February 10, 2020 “ The Best of Everything,” Rona Jaffe’s best-seller from 1958, is what you would get if you took “Sex and the City” and set it inside “Mad Men” ’s universe. Here are the 10 Best Books of 2020, along with 100 Notable Books of the year. This posthumous essay collection from the historian and travel writer Morris, who died last year at 94, ranges from a brief ode to sneezing to an alternative history for Princess Diana. Top 10 Books for Kids. We also like a posthumous essay collection from the beloved travel writer Jan Morris and a new graphic memoir from the brilliant Alison Bechdel that explores her obsession with physical fitness, along with a lot of fiction: story collections by John Lanchester and Te-Ping Chen, and new novels from Rachel Cusk, Helen Oyeyemi, Ben Hopkins and J. Robert Lennon. Trump, the GOP, and the rise of zombie politics. “It’s as if Cusk has been reading Joyce Carol Oates’s best novels,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. Jones’s writing resists self-conscious ornamentation in favor of casual, knowing vernacular, and her structure is unconventional but tightly controlled. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24.) Tick off the titles on our Top 10 lists as you read them. —Rachel Syme, José Saramago’s “Blindness” came by mail, last winter, one month after COVID came to the U.S. Get the ... 2020 in Review The Best Books We Read in 2020. 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. The story Flanagan tells makes our own dark times seem eminently manageable. “Bechdel has devoted a book to each of her parents and outlived them both,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. 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. This was when big corporations such as I.B.M. Price has done something similar here. (Liveright, $24.95.) Welcome to the combined New York Review of Books and Reader's Catalog online store. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) Her biggest triumph is the transmission of consciousness. of 2020. I remember being worried about the virus on the train, wearing winter gloves and a scarf, thinking I should have cancelled. Folkloric elements, including a stalking crow and a shape-shifting demon, carry the reader along until quantum physics takes hold of the plot. With intersecting plots about the construction of an enormous church in medieval Alsace, Hopkins has constructed a clever commentary on the ironies of history. Our recommended books this week offer revisionist views of a couple of historical figures: In “The Invention of Miracles,” her biography of the often-lionized Alexander Graham Bell, the writer Katie Booth takes a dim view of his efforts to eradicate deafness and its culture, while in “The Bomber Mafia,” Malcolm Gladwell looks favorably on the much-criticized Gen. Curtis LeMay and his ruthless Japanese bombing campaign late in World War II. “My duty as a professor is to increase the probability that you will be a significant contributor to our society,” he writes. Booth, who grew up among deaf family members, brings fierce passion to this eloquent and deeply skeptical portrait of Bell, whose inventions went hand in hand with a misguided crusade to eradicate deafness. —Naomi Fry, “The Year of the French,” by Thomas Flanagan, I’m not a recreational reader. (Riverhead, $27.) an exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, January 18–August 9, 2020; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, August 29–November 1, 2020; the Birmingham Museum of Art, November 20, 2020–February 7, 2021; the Seattle Art Museum, March 5–May 23, 2021; and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., June … Booth’s descriptions of Bell’s passionate courtship of his student Mabel Hubbard, who belonged to a much higher social class, are as stirring as a romance novel, and her narrative of his work on the telephone reads like a thriller. © 2021 Condé Nast. 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. The changes we have wrought, McNeill argues, have mostly been the unintentional side effects of economic growth. When he is introducing characters and showing them in conflict, ‘The Bomber Mafia’ is gripping. I enjoyed this short book thoroughly, and would have been happy if it had been twice as long.”, CATHEDRAL, by Ben Hopkins. So I pulled one off the shelf: “The Year of the French,” by Thomas Flanagan. 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. “She digs into the gothic core of family and romantic entanglements. But “Want,” a subtly … How people will deal with this new “regime” will determine what the world looks like not just a century from now but for millennia. ... December 3, 2020. Maybe it would someday be useful to have a spreadsheet detailing how I spent my pandemic—every nineties movie I rewatched, everything I bought online. I took one last trip after that, to Rutgers, the first week of March. Is the house in El Triunfo really sick? I gave a lecture and went out to dinner with a dozen people, professors of English and history. The Trumpist ideal is a black box world, a world in which power does not have to account for itself, and oligarchic rulers can conduct negotiations in secret, without the irritation of a public they must consult or represent. The narrator of Rachel Cusk’s first novel since the Outline trilogy concluded with “Kudos” in 2018 is familiar: a sharply observant writer in middle age. Here are some of the books we loved seeing on this year’s — and past years’ — lists of the New York Times’ Best Children’s Books. (Vikings do not seem to have been the unkempt beasts of pop culture legend—the archeological record is heavy on, of all things, combs.) They’ve ushered in “a regime of perpetual ecological disturbance,” which will strain many species’ ability to adapt. 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. Now, the other collection, “Lost in the City,” is on my bedside table—a down payment on my next escape. The 10 Best Books of 2020 The editors of the Journal’s books pages pick the year’s most distinguished fiction and nonfiction. 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. “Oyeyemi is a master of leaps of thought and inference, of shifty velocity, and the story’s long setup has the discombobulating quality of walking through a moving vehicle while carrying a full-to-the-brim cup of very hot tea,” Alexandra Kleeman writes in her review. 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. 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. 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. (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. Similarly, a Republican friend told me that reading Sittenfeld’s latest, “Rodham,” caused her to question everything she’d believed about Hillary Rodham Clinton. He invented so-called Hamming codes, now basic to digital processing, and co-created an early programming language, L2. In this gritty thriller, set in rural Virginia, Beauregard “Bug” … That's $99.95 for US subscribers instead of $150 and $145.00 for Canadian & international subscribers instead of $219! “Is it limbo, or a wall persuaded to shield us from the truth? The New York Review of Books: recent articles and content from nybooks.com; A few stories take fantastical turns, but the author excels at realism and vivid portrayals of the widening gap between China’s haves and have-nots. and Bell led the charge of technological innovation, and Hamming’s fingerprints were all over the period’s advances. 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. “One of Gladwell’s skills is enabling us to see the world through the eyes of his subjects,” Thomas E. Ricks writes in his review. But my skittering stopped sometime this spring, when I opened “The Known World,” Edward P. Jones’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, from 2003. For the latest must-read recommendations, read The Times and The Sunday Times Best Books of 2021 (so far...). “Mexican Gothic” is Moreno-Garcia’s sixth novel but the first to break through as a major hit. Best Books of 2020. “Her parents are small presences in this book, and shockingly benign. Chen’s debut collection roams China and its diaspora. “Engagingly written, the book enlivens a life that has often appeared dry in other accounts. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) —Jill Lepore, “Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings,” by Neil Price, 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? 1 /11 Best new books for September 2020 ... Homegoing, landed on The New York Times’ bestsellers list, ... MORE ABOUT New Books Best Books Book Reviews. The New York Review, to which he began contributing last year, is collecting tributes from his friends and colleagues. (The husband quit a job in finance to become an artisanal carpenter, a phrase that would fit nicely on a Green-Wood Cemetery tombstone.) Pastels and candy colors — a departure for Bechdel — alternate with stark black-and-white pages. —Elizabeth Kolbert, My reading life in 2020 was mostly distinguished by how hard it was for me to read. 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. 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. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. Or try any of these new books that our editors recommend. “Gladwell is a wonderful storyteller. It didn’t quite work out. “Hopkins is a filmmaker as well as a novelist, so it’s no surprise that he should stock his pages with tension-filled scenes. 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