Three more sleeps until Christmas Eve. Two more sleeps until we’re in Italy. One more sleep before the last day of school for this year. The presents are all wrapped and ready. There’s only one more batch of cookies to bake. The jars of quince-plum jelly that took more than five (5!) hours to make a few weeks ago are solemnly disappearing one by one as we give them away as gifts. And I am fervently anticipating the sweet, sweet rush of relinquishment that I pray steals over me as soon as our airplane takes off and we head south.
Before the hush descends upon us all, I wanted to send out one last What I’m Reading for the year. I’ve been dealing with a particularly nasty recurrence of chronic insomnia lately so my bedtime reading right now is a wan little pile of self-help books, but before things took a nosedive, I had the supreme pleasure of reading Elif Batuman’s second novel Either/Or. It is a magical mixture of rigorous intellect and hilarity. It made me laugh out loud! Delicious.
The book’s narrator is Selin, a New Jersey-born woman of Turkish parents, who is in her sophomore year at Harvard and trying to balance a life of intellectual curiosity with the (mis)adventures of being a young woman in the ‘90s. Her razor-sharp observations about college life, about life in America as someone with a foot (or both?) in a different country, and about being a young woman in a world still so utterly dominated by men and boys are all so well-observed and articulated. It made me revisit all the bad frat parties and awkward “romances” of the mid-nineties, but with a smarter and funnier narrator in my ear than I could ever be. In any case, I loved it.
I first heard about this book when I read an interview with Nathan Thrall in the New Yorker shortly after October 7th. Thrall, an American journalist, lives in Jerusalem and his latest book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, was published just four days before 10/7. It recounts the events of one terrible day in 2012 when a bus carrying very young Palestinian children on a field trip crashed in the West Bank. Thrall uses the crash and its aftermath to illustrate the physical and political reality of Israel’s grip on the West Bank. But the book also weaves in details of various Palestinian families and their histories and the views of Israelis to make for a more complete tapestry. As Thrall put it in a Guardian interview, “I knew the only way [the book] would succeed was if people felt it was an honest depiction; if everybody looked human, real people with explicable motives, loves, jealousies and ambitions.”
I will be honest; this book does not aim to provide hope or solace. It attempts to portray truthfully the absurd and devastating details of the daily lives of people living in the West Bank, people with the same hopes and dreams that we all have. I found it illuminating, though it is but one small drop in the bucket of human suffering of the entire region.
In an ideal world, that entire pile of gifts would be books. It’s all I ever want to give or receive anyway. In that spirit, here are the best books I read this year that I think you should give (or ask for) to (from) your loved ones, plus the books on my wishlist and the ones I received that I’m most excited about. I know it’s last-minute, but bookstores are open until Christmas, so it’s not too late for any of you. Consider this my gift to all you last-minute shoppers and book worms, you are my people!