The Best Books I Read in 2019

In no particular order:

• INRI, by Raúl Zurita
• Lessons in Stoicism, by John Sellars
• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk
• The Poem Is You, by Stephanie Burt
• The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells
• Discourse on Colonialism, by Aimé Césaire
• Voronezh Notebooks, by Osip Mandelstam
• Answer to Job, by Carl Jung
• The World Goes On, by László Krasznahorkai
• No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, by Greta Thunberg
• An Untouched House, Willem Frederik Hermans
• The Empire and the Five Kings, by Bernard Henri-Lévy
• Washington's Farewell, by John Avlon
• This Land Is Our Land, by Jedediah Purdy
• Latest Readings, by Clive James
• Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, by Roy Scranton
• Of Gods and Minds, by James W. Heisig
• The Reactionary Mind, by Corey Robin
• My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite
• This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, by Martin Hägglund
• The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• One Long River of Song, by Brian Doyle
• I Am God, by Giacomo Sartori
• The Ends of the World, by Peter Brannen (audiobook)
• 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, by Yuval Noah Harari
• The Unnamable Present, by Roberto Calasso

The American West

The drive south on I-5 alleviated by an audiobook, Peter Brannen's The Ends of the World —

Until Santa Monica, where Lincoln walked me to Elephante. We ordered Saturday afternoon drinks and looked from the rooftop bar upon the green Pacific. There was no wind; the sunlight was its usual LA golden weirdness; the celebrities around us — aspiring celebrities — laughed with each other, looking up from their phones, with predatory enthusiasm.

I left LA late Sunday. Much of the drive to Arizona was done in darkness, but for the headlights of a 100 mile traffic jam that extended, as I saw it, from LA to Palm Springs. Through the car's speakers The Ends of the World now detailed with awestruck lyricism the Late-Permian mass extinction, when life on earth came within a whisker of expiring.

*

Three days later, in Wellton, east of Yuma, my father's wife, Micha, awoke with a terrible toothache and a swollen left cheek. She called her Mexican dentist. He couldn't see her for a week, he explained, overwhelmed as he was by the rush of American retirees come south for the winter. He prescribed some antibiotics, and we headed for the Mexican border.

Just north of San Luis, we paid $6 to park in an enormous chain-linked lot, among dozens of SUVs and Winnebagos and pickup trucks. I hadn't thought to come to Arizona with my passport, so I stood next to a foot ramp that led to the border and watched my stricken father — his back's flesh reassembled by 125 sutures: surgery for skin cancer — and his stricken sweetheart walk slowly into Mexico.

For 30 minutes I was on the phone with my friend Brad, who lives in Harlem. I told him, among other things, about the dozens of elderly Americans I was watching flow in and out of Mexico. They left the United States more or less emptyhanded — walked, limped, rolled in their wheelchairs — and returned carrying large purple bags of prescription drugs. The majority of them, I observed, appeared to have had their bodies ravaged, over the years, like my father, by America's diet. Some wore patriotic T-shirts or hats, and looking across the parking lot I saw a few trucks and Winnebagos flying American flags.

*

On Thursday night, Dad recommended that I return home via Highway 395, which runs along the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevadas. I contacted Sam in Chico and asked if it would be a good time for me to visit: 395 to Reno, then west on I-80, over Donner Pass, and north, through Yuba City, to Chico. Alas, he told me, as gently as possible: this being a three-day weekend — thanks to Veteran's Day — he needed, for the moment, some time with his friends.

The next morning, by the time I left Wellton, my little Miata's roof down, the Sonora Desert's air was November-harmless hot and the white-blue sky limitless, without clouds.

Heading west on I-8, I saw, on the other side of the freeway's high fence, a man, a woman, and two children sitting in the sand. Border Patrol officers stood at a distance, beside their green vehicles. I had for a moment the impression that they were all floating on the dunes, wind-caressed, cresting.

By afternoon, now well into California, west of Death Valley, it had become clear that I'd left Arizona too late: the Sierras, finally coming into view, were blocking the sunlight that would have permitted me to see their steep, youthful eastern-slope handsomeness. In shadow they towered, darkening. Soon, the air's high mountain cold forced me to put up my car's roof. I missed the view, I thought — the point of this detour. The world, but for the sky's mist of stars, had gone dark.

*

I stayed the night in Carson City, which my dad had long spoken of as lovely — his favorite city in all of Nevada. I found it full of strip malls, franchises, probably much changed from the town he'd known.

The next morning, the car's roof again down, I took Highway 88 west over the Sierras. Vast granite slopes, scooped by glaciers, cradling pines and high meadows, loomed on all sides, a dazzling, unlikely white. The light thickened as I westered. Leisurely retirees in their Winnebagos, of the same generation that I'd watched filing into Mexico, moved aside to let me pass. The mountains kept coming. The light clean, cleaning, endless sun, pristine —

Stopped now and then along the highway's edge, folks photographed little blue lakes or scanned a plateau's meadow for big horn sheep or black bears. The sky's enormity made smallness comforting. The earth, so old, I'd learned — life — survived, weathering.

Soon: descent, the Central Valley, civilization, and the dazed sensation one sometimes feels after what used to be called a religious experience.

We Are Heartbroken

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

— James Baldwin, "Notes of a Native Son"

There I was again this morning, like so many of my fellow Americans: yelling at the television. I happened to be watching CNN, but the channel doesn't matter — what matters is the yelling. By which I mean, if James Baldwin is correct: what matters is the pain.

If only for myself, I want to try to understand that pain. Because it's more than pain, really; it's heartbreak. I am, I have realized, heartbroken.

The source of my heartbreak might date back to November 4, 2008 — the night of Obama's election. I was at Half Moon Bay Brewery, watching, with many dozens of others, including my young sons, the election results. And just after the polls closed in California, Wolf Blitzer formally announced what had become, as the evening passed, increasingly obvious: "Barack Obama, 47 years old, will become the President-elect of the United States."

The next day, I spoke to my mother, a lifelong Republican, about Obama's election. She told me, "I have to admit, when they walked out onto that stage in Chicago, the family, him with his wife and their girls, I wept. It was an incredible sight."

Like so many Americans, the image of that family compelled her — allowed her — to see her country differently. Dr. King had said, "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'" The "one day" that Dr. King had dreamed of, my mother might have thought, had finally arrived. And that possibility could certainly move any American — not just my mother — to tears.

Which brings me back to my pain: the beauty of that moment — the sense of wonder and pride that so many of us, including my Republican mother, felt at that moment — now tastes, for many of us, like ash in our mouths.

So we yell at the television. And rage at beloved family members and friends. We ask, How can this be happening?  That beauty — where has it gone? What have you — we — become?

Of course, after these many months, we have become our rage. And we have watched rage beget rage; and slowly, inexorably, we have, many of us, become lesser versions of ourselves: enraged, deafened, disgusted, in despair.

But the rage is not the point. The pain is the point. So I am trying to think through my rage, to my pain. The pain has nothing — or little — to do, I believe, with a lost election. Lost elections happen all the time. The pain has to do with who we elected. Who we elected forces us to acknowledge: We are not who we thought we were; we are, instead, that.

So we are in mourning, and our grief has turned into anger, as it often does, because we have lost something beautiful: the America, so wholeheartedly yearned for, that we saw on November 4, 2008, when the Obama family walked onto that Chicago stage and told us: This is who we — Americans — are.

To those of you who have felt my anger, or to whom I have directed my anger, even if only through the television: I ask for your patience. Daily, it seems, I pass through the stages of grief: denial; anger; bargaining; depression. I am not yet to acceptance; I do not accept that that is who we are. Of course it is who we are. Yet I do not accept it; I rage at the thought, which is to say, I weep at the thought. I am heartbroken by the thought. And sometimes, I'm sorry to say, I give in to despair.

I suppose some Americans had the same reaction to Obama's election. They thought, That is not who we are. I must confess, I don't know how to respond to such thinking, which might be a failure of my imagination. The beauty of that moment remains, to my mind, incontrovertible. Not least because my Republican mother saw it, too, and I have learned from long experience that when it comes to matters of beauty and decency, my mother can be unreservedly trusted.

In any case, I reassure myself, now and then, with the belief that this moment will pass, that we will remember ourselves, that the pain — and with it, the rage — will pass. Until then, when you witness my anger, try to see past it, to my pain. I will try to do the same with you. The pain — the heartbreak — is what really matters, what we must deal with, if we hope to look at each other — at ourselves — with wonder and pride again.

In Memory of Francois Camoin

The MFA program in San Diego was a disappointment. I called my undergraduate mentor, Darrell Spencer, to talk to him about the University of Utah's writing program, where Darrell had gotten his PhD. Darrell said, "I'll call Francois."

A few days later, Francois invited me to his home. "Bring some stories," he said. "The more, the better."

I brought five or six pieces — not enough, I quickly perceived — and watched with alarm as he dismissed them, one-by-one, out-of-hand: "It's a good thing you got out of San Diego," he said, dropping them onto his coffee table.

The last story he lingered over. It was the oldest work I'd brought with me, written at BYU for Darrell's class. "This," Francois said, tapping a page. "Work on this, don't ruin it, and submit this. This is writing."

I took his advice and a couple months later learned that I'd been accepted into the U's fiction program.

Immediately, his became the voice that most mattered to me — a voice I hear to this day: when I write, when I read, when I teach. His almost imperceptibly gentle hand guided me through my doctoral program; at crucial moments, he said incredibly kind things to me about my work, about my thinking — although I could always tell (bemusement being one of Francois' default modes) that he found me charmingly odd, an incurably Mormon American boy, or American Mormon boy, who by some absurdity of fate had read more than he should have and was now living through the consequences.

Over time, along with a couple of my dearest friends, he gave me the moral courage to try to reinvent myself — a struggle for reinvention that continues to this day, I suppose.

Some specific memories:

Breakfast with him at the Village Inn, where he liked to go because he could smoke with his coffee, a story of mine between us, soon-to-be-ignored, so that we could talk about photography.

A fiction workshop during my second year, when, in near-despair at the banality of our peer editing, he went on one of his glorious rants, blaming our banality on the fact that we were holding class in the Language Arts building. He then decided, clearly on-the-spot — "so that maybe you'll start to think like artists instead of academics" — that from that week forward, until the end of the semester, all of us were to go on Saturday mornings to the art studios on the top floor of the Fine Arts building, to practice figure drawing: "With luck, you might learn how to see, how to pay attention. Until that happens, we're wasting our time."

The liberating discovery that much of his personal library was made up of pulp fiction. When, once, I asked him why, he said, "Because the authors aren't trying to sound like English butlers."

The morning when, walking with me to class, he learned that I did my work on a Windows machine. "Of course you do," he said. "Because you're a Protestant. Umberto Eco wrote about that."
     With my next student loan I bought my first Mac.

When he said in a fiction workshop: "I don't want your epiphanies to happen in Tuscany. I want them to happen at a 7-Eleven in Nebraska."

And, for me, most importantly: What he said to me just after telling me that I'd passed my exams. Today, if I could, I would tell him: Francois, I've become something of a ruin, which you no-doubt would have found interesting, possibly inevitable, but I've never forgotten what you said to me then — it has carried me through many dark hours. And regardless of what becomes of me, I won't forget your bemused generosity, or your passion or your art. You changed my life, or gave me the strength to change it — which is, in the end, the same thing.

He sometimes warned me to be careful of certainty, but of this I'm certain: when I say that he changed my life, when I say that I'll never forget him, I speak not just for myself but for decades of students and friends.

Mary Oliver, RIP

Below, in honor of her passing, a poem she wrote that once spoke for me.

A Pretty Song

From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.

Which is the only way to love, isn’t it?
This isn’t a playground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.

Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods
that hold you in the center of my world.

And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song,
And I say to my heart: rave on.

– Mary Oliver, Thirst