Reading the stars

In 2020 reading nonfiction felt, to me, like an anchor to normalcy: reading about the big ideas and intimate dramas that were the stuff of our lives and the centre of our concerns before the pandemic reshaped our imaginations and our everyday, for month upon month upon month. Anne Boyer’s The Undying (Penguin Press,

320pp, $19.99) was among my favourites of these books – it’s an urgent and often angry account in essays of the author’s diagnosis and treatment of an aggressive form of breast cancer, and one for which the prognosis is generally poor. The essays are often poem-like, dense and allusive, and structured by resonance, image and idea, which makes them exhilarating to read; and it’s a book that interrogates our thinking about illness, treatment and health, as well as gender, work, family and love.

I loved Rebecca Giggs’s Fathoms

(Scribe, 368pp, $35), a much-anticipated book about whales and the space they hold in our imaginations – and how our relationships with the natural and built worlds, as well as our changing climate, can be accounted for in their huge and mysterious bodies. Giggs, too, is a remarkably poetic writer, and the sheer beauty of this book is often staggering, as is her ability to describe complex science and ecological processes in a manner that’s vivid and engaging, and easy for a layperson to understand. It’s a book full of awe and mystery, as well as meticulous research and deep thinking, and it is wildly exciting for the possibilities it opens up for writing about climate, science and the natural world.

Finally, I read Eula Biss’s Having and

Being Had (Text, 336pp, $34.99) towards the very end of this year, just after I had moved into a house, bigger and emptier than any other I’d inhabited, and with my girlfriend, rather than a ragtag group of friends and strangers, as I’d always done before. It was one of those incredibly rare and profound moments of a book finding you, as a reader, at exactly the right time. Having and Being Had is instigated by Biss’s discomfort, especially as a person long accustomed to precarity, in being able to pay for a home and its furnishings from her and her partner’s academic salaries – and it opens out from this point into a fragmentary, often emotionally contradictory examination of capitalism and consumerism (the “having” of the title), as well as drudgey, exploitative employment (the “being had”), and how all this might be reconciled to Biss’s work as an artist and a writer, something separate from these spheres, if also implicated in them. It’s heartfelt and smart, fiery and furious, and a thoroughly invigorating read.

An honorable mention here too for Ellena Savage’s Blueberries, which is thrilling for its zest and energy, the cheek and playfulness it brings to the essay form – it was one of those books that made me want to sit down and write. Best new talents

Katerina Bryant, Hysteria

Kylie Maslen, Show Me Where It Hurts

These essayists both debuted collections this year that discuss the experience of chronic illness and the way it can reshape a life, writing with great intelligence, heart and humour. Guilty pleasure

I don’t believe in guilty pleasures; more accurately, I refuse to feel guilty for any of my pleasures. That said, by far the strangest of my pleasures this year was reading piles of pandemic fiction – and as such I recommend Sigrid Nunez’s Salvation City, William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows, Meg Mundell’s The Trespassers and Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country. Most overrated

Mangoes are overrated. Books are not. Most disappointing Craig Silvey, Honeybee

I have a lot of time for Silvey as a writer, but was so disheartened to see him using a trans character’s identity as a plot point in his new novel, and by the disingenuous way his publisher and publicity team handled the difficult conversations they knew that this would cause.

It has been said so many times that it’s almost considered a banality. 2020 was

A Year, one that saw societal inequalities further magnified. No thanks, of course, to the elite who carried on business as usual, and who own many of the tools we use today to make our lives more connected and more convenient. As many people sit refreshing the apps made by start-ups looking to make a killing, the question undoubtedly arises: Is there a way out? Wendy Liu’s memoir,

Abolish Silicon Valley (Repeater, 244pp, $25.99), attempts to push these exigencies closer to the fore, tracking her metamorphosis from bushy-tailed-and-bright-eyed coder to disillusioned tech worker. What distinguishes this from the tepid exposés that threaten to oversaturate this genre is its clear-eyed self-reflexivity: with Liu not taking even one moment to indulge in fatuous hand-wringing, her complicity does not stop at her admission. Instead, she presents an earnest insider account that not only eviscerates Silicon Valley’s aggressive hunger for power, but also scrutinises the myriad inconsistencies that capitalism engenders, such as the myth of meritocracy, the insistence on assimilation, and the unfettered fetish for “progress”.

Perhaps it is through absurdism that real-life absurdities are most effectively represented. Smart Ovens for Lonely

People (Brio, 320pp, $29.99), Elizabeth Tan’s collection of short stories, uses wry humour and cheeky irreverence to highlight tacit cultural anxieties. As with her equally spectacular debut, Rubik, Tan proves herself to be a dexterous storyteller with an acute eye for the uncanny. Here, ASMR is a competitive sport, and a posse of wraith-like creatures serve as entertainment in a restaurant aquarium. The titular story sees a young woman strike up a tentative familiarity with a cat-shaped smart oven after a suicide attempt. Existential tensions – as wrung through the affective devices and machinations that keep intact the trappings of neoliberal society – are prodded at and pulled apart like modelling clay in Tan’s stories. The result is a non-didactic melange that is at once mischievous and deadly serious.

While the past few years have produced stunning debuts that strive to identify and skewer the contemporary malaise, Raven Leilani’s Luster (Picador, 240pp, $32.99) could very well be the best of the lot. It could even be considered a literary rendition of a post-2010 television show – one such as

I May Destroy You or Tuca & Bertie – which exercises a mode of kaleidoscopic storytelling to comment on the moral standards that society deems sacrosanct. Told in the voice of Edie – a jaded publishing assistant turned gig economy worker who finds herself involved with older, married fuckboy Eric, later accidentally inserting herself into his domestic life and becoming the unwitting mentor figure for his adopted Black child Akila – this is a novel of understated drama. Artful metaphors abound: a cul-de-sac is a “lazy tenor”, an amusement park evokes the “rococo trappings of childhood”, someone wakes up “like a grim little computer”. Leilani does not waste a single word, harnessing tableaux that spiral through vertiginous prose and a remarkable interiority to bring out the silent violences people inflict on each other, and the ineluctable, discordant dynamics that spawn from race and class differences. But Edie is not empowered, nor is she suffering – even in her most broken moments there is a sense that Leilani wants to evade the binaristic tendencies that make up many women-ofcolour characters. To be human, as the author herself recently said in an interview, is to be unruly, and Luster captures a recalcitrance that gives that wonderful admixture of imagination and reality much more room to collide.

Best new talent S.L. Lim, Revenge

Lim is excellent at identifying prescribed taboos and grey areas in postmodern society, and rendering them with discomforting precision. A writer to watch.

Guilty pleasure

Rob Halford, Confess

Music and sports autobiographies are often good barometers of the psyches of people pre- and post-fame. Here, the “Breaking the Law” metal god and leather daddy bares all, telling it as it is.

Most overrated Charlie Kaufman, Antkind

The Synecdoche, New York director pivots to literature, except this time it is just himself sans actors. Maybe stick to making films; we don’t need another Irvine Welsh, now.

Most disappointing

Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

Like Haruki Murakami and Stephen King, Moshfegh is starting to follow a formula. There is only so much self-interested ennui that can propel a story.