A year for the books

The novel survived the coronavirus. Reading habits mutated. Have you caught the bug?

Mom called to ask for audiobook recommendations; her reading habit has not dimmed despite lost sight. What have I read lately? If I recall sunlight on the page from a bus window, it was not this year. Books were important in my commute, timed so I could take a seat and turn pages. The pandemic lockdown seemed like the end of a literary chapter, but it was only a plot twist. Book sales surged on Amazon and in superstores, and publishers ended the year strong.

To understand what happened I turned to big data—my reading list on Goodreads, a diary of reading exploits that Amazon and Google can unlock at any time.

Turns out I've read at least 20 books in 2020, more than any time since I left newspapers, and more on the couch than the commute. I didn't hear as much about having my nose in a newspaper or computer, though that could have been my hearing, and sometimes read past midnight to clear my head.

Burr the Obscure

I'm averaging 350 pages per book, per Goodreads. I've trimmed my diet of the overgrown magazine articles called business gooks, and moved from mystery to history. None of my reading was among the year's 200 most popular books, if only because I stick to the backlist; most of the 1.8 million readers who tagged "Where the Crawdads Sing" got around to it ahead of me. Yet only 105 people expressed any interest in "The Treason Trial of Aaron Burr," a holdover from my bar association stack.

So a few recommendations. I read two of Jon Meacham’s biographies, which probably say more about current events than history; “American Lion” is about Andrew Jackson, Trump's favorite president, who had his own deep state grudges. Meacham's latest, “His Truth Is Marching on,” about John Lewis and the Freedom Riders, reaches back to another time when students drove social change.

I made room for Lauren Wilkinson’s “American Spy,” a mystery that toys deftly with sterotypes of the Cold War spook. Ward Just died late last year and any of his leisurely character studies are worth the time; I pulled “The Translator” off my to-read stack.

The Best Medicine, Till a Vaccine Arrives

In a glum year, humor claimed more lounge time. I discovered James McBride through the streetwise slackers of “Deacon King Kong"; his fabulist retelling of John Brown's Harpers Ferry raid, "The Good Lord Bird,” followed me on a trip South.

On my daily run, I managed to hear audiobooks over the el trains: George Saunders’ “Fox 8,” a novella about a fox displaced by a subdivision, who learns to read in plotting his attack. There are a lot of malaprops that don't translate from print; Saunders slyly voices the fox like a cousin from Poland, which is both funny and endearing. David Sedaris should be heard as well as read. So should Michelle Obama (“Becoming”), who never takes herself too seriously.

Years ago when my new office fit only half my shelves, I gave away half my books. Sadly, at 20 books a year I don't have enough time to get through them all - especially since I'm mostly reading books reserved at the library. There's comfort in the fact that a pie shop is across the street, and there'll always be another book to escape to.