The 15 Best Books of 2020

Read: Who you’re reading when you read Haruki Murakami

Beowulf: A New Translation, by Maria Dahvana Headley

I’ll admit to a moment—more than one, actually—of fogey-ish recoil as I stepped into the jabbingly familiar/unfamiliar world of Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf. “Blinged-out”? “Hashtag: blessed”? “Beowulf gave zero shits”? Too groovy, I feared, for this Beowulf nerd. But not at all. Headley’s text springs these surprises strategically, almost trickily, little fireworks of idiom to hold our attention as she winds with great fidelity of purpose into the depths of the Beowulf poet’s language—the alliteration, the compound words, the sinewy formality, the doleful magic, and the hard existential light. Thrillingly, it becomes a double act: Headley and her ancient forebear, diving together into the word-hoard. Her Grendel—“brotherless, sludge-stranded”—is more pitiable than ever, her Beowulf more of a thumping super-jock. As for the dragon: “the firedrake raked coast-to-coast / with claws, charred gilded Geatland without pause.” Right on. — James Parker

Uncanny Valley, by Anna Wiener

Before she abandoned her ill-paid life in the publishing business for the San Francisco startup scene in 2013, Anna Wiener was a Brooklyn literary type, socially anxious and “affectedly analog” (owner of a record player she rarely used, dater of men of artisanal bent), not to mention oblivious to “the people behind the internet.” She was, in other words, just the unlikely observer of Silicon Valley I’d been waiting for: an outsider-insider, articulately insecure and hyper-self-aware. Her eye and ear for the tribal details of tech-bro culture are acute. Wiener is also unsparing about her own fascination with an ethos of social and generational arrogance: Variously employed on the customer-support side of the tech world, she feels driven to impress Millennial bosses who are her peers, yet all-powerful. Her indictment of the industry’s myopia and insularity, preaching connectivity while abetting the fracturing of America, is close-up and personal. She never aspired to the elite ranks of coders. But in Wiener, the Bay Area now has a brilliant decoder. — Ann Hulbert

Read: Why normal people want to work in Silicon Valley

A Burning, by Megha Majumdar

A reader of Megha Majumdar’s debut novel might describe it as propulsive, though it’s not especially suspenseful. From the get-go, A Burning’s outcome seems almost ordained, starting with the story of Jivan, a young woman in Kolkata, India, who witnesses a terrorist attack and writes an inflammatory Facebook post about the lack of protection offered by police in its aftermath. What drives the novel forward, though, are the distinctly vibrant voices of Jivan and her two fellow narrators, who round out the plot. The humanity with which Majumdar endows her interconnected characters yields an absorbing kineticism—and makes the book’s violent end all the more tragic. Some have noted the parallels between Majumdar’s themes and the flashpoints of current American life, as if to convince U.S. readers that the book is relevant to them. Those parallels are real, and noteworthy. But to me, in this year of restricted mobility, literary immersion in a place far from me was a major part of the appeal. — Amy Weiss-Meyer