The December issue of Library Journal just arrived and, as always, it's a bit of a thrill to open it up and see one's name in lights, so to speak. Here are the results of months of deep reading, much emailing back and forth, and then the final zoom meeting where Barbara Love and I got to finally "meet" each other. https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=best-books-of-2020-literary-fiction
Choosing ten finalists is always so difficult and personal. Four reviewers, multiple sensibilities, so many books that didn't make the cut. Some of them found their way to other "best books" lists and others were honored by the National Book Awards ("Interior Chinatown"), the Booker Prize ("Shuggie Bain"), and the Kirkus Prize ("Luster").
I can't speak for my cohort on this project but when I was finished all I wanted to do was overdose on light, breezy mysteries like the ones I'm in the middle of right now. "The Guest List" by Lucy Foley and "Big Summer" by Jennifer Weiner both involve celebrity destination weddings, a boggy island off the coast of Ireland and Cape Cod respectively, in which the brides and grooms are so unsavory and unlikeable that you almost don't care that something awful is going to happen to them. And be assured, from page one you know that couples this rich and golden and ecstatic with each other are way too good to be true!
Fear not though, I won't let my brain go to complete mush. As the perfect antidote for the final throes of the worst presidential term in my seventy plus years I am savoring Barack Obama's "A Promised Land." Hardly a book that you sit down to and read straight through, this is one to be dipped into and out of, maybe a hundred pages at a time, so that you can absorb it in increments. I won't even attempt to review this book, Chimamanda Adichie already went overboard in that department https://nyti.ms/3gn3kSu
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