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A Year in Reading: 2024
Welcome to the 20th (!) installment of The Millions' annual Year in Reading series, which gathers together some of today's most exciting writers and thinkers to share the books that shaped their year. YIR is not a collection of yearend best-of lists; think of it, perhaps, as an assemblage of annotated bibliographies. We've invited contributors to reflect on the books they read this year—an intentionally vague prompt—and encouraged them to approach the assignment however they choose.
In writing about our reading lives, as YIR contributors are asked to do, we inevitably write about our personal lives, our inner lives. This year, a number of contributors read their way through profound grief and serious illness, through new parenthood and cross-country moves. Some found escape in frothy romances, mooring in works of theology, comfort in ancient epic poetry. More than one turned to the wisdom of Ursula K. Le Guin. Many describe a book finding them just when they needed it.
Interpretations of the assignment were wonderfully varied. One contributor, a music critic, considered the musical analogs to the books she read, while another mapped her reads from this year onto constellations. Most people's reading was guided purely by pleasure, or else a desire to better understand events unfolding in their lives or larger the world. Yet others centered their reading around a certain sense of duty: this year one contributor committed to finishing the six Philip Roth novels he had yet to read, an undertaking that he likens to “eating a six-pack of paper towels.” (Lucky for us, he included in his essay his final ranking of Roth's oeuvre.)
The books that populate these essays range widely, though the most commonly noted title this year was Tony Tulathimutte’s story collection Rejection. The work of newly minted National Book Award winner Percival Everett, particularly his acclaimed novel James, was also widely read and written about. And as the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza enters its second year, many contributors sought out Isabella Hammad’s searing, clear-eyed essay Recognizing the Stranger.
Like so many endeavors in our chronically under-resourced literary community, Year in Reading is a labor of love. The Millions is a one-person editorial operation (with an invaluable assist from SEO maven Dani Fishman), and producing YIR—and witnessing the joy it brings contributors and readers alike—has been the highlight of my tenure as editor. I’m profoundly grateful for the generosity of this year’s contributors, whose names and entries will be revealed below over the next three weeks, concluding on Wednesday, December 18. Be sure to subscribe to The Millions’ free newsletter to get the week’s entries sent straight to your inbox each Friday.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
Becca Rothfeld, author of All Things Are Too Small
Carvell Wallace, author of Another Word for Love
Charlotte Shane, author of An Honest Woman
Brianna Di Monda, writer and editor
Nell Irvin Painter, author of I Just Keep Talking
Carrie Courogen, author of Miss May Does Not Exist
Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists
Zachary Issenberg, writer
Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection
Ann Powers, author of Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell
Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Reading the Waves
Nicholas Russell, writer and critic
Daniel Saldaña París, author of Planes Flying Over a Monster
Lili Anolik, author of Didion and Babitz
Deborah Ghim, editor
Emily Witt, author of Health and Safety
Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
Lena Moses-Schmitt, author of True Mistakes
Jeremy Gordon, author of See Friendship
John Lee Clark, author of Touch the Future
Ellen Wayland-Smith, author of The Science of Last Things
Edwin Frank, publisher and author of Stranger Than Fiction
Sophia Stewart, editor of The Millions
A Year in Reading Archives: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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The Millions Top Ten: December 2018
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for December.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
3.
There There
6 months
2.
2.
Washington Black
4 months
3.
4.
The Incendiaries
5 months
4.
9.
Severance
2 months
5.
-
The Friend
1 month
6.
5.
The Ensemble
6 months
7.
6.
The William H. Gass Reader
2 months
8.
-
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
1 month
9.
8.
Killing Commendatore
3 months
10.
7.
Transcription
4 months
The Overstory's reign is over, and once again Millions readers have sent a book to our Hall of Fame. It's the 155th title to reach the Hall since we began counting in 2009, and those books represent a combined 930 months of our readers' interest. Laid out consecutively instead of concurrently, that's more than 77 years of reading!
In its place, There There by Tommy Orange assumes supremacy this month, leapfrogging Esi Edugyan's Washington Black which remains in second. Both books were highly regarded by contributors in our Year in Reading series, in which Tommy Orange himself participated. I'm not saying Millions readers reward authors for publishing in the series but I'm not not saying the same.
Meanwhile two newcomers join this month's list: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh and The Friend by Sigrid Nunez.
Mere weeks ago, Lucia Senesi interviewed Moshfegh for The Millions, and in their wide-ranging discussion about craft and creative output, they also explored the notion of whether "writers or artists really have a gender." Moshfegh believed so:
I think the female and male minds work very differently in their biology, the way that language has developed over the last how many thousands of years was part of the patriarchal system. Written language is inherently more male logic linearity. Femininity is more in the realm of emotional intelligence and intuition. That’s why it’s very difficult to argue between the gender. Mostly women learn how to argue like a man. So I do think that writers, maybe it’s different for visual artists, whatever everybody’s brain is different, but I do think that women writers have a different experience and sensibility than male writers, because by their very nature. I think maybe part of this whole movement for equality try to suggest that we are the same, which we are not. The work we need to do is to learn how to value both genders for the things that they’re given us.
Like There There, The Friend, which won this year's National Book Award, was a darling of our Year in Reading series, drawing praise from seven contributors: Bryan Washington, Ada Limón, Adrienne Celt, Lucy Tan, Anisse Gross, Kamil Ahsan, and our own Anne K. Yoder. For her part, Nunez contributed to the series back in 2010, when the series was only six years old.
This month’s near misses included: Becoming, Milkman, The Practicing Stoic, and What We Were Promised. See Also: Last month's list.
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The Millions Top Ten: November 2018
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for November.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
2.
The Overstory
6 months
2.
7.
Washington Black
3 months
3.
5.
There There
5 months
4.
4.
The Incendiaries
4 months
5.
6.
The Ensemble
5 months
6.
-
The William H. Gass Reader
1 month
7.
8.
Transcription
3 months
8.
10.
Killing Commendatore
2 months
9.
-
Severance
1 month
10.
-
The Golden State
1 month
The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction has reached our site's Hall of Fame each year that the site has operated, and this month the trend continues with the ascension of Andrew Sean Greer's Less. Joining it on that voyage is Sergio De La Pava's Lost Empress, marking the second time De La Pava's earned the honor since Garth Risk Hallberg profiled him back in 2012. We ran another long interview with the author earlier this year.
Meanwhile Michael Ondaatje's Warlight has once again dropped out of our Top Ten. In the past four months it's been on, off, on and off, flickering like a candle that can't quite stay lit.
With three fresh spots, we welcome three newcomers to the list.
All 928 pages of The William H. Gass Reader hold sixth position, and the book enters our ranks at an appropriate time. When better than the winter, asked our own Nick Ripatrazone, to appreciate the author of "a wild, wacky horror story about snow that deserves to be rediscovered, appreciated — and, instead of Joyce — tweeted, as the snow falls upon all the living and the dead"? Nick went on to enumerate his thoughts on Gass's work, and its transformative effects.
In the ninth spot, we find Severance, Ling Ma's "funny, frightening, and touching debut," which our own Adam O'Fallon Price called "a bildungsroman, a survival tale, and satire of late capitalist millennial angst in one book" in his teaser for our Great 2018 Book Preview. Ma has since contributed to our ongoing Year in Reading series, recommending a newly reprinted novella first published in 1982. To find out which, you'll have to read the entry for yourself.
Finally, Millions editor Lydia Kiesling's novel The Golden State makes its first appearance on our Top Ten. As of this writing, four Year in Reading participants have included the book in their lists: Angela Garbes, Edan Lepucki, Lauren Wilkinson, and Crystal Hana Kim. (They won't be the last.) "It was one of several books I read that also complicate the conventional ways we view and talk about motherhood," Garbes wrote. "The novel’s anxiety-laced vulnerability, its at once mundane and urgent first person narration, was a revelation," Lepucki added.
Next month's list should be shaken up quite a bit by the rest of the Year in Reading series, which reliably bloats everyone's "to read" piles just in time for the New Year.
This month’s near misses included: The Practicing Stoic, Lake Success, The Friend, and What We Were Promised. See Also: Last month's list.
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The Millions Top Ten: October 2018
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for October.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
Less
6 months
2.
2.
The Overstory
5 months
3.
3.
Lost Empress
6 months
4.
5.
The Incendiaries
3 months
5.
4.
There There
4 months
6.
7.
The Ensemble
4 months
7.
9.
Washington Black
2 months
8.
10.
Transcription
2 months
9.
-
Warlight
3 months
10.
-
Killing Commendatore
1 month
Only the lightest, feather soft jostling on the top half of our list this month, as R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries trades places with Tommy Orange's There There. From there, things get more interesting. First, two books graduated to our Hall of Fame: Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad and Leslie Jamison's The Recovering. It's the first time either author has had the honor, and this move freed up two new spaces on the list.
One of those spaces was filled by Michael Ondaatje's Warlight, which rejoins our rankings in ninth position after taking a one-month hiatus.
The other space was filled by Haruki Murakami's Killing Commendatore, which our own Hannah Gersen described as a "new novel ... about a freshly divorced painter who moves to the mountains, where he finds an eerie and powerful painting called 'Killing Commendatore.'" Of course, when it comes to Murakami, simple descriptions belie subtle unsettlement. "Mysteries proliferate," Gersen continues, "and you will keep reading—not because you are expecting resolution but because it’s Murakami, and you’re under his spell."
Of the five "near misses" this month, four appeared in our Great Second-Half 2018 Book Preview. The Practicing Stoic, which did not, is Ward Farnsworth's "idiosyncratic, strange, yet convincing and useful volume," according to Ed Simon, offering a novel corrective to the popular understanding of Stoicism. "The Practicing Stoic is one of many philosophical self-help books, contending with the primordial question: 'How am I to live?'" Simon continues as he situates it within the context of several others in the canon. Additionally, Stoicism itself proves valuable in how it "help[s] us cope with the ever-mounting anxieties of postmodernity, the daily thrum of Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds, the queasy push notifications and the indignities of being a cog in the shaky edifice of late capitalism (or whatever)."
Next month two more spots should open on our list for two newcomers, and there's only one way to find out which.
This month’s near misses included: Severance, The Golden State, Lake Success, The Practicing Stoic, and What We Were Promised. See Also: Last month's list.
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Seeing the Forest for the Trees: ‘The Overstory’ and ‘Eucalyptus’
1.
Step beneath the outermost leaves and the temperature drops, the light dapples, the path narrows, the situation becomes uncertain. There, out of direct sunlight, life rushes out in cacophonies of saturated color. Tree bark and humus curl past the edge of sight in choppy, gray-brown waves. Moon-pale mushrooms jut from fallen trunks like leering, drowsy eyes. Red smears of fox prey, turquoise flashes of diva birds, purpled cursive looping vines. Black mud sucking at boots in tiny pools, surface a-skitter with paratrooper swarms of translucent mosquitos. And everywhere green, green, and still more green. The understory of a forest or the ecosystem of a novel?
2.
Every forest is full of trees, but it is the trees that make the forest. And so it is in Richard Powers’s latest novel, The Overstory. Across 500 pages of lush, sometimes overgrown prose, Powers nurtures a story of enlightened discoveries, social quandaries, and human disappointments set beside the centuries-long perspective of trees. Appropriately, The Overstory is built like an oak, and the book is broken into four sections called “Roots,” “Trunk,” “Crown,” and “Seeds.” The lives of the nine primary characters grow into this organic mold, and the eventual shape of the novel comes to resemble a plant in its maturity.
The “Roots,” comprising the first third of the book, introduce the protagonists. They are given their own chapters, in which we glimpse the budding of their identities and personal mythologies. Each is linked to a species of tree, an archetypal cast for their character. For instance, Nicholas Hoel is born into the annals of a multi-generational Iowa farm family who developed an eccentric relationship to a doomed American chestnut. This root story foreshadows traits of Nicholas as an adult vis-à-vis his family chestnut; he’s distinctly “American” in his individualistic, grandiose, and downtrodden-but-not-down way. “My maple turns red like me,” says another protagonist, Adam Appich, whose discomfort with communication will outlive his youth. Elsewhere, a mulberry tree stains the flagstones of a suburban backyard patio and Douglas fir trees bristle against the prevailing winds—unique morphologies signifying complex personalities. Through these comparative chapters we meet characters diverse and discretely identified, as if in a botanical garden.
But in the next section of the novel, these archetypes and their character cutouts feed into a larger vision. As readers start the “Trunk” section, the journeys of Nicholas, Adam, and all the others coalesce into a single, wild narrative. Action by action and year by year their lives contribute to a grander story—to put to an obvious point on it—like so many rings forming on the trunk of a tree. The plot straightens out, progressing at an impressive trajectory.
Yet even linear stories like this one demand their own questions and reconsiderations. “If he could read, if he could translate ...” one character muses while tracing the wood-grain pattern of a prison desk at the beginning of the “Trunk” section:
If he were only a slightly different creature, then he might learn all about how the sun shone and the rain fell and which way the wind blew against this trunk for how hard and long. He might decode the vast projects that the soil organized, the murderous freezes, the suffering and struggle, shortfalls and surpluses, the attacks repelled, the years of luxury, the storms outlived, the sum of all the threats and chances that came from every direction, in every season this tree ever lived.
The pattern on the furniture before him clearly isn’t the only whorling conundrum occupying his thoughts. The incremental buildup of the novel’s tree-ring structure in the middle section defies easy interpretation, at least for the characters living through its accumulation.
In typical form, The Overstory’s plot eventually reaches a crisis. In the “Crown,” the story structure takes a slightly different course than is found in more traditional novels—instead of collapsing, it branches out. After the climax of “Trunk,” the protagonists travel various paths, mostly alone and, differently vulnerable as individuals than as a group, weather their own stormy seasons. In “Seeds,” each character’s actions bear consequential fruit and, at the conclusion of each mortal micro-drama, they sow the seeds of future stories.
Living trees are more than solitary organisms clinging to the dirt; they host fungal complexes in their root balls, beetle families and owl chicks in their odd hollows, and mossy carpets in their canopies. They are entire worlds to other creatures. The Overstory, with its tree-shaped arc, becomes a nurturing, metaphor-rich environment for storytelling. In its contours, individual lives beget remembrances, songs, and whole other people. And they all become a part of the bigger story, a tree of lives.
Nicholas Hoel, you may remember, grows up beneath the shade of an American chestnut. When he inherits a collection of hundreds of photographs of the tree taken by his relatives for almost a century, he sees “generations of grudge, courage, forbearance, and surprise generosity: everything a human being might call the story happens outside his photos’ frame.” What is captured in them over the years is more inscrutable: “Inside the frame, through hundreds of revolving seasons, there is only that solo tree, its fissured bark spiraling upward into early middle age, growing at the speed of wood.”
3.
Every forest is full of trees, but it is the forest that makes the trees. And so it is in an almost-forgotten Australian novel, Eucalyptus by Murray Bail. Published in 1998, Eucalyptus took root in the land Down Under and notched some of the continent’s most prestigious literary awards—including the Miles Franklin Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize—however, the book garnered little enduring attention elsewhere. Unlike the taxonomical sweep of Powers’s novel, Eucalyptus derives its unforgettable force by studying its sole namesake. By observing and re-observing the ever-changing eucalyptus, Bail writes a lyrical study on the teeming tilth of individual experience.
In Eucalyptus, the hot scrub of inland Australian seems to go on forever, its kerosene-blue sky no consolation for its endlessness. The dead hills of grazing pasture unroll into the distance, measured off by sagging barbed-wire fences. The only features to catch the eye across the parched Aussie backcountry are the sentinel eucalyptus trees, somber and grand in their loneliness. Under the mottled light of these epic trees, a widower named Holland devises an idiosyncratic plan to arrange for his daughter’s marriage. The successful suitor of his beautiful daughter Ellen will be able to identify and name every variety of eucalyptus tree on his property, which number more than five hundred.
Within the morphology of these multifarious trees, Bail finds striking metaphors to flesh out the people, places, and offshoot stories in Eucalyptus. “Each and every eucalypt is interesting for its own reasons,” writes Bail at the novel’s outset. And sure enough, throughout the book, he describes more than a hundred of these alien plants with the luxurious wonder of a poet. The salmon gum is “the color of a nun’s belly,” the hard-twisting gnarl of jarrah has “civil disobedience in its nature,” and the mallees with their spindly indecision, according to one character, “leave me cold” because “they can never make up their minds which direction to take.”
If The Overstory is built like an oak tree, Eucalyptus is more of a brash and bushy thicket. Instead of a narrative structure composed of roots that form a trunk and branch thereafter, each chapter of Eucalyptus takes on the characteristics of different eucalypt subspecies. The name of the chapter tree clues readers into clever developments in the novel’s ecosystem or relates to another complementary story told by a character, of which there are many. Ever seeking fresh vantages from which to tell stories, the book has the crackling energy of recently burned land, where new growth riots in nutritious soil.
In a chapter named for Eucalpytus regnans—the mountain ash, tallest of all eucalypts and a height competitor to giant sequoias and coastal redwoods—readers meet Ellen’s most accomplished and most-likely-to-be-successful suitor through metaphor. Mr. Cave is described by the town’s spinsters as “tall timber—a term used locally ... to render male flesh abstract.” This setup introduces us to Mr. Cave’s notable height and at the same time foreshadows a golem-like uncanniness to his limitless knowledge of eucalypts. Mr. Cave is, alternately, “a telegraph pole fashioned from a tree,” which speaks to a utilitarian rigidity derived from his cultivated hobby. Complicating the picture of Mr. Cave, later in the chapter, it’s told that “tall trees breed even taller stories” and further, “the tallest trees have the tiniest seeds.” This includes Eucalyptus regnans, “which shakes the earth when it falls and provides enough timber to build a three-bedroom house” and “grows from a seed scarcely larger than the following full stop.” Not only does the multidimensional thicket of metaphorical play help form a better picture of Mr. Cave; it also alludes to the ominous consequences of his character in Ellen’s story.
We meet Ellen as a young girl and watch her grow up in the middle of nowhere with her father. She is introduced alongside her dad’s obsession with planting trees, and the first specimen in the ground was outside her window: Eucalyptus eximia, or yellow bloodwood. “The specific name is taken from the English adjective eximious, in the sense that the tree in flower is extraordinary,” writes Bail. Diamond in the rough, wheat in the chaff—pick your metaphor—Ellen cuts a beautiful figure in a dusty patch of the outback. Her blond locks and freckled face make her a topic of the town gossips; her beauty even caused a young man to crash his motorcycle after catching a surreptitious glimpse of her nakedness. Ellen’s femininity is a rare and remarkable species in the hot, male climate of the novel.
But Eucalyptus is, at its heartwood, a story that tries to capture the interior life of Ellen while she’s in the throes of such an unusual upbringing and betrothal. For one birthday in late adolescence, Holland gives Ellen a sapling of Eucalyptus maidenii, or maiden’s gum. At the time, it marks not her maiden-like innocence but rather her ironic understanding that she’s matured beyond her father’s comprehension. Later in the novel and in her life, Ellen stumbles across her maiden’s gum again. This time, in the bloom of her teens, she arrives at it after a downpour. Impulsively, she decides to take off her dress to dry it over a branch. She finds her father has pounded a rusted nail into the trunk. “Hanging to dry,” Ellen reflects on this strange symbolic violation, “the dress repeated a collapsed version of herself.” Given her circumstances and the ways older men use these trees, it’s no wonder that she exclaims, “I’m not interested in any of them!”
Despite the dread Mr. Cave inspires with his implacable march through Holland’s forest to Ellen’s marriage bed, the illuminating literary transformation of the trees along the way inscribes natural and transcendent qualities onto the margins of human need, want, ambition, and love. A twisted grove of snarling emotions, as well as tools like metaphor and parody we unpack to understand them, encircle Mr. Cave, Holland, and Ellen. These rootbound characters are rendered complicated, universal, and dreamlike by inhabiting this poetic copse of eucalypts.
4.
But aren’t these botanical comparisons just tasked with the regular work of metaphor, which is always present in creative writing? In a way, of course. But the frequency, specificity, consistency, and overarching chapter structure in both Eucalyptus and The Overstory transcend the typical well-considered similes of other works. These novels become figurative microclimates and by doing so share how characters and stories fit into larger ecosystems of understanding.
“Every country has its own landscape which deposits itself in layers on the consciousness of its citizens,” writes Bail, “thereby cancelling the exclusive claims made by all other national landscapes.” One bonus pleasure of Bail’s wild little novel is how, by exploring fictional personality quirks and eucalypt morphology, he is also able to make broad, convincing characterizations of his homeland. “The eucalypts stand apart, solitary, essentially undemocratic,” he writes at one point, and at another that they are “notorious for giving off an inhospitable, unsympathetic air.” We come to see not only his layered characters, but also the traditions and national traits that would generate such people as Holland, Mr. Cave, and Ellen. It is as if “Advance Australia Fair,” the national anthem Down Under, is being played through a flute made from coarse-grained eucalyptus windthrow.
Through the pages of The Overstory (and this is true of Eucalyptus as well), readers are vined-over with tree metaphors, facts, and anecdotes and, thereby, become just a little greener themselves. It’s a strategy that Powers uses to set us up for the bigger takeaways of the book. “A chorus of living wood sings to the woman,” intones the omniscient narrator in the introductory pages of The Overstory. “If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.” It’s nearly the whole tome before Powers explicitly returns to his greening agenda.
“Here’s a little outsider information,” says Dr. Patricia Westerford in a long soliloquy toward the end of The Overstory:
and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.
Having greened a little ourselves, we see how trees can become a little more human through our deeper understanding of them. Though rich in flawed characters, social turmoil, and contestable ideas, The Overstory’s primary mission is to show the majesty, complexity, and vulnerability of the other natural world that greenly sparkles all around us and instill empathy for it. Grafting the two stories—of us and of the trees—wouldn’t be possible, or at least not as effective, without convincing us through figurative language that we are part of the same ecosystem of meanings.
“The artist, yes, humanizes the wonder of nature by doing a faulty version of it,” writes Bail, “and so nature—landscape, the figure—is brought closer to us, putting it faintly within our grasp.”
5.
Is the tree-like structure of The Overstory, with its branching later acts and story-seeding finale, an evolutionary form for future novels? Is the feral underbrush of allusive meaning found in Eucalyptus a messier but more nuanced way to understand people in their fullness? Perhaps it’s better to leave the answers to the biological genius of natural selection. From Bail:
What is frail falls away; stories that take root become like things, misshapen things with an illogical core, which pass through many hands without wearing out or falling to pieces, remaining in essence the same, adjusting here and there at the edges, nothing more, as families or forests reproduce ever-changing appearances of themselves; the geology of fable.
Image: Flickr/Victor Camilo
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Tree Time and Mortality in the Eyes of Alfred Hitchcock, Richard Powers, and Ursula K. Le Guin
1.
Trees tell time when they cease to live. Concentric bands show up clean and countable, the index of so many wet and dry seasons past, but only when the end has been determined, when no more rings will be added. The tree is always recording, but it takes chopping it down to render the story legible, to make counting count for us. Dendrochronology—the science of studying time by way of trees—is a postmortem practice encircled by beginnings and endings.
We need an end to make sense of what came before. This, according to Frank Kermode’s classic study of literature The Sense of an Ending (1967) is what makes apocalyptic narratives so appealing: An ending provides the frame in which to plot out our concerns. Feeling ourselves on the way to something is infinitely preferable to being simply out here, somewhere. It is partly this “sense of an ending” that makes climate change so difficult to conceptualize and to confront in narrative terms. Climate change, after all, should not be thought of in terms of an end but rather on the order of many ends, ends with varying temporalities and which will unevenly affect life distributed around the globe along different axes of power and privilege. Disaster movies notwithstanding, climate change poses what literary critic Rob Nixon calls a “representational challenge” to narrative. We need new narrative modes, Nixon says, for registering the “slow violence” of environmental collapse, the many endings resistant to—or unavailable to—attention-grabbing denouement. At least one major critic and novelist, Amitav Ghosh, has argued that this task is anathema to literary fiction all together. Climate change, Ghosh argues in The Great Derangement, is beyond the conventional novel form.
Yet the Anthropocene, one of the most important terms to emerge from recent discussions regarding climate change, attempts to overcome this narrative impasse. However one feels about the term—disagreements abound regarding when it started, about what we should really call it instead, and about whether it is a geological epoch at all—the notion of the Anthropocene tries to force in some of the narrative parameters that we so crave. As many have pointed out, the Anthropocene suggests not only a beginning to the human story but also—projecting forward—an end. The qualifications for a geological epoch indicate that a scientist should be able to discern the stratigraphic rock boundaries of the discrete period in question. Because every epoch previous to the current Holocene began and ended long before humans existed—and because the Anthropocene itself is still in formation—we are for the first time tasked with considering an open rather than closed chapter in the book of the earth. As historian of science Robert V. Davis explains, if the Anthropocene is to be accepted, it is only because, in the future, “retrospection will show the present as having been shaped geologically by man.” The many smaller ends of climate change slip past our narrative conventions, but the Anthropocene promises—however bleakly—that the end is foreseeable, at least from some future finality looking back. This despite the fact that, as philosopher Claire Colebrook points out, there may be no humans left to do the looking.
Some of the strongest material evidence for the Anthropocene comes from studies of ice core samples, but at least one instance of dendrochronology helps make sense of the epoch’s strangely anticipatory narrative logic. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) depicts film’s most famous scene of tree ring reading by way of perhaps the world’s most famous species of trees. Scottie Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) and Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) travel north from San Francisco to the John Muir forest, where they stand amidst Redwoods. When asked by Scottie what she is thinking, Madeleine responds, “Of all the people who have born and died while the trees went on living.” Scottie responds professorially: “Their true name is Sequoia sempervirens, always green, ever living.” “I don’t like them,” Madeleine says. “Why?” “Knowing I have to die,” she answers. The pair walk from the living trees to a nearby cross section of a tree that is suspended by a sign, a “Redwood round.” The camera pans across the tree cross-section slowly enough for us to read the white flags which mark historical events at various rings: “1215 Magna Carta Signed,” “1776 Declaration of Independence,” etc. At this point a swell of eerie music prepares us for what Madeline says next, as she reaches her hand to the wood. Pointing to one and then another ring just inside the inner edge of the round, she says, “Somewhere in here I was born, and here I died. It was only a moment for you, you don’t notice.”
Madeleine’s seemingly absurd statement works within the complex plot of the film: In short, she is possessed by a long-dead ancestor, and so this idea that she—inhabited by a past personality—can point to rings indicating both her birth and death makes a sort of spooky sense. Hitchcock certainly had other things in mind, but we might consider Madeleine’s words as the pronouncement necessitated by the projective schema of the Anthropocene. Here we humans were born, and here we died. She stands at the vantage of the future which looks back to read the opening and closing of homo sapiens as it is scored into the planet. We have come and gone; the trees and their story of us remain. This, after all, is what Madeleine feels so poignantly: all the people who died as these trees, impassive but watchful, continued to live. The Anthropocene invites us, like Madeleine, to see our existence bounded in a time that trees, the planet—the tellers of the story—surpass. Standing poised over the containing record, we see the story entire. The tree thus acts as a partially satisfying symbol and harbinger of a distant future end, a seeming permanence against which our narratives can unfold.
2.
The cover of Richard Powers’s new novel The Overstory (2018) superimposes rings radiating outward atop what appears to be a Redwood forest. Each ring contains a different time: from day to night to day, and seemingly across years, too, as the small figures on horseback suggest. That The Overstory is about both trees and time is perhaps the simplest thing one could say about this environmental epic. Powers follows close to a dozen distinct storylines across centuries. Trees are characters alongside the people who form these multigenerational sagas—sagas that, by the novel’s conclusion, connect and blend. Forest ecology is an explicit focus of much of the novel—especially as focalized through Patty Westerford, an ecologist whose fictional The Secret Forest is a nod to the real-life The Hidden Life of Trees, by forester Peter Wohlleben. But even when characters aren’t musing over or discussing the life of the forest, the novel reinforces on the level of form the sense that trees offer profound testament to duration and interconnection.
Trees testify to a life both older and stranger than any we commonly perceive, and The Overstory is largely an experiment in scrambling—or splicing, in botanical terms—temporal orders: What happens when trees bend to the whims of human time? Usually, the novel suggests, they break, or are broken, at which point we are able to observe time, and thus ourselves amid the rings. This, the novel insists, is what is happening in the age of environmental catastrophe: Trees and the planet they sustain are forcefully sped up to our pace, a doomsday clock, and we are confronted by the repercussions in the downed wreckage that follows. But how does human life look and feel when put in terms of old growth and legacy trees? More expansive than we can easily imagine, it turns out. Good fodder for Powers, who, as Jeff Karnicky explains in his review of the novel, “Tree Time,” has the uncanny ability to build an entire narrative world around a single prevailing motif.
Powers keeps tree rings always in mind as the novel moves forward, with small images of tree cross-sections adorning chapter and section breaks. Throughout, too, various characters refer to and reflect on tree rings, whether in conducting actual dendrochronological research (as in the case of the ecologist character) or when thinking—as in Vertigo—of all the events that transpired at various points in a given tree’s ring record (a historic flood, a father’s death). Poignant in relation to Madeleine’s words in the Muir Woods is one haunting scene that closes a major section of the novel. Nick, the artist figure of the novel, returns home to a scene of tragedy, of death, which he immediately flees:
Nick blunders through the front door, trips down the porch steps, and falls into the snow. He rolls over in the freezing white, gasping and reviving. When he looks up, it’s into the branches of the sentinel tree, lone, huge, fractal, and bare against the drifts. All its profligate twigs click in the breeze as if this moment, too, so insignificant, so transitory, will be written into its rings and prayed over by the branches that wave their semaphores against the bluest of Midwestern winter skies.
Passive and watchful, the tree—a “sentinel”—is the permanence under which the little human dramas unfold.
This is the way it should be, Powers suggests: Human stories mix, meander, and sputter in the understory of a larger life always proliferating above our heads, rooted sprawling under our feet. It is our poverty of imagination that keeps us dull to this life. A voice seemingly belonging to a tree—or to all trees, perhaps—makes this clear in the opening page: “All the ways you imagine us—bewitched mangroves up on stilts, a nutmeg’s inverted spade, gnarled baja elephant trunks, the straight-up missile of a sal—are always amputations. Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above.” On the scale of civilization, missing the half of it means we will “lose by winning” the war against nature and necessity, as one characters puts it. Towards the end of the novel, Powers actually uses one character to explain this problem in terms of the novel form itself. Ray Brinkman is in bed, his permanent place since a stroke that laid him low dozens of pages before. He listens to his wife read him books, working through “The Hundred Greatest Novels of all Time.” All of Powers’s characters are cognizant to some degree of the impending direness of environmental collapse, and Ray is no different. These thoughts follow him even into his interaction with books, which he understands to be fundamentally limited and limiting. “To be human,” Ray thinks:
is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.
It is difficult to know where Powers stands in relation to this statement. Is The Overstory a book-length refutation of Ray? Does Powers claim that a novel—this novel—can in fact do what Nixon wants and also accomplish what Ghosh says is beyond the scope of literary fiction? That is, can a novel render legible and compelling “life” as “mobilized on a vastly larger scale”? Or does this moment in The Overstory betray the novelist’s own doubts about his project? Is Ray the puncturing problem that Powers feels is always there, nagging? Whatever the case, the novel asks us to consider whether novels can indeed impress the overstory.
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3.
In a recent interview, Powers cited Ursula K. Le Guin as inspiration for his environmental epic. He has in mind her classically environmental fiction—specifically, the novella The Word for World is Forest (1972). This science fiction shares with Powers an interest in confronting human concerns with the sublime expanse of forest ecology. Like The Overstory, Le Guin’s story wends conventional characters together with rooted ecologies more complex, interdependent, and surprising than anything we ambulatory beings can grasp. (Powers may also be thinking of Le Guin’s wonderfully weird “Vaster than Empires and More Slow,” which expands on the sublimity of plant power in ways that I will not spoil here.)
It makes sense for Powers to see in The Word for World an important predecessor to The Overstory, but given the centrality of trees, the more important comparison is actually a lesser-known piece of fiction by the late great Le Guin. “The Direction of the Road” (1974) is a “tale" in Le Guin's preferred fantastical sense of the term. Collected recently in The Unreal and the Real (2012), one of a two-volume set of collected works from Saga Press, the tale spans a mere seven pages, yet it asks the same questions that animate Powers’s 500-plus-page tome. But in asking the same questions, Le Guin’s tale comes to substantially different conclusions.
Much like The Overstory, “The Direction” is an exercise in point of view. While Powers begins with a tour de force opening from the perspective of a tree/trees only to then affix to human concerns, Le Guin’s entire story is narrated by a tree. But Le Guin lets us figure this out on our own through the first few pages. We get to know the tree: proud, dutiful, a bit inflexible and wooden, perhaps. The tree tells of its long life, its watchful stance over a century that sees horses give way to automobiles give way to traffic. Throughout, Le Guin plays a trick with relativity and perception in a way that I will let you explore on your own. (The provocation: How might a tree—a rooted tower—see the world? As she herself explains of her process in David Naimon’s recent Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing, this is quintessential Le Guin. Change one rule, one significant parameter, and explore the repercussions all the way down.)
As usual, however, the most important moment of the tale arrives at the end. A car on the bustling road beside the tree smashes into its trunk. We might expect that the tree is done for, is mangled beyond recovery, a minimalist drama of the collision course we’ve set the warming planet on. This may have been the finale in the hands of a lesser writing. But for Le Guin the point is—as usual—almost completely the opposite of the expected. In the moment before the car makes contact, the driver looks up at the tree, and the tree feels itself seen in a wholly new and unwelcome way. “He saw me under the aspect of eternity,” the tree tells us. “He confused me with eternity. And because he died in that moment of false vision, because it can never change, I am caught in it, eternally.” The driver dies, and in his final moment, he makes the tree eternal, an injustice it can hardly bear, a cruelty it objects to passionately. “Eternity is none of my business,” the tree bemoans:
I am an oak, no more, no less. I have my duty; I have my pleasures, and enjoy them, thought they are fewer, since the birds are fewer, and the wind’s foul. But, long-lived though I may be, impermanence is my right. Mortality is my privilege. And it has been taken from me.
The tree is barely scathed. It is left standing, as if a permanent, unshakeable part of the landscape. And this is the tragedy.
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4.
The Overstory is about the human inability to comprehend “tree time,” to borrow Karnicky’s phrase, a scale of hundreds if not thousands of years, and about the death of trees that follow in the wake of this continuing and perhaps inevitable misunderstanding. Joining Madeleine in Muir Woods, The Overstory suggests that we see in dead trees the catastrophe in full, written in rings as if having already occurred. Le Guin’s tale, on the other hand, is about a tree that demands the dignity of death. In the Anthropocene, a tree that clings to “impermanence” as a “right” is a reminder that the very idea of permanence is human. Powers makes of trees a would-be permanence felled low by human hubris, but Le Guin suggests exactly the opposite—that it is our misunderstanding that makes of trees a permanent fixture in the first place. Le Guin’s tale is an elegant reminder that the tidiness of the end—as if final and absolute—exists nowhere but in our collective desires.
A problem as overwhelming as climate change would seem to require the complexities of the long-form novel. We need not just characters but generations of characters; not just arcs but intersecting webs. Powers provides all of this and more, and there is much to commend in his remarkably synoptic and sprawling masterpiece. The Overstory is a deftly choreographed weave of human stories overshadowed and branched in extensive canopy. But even with this achievement in mind, Le Guin’s compact fable tugs as a necessary critique. Telling stories about the timelessness of trees risks forgetting that death is, of course, a natural part of life, even in the Anthropocene. There’s something in the comparative simplicity and compactness of Le Guin’s tale that insists on a perspective we hardly stop to accept, a voice lost amidst the din of our clamoring narrative needs. In our eagerness to find the end where there are only ends, the tree is made subordinate to a human story that is thereby circumscribed that much tighter.
The novel form has been pronounced dead by more critics through time than perhaps any other art form, and we will not further challenge its seemingly eternal, vampiric existence here. But even as the novel should continue to play an important (if vexed) role in addressing climate change through narrative, we would do well to hear the still, strange voice of an oak tree that has not yet died but hopes to do so, perhaps one day soon. This tree has something to say:
If they wish to see death visibly in the world, that is their business, not mine. I will not act Eternity for them. Let them not turn to the trees for death. If that is what they want to see, let them look into one another’s eyes and see it there.
The Millions Top Ten: September 2018
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for September.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
Less
5 months
2.
5.
The Overstory
4 months
3.
2.
Lost Empress
5 months
4.
8.
There There
3 months
5.
7.
The Incendiaries
2 months
6.
4.
Frankenstein in Baghdad
6 months
7.
3.
The Ensemble
3 months
8.
6.
The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath
6 months
9.
-
Washington Black
1 month
10.
-
Transcription
1 month
Pulitzer-winner Andrew Sean Greer holds this month's top spot with his latest novel, Less. Two more months of strong sales and he'll ascend to our Hall of Fame, just as Leslie Jamison (The Recovering) and Ahmed Saadawi (Frankenstein in Baghdad) seem poised to do in October.
One of two newcomers this month is Esi Edugyan, whose Booker-shortlisted novel Washington Black is based on a famous 19th-century criminal case and tells the story of an 11-year-old slave's incredible journey from the cane fields of the Caribbean to the Arctic, London, and Morocco. "In its rich details and finely tuned ear for language," wrote Martha Anne Toll for our site last week, "the book creates a virtual world, immersing the reader in antebellum America and Canada as well as in Victorian England."
Edugyan is joined on our list by Kate Atkinson, whose new period novel Transcription focuses on a female spy, recruited by MI5 at age 18 to monitor fascist sympathizers. "As a fangirl of both the virtuosic Life After Life and of her Jackson Brody detective novels, I barely need to see a review to get excited about a new Atkinson novel," wrote Sonya Chung in our Great Second-Half 2018 Book Preview, and evidently her feelings are shared by many Millions readers alike.
Spots for both books were opened when Warlight and The Mars Room dropped from our ranks. Elsewhere on the list, shuffling abounds. The Overstory rose to second position after being shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and There There rose as well after being longlisted for the National Book Award.
Meanwhile, if you'll turn your attention to this month's "near misses" below, you'll see The Golden State, the debut novel from Lydia Kiesling, our intrepid editor. Longtime readers of this site are no doubt familiar with Lydia's brand of antic, incisive writing – she's one of the few authors who've made me laugh and tear up in the same piece – but prepared as I was, I'll admit this book floored me in the best way. Not only is it an engrossing depiction of a very particular parent's mind, but it's also an exploration of what it means to connect with others, raise them, be influenced and repulsed by them, as well as overwhelmed by them alike. As a bonus, there's also an absolutely ruthless and necessary skewering of modern university administrative work, and the entire story vibrates with an extreme sense of place. I cannot wait to read what Lydia writes next and in the meantime I encourage you all to check this one out.
This month’s near misses included: Severance, The Practicing Stoic, and The Golden State. See Also: Last month's list.
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2018 Man Booker Shortlist Announced
The 2018 Man Booker Shortlist has been revealed!
In its 50th year, the Man Booker Prize continues to uphold its mission to "promote the finest in fiction by rewarding the best novel of the year written in English and published in the United Kingdom." Wittled down from the 13-title longlist, the 6-book shortlist includes writers from the UK, US, and Canada—three, two, and one, respectively. With her debut novel, Johnson is the youngest writer to be shortlisted for the Man Booker at 27, and Edugyan is the only nominee this year to have been shortlisted before (Half-Blood Blues in 2011).
Here's the 2018 Man Booker shortlist (which features many titles from our 2018 Great Book Preview) and applicable bonus links:
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner (Read our review)
Everything Under by Daisy Johnson
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
The Long Take by Robin Robertson
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Milkman by Anna Burns
The Man Booker Prize will be awarded on October 16.
The Millions Top Ten: August 2018
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for August.
Looking for additional book recommendations? One of the benefits of subscribing to The Millions is access to our exclusive monthly newsletter in which our venerable staffers let you know what they’re reading right now. Learn more here.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
Less
4 months
2.
3.
Lost Empress
4 months
3.
6.
The Ensemble
2 months
4.
5.
Frankenstein in Baghdad
5 months
5.
7.
The Overstory
3 months
6.
4.
The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath
5 months
7.
-
The Incendiaries
1 month
8.
9.
There There
2 months
9.
10.
Warlight
2 months
10.
-
The Mars Room
1 month
“I have to watch I don’t get arrogant,” said Andrew Sean Greer after a Guardian reporter asked him how he’s changed since winning the Pulitzer for his latest novel, Less. Will he be able to stave off arrogance now that he's held first position in our Top Ten for two months, though? Bet smart.
So, we bid farewell to two titles ascending to our Hall of Fame this month – The Immortalists and My Favorite Thing is Monsters – and we welcome two newcomers in their place – The Incendiaries and The Mars Room.
Much praise has been heaped upon The Incendiaries, not least of all Celeste Ng's compliment on R.O. Kwon's "dazzlingly acrobatic prose." That admiration might be topped only by Michael Lindgren's review of The Mars Room in which he called Rachel Kushner "the most vital and interesting American novelist working today." The point is obvious. Golden rules are hard to find these days, but maybe it's enough to say that Millions readers always have good taste.
State of California native Tommy Orange's There There earned a place on the 7-title shortlist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize this month, and the debut also moved up a spot from ninth to eight on our list. Will that momentum carry it up again next month? Be sure to check back and find out in October. On and on we go.
Next to Orange's novel on our list in ninth position is Michael Ondaatje's Warlight, which earned Man Booker longlist recognition last July. Month's end is when we'll see if it makes the next round of cuts. List long or short, Ondaatje's no stranger to any kind.
This month’s near misses included: Severance, Circe, What We Were Promised, An American Marriage, and Some Trick. See Also: Last month's list.
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The Millions Top Ten: July 2018
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for July.
Looking for additional book recommendations? One of the benefits of subscribing to The Millions is access to our exclusive monthly newsletter in which our venerable staffers let you know what they’re reading right now. Learn more here.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
2.
Less
3 months
2.
1.
The Immortalists
6 months
3.
7.
Lost Empress
3 months
4.
6.
The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath
4 months
5.
4.
Frankenstein in Baghdad
4 months
6.
-
The Ensemble
1 month
7.
10.
The Overstory
2 months
8.
8.
My Favorite Thing is Monsters
6 months
9.
-
There There
1 month
10.
-
Warlight
1 month
Reflecting on the Great 2018 Book Preview - the first of the year, not the more recent Second-Half preview - it's interesting to note that of the first six titles we highlighted, four of them have made appearances in our Top Ten. For six months, Jamie Quatro's Fire Sermon and Denis Johnson's The Largesse of the Sea Maiden hung around our list; this month they graduate to the Hall of Fame. On their heels, Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad holds fifth position this month, and in two months' time will likely join Quatro and Johnson in our Hall. Also, among the "near misses" listed at the bottom of this post, you'll find Leïla Slimani's The Perfect Nanny, a French story which "tells of good help gone bad," as our own Matt Seidel put it months ago. From a certain perspective, it's wild that 66% of the first half dozen books we flagged last January have resonated so much with our audience. In fact, of the 10 titles on this month's list, 70% of them appeared on that first Book Preview. Put simply: Millions readers, we're here for y'all. Trust us.
(For the record, the three titles currently on our Top Ten which did not appear in our Book Preview last January: Less, The Overstory and My Favorite Thing is Monsters.)
Three new titles joined our list after Quatro and Johnson's books moved on to our Hall of Fame and Tayari Jones's An American Marriage dropped out. The newcomers are Aja Gabel's The Ensemble, Tommy Orange's There There, and Michael Ondaatje's Warlight, which hold the sixth, ninth and tenth positions this month, respectively.
In a preview for our site, Millions editor Lydia Kiesling recommended readers get "a taste of Gabel’s prose [by] read[ing] her Best American Essays-notable piece on grief and eating ortolans in France," and noted that "Orange’s novel has been called a 'new kind of American epic' by the New York Times." Meanwhile staffer Claire Cameron, while writing about Michael Ondaatje's latest, mused, "If only Anthony Minghella were still with us to make the movie."
Overall it's clear that the Book Preview foretells Top Ten placements. Next month at least two spots should open up for new titles. Will those new books come from our latest Second-Half Preview? Based on the numbers, it looks likely.
This month’s near misses included: Circe, Some Trick, The Mars Room, and The Perfect Nanny. See Also: Last month's list.
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Eclectic 2018 Man Booker Prize Longlist Announced
The literary world was already a flutter with anticipation for the 2018 Man Booker Longlist announcement—and then The Guardian accidentally broke the embargo. Even though the article was promptly removed, the damage was already done (aka revealing the eclectic and unexpected list a day early).
In an effort to promote fiction, the Man Booker Prize is awarded to "aims to promote the finest in fiction by rewarding the best novel of the year written in English and published in the United Kingdom." In its 50th year, the longlist includes a few genre titles; two debut novelists (Sophie Macintosh and Guy Gunaratne); one previous Booker (and only Golden Booker) winner (Michael Ondaatje); and an emphasis on British and Irish authors.
Here's the 2018 Man Booker longlist (which features many titles from our 2018 Great Book Preview) and applicable bonus links:
Sabrina by Nick Drnaso
The Water Cure by Sophie Macintosh
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner (Read our review)
Everything Under by Daisy Johnson
Snap by Belinda Bauer
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
The Long Take by Robin Robertson
From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan
In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne
Warlight by Michael Ondaatje (From our archives, a piece on attending an Ondaatje reading)
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Milkman by Anna Burns
Normal People by Sally Rooney (Rooney's 2016 Year in Reading entry)
The Man Booker Prize shortlist will be announced on September 20th.
The Millions Top Ten: June 2018
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for June.
Looking for additional book recommendations? One of the benefits of subscribing to The Millions is access to our exclusive monthly newsletter in which our venerable staffers let you know what they’re reading right now. Learn more here.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
3.
The Immortalists
5 months
2.
4.
Less
2 months
3.
5.
Fire Sermon
6 months
4.
7.
Frankenstein in Baghdad
3 months
5.
8.
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
6 months
6.
9.
The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath
3 months
7.
10.
Lost Empress
2 months
8.
-
My Favorite Thing is Monsters
5 months
9.
-
An American Marriage
1 month
10.
-
The Overstory
1 month
Three books are off to our Hall of Fame this month, but one of them is completely blank, which I believe is a first for our site. Back in November 2017, in Hannah Gersen's Gift Guide for Readers and Writers, she noted the benefits of the 5-Year Diary's design:
The design is unique in that every page represents one day and is divided into five parts, with each part representing one year. So, when you write your entry for Feb 1, you can look back at Feb 1 of the previous year to see what you were doing/writing/reading/thinking/weathering. I think it’s especially useful for writers because if you use the space to track writing and reading projects (as I often do), it’s a great way to gauge your long-term progress.
Accompanying the Diary are two works from Carmen Maria Machado and Jesmyn Ward.
Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties was the darling of our most recent Year in Reading series, picked by seven participants – Jamel Brinkley, Morgan Jerkins, Rakesh Satyal, Julie Buntin, Lidia Yuknavitch, Louise Erdrich and Jeff VanderMeer – who together sang a chorus of Buy this Book, Buy this Book, Buy this Book. Over the chorus came Nathan Goldman, who wrote in his review for our site that "for all its darkness, Her Body and Other Parties is also a beautiful evocation of women’s—especially queer women’s—lives, in all their fullness, vitality, and complex joy. Formally daring, achingly moving, wildly weird, and startling in its visceral and aesthetic impact, Machado’s work is unlike any other." Evidently, Millions readers dug the tune.
Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing was also well-received, drawing praise from four of the seven Year in Reading participants linked above, as well as from Kima Jones and Sarah Smarsh. In her review for our site, Nur Nasreen Ibrahim observed that "Ward’s fiction is about inherited trauma in a deeply divided society, where the oppressor and the oppressed share a legacy" and she also pointed to the other works invoked within the text. "By invoking [Toni] Morrison and [William] Faulkner for new readers," Ibrahim wrote, "Ward excavates not only the suffering of her characters, but also the long tradition of fiction about slavery, fiction that grapples with racial injustice that extends into the present."
Elsewhere on our list this month, My Favorite Thing is Monsters returns after a monthlong hiatus, and newcomers An American Marriage and The Overstory fill our ninth and tenth spots, respectively. In the weeks ahead, we'll publish our Great Second-Half 2018 Book Preview, and surely several of those upcoming titles will be reflected on our July list. Get ready.
This month’s near misses included: The Mars Room, Pachinko, Warlight, The Odyssey, and The World Goes On. See Also: Last month's list.
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The Millions Top Ten: May 2018
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for May.
Looking for additional book recommendations? One of the benefits of subscribing to The Millions is access to our exclusive monthly newsletter in which our venerable staffers let you know what they’re reading right now. Learn more here.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
5 Year Diary
6 months
2.
2.
Her Body and Other Parties
6 months
3.
5.
The Immortalists
4 months
4.
-
Less
1 month
5.
4.
Fire Sermon
5 months
6.
7.
Sing, Unburied, Sing
6 months
7.
10.
Frankenstein in Baghdad
2 months
8.
6.
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
5 months
9.
9.
The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath
2 months
10.
-
Lost Empress
1 month
It's surprising that this is the first time John McPhee's sent a work to our site's Hall of Fame, which recognizes books that have made appearances on our Top 10 for more than six months. McPhee, whose Draft No. 4 attains that honor this month, has published more than three dozen books. To have only one ascend to our hallowed halls surely reveals more about us than him, no? Well, an honor is an honor regardless of past injustice. Going forward, consider this my call to action: go read Oranges and learn all about the absolute madmen who grew grapefruits and limes on the branches of orange trees.
With one newly opened spot on this month's list and one title dropping out of favor from last month's, we welcome two newcomers. First there's Less by Andrew Sean Greer, who just won the Pulitzer, and second there's Lost Empress by Sergio De La Pava, who years ago won something even more coveted than an award: a glowing profile from our own Garth Risk Hallberg. Writing at the time about De La Pava's breakout, A Naked Singularity, which ultimately made it to our Hall of Fame, Hallberg recalled getting hooked on a big self-published book despite his initial skepticism, and in spite of the book's superficial flaws.
A good big novel lives or dies at a level far removed from considerations of teachable “craft” — the level Henry James and Michel Houellebecq gesture toward when they speak, in different contexts, of “intensity.” ... And at that level, A Naked Singularity is, if not a masterpiece, then certainly a roaring success.
Fast forward six years and De La Pava's returned with another 600+ page novel. Plus ça change...
Elsewhere on our list, the top two titles retained their positions, The Immortalists rose two spots, Sing, Unburied, Sing dropped two more, and books by Ahmed Saadawi, Denis Johnson, and Leslie Jamison jostled around a bit. Altogether that part isn't terribly eventful, but next month we'll see three spots open up, and that's where the fun should really begin. Stay tuned.
This month’s near misses included: An American Marriage, The Overstory, The Mars Room, and Pachinko. See Also: Last month's list.
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The Millions Top Ten: April 2018
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for April.
Looking for additional book recommendations? One of the benefits of subscribing to The Millions is access to our exclusive monthly newsletter in which our venerable staffers let you know what they’re reading right now. Learn more here.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
5 Year Diary
5 months
2.
3.
Her Body and Other Parties
5 months
3.
4.
Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process
6 months
4.
5.
Fire Sermon
4 months
5.
7.
The Immortalists
3 months
6.
9.
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
4 months
7.
8.
Sing, Unburied, Sing
5 months
8.
10.
My Favorite Thing is Monsters
4 months
9.
-
The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath
1 month
10.
-
Frankenstein in Baghdad
1 month
We sent both Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach and Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere to our Hall of Fame this month. It's the second time Egan has attained this honor – her last novel A Visit from the Goon Squad reached the Hall in 2011. Egan joins twelve other authors who've had two works ascend to our Hall of Fame, and if the current pace holds true we can expect her third book to reach some time in 2025. If you're keeping track at home, we've now had thirteen authors send two books to our list; four have sent three; and then David Mitchell has sent four.
The rest of our list shifted up the ranks accordingly. Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties moved from third to second position; John McPhee's Draft No. 4 from fourth to third. You get the idea.
Two very different books fill the open spots on this month's list.
Occupying ninth position is The Recovering, Leslie Jamison's sweeping exploration of addiction and those who grapple with it. The hefty volume was recently hailed by Michael Bourne as "a welcome corrective to the popular image of addiction as a gritty battle for the addict’s soul and recovery as a heroic feat of derring-do." He noted that Jamison's gifts are on display, and that the book "shimmers throughout." However Bourne was not without some criticism. The work could've used more "ruthless editing," and "there is little in The Recovering that wouldn’t be twice as compelling in a book half as long," Bourne wrote.
Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad claimed the tenth spot after several months among the near misses. The book, which was translated for English readers by Jonathan Wright, was recently shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize. (While on the topic of honorifics, it had previously made an appearance on Lydia Kiesling's Year in Reading.) In our Great 2018 Book Preview, I looked ahead to Saadawi's latest:
The long-awaited English translation of the winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014 gives American readers the opportunity to read Saadawi’s haunting, bleak, and darkly comic take on Iraqi life in 2008. Or, as Saadawi himself put it in interview for Arab Lit, he set out to write “the fictional representation of the process of everyone killing everyone.”
This month’s other near misses included: Less, An American Marriage, The Odyssey, The World Goes On, and The Overstory. See Also: Last month's list.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Wolitzer; Castillo; McCallister; Moore; Murnane; Powers; Jamison
Out this week: The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer; America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo; How to Be Safe by Tom McCallister; See What Can Be Done by Lorrie Moore; Border Districts by Gerald Murnane; The Overstory by Richard Powers; and The Recovering by Leslie Jamison.
Want to learn more about upcoming titles? Then go read our most recent book preview. Want to help The Millions keep churning out great books coverage? Then sign up to be a member today.
A Year in Reading: Tayari Jones
This year has been rough. Between politics and the environment, I find it hard to slip into the fictional world of a novel, usually my favorite escape. Lately, I will read a couple of chapters, and although the writing is good, the story is fresh, I can’t make myself engage.
So 2017, has kind of been the year of not reading.
Nevertheless, a few excellent books have broken through. Some are old favorites, revisited as I try to make sense of these trying times, but others are new reads that snagged my frayed attention.
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison is my favorite novel of all time and I reread it each year as I prepare for the holidays. There is no malaise quite like a black bourgeois blues. I like to follow it up with Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the first novel I ever loved. While Morrison diagnoses the rot at the center of upwardly mobile patriarchal family life, Mildred D. Taylor lets you remember what it is to be a little girl who just loves her daddy. Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s debut, A Kind of Freedom, a family story set in New Orleans, is really good, too.
I was in a nerd-fight with a friend and we read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. In my view, they are different takes on the same Big Question: how do we treat those whom we have arbitrarily marked different? In Never Let Me Go, the outcasts are cloned human beings and Fowler chooses to excavate the not-so-fine line between humans and apes. My friend, who preferred the Fowler novel, accused me of preferring Ishiguro because his characters live in a posh English boarding school while Fowler’s people live in Bloomington, Ind., and go to IU. I did concede that challenging the person/animal divide is more ambitious than interrogating person-on-person unkindness. I was similarly intrigued by Richard Powers’s new one, The Overstory—check for it in April.
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White Houses is the best novel in my galley stack. Nobody writes love like Amy Bloom. In this book, the lovers are Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok. It’s a heart-healer and a heart-breaker. It will be released just in time for Valentine’s Day. Speaking of Mrs. Roosevelt, The Firebrand and the First Lady by Patricia Bell Scott tells the story of Pauli Murray, another friend of Eleanor, and a great unsung hero of the civil rights movement, another “hidden figure.”
I also found myself nibbling at short story collections. I especially loved What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Arimah, Five Carat Soul by James McBride (I adored the story about the zoo!) Get in Trouble by the ever-brilliant Kelly Link blew my mind. Looking to the future, I adored Renee Simms's forthcoming Meet Behind Mars. In memory of James Allen McPherson I revisited his ground breaking collection, Elbow Room.
Apparently, I read way more books this year than I thought.
More from A Year in Reading 2017
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