Jenny's Best Books of the Decade 2009-2019

I tried making a list of the best books published in the last decade and it just wasn't as meaningful to me as the best books I read during the last decade, so that's what this is.

And really, Episode 100 has the official top ten list. Maybe I'd move one or two around. But these are still a solid list. What I did instead was to go back through my booklists and highlight some books I wish I could have included in the top books of the decade.

Top Ten Books from Episode 100:

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Justine by Lawrence Durrell
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr.
Stoner by John Williams
Ark by Ed Madden
Black Wave by Michelle Tea

Honorable Mentions from the Last Decade:

2010

Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente
The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagan

2011

The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

2012

Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

2013

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff

2014

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Orfeo by Richard Powers
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon

2015

Kindred by Octavia Butler
Us Conductors by Sean Michaels
North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud

2016

The January Children by Safia Elhillo
The Sympathizer by Viet Than Nguyen
Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien

2017

The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Evicted by Matthew Desmond

2018

Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams
Buttermilk Graffiti by Edward Lee
Virgin by Analicia Sotelo
When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz

2019

Well, there's an entire list!

Jenny's Best of 2019 - The Full List

I ultimately chose a cream of the crop list for the Best of 2019 podcast episode (coming 12/31) but all of these books received five stars from me. Those with an asterisk may have been four star reads for one reason or another (probably more like four and a half) but had sticking power for other reasons, and deserved a mention.

These are in order by when I read them and not prioritized in any other way. This list spans from December 1, 2018 to November 30, 2019. These are not necessarily books published in 2019 but just books I read during that span of time. The quickest way to go back to my review of each title is to find me in Goodreads, or follow the link to the book in the month I read it (in the blog I do a round up episode at the end of each month.)

Does this look like a lot? I read over 300 books in 2019 so this is a good number. I'm happy when so many end up highly rated and enjoyable. It means I'm doing better at picking out my own books.

Poetry

Magical Negro by Morgan Parker (January 2019)
The Library of Small Catastrophes by Alison C. Rollins (March 2019)
Halal if You Hear Me edited by Safia Elhillo and Fatimah Asghar (March 2019)
Our Men do not Belong to Us by Warsan Shire (April 2019)
Brute: Poems by Emily Skaja (April 2019)
The Tradition by Jericho Brown (July 2019)
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets (September 2019)

Literary fiction

The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose (December 2018)
The Word for Woman is Wilderness by Abi Andrews (December 2018)
Eliza Waite by Ashley Sweeney (December 2018)
Sula by Toni Morrison (December 2018)
Severance by Ling Ma (January 2019)*
Outline by Rachel Cusk (February 2019)
America is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo (February 2019)*
Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras (February 2019)*
The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina (March 2019)
Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet (April 2019)
A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza (April 2019)
Bright by Duanwad Pimwana, translated by Mui Poopoksakul (April 2019)
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (May 2019)
The Pisces by Melissa Broder (May 2019)
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli (June 2019)
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (June 2019)
Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell (June 2019)
Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Punchaya Sudbanthad (July 2019)
The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth by Veeraporn Nitiprapha (July 2019)
The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy (July 2019)
The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter (July 2019)*
Space Invaders by Nona Fernandez (August 2019)
Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson (August 2019)
Cantoras by Caroline de Robertis (September 2019)
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor (September 2019)
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (October 2019)
The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery (October 2019)*
Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward (November 2019)
Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg (November 2019)*

Romance

The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary (June 2019)
The Right Swipe by Alisha Rai (June 2019)
Red, White, & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston (July 2019)

Science fiction/fantasy

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (January 2019)*
The Vela by Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, S.L. Huang, Rivers Solomon (March 2019)
If, Then by Kate Hope Day (July 2019)
The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang (August 2019)*
The Deep by Rivers Solomon et al (October 2019)
Mockingbird by Walter Tevis (November 2019)

Graphic novel/manga

My Brother’s Husband vol. 1 by Gengoroh Tagame (February 2019)
Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe (November 2019)

Non-fiction

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (December 2018)
The Best American Food Writing 2018 edited by Ruth Reichl (December 2018)*
84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff (January 2019)
Heavy by Kiese Laymon (January 2019)*
Fired Up by Andrew Johnston (February 2019)
Double Awesome Chinese Food by Margaret, Irene, and Andrew Li (February 2019)
Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir by Ruth Reichl (March 2019)
The Food Explorer by Daniel Stone (March 2019)*
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman (April 2019)
White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo (May 2019)
When Wanderers Cease to Roam by Vivian Swift (May 2019)
Permission to Feel by Mark Brackett (September 2019)
The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy (September 2019)
Erosion by Terry Tempest Williams (September 2019)
A Year Without a Name by Cyrus Grace Dunham (November 2019)
Unfollow by Megan Phelps-Roper (November 2019)
Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward (November 2019)
This Tilting World by Collette Bellous (November 2019)

Review: The Devils’ Dance

The Devils’ Dance by Hamid Ismailov
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Devil's Dance by Hamid Ismailov was a challenging read for a number of reasons. It is a story within a story, of the historical 19th Uzbek female poet who is forcibly married to three Khans in a row, as told by Abdulla Qordiriy, an Uzbek writer who has been imprisoned in a Soviet (NKVD) facility in 1938.

This is a translated novel, translated from the Uzbek which the translator isn't trained in, but the Soviet translation was too full of problems (his afterword was fascinating!) There is poetry on almost every page, also translated, and most assuredly full of layers of meaning that I grasped only some of the time.

Just reading it, dense prose and long chapters, proved a challenge. But also the way violent acts are mentioned in passing can get hard to deal with as a reader, the violence against women but also the mind games in the prison.

But I can now say I have read a novel from Uzbekistan, and this translation won a major translation award. It must have been quite the feat.

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Review: Broken Verses

Broken Verses by Kamila Shamsie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Fourteen years ago, famous Pakistani activist Samina Akram disappeared. Two years earlier, her lover, Pakistan's greatest poet, was beaten to death by government thugs. In present-day Karachi, her daughter Aasmaani has just discovered a letter in the couple's private code—a letter that could only have been written recently."

This book has many layers but I was also interested in the portrayal of modern day Pakistan - one woman is an activist, another an actress, another works for a TV station. Aasmaani was never her mother's priority but she is still searching for her and it is heartbreaking.

I had previously read Home Fires by the same author, which was largely set outside of Pakistan, and wanted to read something set in the country for my Around the World reading project. Most of this novel is set in Karachi but some characters also go to Islamabad. Ramzan (we sometimes call it Ramadan) is also observed during the novel, which is interesting when everyone "should" be observing it.

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Review: The Factory

The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well, I hate the word Kafkaesque except in this case it really is appropriate - this slim translated novel is about three people recently hired to work at a sprawling, city-dwarfing factory, the kind that has bus routes and restaurants to support the workers (or is it to keep them there?) One woman shreds paper at a job she is overqualified for, one man is proofreading documents by hand and battling sleep, and one bryologist has been tasked with something both impossible and that don't seem to actually want him to accomplish.

I've always felt the series of short novels from Japan speak to one another and had to laugh when one character, after thinking negatively about their job, counters with "at least they aren't working at a convenience store." (If you know the novel CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN you will get what I'm saying.)

The concept of senseless work is heavy with dread but feels even worse in this setting. There are other things going on that are a bit confusing - animals that may or may not exist, a dangerous forest on the grounds of the factory, and the sense that in the overwhelming vastness of the factory, there are as many ways to inadvertently violate expectations in each little microcosm. The author communicates the stress of that very well.

While I received a copy from the publisher through Edelweiss, the book came out October 29, 2019.

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Review: The Bromance Book Club

The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gavin and Thea's marriage is on the brink of disaster and his baseball teammates pull him into a secret club that uses romance novels to understand and romance their wives. It could have been hokey but instead I found this author to have incredible comic timing (including writing a very realistic deteriorating sex scene between married people who are upset with each other.) This might be the romance novel I assign to my reading class because it's a regency inside a contemporary, with men who have something to learn (and help each other to learn it!)

This came out November 5 from Berkley who provided me an eARC through Netgalley.

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Review: Jamila

Jamila by Chingiz Aitmatov
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Chingiz Aitmatov is a Kyrgyz author who wrote in Kyrgyz and Russian. Although Jamila was published in Russian, I'm going to count it for Kyrgyzstan for my ongoing Around the World reading challenge.

Set during the long period of collectivism as a Soviet state, in the village where Jamila lives with her in-laws (her husband is a soldier on the front but is delayed in his return because of an injury, and in fact most of the able-bodied men are absent for the same reason.) Her brother in law, too young to fight, is the narrator of the story. He and Jamila harvest wheat together (to be sent to the front) and he is the witness to her interactions with others. He is also coming into his own artistic sensibilities. .
As in most books I have read set in this area, the landscape of the steppes require a lot of hard work, isolation, and horses are central to daily life. Jamila's father was a known horse trainer so she has skills in that area as well.

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