For the past four months, my wife and I have been reading Rebecca West’s 1941 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon together, ten pages per day. If I had to give one final reading suggestion for 2020, it would be West’s account of her 1937 journey through Yugoslavia. The book has a sprawl—geographical, theological, aesthetic, political—that is matched by the sharpness of its character sketches. (For example: “She was one of those widows whose majesty makes their husbands seem specially dead.”) For pages she’ll concern herself with the minutiae of travel—how to elude that pushy tour guide; where to stay and what to eat—before pivoting to a grand proclamation about our species’ bent towards self-sabotage: “Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad.” There are many things I’d prefer to forget about 2020. I know I’ll remember the pleasures of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
Here are some of my other favorite books of the year—books that I didn’t get a chance to write about but that delighted me in one way or another. With the Nazis advancing and the Yugoslavia she so loved crumbling, Rebecca West observed that “these days have given us a chance to test the artistic process, and judge whether it is a tool that does honest work or whether it simply makes toys for the childish.” The following books did honest work in bad times, offering, again in West’s words, “the small white star of the song, which is correct, permanent, important.”
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