Read on Twitter
I'm not crazy about best-of lists. @NewYorker framed it better: "The Best Books We Read." Except for lists made by the pathologically omnivorous, that should be standard. The best "best-of" lists are illuminations of what & how a critic reads, watches, etc.
@elongreen is asking people for their favorite longform of 2020. W/ caveat that it's quite possible I haven't yet read what will be my favorite--I find stories years later--here are some pieces I read and intensely admired.
The story that lingers w/ me most--as reporting, as storytelling, as revelatory--was @joshsanburn's portrait for @VanityFair of a Queens funeral home in the pandemic, w/ photographs by @pvanagtmael. https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2020/7/behind-the-curtain
The other side of that story, a statement of pandemic grief I won't forget, was @jesmimi's profound tribute to her late husband, "On Witness and Respair": https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2020/08/jesmyn-ward-on-husbands-death-and-grief-during-covid
The pieces that most astonished me as writing were @fotoole's three essays on U.S. politics--Biden as mourner, the DNC, and the zombie politics of post-election Trumpism--for @nybooks. Given topics, you wouldn't expect beauty, but these essays are gorgeous.
I have more in this list but 1st a word about "best": the disclaimer isn't only that this is what I happened to read but also that which resonated w/ my taste and experiences. I've done my time judging magazine & book awards; given criteria, I'm ok saying, *this.* But...
There are stories I loved, like @LelandNally's deep dive into Jeffrey Epstein's black book for @MotherJones that wouldn't assign to undergrads. What makes it great to me in part is its implicit mockery of journalistic norms my students don't yet know. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/i-called-everyone-in-jeffrey-epsteins-little-black-book/
Of the stories above: I love the story on the Queens funeral home because it's great writing & reporting about remarkable people. Everyone shld read it! But also: I love immersion journalism, which is harder & harder to find, & I like stories about ordinary people. That's taste.
By "that's taste" I don't mean *good* taste; I don't really believe in good or bad taste. I mean, that's a story my previous reading & writing, my experiences, had prepared me to recognize. That's what I want more of in "best of" lists: Context. Not as qualifier, but as story.
Another on my 2020 favorites list: "The Skinning Tree," @JenPercy on a white Wyoming town's annual reenactment of what they believe to have been a Sioux murder of a white man. Comic, horrifying, generous, damning. https://harpers.org/archive/2020/02/the-skinning-tree-lusk-wyoming-redface/
I loved it because I've admired Percy's stunning sentences since her book Demon Camp; & because such tales of broad, mythic delusion resonate w/ my reading years ago of Richard Slotkin's trilogy on the racist mythology of the West, starting w/ Regeneration Through Violence.
Which is another way of saying that every "best of" list is implicitly a mile marker in a reading life, the work you read & love now because of the work you read & loved before. Would I have seen this story as so powerful had I not struggled w/ John Ford's The Searchers?
That doesn't mean the quality of "The Skinning Tree" is dependent on having spent some years reading in Native American & white Western history & myth. Rather, it's how I came to it. A good "best-of" list, I think, is both transparent and autobiographical.
So, in the interests of transparency, I should note that Percy, author of "The Skinning Tree," gave my last book a great review. That's not what makes me like her story. Would I have been able to love it if she gave me a bad one? I'd like to think so, but wld I even have read it?
Anyone engaged in any of the arts can either cop to cronyism, deliberate & subconscious--there are writers I skip because they've been cruel to friends--or they can--deliberately or subconsciously--contribute to the mystification of literary production that keeps others out.
