Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing

by Robert Caro

This is absolute candy for me. Caro, the buttoned-up, indefatigable biographer of Robert Moses and—in five volumes—Lyndon Johnson, has, in his 80s, become a cultural hero weighted with some of the same admiration we place on hardworking throwbacks like Vin Scully, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Robert Mueller. In this anecdotal working memoir he embraces his identity, sharing his patient and creative methods—"turn every page!"—for unearthing the untold stories behind his subjects' lives and the lives of those they effected. Fascinating and entertaining for anyone who has read (or, like me, has always aspired to read) any of Caro's giant volumes, but also a wonderful self-portrait for anyone else who is interested in a life tirelessly devoted to a worthy vocation.

Thick: And Other Essays

by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Tressie McMillan Cottom is a very public intellectual. A sociologist by trade, she tweets with great volume and skill and has been placing essays across the internet since grad school—writing too much, as one protective older academic once warned her. But that's what she does, turning the analytical tools of her trade as well as her lived experience into unsparing, funny, paradigm-shifting commentary about, among other things, the brutal cost for a black woman of being presumed incompetent and the rationality of the "irrational" spending of the poor. These are not essays written to make you feel good about what's possible—she's just telling you what is.

Girl, Woman, Other

by Bernardine Evaristo

You might, on first glance, find Evaristo's prize winner daunting: the stories of twelve characters, told over 450 pages in a style that, with its idiosyncratic layout and mid-sentence line breaks, looks almost like free verse. It turns out to be anything but: the writing itself is almost breezily straightforward and the characters so lively and distinctive that by the end you feel as if they are friends sitting around your living room. The challenge comes instead from the sheer accumulation of lives and identities: if "identity" is one of the central themes of our time, these twelve people, all by some definition Black and British and nearly all women, explode identity by their sheer variety and individuality, never unaware of their identities and never anything but individual within them. Imagine Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, with its collection of masterfully compressed and connected life stories, but stretched not across history but contemporary Britain. I expect Girl, Women, Other will evoke the same level of interest and discussion.

Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

by Mira Jacob

"Sometimes, you don't know how confused you are about something important until you try explaining it to someone else." Starting with a premise similar to Ta-Nehisi Coates's in Between the World and Me—trying to explain to her son the America he is growing up brown in—Mira Jacob has made a very different, but equally thought-provoking, book. Jacob is a novelist, but here she uses a collage comic-book style that turns out to be ideal for her approach of layering conversation after conversation—with her son, with her Indian-immigrant parents, with her Jewish husband, with friends, lovers, kooky employers, jerks in bars—that capture the difficulty, the weirdness, the humor, the sadness of talking about identity, especially with those you love. A brilliant, funny, challenging, and appropriately mixed-up read.

The Dishwasher

by Stéphane Larue

This is a novel about gambling, heavy metal music, late-night debauchery, and washing dishes in a restaurant. Guess which is the most interesting, by far? The dishwashing! If you've read other behind-the-scenes food-service accounts, perhaps you won't be surprised, but a busy night in the dishpit and on the prep line can be thrilling, especially in the hands of a writer with such a vivid sense of the work and the characters involved, and of how work like that can be a lifeline for a young man otherwise screwing his life up at every turn. Larue's debut, a bestseller already in his native Quebec, has been called a cross between Kitchen Confidential and The Gambler, but I think of it as somewhere between two other favorites of mine, Queen of Spades and Love Me Back. Forgive me for saying so, but I ate it up.

The Town House

by Norah Lofts

I must acknowledge that this is the most unattractively published of any book I've chosen for Phinney by Post, but don't let the cover (or typeface inside) turn you aside: there is superb storytelling to be found here. I have my new favorite podcast, Backlisted, to thank for leading me to Norah Lofts, a bestselling historical novelist from the middle of the last century who, from the evidence of this book at least, was brilliant at marshaling historical details to dramatize how lives were bound by status, money, and capricious fate. The first in a trilogy tracing the inhabitants of an English village home from the 14th century to the 20th, The Town House follows the rise from serfdom of a smith named Martin Reed, braiding choice and cruel chance in an unsentimental, affecting, old-fashioned tale.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

Macfarlane is often called the great nature writer of his generation, but his vision of nature is not one of a pristine, unpeopled wilderness: his wilds are, for better or worse, deeply human, connected to the culture and language we've built over centuries. Having looked, in his first book, Mountains of the Mind, at how we're drawn to the highest places, now in this gorgeous and provocative new book, he has done the opposite: descending into caves, mines, catacombs, and nuclear storage facilities to unearth our relation, in both myth and practical action, with the underworld. There's no better guide: he writes with a fully grounded beauty, and brings a natural optimism to some of our darkest places.

Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

Having missed out on Marlantes's fiercely admired Vietnam epic, Matterhorn, and in the mood for a big Northwest tale, I decided Deep River, only his second novel in four decades of writing, would be my big book of the summer. I'm very glad I did. It is indeed a big Northwest tale, following a few decades in the lives of a dozen or so main characters and many memorable secondary players, nearly all of them Finnish immigrants to the logging camps and fishing villages near the mouth of the Columbia a century ago. Characters grow and die, succeed and fail, fall in and out of love, suffer tragedy and survive it, and get caught up in the larger dramas of their time—war, labor battles, good times and bad. But most of all, they work: for women and men, old and young, the highest praise among these stoic Finns, whether for an employee or a love match, is to be called a "good worker." I lived in their world for two weeks, and they'll live in mine—Aino and Aksel, Matti, Ilmari, and Kyllikki—for a lot longer.

Golden Days

by Carolyn See

This book never goes where you expect it to. Is it a satire of '80s SoCal self-empowerment? Is it a post-nuclear-war story of human apocalypse and survival? Both? Neither? The real story, for me, is in See's sentences: as swervy, surprising, and suddenly breathtaking as the hairpin turns of the Topanga Canyon road on which her narrator, post-divorce, finds a home in the midst of the particular LA excess of the era. As I emailed the friend who had tipped me off to this forgotten gem, after reading the jaw-dropping first dozen pages: "Joan Didion is reading this and thinking, 'I'm getting left in the dust.’" Rediscover this crazy and wonderful book, as we approach our own apocalypse(s).

Women Talking

by Miriam Toews

Toews has become one of Canada's leading novelists by writing with insight, sorrow, humor, and anger about the patriarchal Mennonite community in which she was raised. So how would she deal, in fiction, with a horrific (and true) incident in another Mennonite colony—the systematic drugging and rape of the colony's women by many of its men? Not as you might expect: the incident itself is offstage, replaced by the conversations of women as they, long kept isolated from the world around them, debate the ethics and efficacy of reform, revenge, and rebellion, finding the language of personal politics as they speak it, almost like a Continental Congress welling up in the attic of a barn as they wait for the men to return. It's rousing, subtle, and provocative.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

Calling Drive Your Plow a murder mystery is a bit like calling Beloved a ghost story. There is a series of unsolved murders (which—spoiler!—are solved), but the real story is in the storyteller: Janina Duszejko, a reclusive, strong-opinioned, sixtyish woman living in a village in southwest Poland, who loves animals and William Blake and is certain of the truths of astrology. Like the narrator of Milkman, she prefers nicknames to given ones (including her own); like Ottessa Moshfegh's narrators, she sometimes courts the repulsion of her neighbors. Like both, she has a voice like no other, and Tokarczuk's novel is a scathing portrait of a place and an illuminating one of the inner life of a fiercely idiosyncratic woman. One of the best books I've read this year.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

Last month I read the U.S. Climate Report, but only when I read this book did our predicament come devastatingly to life. Why? The facts are, mostly, the same; Wallace-Wells has only gathered existing reports into what, at times, reads like a Harper's Index of doom. Is it because it's written in a literary way, packaged in a handsome, literary volume, as befits a writer who used to work at the Paris Review? Is it because he vividly describes the climate changes that are already snowballing (or, rather, fireballing) and that are just a few decades from making our planet unrecognizable and, for many, unlivable? Is it because, despite calling himself an "optimist," he offers little hope, even though the knowledge of our situation and the technical (if not political) solutions are both at hand? Whatever the reason, there is no book I've read in years that is going to live under my skin every day the way this one does. Its dire portrait of the coming decades—"It is much, much worse than you think" is the opening sentence—may lead you to action, or to fatalism, but I can't imagine leaving this book unchanged.