Best reviewed books of 2019

Best reviewed books of 2019

POSTED JANUARY 11, 2020

The Literary Hub website may just be the best internet resource for books of all descriptions.  For those who have not yet discovered it, you can reach their home page here.  

As 2019 wound down, Literary Hub posted a dozen or so "best of the year" articles covering various literary genres.  Below are links to the best-reviewed works of fiction (below left) and literary non-fiction (below right). 

The five fiction books receiving the most positive reviews were:

1. Normal People by Sally Rooney 

“… a compulsive, psychologically astute will-they-or-won’t-they love story involving two of the most sympathetic people you’re liable to meet between covers. Although hailed as a voice of millennials, Rooney offers plenty to appeal to readers across genders and generations … Rooney’s dialogue, like her descriptive prose, is slyly ironic, alternately evasive and direct, but always articulate. It cuts to the heart." (from the NPR review)

2. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead 

“… a surprisingly different kind of novel. The linguistic antics that have long dazzled Whitehead’s readers have been set aside here for a style that feels restrained and transparent. And the plot of The Nickel Boys tolerates no fissures in the fabric of ordinary reality; no surreal intrusions complicate the grim progress of this story. That groundedness in the soil of natural life is, perhaps, an implicit admission that the treatment of African Americans has been so bizarre and grotesque that fantastical enhancements are unnecessary." (from the Washington Post review)

3. Inland by Téa Obreht 

“Magic realism served Obreht well in her fable about Yugoslavia’s baroque divisions, and it’s no less effective in shaping this alternative foundation myth about the American west. On the face of it the book begins conventionally enough … The twist lies in Obreht’s affinity for unusual transformations … Exquisitely panoramic as it is, Lurie’s account of his travels forms only one strand of the novel. It’s interwoven with the tale of a single day in the life of Nora, a frontierswoman … Obreht builds a narrative that is every bit as compelling as Lurie’s and just as full of revelations. Their parallel journeys into Arizona’s inhospitable interior…probe the cost of survival and the human yearning to belong." (from The Guardian review)

4. The Topeka School by Ben Lerner 

“…thoroughly, intimidatingly brilliant and absolutely contemporary … funny, and at times, painfully acute. A bildungsroman in lyric chorus, it looks back on the past with affection but without nostalgia, and lands in the frighteningly unsure coda of the present day … manages, in its particularity, to tell a story that is emblematic of American life … Lerner seems to reinvent the novel as a happy side effect of some other project … " (from the Harper's review)

5. The Testaments by Margaret Atwood 

“Atwood picks up plot elements that originated in the TV series…and twists them to her own ends … The Testaments owes more to the TV series than a handful of details. Its tone hews closer to the series than to the novel that precedes it … The Testaments is fun to read in a way that The Handmaid’s Tale is not, fun in the same way that the TV series, for all its grim lighting and performances, is crowd-pleasing. Its characters are not powerless or crushed." (from the Slate review)

The five top non-fiction:

1. In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado 

"Machado understands that memoir, like architecture, requires a sense of proportion. The problem is that women’s feelings are rarely ever considered proportional … Machado understands that memoir, like architecture, requires a sense of proportion. The problem is that women’s feelings are rarely ever considered proportional … Here and in her short stories, Machado subjects the contemporary world to the logic of dreaming. She is often said to spin urban legends or fairy tales; her writing, while clear, is full of nameless currents, hidden transactions between pleasure and terror. The result is a space that cannot, even years later, be easily escaped." (from the New Yorker review)

2. Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane 

"Macfarlane’s writing is muscular, meticulously researched and lyrical, placing him in the lineage of Peter Matthiessen, Gretel Ehrlich and Barry Lopez. What distinguishes his work is his beginner’s mind, his lack of self-consciousness, his physical pursuit of unlearning what he has been taught by received information … Underland is a book of dares. Macfarlane dares to go deep into earth’s unseen world and illuminate what we not only shy away from but what we don’t even know exists … Underland is a portal of light in dark times. I needed this book of beauty below to balance the pain we’re witnessing aboveground." (from The New York Times Book Review)

3. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino 

…announces a major talent in the art of the essay … In an essay titled ‘Always Be Optimizing,’ Tolentino looks at ‘the ideal woman,’ the one you see posting about her workouts, children, and garden on Instagram … What makes the essay more than simple cultural observation is Tolentino’s critique of the economic and societal forces that twist women into such an unsustainable set of contradictions … Pessimism about false promises might turn out to be the cultural legacy of Tolentino’s generation, the much-maligned millennials. The best essays in the collection aim directly at these outrages… If anything can save us, it just might be the snap of Tolentino’s humor, the eloquence of her skepticism." (from the Boston Globe review)

4. The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom 

“…[an] extraordinary, engrossing debut … Broom pushes past the baseline expectations of memoir as a genre to create an entertaining and inventive amalgamation of literary forms. Part oral history, part urban history, part celebration of a bygone way of life, The Yellow House is a full indictment of the greed, discrimination, indifference and poor city planning that led her family’s home to be wiped off the map. It is an instantly essential text, examining the past, present and possible future of the city of New Orleans, and of America writ large." (from The New York Times Book Review)

5. The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang

“Wang is a highly articulate and graceful essayist, and her insights, in both the clinical and general senses, are exceptional … [Wang’s] perspective in The Collected Schizophrenias is encyclopedic and prismatic even without taking into account how her primary mental illness may have fractured her identity … These essays are mesmerizing and at times bittersweet … The Collected Schizophrenias is a necessary addition to a relatively small body of literature, but it’s also, quite simply, a pleasure to read. The prose is so beautiful, and the recollection and description so vivid, that even if it were not mostly about an under-examined condition it would be easy to recommend.” (from The Los Angeles Review of Books)