Consider This from NPR - Our Favorite Reads Of 2020 (And Hundreds More)

Episode Date: December 24, 2020

Every Fall NPR asks our critics and staff to pick their favorite books from the past year. Those nominations - there's hundreds of them - are then sorted down to a semi-manageable number. This year is our largest list yet with 383 titles. Click here to visit NPR's Book Concierge for 2020. The hosts of Consider This all submitted their picks to the list. Here are some of their favorites:Ari Shapiro recommends Susanna Clarke's novel Piranesi. A mythic story about a man who is disoriented and trapped in a mysterious sort of house. Mary Louise Kelly has a suggestion great for a book club. Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet explores the connection between what was arguably William Shakespeare's greatest play, Hamlet, and the death of his only son four years before. Ailsa Chang's pick is a good read for ages 10 and up. Everything Sad Is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri takes you on a journey through myth, youth and cultural clash as a young boy and his family flee Iran and end up in Oklahoma. Audie Cornish chose to share Just Us by poet Claudia Rankine. It's a collection of essays, photos, poems and conversations that Rankine has been having with friends and strangers about race. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Daniel Nayeri moved to Oklahoma from Iran as a young boy. And one of the first things he remembers about coming to America was the peculiar shape of a potato chip. The very first morning we woke up, and the wonderful woman who had taken us in had served sandwiches. We had slept in. I was very jet-lagged. And on the plate were these chips I had never seen before,

and they were all the same shape, and they nested into one another. And I could not believe that America had chips like this. Of course, they were Pringles. Nayeri told my colleague Elsa Chang that the discovery of Pringles on his first day in America shocked him. Just one of many cultural shocks that this Iranian refugee would experience. When you're a refugee in a place that's a little bit more homogenous, I think the first question you end up getting asked over and over again is, what are you doing here? And you end up having to tell the story over and over again, which is sort of where my love of storytelling began. Nayeri fled Iran along with his sister and mother because his mother converted from Islam to Christianity, which was a crime.

She had sort of joined the underground church and her apostasy is a capital crime in Iran. So she ran afoul of the secret police there, ominously named the committee, the comité. And we had to leave very, very quickly. This is a tale of navigating adolescence and a new culture. And it's a true story told in the autobiographical novel, Everything Sad is Untrue, by Daniel Nyeri. Consider this. Many of us are away from family and friends this holiday season. Our travel plans canceled.

So there's no better time to curl up with a really great book. Coming up, the Consider This hosts share our favorite reads of 2020, and we'll tell you how to find hundreds more. From NPR News, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Thursday, December 24th. Hip-hop and America's prisons have both grown exponentially. Is this a coincidence, or is it by design? I'm Sydney Madden. Listen now to Louder Than a Riot, the new podcast from NPR Music, where we trace the collision of rhyme and punishment in America. All 11 episodes are available right now. Go binge it. It's Consider This from NPR. Our annual Book Concierge started in 2013 as a way to rethink those year-end best books lists,

where titles are ranked against each other. NPR used to publish those, too. We were very tired of lists at one point, and that's how this happened. Maybe the best person to explain this is Petra Mayer, one of the book concierge editors. So every fall, we ask our critics and our staffers to pick their favorite books from the past year. And we take all those nominations, there's hundreds of them,

and we wrestle them down to a semi-manageable number. This year is NPR's largest collection yet, with 383 titles from comics to cookbooks. When you go to npr.org slash best books, you'll see this brightly colored waterfall of book covers. And because it's easy to get lost in a collection almost 400 titles long, you can filter and sort the recommendations using categories like ladies first, it's all geek to me and the dark side. So we've got these very handy tags and they are stackable. So you can

just click a combination of them. Some of them are things like book club ideas or staff picks, which is always the most popular one actually, or nonfiction or science fiction or comics. So, you know, you can stack them. You'd say like, I want a book for my book club and it has to be short and it has to be funny and it has to be about a woman. So you'd click book club ideas, rather short, funny stuff and ladies first. And about a woman. So you'd click book club ideas, rather short, funny stuff, and ladies first. And the concierge will bring you the book that matches that, which is called Temporary by Hilary Leichter. It's a satire about a woman who has a succession of terrible temp jobs.

That's NPR's Petra Mayer. Well, before you dive in, the hosts of Consider This want to share a few of our recommendations. I picked three titles for the concierge, including Piranesi by Susanna Clark. I was writing a story about someone who lives largely alone, but in a vast house, in a house in which there are many, many things to explore. Now, Susanna Clarke was famous for an epic fantasy novel called Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Piranesi is smaller in every way. But Clarke told me there are some parallels between her

protagonist and her own experience. The character, named Piranesi, is disoriented and trapped in this mysterious sort of house. And the reason Susanna Clarke spent years struggling to write this second book is that she had an illness that left her disoriented and housebound. There's still knowledge to be found and still wonders to be seen. And there's still beauty to fill your eyes, even though you are cut off from a lot of other things. Piranesi wanders through endless halls of marble statues. Oceans roar through the basement. He's in a very strange and in some ways inhospitable place, but he doesn't feel it's inhospitable.

It is a meaningful place. The statues and the house all feel generally, overwhelmingly benevolent to him, and he feels like he is in communion with them, like he is sort of almost having a conversation with the world in which he finds himself. That's Susanna Clarke on her novel, Piranesi. Well, up next is Mary Louise Kelly. Her recommendation is for those of you who might be looking for something to read with your book club. In fact, my pick is based in part on a recent meeting of

my book club here in DC, which if you'd listened in, you would have heard me asking, so what should we read for our next book? And you would have heard a chorus of responses. Can't we just read Hamnet again and again and again? Like, just keep reading it. It was so good. This is a group, by the way, of a dozen women, all ages. We never unanimously love anything. Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell was the exception. Here she is reading an excerpt. He is dead. He is gone. And Hamnet? The mind will ask again. At school? At play? Out at the river? And Hamlet? Where is he? Here, she tries to tell herself, cold and lifeless on this board, right in front of you. Look. Here. See. And Hamlet? Where is he? The novel explores the connection between what was arguably William

Shakespeare's greatest play, Hamlet, and the death of his only son four years before. I got to interview O'Farrell about the book, and she told me... It seems so obvious, in a sense, that this is a play about fathers and sons and absence and loss and grief and the inability to deal with grief. You know, it causes this enormous chasm within you. And of course, you know, there is, I mean, there is a story which I read, I mean, it's possibly apocryphal, that Shakespeare himself played the ghost in the first productions of Hamlet. And of course, I slightly forgot, and then I read the play again, and I realised the ghost is also called Hamlet. It is a beautiful love story. And the writing, it's so beautiful. I was

often reading through tears. I was looking back in the diary I wrote a couple of years ago. It covered the time in which I was writing the novel. And I just came across this completely blank double page. And on it was written one line and it said, I killed Hamlet today. I remember dreading it as I was coming up to that point in the book. And I found that I couldn't write those scenes in the house where my children live. I had to write them in the garden. That's Maggie O'Farrell and her novel Hamnet, chosen by Mary Louise Kelly. Okay, next is Elsa Chang. We already heard a bit about her pick at the top of the show.

It's called Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri, and it's written for ages 10 and up. Elsa says it hooks you right from the opening line. All Persians are liars, and lying is a sin. This book takes you on a journey through myth, youth, and culture clash as the main character and his family flee from Iran to Oklahoma. It's a novelistic take on the author's own life, and his mother emerges as the true hero of this story. This whole book doesn't happen if my mother doesn't give up everything in the world, her medical practice, her very high social standing, her marriage, her family, her home,

her home country. My mother converted to Christianity because that is her belief. It was very clearly not a cultural agreement. It was something for which all of it was relinquished. A life being very well-to-do in Iran becomes a life of abject poverty and abuse, and she will tell you she would do it all over again. To that end, the book even says, when you look at her, you have to say, wow, this person is completely unhinged and crazy, or there is something that she is deeply and sincerely valued above all this, and that is her faith. The story moves back and forth through time,

and at one point, Nyeri writes that, quote, a patchwork memory is the shame of a refugee. When we look at family histories, we often use metaphors of the family line or the family tree. And what that really implies is the collective effort of keeping family tradition and family memories alive. Your uncle might pull you aside in the holidays and gift you his dad's pocket knife, or your grandfather might teach you how to make yogurt properly. Whatever these traditions, these ideas are, they're a linear path. And when you take one chunk of the family, a small chunk, and immediately remove them, you're breaking that line. And I think it is a shame to be so unclaimed. This idea that the collective work that any family does of telling each other their own story can't be done.

Daniel Nyeri, his book is Elsa Chang's pick called Everything Sad is Untrue. And finally, Audie Cornish with her recommendation, a book by Claudia Rankin called Just Us. The title comes from a surprising place, the late Richard Pryor and his stand-up bit on the criminal justice system where he says, you go down there looking for justice and that's what you find, just us. Comedians like Richard Pryor, Dave Chappelle, Eddie Murphy, Wanda Sykes, you know, these people are able to hold the good and the bad of it. They're the people I go to who can both see it and hold it and move through it. And they don't abdicate.

They really stay in there. Claudia Rankin says this book was not just about listening to what she heard, but reflecting on herself. I'm really interested in what other people say to me, but I'm also really interested in why I say the things that I say. Because we are all socialized inside a system that was shaped with the tenets of white supremacy. So how is that affecting my behavior? How is that affecting the amount of patience I have in conversation with you? What am I hearing

when you speak to me? Why am I saying the things that I'm saying to you? Now, the bestseller lists this year have seen books about how to soothe racial tensions. But if you're looking for an easy solution, Claudia Rankin told me it won't be in Just Us. There's no strategy because I'm not interested in telling people what to do. I'm not offering a prescription. Just Us is a book that says, look at this. Let's see what it means to be in conversation. Let's see what it means to apprehend the same reality. When you see a man put his knee on another man's neck until he dies and has to call out for his mother,

what is behind that? What allows us both to be able to hold that as part of America? You know, it would be in a different category. What are those categories? Self-help books or something? It's not that. That's not, that was never my intent. My intent was to look, to look at a thing.

Claudia Rankin, recent MacArthur Genius winner. She spoke with Audie Cornish about her book, Just Us. And it is one of over 380 titles you can browse through now at NPR's book concierge. Just go to npr.org slash best books, or follow the links in our show notes. You're listening to Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.