The Best Books of 2019

It’s acidic, it’s absorbing, and it’s chunky enough to provide a bulwark against unwanted conversations with people you’re obligated to see during the holiday season.

The only time I think about cryonics is when my mind turns to the few dozen people (Iris Murdoch, Shakespeare, Goethe, etc.) whose brains I wish were still available so they could comment on modern moral dilemmas such as climate-change denial, privacy, animal rights, and AI. Luckily there is Ian McEwan, who is alive, operating at a normal temperature, and writing what I can only describe as literary moral thrillers at a satisfying clip.

Ah, the book that broke 10,000 brains. Or maybe fixed them. You be the judge. Odell’s polymathic joyride is the antivenin to a sea of dreadful self-improvement TED Talks and Medium manifestos touting the benefits of mindful attention. It’s about art, it’s about technology, it’s about birdwatching, it’s about garbage, it’s about you.

Trust Exercise is a teenage love story with a plot like sorcery, and it is riddled with bullets of social insight. This formula (wizardry plus insight bullets) is like the Traveling Wilburys or buttered popcorn: a sum even greater than its formidable parts. Halfway through there’s a “gotcha� moment in the Gone Girl vein, but it is nimble enough that the twist feels momentous instead of head-spinning.

If “Martin Amis, but make it French and female� gets your salivary glands a-lubricating, step right up.

Oval is Don DeLillo’s White Noise updated for 2019 minus the satire of academia plus a layer of millennial discontent. Anja is a scientist who lives in a “socio-environmental living experiment� in Berlin, which means a campus of ecohouses that are poorly ventilated and smell like human waste. She works for a sinister company in a dystopian future where climate change is a daily hassle and art galleries have been converted into venues for initial coin offerings. Swift plot, lotta underline-able sentences, what’s not to love?

There are very few good reasons to use the word oneiric in a sentence and here is one of them: It’s one of the few English adjectives appropriate to Sarah Rose Etter’s novel about a woman born with a stomach disfigurement who navigates the world (as we all do) with the trepidation and fury and occasional exultation that results from having a disappointing body.

Having spent part of my childhood in a secluded xenophobic community, I have a soft spot for novels about secluded xenophobic communities. This one takes place in Appalachian Ohio. It’s about three women who push a certain “Don’t Tread on Me� philosophy to a punishing extreme by living off the grid in a DIY hut, eating groundhog stew, getting in trouble with multiple authorities, and focusing every trick of human resourcefulness onto a situation of wretched poverty.

If you told me a few months ago that the most page-turn-y book of 2019 would be a formally experimental memoir of domestic abuse I would have said, “Haha, nice. I’m also in the market for a bridge if you have one to sell.� Joke’s on me.

I dunno if Ben Lerner was reading a lot of Faulkner when he wrote The Topeka School or if he naturally shares some of that writer’s fixations (clan, memory, language) and modes (doom-filled, funny, allusive), but either way: damn. Channeling W.F. in a work that is wholly nonderivative and frighteningly contemporary is a feat I can’t adequately evaluate, only admire. This is a book that simultaneously gives no fucks and all of the fucks.