My First Annual Book Awards!
So kind of BTS to wave goodbye to 2020 with me by hosting my very first annual book awards!
Welcome, everyone, to my First Annual Book Awards! After all the fun I had going through your favorite reads of last year, I couldn’t help but put together an installment of my own. As such, I’ve decided to bestow prestigious awards upon 12 of the 56 books I read in 2020.
I am just tickled to announce that K-pop sensation BTS will be hosting this year’s awards all the way from Seoul! Look at them, in all their bookish glory, ready to usher you through my diatribes. Stream BE by BTS while reading along for best results.
Best Book That Made Me FULLY SCREAM While Reading
Martin can confirm the accuracy of this award.
Winner: Confessions by Kanae Minato
One of my favorite movies is the Winona Ryder and Christian Slater cult classic Heathers (1988), to the point that I even sat second row at an off-broadway musical adaptation and still sing songs from it. Confessions by Kanae Minato is aptly described right on the cover as “if Albert Camus had written Heathers,” given its penchant for creatively serving dish after dish of revenge served cold. Every 50 or so pages I screamed at unexpected twists, cunning acts of violence, and terrifyingly adept shifts in perspective that bring the entire book together for a truly wild ride.
Best Approximation of The Secret History by Donna Tartt
All I want in this cruel world is a book that reminds me of Donna Tartt’s dark academia archetypal delight. The fundamental qualities include an elite educational setting; a dark mystery (preferably a murder); bacchanalia; and rich kids doing rich kid things.
Winner: The Likeness by Tana French
This book is perhaps the only one I read in 2020 that actually gave me ~the feeling~ that I got from The Secret History. While technically part of French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, The Likeness was recommended to me as a standalone book that properly emulates the aforementioned aspects of dark academia that I most crave. It follows an Irish detective on her quest to solve the murder of a girl who uncannily shares her likeness; she immerses herself in the dead girl’s life of post-graduate studies, swaddled by the wine and money of her four quirky and rich classmates. Even its TV Tropes page is littered with TSH references.
Best Ye Olde Book that Everyone has Read Except Me
I try to annually read a book or two that just about everyone on the planet has read except me, and sometimes it finally *clicks* why everyone has read them.
Winner: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
I am as shocked as you are that I thoroughly enjoyed The Old Man and the Sea, a book that is entirely about a man chasing a fucking fish. I read it during the waning days of summer and wished fervently to pilot my own ship in search of anything as meaningful to me as the old man’s fish.
Best Contemporary Book that Lived Up to the Hype
There are always books that get excessively publicized, but this one is worth the hype.
Winner: Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
For me to read a book entirely on my phone, it has to be pretty captivating. (It is a small screen.) Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid was just that: captivating, thought-provoking, and gripping (particularly in the penultimate scene). I think it ended up on just about every year-end book list, so I’ll leave it at that and encourage you to pick it up if you haven’t already.
Most Slept-Upon Book of 2020
A book that was underhyped! Underrated! SLEPT UPON!
Winner: Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas
I am gobsmacked by the divisive reviews of this book. At time of publication, this book has a cumulative Goodreads rating of 3.12(!) based on reviews from more than 10,000 users despite being pretty well-received by critics. I’m naming Catherine House as the most slept-upon book because you people need to get your act together and give it a chance.
Catherine House is Elisabeth Thomas’s uniquely mystifying debut novel about a young woman attending an elite boarding school where all is not as it seems. While it might seem from that description to nestle nicely into the ~dark academia~ genre that I so adore, I think that’s the main hangup most people tend to have with Catherine House: it is absolutely NOT that kind of book, and it really suffered from being marketed that way. Instead, it promises gothic scenery, hedonism, a dash of sci-fi, and extremely specific food descriptions.
I wrote a far more compelling case for reading this book over the summer, but the long and short of it is that you have to just let this book wash over you instead of demanding it adhere to genre and plot conventions.
Most Terrifyingly Prescient Book That You Should 100% Read Anyway
Typically found on bookstore tables with little placards like “deeply resonant in today’s climate.”
Winner: Severance by Ling Ma
Severance by Ling Ma made me buy my first masks of the pandemic. I read it three weeks before New York shut down, and what a time to read a book that chronicles a mysterious disease that takes over the world.
With that in mind, I would think about this book every day even without a pandemic: it digs into what it takes for people to give up the comfort of routines, weaves a tale around the rotting core of late capitalism, and realistically depicts the nuances of relationships and nostalgia during an apocalypse.
I want to leave 2020 behind as much as the rest of you, but Severance is too important and delicate and cutting a book to ignore. I made a case for sinking your teeth into it in my very first newsletter.
Best Book by a Man
A mere eight out of 56 books I read last year were written by men. That makes them a minority here!
Winner: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
I think about Exit West by Mohsin Hamid a lot. It’s a novel that follows a couple that flees civil war through a series of magical doors. The audiobook is read by Hamid himself, and I listened to his tale of worldwide exploration in the last few weeks before New York shut down. I wrote a full review of it back in April.
Best Book with a Surprise Threesome
Well!
Winner: Plain Bad Heroines by Emily Danforth
Without giving any spoiler-related context on the actual award being won here, Plain Bad Heroines was a really wonderful and immersive read with a leading cast of queer characters. This book, which was apparently the longest book I read in 2020, kept me captivated using a delightful blend of gothic convention, stylized high-camp narration, authentic depictions of queer young women, and a lot of bee talk. There’s also a lot of complex discussion of women’s sexuality throughout the book that I found nuanced and compelling (and, yes, there’s a threesome). I wrote a longer review in November after reading it for a book club.
Best Three-Star Book
Rather than a middling three-star book that is just “fine,” a good three-star book typically contains a delightful (albeit sometimes predictable) plot with decent writing. It’s a book with flaws, sure, but the overall effect isn’t spoiled as a result.
Winner: The Binding by Bridget Collins
The Binding follows the journey of a farmer-turned bookbinding apprentice living in an alternate universe where people visit bookbinders to rid themselves of memories. The fantastical plot took a little ramping up to get into, but then a glorious queer romance takes over and all becomes deliciously clear. The Binding kept me up reading until four in the morning and had the wildest world building, which makes it my favorite three-star book of the year.
Congratulations to all the winners so far! We have just three more awards to give away because the boys are getting tired of my rambling. These three awards are for my favorite books read in 2020.
2020’s Best In Show
These three books are the books I have recommended the most since reading them. They are my genuine favorites of the year.
Best In Show: Short Fiction
Winner: Revenge by Yoko Ogawa
I am obsessed with Revenge. I wrote about it over the summer after reading it in a feverish few hours, and I haven’t stopped recommending it to friends or thinking about it since. I typically dislike short stories, which should speak to the strength of this collection of connected tales. It’s best read with little context, but I think it’s obvious enough to point out that its characters are often preoccupied with vengeance. You can read my full thoughts here.
Best In Show: Fiction
Winner: If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha
If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha is easily my favorite novel of 2020.
In a recent interview with Cha for The Rumpus, Violet Haeun Kim wrote that “books and characters that don’t easily fit into the dominant Western canon are often burdened by the weight of representation. But perhaps because of the forceful individuality of its characters, If I Had Your Face never deteriorates into any sort of manifesto that makes strong claims to representative authority.”
It does the novel a disservice to say that it merely follows the intertwined lives of several women living in modern Seoul and their experiences with plastic surgery, beauty standards, love, loss, idol culture, and patriarchy. What I liked so much about the book is how unique each character felt, despite their relatively commonplace circumstances; Cha calls the characters “specific to the extreme.” I can easily say that I haven’t read any other characters like the ones here, and they make this book truly remarkable.
Best In Show: Nonfiction
Winner: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
I can’t adequately convey my reverence for Cathy Park Hong and her first collection of essays, Minor Feelings. The collection is billed as an “exploration of Asian American consciousness and the struggle to be human” that uses elements of memoir, criticism, and history to, as Jane Hu for The Nation explains, “fracture that story, spilling it across multiple genres.” Her review is better than anything I can write, so I’ve excerpted some of its contents below:
Because Asian Americans have historically been stereotyped as meek, recessive, invisible, their emotional vocabulary has similarly inhabited a more muted register. They occupy, she writes, “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic.” Not only are these minor Asian American feelings defined by a more depressive range of emotion—shame, resentment, paranoia, and melancholy—but their lack of catharsis also means they linger for a long time. The crux of Hong’s book, then, is this: How does one tell an Asian American story that captures the full range of these minor feelings, their complexity, their pathos, their commonness, without simply lapsing into conventions of disappearance and weakness so deeply associated with being Asian American?
And there you have it! Thanks for joining me and three of my Bangtan Boys for this prestigious award ceremony. They will be in touch about getting you a special gold-plated Bangtan Bomb for making it all the way to the end of this newsletter.
RM would like to get back to his own reading, while Jin and Suga are simply done being here. (Look at those faces.) Bye!