useless as it was...triggering *cries in barbaric US-based healthcare*.