As years go, 2020 was like an endless December train ride through Barrow, Alaska.
Dark and dreary, stressed and weary.
It was a good year in at least one respect. It was a good year for reading. Even when the library closed for weeks in March and April, it gave us time to pick through that mounting pile of "books I plan to read but know I probably won't."
The lockdown inspired me to start a diary to catalog what I am reading by title, author and a few thoughts that I took away from each book.
I read 29 books this year, from "Killers of the Flower Moon" by David Grann to "A Promised Land" by Barack Obama. While both of those are fine efforts that I recommend highly, they did not make the list of books I enjoyed most in 2020 (not published in 2020, but read in 2020).
These six did:
1. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016) by Matthew Desmond.
This book is a celebrated masterpiece, hailed as "astonishing" by the New York Times Book Review and "wrenching and revelatory" by The Nation.
“This book gave me a better sense of what it is like to be very poor in this country than anything else I have read," Bill Gates said. "It is beautifully written, thought-provoking, and unforgettable."
I grew up in substandard housing, when most days meant struggling to stay warm, or to keep the rain outside where it belonged. Our need for food and a warm night's sleep often wrestled with one another. So this book hit home with its detailed descriptions of inner-city poverty and the endless cycle of dead-end options.
The book follows eight Milwaukee families struggling to pay rent to their landlords during the financial crisis of 2007-08.
Reality shows up relentlessly in these pages to counter the quixotic mantra that good things will come to those who just work hard enough. A young mother finds a tenuous existence with an apartment, child care and a job -- only to have the rug yanked out when her restaurant hours are cut without warning.
Systemic flaws are laid bare. Dumpy apartments in crumbling buildings rent for barely 10% off the rents paid for nice apartments in the "respectable" part of the city. Slumlords operate ruthlessly, piling up evictions and moving tenants in and out while mastering the loopholes and gaming overburdened courts.
Desmond's writing is pretty simple and straightforward. It's as a reporter that he shines. A professor of sociology at Princeton University and recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, Desmond moved into a dilapidated, inner-city apartment for months. He met tenants and landlords and convinced them to let him document everything.
Names are changed, but a rigorous fact-checking process verifies the contents. As a final layer of verification, Desmond hired a consulting firm to audit his work.
This book took about a decade to complete. Every American should read it.
2. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (2010), by T.J. Stiles.
This is one of two biographies by Stiles that I read this year, the other being his his latest book, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America. If someone ranks America's pre-eminent historians, Stiles is surely on that list.
The Vanderbilt book is superlative due largely to the subject material. Stiles sketches a fine portrait of "The Commodore," a hard man with few pursuits in life outside of work. Vanderbilt was so unyielding that he belittled and cast aside his own son Corneel because he suffered from epileptic seizures.
But it is Stiles' narration of the themes that changed American life to this day, and Vanderbilt's central role in those changes, that elevates this book to greatness.
Vanderbilt became a wealthy man running ferries and shipping routes to and from Manhattan. Then American innovation produced the train and Vanderbilt became a famous man -- and truly rich.
He had the foresight to see America as a country of customers at a time when few businessmen even tried to reach a regional market. Vanderbilt quickly recognized he could send passengers from New York City to Chicago if he controlled the trains and the track. Once others caught on, notably Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, Vanderbilt outwitted them time and time again.
Vanderbilt was among the first of a pioneering group of 19th century businessmen who understood that controlling all suppliers and services associated with a business meant total domination. He often took nervy risks to make those acquisitions. He was never afraid to cut fares to the point of losses in order to vanquish lesser-capitalized opponents.
Vanderbilt did more than anyone to establish the modern stock share valuation concept. Prior to Vanderbilt, stock shares were based on the future brick-and-mortar growth. It was Vanderbilt's reputation and success that moved share values to reflect the ideas and general business strength of a company.
“Vanderbilt was many things, not all of them admirable,” Stiles says in his book, “but he was never a phony. Hated, revered, resented, he always commanded respect, even from his enemies.”
3. Born to Run (2016), by Bruce Springsteen.
For a long time now I have answered "Bruce Springsteen" when asked for my favorite writer. That bordered on a frivolous response given that his writing tops out at 477 words at most ("Incident on 57th Street").
Now that the Boss is a published author, that is no longer the case. While the plot might not have been difficult, Springsteen writes with an aplomb that won over nearly all the critics.
"Astonishing," wrote Vanity Fair. "Frank and gripping," added David Brooks. "In Born to Run, he risks his mythic stature, but he emerges as more substantial, more admirable," the Wall Street Journal agreed.
A good book leaves you talking about it months later and Bruce delivers. He toes the line between frankness and class, taking care not to reveal too much about other characters in his story.
When he tiptoes around his foolhardy first marriage to actress Julianne Phillips, it feels right. We don't need to know those details. When he lights into Jake Clemens for showing up an hour late to his audition to replace his uncle, the Big Man, Clarence Clemens, it also feels right. The kid can take it.
This is Bruce revealing without being maudlin. Nearly everyone knows the story of young Bruce and his Great Santini relationship with Douglas Springsteen. It's a rock-n-roll story of father-son turmoil Bruce covered many times musically from rockers like "Adam Raised a Cain" to ballads like "Independence Day."
Against that long history, there's a simple joy in Bruce describing taking his father on a no-expense-spared deep-sea fishing trip before he died.
The book is full of candid Bruce. He reveals details of his struggle with depression, a difficult topic, especially for a world-famous multimillionaire. He handles it deftly.
My favorite nuggets relate to Bruce's management of the E Street Band. He is definitely The Boss when it comes to demanding the work, discipline and professionalism. He shares a marvelous 1985 anecdote: Bruce on stage to start a show at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, counting off "Born in the U.S.A." while piano man Roy Bittan and guitarist Nils Lofgren remained backstage, cluelessly locked in a ping pong duel.
"Ping-Pong tables were banned for years. Heads rolled!” Bruce writes, and the reader does not doubt it.
4. The Tender Bar (2006), by JD Moehringer.
This book was the surprise of 2020. It languished on my bookcase for well over a year, part of a bagful of memoirs I purchased in late 2018 while visiting the Strand Book Store in New York City.
I pulled it down after the March lockdown shuttered the library. A decorated journalist, Moehringer shares a warm, sweet story of his eccentric family, and the everyday denizens of Dickens, a local bar in Manhasset, N.Y.
My favorite memoirs in this vein are "Running With Scissors" by Augusten Burroughs and "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls. Unlike those books, there's no meanness to the adults who inhabit Moehringer's youth. That does not mean this isn't a serious book.
JD is filled with the self-doubt of someone flirting with success beyond anything in his family or extended circle. But the gang at the bar, and his ornery uncle Charlie, are all on board with Moehringer's Ivy League dreams.
I won't spoil it further. This is a charming book.
5. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (2015), by William Finnegan
I'm calling this a memoir, but it's also a travelogue, a history of surfing, a how-to book on surfing and part philosophy on life.
A longtime writer for The New Yorker, Finnegan has a life story made for a book like this. The guy grew up a short walk from a Lahaina beach, where he spent mornings surfing before school. He later quit a good job in his mid-20s to roam the South Pacific for several months. "The perfect wave" would be discovered in Fiji.
As a mature adult writer, he reported award-winning pieces from war zones. Finnegan married a successful lawyer and settled in New York City. Still, he spent middle age making regular surfing trips to Madeira.
I've read a lot of memoirs and this one defies traditional description. Finnegan recounts his life story amid part personal psychoanalysis and part removed rumination of the massive cultural shifts that defined the 60s and 70s. The book reads like what it is, a deeply personal story culled from decades of diary entries and memories. Finnegan does not dodge his personal failings along the way.
To someone who has never surfed and doesn't even know how to swim, the surfing material is a fascinating peek into a dynamic subculture. Many months after reading this, I remember that when you glide smoothly out of a barrel, the proper response is no response. It's a surfer thing.
6. Final Cut (1999), by Steven Bach.
A good book can teach you things. A good book can tell a great story from a unique perspective. And good writing makes a book worth your time.
Check, check and check with this joy of a book by Steven Bach. He offers a unique insider's view of the movie industry. It is certainly a rare thing for one of the producers of perhaps the biggest movie bomb in history to author a frank retelling of the entire catastrophe. But Bach does just that in what feels like a catharsis of sorts.
Before he gets to the messy "Heaven's Gate" stuff, Bach gives us a splendid history of United Artists. Given that "Heaven's Gate" killed United Artists, it is more than appropriate to remember the victim before recounting the crime.
The villain is the super-sized ego belonging to director Michael Cimino. But no matter how bizarre and diva-ish Cimino gets, Bach never reveals any bitterness. In fact, the book throughout has a carefree vibe that serves the material well.
Cimino repeatedly lies and makes outlandish demands. He insists on casting a French actress who doesn't speak English as the female lead, which would be fine if the character were French. Alas, she is an 1890s frontier woman in Wyoming.
Bach and his partner are increasingly helpless at keeping Cimino on schedule and on budget. But "Heaven's Gate" was influenced by a variety of related factors that Bach weaves throughout in fine subplot fashion. The Hollywood pressures are clear in these pages, as executives gamble to back the next box office winner.
But Bach keeps it light, a clarity no doubt helped by nearly two decades of space from movie set frustrations. He employs a wonderful writing technique of ending chapters with a clever quip or an abrupt plot teaser.
Chapter 18, for example, concludes with executives finally screening Cimino's long-delayed cut of a movie United Artists insisted, demanded and, finally, legally required him to deliver at three hours.
"We sat down, spacing ourselves widely in the large screening room, and saw Michael Cimino's 'Heaven's Gate,'" Bach writes.
"All five hours and twenty-five minutes of it."
