Welcome to a longstanding LWON tradition: our end-of-year recommendation lists. The idea is to provide our beloved readers with curated experiences to fill the rare moment of silence that is the last week of December. Below is a list of top-notch reading material we’ve discovered this year, and if you’re looking for further inspiration, do peruse these seven previous ‘what to read’ lists:
2021, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014
Jessa: I heartily recommend The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt. But don’t take my word for it, just ask the 2012 non-fiction Pulitzer Prize jury. It centers on the moment Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things was unearthed in a monastery during the Renaissance, and it paints a vivid picture of everything surrounding that event, which it nominates as the moment modernity began.
Ann: A friend who’s also a writer has been telling me to read mid-century British novels written by women and so I took a whack at one of them and found her lacking, and then my friend told me again and the upshot is that I’ve now read all of Jane Gardam, Rumer Godden, Penelope Fitzgerald, and sometimes I read Barbara Pym. I won’t even mention Margery Sharp and Muriel Spark because I read them long ago. They’re not all the exact same age but they do overlap. They’re all uneven; not one of them stopped writing until she keeled over. I’ve read these books repeatedly because my goodness sakes alive, these writers are smart as they want to be and they can WRITE. What was going on in the mid-twentieth century Great Britain? Besides universal post-war deprivation, added to a cultural position which induced boredom, plus excellent educations? Maybe that’s enough. So, my own favorites, not necessarily the best, just the ones I most like rereading: Gardam: the Filth trilogy. Godden: In This House of Brede. Fitzgerald: At Freddie’s. Pym: Excellent Women. Sharp: The Innocents. Spark: A Far Cry from Kensington.
Craig: Arizona science journalist Melissa L. Sevigny’s third book came out this year, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon. Many books chronicle historic journeys down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. One of the most informative and enjoyable that comes to mind is Kevin Fedarko’s classic, The Emerald Mile, which follows the illegal speed record set by men in a boat 277 miles down the length of the Canyon in 1983. The two books should be read as companions. Sevigny goes to 1938, when a young botanist and her mentor made the first botanical survey of the Grand Canyon along a river infrequently navigated at that time. They were warned they would likely die, which was a distinct possibility. The relationship of the two women is enveloped by an enormous landscape as they grapple with their all-male, notably masculine crew on the expedition of a lifetime. It’s a rollicking story, and the kind of gender bend needed as much in 1938 as it is now.
Emily: This is an old favorite, but I’m rereading The Diaries of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain aloud with Pete right now and it is just so good. So wry and self-aware and playful, and of course the writing is gorgeous. We’re at the part where Eve successfully tames a brontosaurus. She’s much cleverer than Adam and he knows it.
Cameron: My recommendation for sweet vacation reading is Romantic Comedy, by Curtis Sittenfeld. I LOVE Sittenfeld and this one might be my favorite. It’s about a writer at a late-night comedy show (à la Saturday Night Live) – and I keep trying to describe it beyond that, but maybe I should just say it’s a pretty delightful romantic comedy that feels like it has a backbone. And the Indigo Girls are prominently featured. So, a lot of my favorites in one place.
Helen: When I’m having a hard time, as I currently am, I reread books from the Vorkosigan Saga. In these 16 books and half a dozen short stories, Lois McMaster sets up a world – space travel, lots of planets, an empire, another empire – and pretty much goes to town. There’s spaceships shooting at each other. There’s intrigue and politics. There’s a murder mystery. There’s a couple of romance novels. This set of stories has it all and they’re always a pleasure to fall back into. They’ve also been republished in different collections and stuff, and a lot has been written about reading order, so they can be a little intimidating to pick up. (It’s a LOT of planets.) I started with a collection called Cordelia’s Honor and that worked for me.
Image: DALL-E