5 Books I Want to Read in 2020
illustration by Magdalena Pankiewicz
It isn’t that I don’t read enough. I feel that I do for the amount of time available that I have. Would I like to read more? Absolutely, like it was my job to just read good books. There is the fantasy hour of being alone or tucked inside a French inspired cafe with a cappuccino and lost away in someone else’s written words. Hope to bring that afternoon into fruition in 2020 accompanied by one of these 5 books by female authors.
Emergency Contact is the debut novel by Mary H.K. Choi, a coming-of-age story on young love in the digital age. Relationships built on iMessages and texts, Choi offers the young adult reader a journey into love in a world of technology.
Jia Tolentino, a New Yorker staff writer debuts with Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion, a book of nine essays touching upon topics such as solidarity and morality, pop stars, feminism and politics. This New York Times Bestseller is equipped with self deception “from scammer culture to reality television,” according to Esquire.
Grand Union is the first set of short stories by prolific British writer Zadie Smith. New and unpublished works, Smith offers a diverse collection of short fiction with some critics saying that the author has moved away from traditional storytelling.
Jami Attenberg continues to write about dysfunctional families and she’s quite good at it. New York Times said, “This is how you write a very good novel about a very bad man.” Yes All This Could Be Yours is a novel about a toxic person and Attenberg takes on the family patriarchy with some wit and a lot of under your skin storytelling.
The one book that I go back to at least every other year, simply for Joan Didion’s point of view narrative and its vintage tales of San Francisco’s hippie movement and California in itself during the 1960’s. Slouching Towards Bethlehem is the ultimate classic of non-fiction essays from a most iconic female writer whose influence spans through generations. If a writer truly writes what they know, Joan Didion captured everything she saw, heard and encountered.
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