Books in 2020

Each year Gazettabyte asks industry figures to pick their reads of the year. Industry analysts and regular contributors Dana Cooperson and Andrew Schmitt kick off this year's highlighted books.

Dana Cooperson, independent analyst

I had difficulty concentrating enough to read during the lockdown despite having more time. Eventually, events spurred my overdue fiction/ non-fiction exploration of the underpinnings of systemic racism as well as some escapism through journeys that the pandemic made impossible.

Five of my books fit the first category: four explore the legacy of human slavery in the US and the African-American experience, while the fifth, Trevor Noah’s memoir, traces similar terrain in apartheid/ post-apartheid South Africa.

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by the lawyer and equal justice advocate, Bryan Stevenson, uses statistics and egregious cases of the miscarriage of justice that lead to the unequal application of capital punishment.

Stevenson intersperses the shocking case of Walter McMillian, a young, self-sufficient Black man who was wrongly accused of killing a white woman, with tales of his founding of the Montgomery, Alabama-based non-profit Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), and a procession of cases EJI litigated on behalf of poor, minority, and juvenile clients.

One wonders how Stevenson and his team could work doggedly on these cases while facing death threats and obstacles. There are few happy endings for the accused yet the book is ultimately hopeful.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by journalist Isabel Wilkerson is a history of the migration of six million African Americans from the agrarian Jim Crow South to the urban north and west of the country between 1915 and 1970.

The book weaves broad historical and sociological data with the bittersweet stories of three individuals who migrated to escape terrorism and lack of opportunity. It also helped me piece together historical underpinnings of today’s fight for justice, as epitomised by the Black Lives Matter movement.

If the statistics don’t move you, the stories of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster will. (Note: Wilkerson recently published a follow-up, Caste, which my reading buddies recommend.)

James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain is a semi-autobiographical novel about an African-American boy growing up in 1930s Harlem. This beautifully written, structurally interesting book focusses on fourteen-year-old John, who is struggling with poverty, abuse, and religious faith; and John’s father, Gabriel, mother Elizabeth, and Aunt Florence, all of whom escaped Jim Crow and who all struggle. Baldwin writes with imagery and passion. I had not read Baldwin before.

This year I also returned to Tony Morrison, with Sula, another tale of African-American diaspora that begins in 1919 Ohio. Like Baldwin’s book, Sula deals with intergenerational trauma and features indelible characters and powerful prose. A slim book, deep in characterisation and emotional punch.

A no less passionate book, infused with its author’s gift for making people laugh, is comedian Trevor Noah’s memoir, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.

The book’s title refers to South Africa’s Immorality Act of 1927, which made his birth by a black Xhosa mother and white Swiss father in the waning days of apartheid punishable by five years in prison.

The book details the hoops his family jumped through to avoid incarceration during apartheid and Noah’s chameleon-like abilities to navigate South Africa’s bizarre race-based caste system and a thriving black-market economy.

A polyglot, Noah’s facility with languages was key to his ability to navigate situations, some of which were life-and-death serious.

Rounding out this year’s recommendations are four excellent books that took me to different times and places.

The Awakening, published in 1899, deals with protagonist Edna Pontellier’s search for meaning and escape from the strict social customs of nineteenth-century New Orleans society.

The book, which treats adultery unapologetically, created such a backlash against author Kate Chopin that she stopped writing. My daughters, who read the book in school, tipped me off to this classic. The ending, which I won’t spoil, leaves one wondering whether this a feminist tale and the ending's meaning.

If you are looking for a diverting read, you can’t do better than something— anything— by Bill Bryson. Bryson is an Iowa-born journalist and author who ruminates on such topics as language, culture and history.

This year I read Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life which uses the Victorian parsonage where he lived in “a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped” to anchor a room-by-room history and cultural reflection on the evolution of private life.

His writing roams across ten thousand years of history, etymology, and sociology, such as how the “hall” evolved from the most important room in a domicile to “a place to wipe feet and hang hats” and how “limelight” became associated with the theatre.

Circe by Madeline Miller is a retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey from the perspective of the titular sorceress, who is banished by Zeus to a remote island. Confusing at first, the novel is ultimately rewarding for those interested in mythology. Spoiler alert: Odysseus does not fare well in this version of the tale.

News of the World by Paulette Giles is a sweet little book "soon to be a major motion picture" starring Tom Hanks.

The book is set in the aftermath of the US Civil War in 1870s Texas. Septuagenarian war veteran, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, is an honourable man who makes his living travelling to towns and charging a fee for reading newspapers from around the world. He agrees to take a young German orphan girl, who has been recaptured (and questionably “liberated”) from the Kiowa tribe that killed her parents, to her relatives 400 miles away. What is the right path for the Captain and his charge? Don’t wait for the movie to find out.

Let’s hope 2021 is a better year for all.

Andrew Schmitt

I was told The Bitcoin Standard was the book to read to get a perspective on the technology. It is indeed a good book though heavily biased in favour of bitcoin and against the global government fiat money scheme. It keeps the politics in the background and is a good primer to understand what is supposedly happening with Bitcoin.

I re-read Dune by Frank Herbert in anticipation of the new movie after first reading it decades ago. It's a great book but requires investment, and the payoff is just entertainment. I never read the sequels after reading the first book and I don't want to now.

In American War by Omar El Akkad, a future America is torn by civil war due to climate change. The book was recommended to me; I can't recommend it myself. I'm just not into bleak disaster themes anymore. It will probably become another Netflix series.

I also re-read The Good Shepherd by C. S. Forester in anticipation of the movie that was never generally released. I read it when I was young; I don't remember why. It's well-written and now I want to look at his other works.

I ended up seeing the movie on AppleTV, which tried to capture the captain's deep thinking that the book expresses so well. But this was a battle fought in the captain's mind and you need to read the book to see it correctly.