Homeland Elegies

by Ayad Akhtar

Akhtar pulls you in with his very first sentences—intellectual and political, but flowing with the energy and intimacy of friendly conversation—and you are off on a ride through post-9/11 America, as lived by one man—like Akhtar the son of Pakistani immigrants and like Akhtar a Pulitzer-winning playwright, although the book is fiction. His father is an America-embracing, Trump-friendly cardiologist/failed businessman; his new best friend (for a time) is a hedge-fund billionaire pouring his money into positive PR for Islam. It's a marvelously complex, challenging, and companionable portrait of America, by one of its children.

The Starship and the Canoe

by Kenneth Brower

The starship is a father's dream, the canoe—really a kayak—his son's. The father is Freeman Dyson, physicist and wild thinker who concocted plans to colonize comets and send spaceships to Saturn, and the son—estranged for a while in his early 20s from his father—is George Dyson, living sometimes in a treehouse north of Vancouver and building kayaks based on the technological traditions of the indigenous Arctic. Brower shuttles between them before bringing the two together, writing with all the grace, curiosity, and humor of John McPhee, a comparison that brings another set of father/son dynamics, since Brower's own famous father, David, was the subject of McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid. A wonderful book that gathers even more meaning from its context, both before and after it was published in 1978.

A Girl’s Story

by Annie Ernaux

The "girl" of the title is Ernaux herself, at age 18, marked by her bookishness for a life outside the working class in which she was raised. And the story is, in essence, that of a single moment and its aftermath: an ambiguous encounter with a slightly older man, forced and then forgotten by him but altering her life forever. As in The Years, she holds her own past self at arm's length—who is this "I" who once was me, she asks again—but for all the distance she places between herself, now in her seventies, and this girl, the connection between them, along with the ruthless honesty of her self-investigation, give this little book an intensity beyond anything contained in The Years.

Agency

by William Gibson

Famously, Gibson predicted our future in books like Neuromancer, and then our present caught up to him. Fittingly, his current loose trilogy, of which Agency is the second book, is set both in the future and in our recent past, or rather an alternative past—a "stub," in the book's term—to which people from the future can travel, through various intermediaries. Gibson is one of my favorite writers, whose vision of the future makes you feel so intensely the conditions and possibilities of our own present, but I had forgotten just how enjoyably challenging it is to situate yourself in the worlds he creates and only slowly explains. Agency's alternative past is full of horrors, at least at a distance, but is surprisingly utopian in the possibilities of good will on display. My mind was crackling with thought and pleasure throughout.

Cleanness

by Garth Greenwell

I loved Greenwell's first book, What Belongs to You, the elegant and intense story of an American's desire for a Bulgarian man, and I love this one too. It's also the story of a young American in Bulgaria, it's also a story of desire, and it's also elegant and intense. But, as a set of connected stories, it's more diffused, and, with a three-story centerpiece called "Loving R.," it's more open to the possibility of joy. Greenwell writes about desire and physical intimacy with a jaw-dropping candor and intelligence, but the most striking thing in this book are the sentences: cascading series of comma splices that (in a manner that might remind readers of Cusk or Sebald, though Greenwell's style is his own) create both an intimate engagement and a melancholy distance for the narrator and ourselves. This feels like life, breathed and lived, and stylishly recalled.

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

by Robert Kolker

Schizophrenia is among the most ruthless of diseases, suddenly erupting in a life, often in adolescence, and turning it inside out in ways few treatments have been able to solve. That's what happened to six of the twelve children in the Galvin family in Colorado in the '60s and '70s, creating a house of turmoil for the stricken and their family members, but also a rich genetic record for researchers desperate to solve the disease's puzzle. With an empathetic and scientific mastery that will remind many readers of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Kolker weaves the devastating but still humane story of the Galvins together with the often equally frustrating history of schizophrenia's many failed treatments, and brings the two storylines together to offer some hope for the future. A superbly compelling book.

Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

Who knew that the finest chronicler of the modern conservative movement would be a writer from the left? Or that his four massive volumes of history, taking us from Goldwater's landslide defeat to Reagan's landslide victory, would be so incredibly entertaining? Perlstein's method is full immersion: a moment-by-moment recounting of political news and behind-the-scenes maneuvering, which in this case means the rollercoaster of hope and malaise of the Carter presidency and the rise of direct-mail politics and the Christian right that brought us the elderly ascent of the Gipper. Reaganland may be the finale of Perlstein's epic, but as we know, the story was just beginning, and you'll find the echoes of our current times deafening.

Her First American

by Lore Segal

My favorite book I've read so far this year came out in 1985 and takes place in the late '50s. You may know Segal (I did, at least) from her fantastic kid's book, Tell Me a Mitzi, but boy, she is quite a novelist too. Her First American features two indelible characters, a young refugee from Austria, Ilka Weissnix, trying to find America, and the American she finds, Carter Bayoux, a charismatic, troubled African American intellectual. Surrounding them is an equally memorable cast of supporting roles and cameos, and while at its heart this is an encounter between identities—young European meets older African American—its brilliance comes from the sheer, strange, lively individuality of everyone she imagines. It's funny, poignant, brilliantly told and heard, and so subtly insightful that it still feels ahead of its time.

Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

It hasn't been easy to explain why I like this novel so much (Laura and Nancy and the Booker Prize judges do too), but I think it comes down to what it's like to be inside the head of Wallace, the gay African American Big Ten biochemistry grad student whose real life you share for a few alternately slack and intense summer days. He's a hard one to get to know, for his friends and for a reader, armored with defenses and then suddenly so bristly and vulnerable when those defenses are pierced that you might need to turn away. The vulnerability might remind you of Kiese Laymon's Heavy, but you might also think of Sally Rooney's novels, with their similar deliberately banal titles and similarly drifting, passionate twentysomethings.

War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy

Memorial Drive

by Natasha Trethewey

The Ice Palace

by Tarjei Vesaas

I read this book twice last year, at the beginning of the year and the end, and my awe and delight at its beauty only increased. The story is simple—a new girl comes to a small Norwegian town, and makes a connection to a girl there—and the language is stripped down to its minimum. But oh my, the intensity that those simple words—some of them unspoken—carry! In other hands, this might have felt like a horror story, but Vesaas (a household name in Norway, but nearly unknown here) invests it with stark enchantment. When I describe it as a cross between Denis Johnson's Train Dreams and Tove Jansson's The Summer Book, please forgive my glibness and know that I am giving it the highest praise I have.