The Books Briefing: The Best Books of 2020

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

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

Transcendent Kingdom, by Yaa Gyasi

I remember reading Yaa Gyasi’s 2016 debut, Homegoing, and being blown away by the book’s ambition. An intergenerational story that crossed oceans and epochs, it stayed with me for years. Gyasi’s latest book, Transcendent Kingdom, uses a narrower lens but is no less gripping. It follows Gifty, a sixth-year doctoral student in neuroscience who is reckoning with her family’s relationship to mental illness, addiction, and abandonment. The work she does in her lab, studying the reward-seeking behavior of mice, channels the grief she still carries about her brother’s death from opioids. Gyasi skillfully moves back and forth between the present day and Gifty’s childhood, richly detailing her characters’ lives and treating these heavy topics with complexity and honesty; in particular, the scenes portraying Gifty’s brother’s addiction are devastating without being emotionally overwrought. Writing a successful follow-up to an impressive debut is difficult, but Gyasi certainly did.  — Clint Smith