Another year passed, this one in a haze of COVID-19 and in a fog of quarantine on the East Coast. One of the things that brought the most texture to these past 8 months (and indeed, the last year) is literature, so just like last year, the Poley Awards are a time for me to categorize those books (and, tangentially, celebrate my childhood stuffed bear “Poley”).
*prepares faux awards-show voice*
Tonight’s first Poley Award goes to the books that deserve to be read, even when reading feels like a chore. Drumroll, please…
The Poley for “Highest Quality-To-Page Ratio” goes to…
(Rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?) If I only had one day a week to read, I would read these. They’re succinct, engaging, and often profound.
- Tenth of December and Civilwarland by George Saunders. In these short story collections Saunders depicts the human condition like a tarnished family heirloom collecting cobwebs in a dust-streaked attic. These tragic and vulnerable slices of life, rendered absurd and universal by their oft-whimsical setting, powerfully portray the Cain-like fallible innocence of their protagonists.
- The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Butler was one of the authors responsible for making “science fiction” just “fiction”. Sower reads less like a 1993 speculative fiction piece and more like a Diary of Anne Frank for 2020, and yes, it is every bit as dreadful and hopeful as that sounds.
- The Hidden Girl, And Other Stories by Ken Liu. These wonderful stories effortlessly fuse piercing examinations of contemporary ethical crises, ancient-seeming meditations on humanity and beauty, and almost-real speculative science fiction. Liu is quite simply blazing a brand-new trail toward the Good Life, and we are lucky enough to be his passengers.
The Poley for “Oops, I haven’t showered and I’m three hours late to work” goes to…
This Poley goes to the books that are so totally engrossing that one’s spouse must employ physical force to get one to put it down.
- The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson. When my friend bought me a copy of The Way of Kings, I was a little skeptical it would amount to anything more than Tolkien wannabe web-fic. After devouring 3900 pages in record time, I can happily recant that sentiment. Sanderson’s worlds are every bit as fresh as the imaginings of Liu or Jemisin, and every bit as exhaustive as the creations of Tolkien or Rowling. And where some fantasy works are more fun to watch than to read, Sanderson kept me riveted through a winning combination of meta-literary philosophical musings and frequent gasp-out-loud moments of cool. Truly deserving of the phrase “epic fiction”.
The Poley for “Most Novel Novel” goes to…
- In the Woods by Tana French. I can’t say too much about this tensely paced, visceral crime thriller without spoiling it, so I’ll merely assert that this book upended my outlook on the entire whodunit genre. The more familiar one is with Agatha Christie and Robert Galbraith, the more devastatingly monumental In the Woods becomes. Eight months later and I’m still not quite over it.
The “Words and Pictures” Poley
Comic books, duh. Due to quarantine’s disruption of my local library I read quite a few excellent series online this spring and am delighted to share the fruits of my labor. These are the best introductory comics for any taste.
For the space opera fan: Saga by Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples. Vaughan is my favorite writer in comics — earnest and nuanced and savvy without ever descending into pedantry. More importantly, he knows how to write for visual stories, and his partner-in-crime on this series, Fiona Staples, is incredibly skilled at rendering wordless, authentic emotion. This series is gripping, mature, and not for the faint at heart… but it is also the best ongoing series in the industry.
For the mystery buff: Blacksad by Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido. If you’ve ever wondered what 30s-era gangsters, Nazis, and private eyes would look like as classic Disney cartoons, Blacksad has got you covered. Deliciously noir and bursting at the margins with magnificently detailed art, these books are an unmitigated delight.
For the fine-arts aficionado: Descender by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Ngyuen. A sci-fi story about children and hubris and loyalty by one of the masters of the medium, Jeff Lemire. Even though the pages of this book are standard-issue gloss paper, the ink on each panel faithfully imitates the warp and weft of rough sketchpad paper, upon which Dustin Ngyuen’s watercolor paintings absolutely scintillate.
For the philosopher: Daytripper by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá. This wonderful little book is about a obituaries writer who spends a lot of time thinking about death. And yet, by reading it, I learned better to appreciate life. I don’t know of higher praise that can be given a work of literature.
The “Prop Your Furniture Up With This” Poley
Yeah, not all of my books were joys this year. I read some that negatively and flagrantly violated my expectations, which is a surefire way in my home for a book to find itself acting as structural reinforcement for potted plants. (And, for the record, I’m firmly in the “quitting books is a good way to read books you actually like” camp, so I didn’t finish any of these, but I did push through my initial discomfort just to be sure it wasn’t just my imagination.)
- I’ve decided that comic books are usually better the newer they are. I read various so-called classics by Alan Moore (V for Vendetta), Grant Morrison (Swamp Thing), and other decades-reigning titans of the comics industry, only to find that I really preferred how much less sexist everything published after 2000 is.
- Unfortunately there are also exceptions — sometimes recent comics are really bad, too. I tried series like The Last Days of American Crime, Deadly Class, and an adaptation of American Gods, but couldn’t finish any of them. 2020 has been a grim year, and so I don’t really need comics, the most hopeful of media, to be contaminated by child assassins and voyeurism straight out of the pages of Playboy. No, thank you.
The “Superlative Dinner Conversation” Poley
These are the books that won’t quite fit anywhere else, but I loved them so much I feel a need to talk about them, and I’m sure you will too. Buy them in case you need to annotate liberally.
- Thinking, Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Perhaps counterintuitively, the nonfiction books I love the most are the ones whose thesis is that my own brain is not to be fully trusted. Kahneman’s Nobel-winning work, summarized in this dense book, spans a long career in cognitive psychology where much of his time was spent proving exactly the irrationality of the human brain. Partly I love the audacity of the idea, but if I’m being honest, a big dose of epistemic humility (served up by Kahneman and his compatriots Ariely and Haidt) has just made me a more tolerable human.
The “Concessions to a Pandemic” Poley
Sometimes we need to relax pre-pandemic, achievement-based goals of reading 52 books in a year; here’s some media for those moments:
- Brick, Knives Out, and The Brothers Bloom directed by Rian Johnson. These are all smart genre films from a master of genre, and each one swerves through story beats with humor and poise. Perfect popcorn movies.
- Snowpiercer (2013) directed by Bong Joon-Ho. Joon-Ho is best known for winning the Oscar for Parasite, but Snowpiercer is that film’s equal — it replaces satire with allegory, but is no less scathing in its indictment of exploitative capitalism.
- Locke directed by Steven Knight. This film turns 2 hours in a car with Tom Hardy from a low-class gimmick to a psychological roller-coaster. Excellent.
- XCOM: Chimera Squad by Firaxis. The XCOM games are the best turn-based strategy franchise in existence, and Chimera Squad is the latest, freshest release. It’s good for twenty hours of punishment at least, which is well worth its lightweight price tag.
Okay, that was a lot of great Poleys (*applause*), but I’ve been saving the best for last. That’s right, ladies and gents, I’m presenting …
The “Dangerously likely to change my life” Poley
These are the books that I simultaneously dread and revere: the former, because I know that each page makes it more likely that the foundations of my life are shaken to the core, and the latter because I know that each page is vitally and completely essential.
And note that I didn’t agree with everything presented in these books — but grappling with these ideas, whether I end up agreeing or not, is an act that threatens to change my life.
- Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty.
- This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein.
- Our Only World by Wendell Berry.
- Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas.
- Deep Economy by Bill McKibben.
These five works all share an intellectual ethos: a relentless pursuit of the most humane and practical ways to increase human flourishing. Piketty’s masterwork explores the relentless, self-perpetuating accumulation of capitalistic wealth in the largest economic-historical study of its kind, showing that capitalism as it stands today is built to concentrate assets into the hands of a small rentier elite. Giridharadas argues powerfully that those same elite winners are the least likely to effect meaningful change, despite their oft-good intentions — they fund only the research which suits their profit goals and ignore free-thinkers who challenge them.
Klein carries on the wide-ranging journalistic spirit of Giridharadas and focuses those observations into a razor-sharp point: the tools of unregulated late capitalism are fundamentally incommensurate to the task of halting climate change and the systematic inequality which exploitative capitalism has birthed. McKibben argues in a similar vein to Klein, but focused more positively on the local, communal actions which offer our greatest chance of overcoming the triplicate ills of inequality, ecological ruin, and social injustice. And finally, Berry’s essays offer the unyielding voice of the prophet, reminding us of the goodness of the places and communities from which we are economically and existentially exiled.
These books do not merely outline a policy platform, but a way of being. This is a mode of existence that is motivated, not by fear or scarcity, but by an unerring belief in the goodness of creation and fellow-humans, and a sacrificial, sacramental commitment to their flourishing.