2020’s Most Memorable Reads

Here is a list of the five most memorable books I read in 2020. Two were rereads. Three were new to me.

Doctor Dolittle’s Circus by Hugh Lofting, A-: I had forgotten why I loved the Dr. Dolittle series so much as a child. This book reminded me, and I will reread more of the series soon.

The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge, A: The premise in this book is that there is a tree that will give you knowledge if you feed it a lie. The bigger the lie, the bigger the payoff in knowledge, but the cost is high. First you must spread that lie to the rest of the world, with potentially harmful consequences.

The main character of the story is Faith Sunderly, a teenager whose family moves to a remote island so that her father, a clergyman and noted scientist, can join an archaeological dig there. That’s what she’s told, anyway, but the truth is much more complicated and dangerous. When her father turns up dead, the islanders treat it as a suicide, but she believes he was murdered. The tree may offer clues to his murder and enable her to take revenge, but first she must tell terrible lies.

I don’t normally resort to using other people’s or organization’s reviews, but this one sums up my feelings about the book so neatly that I decided to make an exception this time:

“Mystery, magic, religion, and feminism swirl together in Hardinge’s latest [2016] heady concoction… Hardinge creates a fierce, unlikable heroine navigating a rapidly changing world and does it all with consummate skill and pitch-perfect prose, drawing readers into Faith’s world and onto her side and ultimately saying quite a lot about the world. Thematically rich, stylistically impressive, absolutely unforgettable.” (Kirkus)

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, A: So many people had talked up Butler’s writing to me, I was nervous to finally read one of her books, because I was afraid it might disappoint. I shouldn’t have worried. It was everything I was promised it would be, and now all of Butler’s other novels, including the sequel to this one, are on my reading list.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, A: This is a peculiar book about a man, called Piranesi, who lives in a seemingly endless palace of statue-filled rooms that’s surrounded by the sea and often flooded by tides. No explanation is initially given for who he is, why he lives in such a strange place, or why he is alone except for one other person who mysteriously comes and goes according to their own secret agenda. The answers are doled out slowly and carefully, and the reward for the patient reader is to vicariously dwell in a place of eerie tranquility and innocence for a while. I can’t say that it has a happy ending, or that it doesn’t go to some dark places, but I feel as though I captured enough of that tranquility and innocence to carry me through to the end of the book and beyond.

The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin, A: As a young child Tenar was taken from her home and transformed into Arha, the Eaten One, high priestess of a fading but still powerful religion. As she grows to adulthood, she spends her days in service to the Powers of the Earth, death, and learning the pathways of an underground labyrinth where no light is allowed. One day a thief invades her domain and teaches her about the outside world, and she must decide if she really wants to spend her entire life in darkness.

This book, now that I think about it, is similar to Paranesi in that the main character lives in virtual isolation without a full understanding of why. And like Piranesi (which this book predates by many decades), it’s a slow story that requires patience from the reader. Its ending may or may not be construed as happy, depending on one’s mindset. I find it liberating and vaguely hopeful while at the same time painfully uncertain and frustrating. Or, to put it another way, it’s emotionally complicated, which is perhaps part of why the book is usually sold as YA fiction and so successful in that category (I first read it as a teenager myself). BTW, though The Tombs of Atuan is technically the second in Le Guin’s Earthsea series, it can stand on its own, so there’s no need to read the others in the series unless you want to.