In this episode, we're joined by librarians Vicki Huggins and Rachel Adams to talk about the library's best books of 2020 lists. We also talk about reading in 2020 and revisit our reading goals for the year.
Recommended Reading
Check out all of KCLS' Best Books on our Best Books page.
Listen
A transcript of this episode is available at the end of our show notes.
Contact
If you'd like to get in touch, send an email to deskset@kcls.org.
Credits
The Desk Set is brought to you by the King County Library System. The show is hosted by librarians Britta Barrett and Emily Calkins, and produced by Britta Barrett. Our theme song is "I Know What I Want" by Math and Physics Club. Other music provided by Chad Crouch, from the Free Music Archive.
Transcript
Emily Calkins:
You are listening to The Desk Set.
Britta Barrett:
A bookish podcast for reading broadly.
Emily Calkins:
We're your hosts, Emily Calkins.
Britta Barrett:
And Britta Barrett.
Emily Calkins:
On this episode, we're talking about KCLS's Best Books of the year and what reading in 2020 looked like.
Britta Barrett:
Was it a little different for you this year?
Emily Calkins:
It was a little different for me. I was just talking to a friend last night about what I read this year and I have finished 48 books. My challenge or my goal for myself was 75. I'm a little below, which is not that surprising. But more than that, what I noticed in myself was a real narrowing of the kind of thing that I was willing to stick with. I picked up and put down way more books than I normally do this year.
Emily Calkins:
It's interesting because I've probably have talked about on the show before that, a lot of times what I want is a fluffy, happily ever after romance, but for me, that didn't always work this year. I didn't want something that was too happy or too easy, but I also didn't want something that was too intense or too dark. It was a real narrow slice of stuff that was really appealing for me.
Emily Calkins:
I found lots of good things in that slice that we'll talk about when we talk about Best Books, but it definitely was a weird year to be reading. There was just so much going on, a pandemic and the election and the Black Lives Matter protests and all of the other things going on, that I often found myself reading the news more than I was reaching for fiction, and even non-fiction. How about you?
Britta Barrett:
Absolutely the same on all counts. I read half as many books this year as I did last year, which we should put into perspective. As librarians, we have a skewed idea of what is a lot or not very many books to read in a given year, but for sure, just concentrating on reading a book was harder, which is something that I didn't expect. My nose was buried in reading news.
Britta Barrett:
When I was looking for non-fiction to read, wasn't necessarily looking for, I don't know, an adorable book about what we can learn from jellyfish, even if that book made the charts this year. Escapism is great and totally fine if it works for you, but it just didn't feel right, is the best way I can describe it. I was looking for books that would immerse me more in learning about the world around me and my part in it.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. I think, when you say, "We have a skewed view of how many books is a lot to be reading," that's totally true. I will say right now, I did not finish the 10 to Try challenge this year. That's part of my job, is designing that challenge and creating it and promoting it and helping people find titles to read for it, and I just could not do it this year. I just really had to find the things that worked for me and it didn't line up with the challenge this year. So I tried, 10 to Try, but 2021 is the new year. Yeah, it was just such an interesting year to be alive, but to be reading too. Yeah.
Britta Barrett:
If you, dear listeners, had the same experience, please just be kind to yourself and give yourself permission to have survived along with all of us and have read anything.
Emily Calkins:
Absolutely. Yeah. And to celebrate the things that you did read even if, you, like me for a while, only read subtitles on a television show, that is. For a month, I was like, "Nope, I'm going to read the subtitles on this German television show. I'm not going to read a book." If you did finish the 10 to Try challenge, you can pick up a finisher button. You can do that as part of your curbside, our contactless services.
Emily Calkins:
So when you use the, myLIBRO app, which is the way to book an appointment to pick up holds, you can make a note there that you'd like to pick up a 10 to Try finisher button. If you would like to enter the grand prize drawing for 10 to Try this year, which is a stack of books chosen for you by a librarian, you can take a photo of your finished bookmark and send it to 10totry@kcls.org.
Emily Calkins:
So it's the numeral 10, and then the words, to try, @kcls.org. You can also log your reading online with our online reading platform. The easiest way to access that is to go to kcls.org/10totry, and there's a link there that will get you connected. You'll automatically be entered into the drawing if you log that way.
Britta Barrett:
One way that reading was different this year for a lot of people is that, maybe your local library was closed for a period of time and you shifted more to reading digitally. Was that your experience, Emily?
Emily Calkins:
Yes, definitely. I mean, our KCLS libraries were closed for about three months. That was true for staff as well as for patrons, so we could not get into the buildings to get our hands on physical books. I made very good use of Libby, which is the app that you can use to read and listen to our Overdrive collection. It's great because there are tons of adult books on there, of course, but there's also lots of children's books. So I have Libby on my phone, but I also have it on our family iPad. We checked out lots of picture books to read with my three-year-old as well as books for me to read and listen to.
Britta Barrett:
If you are someone who has spent a lot of time binge watching television this year, we also have streaming platforms for that too. Kanopy has an amazing selection of indie movies, documentaries, world cinema. Hoopla is another one that has movies, TV, music, but also comics, which is a great way to read, both for adults and kids, your favorite comics and graphic novels.
Britta Barrett:
Now, we're happy that we have curbside service in action. There are a few locations that even have 24/7 library lockers. You can pick up curbside printing at many locations, we're back in action. At some point in the next year, we'll probably also be inviting the public back into our buildings at a reduced capacity, but TBD on that date.
Emily Calkins:
Yes. I think we're all really looking forward to the day when we can have people back in our buildings browsing our shelves. I know, as a reader, I'm excited to be able to go into a library and browse shelves. In the meantime, if you are looking for that experience of serendipity, our libraries are offering surprise bags as well. So check out, again, myLIBRO which is the app that you can use to schedule your book pickup and you can request a surprise bag through there. It's a nice way to sort of get that feeling of discovery even if you can't browse the shelves yourself.
Britta Barrett:
If you want something that's a little more customized, you should totally check out BookMatch.
Emily Calkins:
Yes. BookMatch is our online book recommendation service. If you go to kcls.org/bookmatch, which is spelled exactly how it sounds, you can answer a few short questions and in about a week, you'll get a list of suggestions picked just for you by a librarian, and then you can put them on hold and pick them up at your library.
Britta Barrett:
So many ways to help you find your next favorite book.
Emily Calkins:
Absolutely, that's what we're here for, especially now when there's so much other stuff to wade through. Now, we're excited to have a couple of other staff members join us to talk about our Best Books lists for the year. All right. To talk about our Best Books of 2020 lists, we have a couple of librarians joining us today from our branches. Vicki, can you introduce yourself?
Vicki Huggins:
Yes, I am Vicki Huggins. I am the Children's and Teen librarian at the Kent Panther Lake Library.
Emily Calkins:
Awesome. We're so excited to have you with us. We also have Rachel here.
Rachel Adams:
Hi, I'm Rachel Adams and I am the Teen Services librarian at the Des Moines branch.
Emily Calkins:
Great. We're really excited. Britta and I read a lot, but we're not super well-versed in teens and children's literature. We're really glad to have you here with us to talk about those lists. I thought we could start, just each of you, reflecting on the list. Let's start with you, Vicki. Tell us about the children's list. What did you notice about the list this year?
Vicki Huggins:
This year, there are so many authors and illustrators who are people of color on our list, which is awesome. Particularly, black authors like Derrick Barnes and Gordon C. James from I Am Every Good Thing, Lesa Cline-Ransom from Overground Railroad, Omar Mohamed, who tells his story of being a refugee in Kenya in When Stars Are Scattered, and Jacqueline Woodson from Before the Ever After, with many, many more. There are also Indigenous people represented with, We Are Water Protectors by Carole Lindstrom. This is really a larger part of publishing trends in children's literature.
Vicki Huggins:
One of the things I really noticed about the middle-grade titles on our list is a willingness to let them end without fixing everything. Books like Fighting Words by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley and Before the Ever After by Jacqueline Woodson, We Dream of Space by Erin Entrada Kelly, and again, When Stars Are Scattered. They confront the reality that, not everything can be fixed. We can't keep our parents from arguing. Fighting Words, it's a pretty tough book about kids who were sexually assaulted and that doesn't change overnight. It's just great for kids to know that things can improve, but it doesn't necessarily, magically change and fix everything and things take time.
Emily Calkins:
One thing I noticed on the adult list that I'll talk about a little later, but I'm wondering if you see it on the children's list is some old favorites, like some authors and illustrators who, they were on the list last year maybe or in years past. I'm wondering if you see any perennial favorites on this list.
Vicki Huggins:
Yes, we have multiple. We have some new authors, but we also have, Derrick Barnes and Gordon C. James, they're the authors of Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut, which is an awesome book. We have Katherine Applegate with her sequel to The One and Only Ivan, it's The One and Only Bob. We also have Dan Santat who is a Caldecott Medalist for The Adventures of Beekle, An Unimaginary Friend and he is an awesome illustrator, I love him.
Vicki Huggins:
We also have Victoria Jamieson who is an amazing graphic novelist and... Oh, so many of them. Jacqueline Woodson, she has been around forever and she is great. There was one more. Oh, Erin Entrada Kelly. She has so many great books and she is a Newbery winner of Hello, Universe. So, lots of authors that we recognize from previous lists in some of our booklists.
Emily Calkins:
One thing that I noticed this year on the children's list is that we have some authors on the children's list who are also on the teen list, which I think is the first time that, that's happened. There are a couple of them, Ibram Kendi is on the children's list with Antiracist Baby and on the teen list with an adaptation of his National Book Award winner for adults, the teen version is called, Stamped and then it has a subtitle. Candace Fleming who writes nonfiction is also on both the children's list and the teen list. I think this is a good time to bring in our teen services librarian. Rachel, what do you notice about the teen list this year?
Rachel Adams:
Great question, Emily. First of all, I want to say that I think this list is awesome. I think it really represents a wide berth in variety of teen literature that came out this year. There are lots of different formats, there's graphic novels, there are nonfiction titles, there are books in verse, there's funny books, fantasy. I really think there is something for everyone and really every reader on this list.
Rachel Adams:
I also can see a lot of trends in young adult publishing that were occurring this year, that are also showing up on our list. Some of those themes that I am noticing on the list are things like, queer empowerment stories and specifically, main characters of color who are also LGBTQ+. These stories are sometimes funny, sometimes they're a little more serious. There are books that are memoirs and there are some that are also graphic novels. So we have books like Flamer, which is a graphic novel and it's also a memoir about the author's time going to a boy scout camp and recognizing his sexuality.
Rachel Adams:
We also have other just straight-up memoirs like All Boys Aren't Blue. Then, we even have funny books like, You Should See Me In A Crown, which is a little bit more on the humorous rom-com side. Another theme that I'm noticing is really, books that are looking at racism in institutions and also in our society. Also, looking at the history of racism in this country and really those affects on teens and how teens are pushing back against this racism. I think that's obviously tied to the Black Lives Matter Movement. Again, there are nonfiction and fiction titles in this category. So Stamped, for example, is one of those.
Rachel Adams:
We also have a fiction book called This is America, which is about a girl who's writing letters to the Innocence Project or the Innocence X Project, I think, they call it in the book, about trying to help and get her father out of jail who's been wrongly convicted. Again, tied to this racism theme, there are also a lot of books on this list they're looking at the immigrant experience and the experience of teens coming to this country and really giving voice to those teens who often struggle moving to a new place or looking different from those around them.
Rachel Adams:
So we have graphic novels like, Almost American Girl, which is about a girl who I believe moves from Korea with her mother to the United States and her first year here living in the United States. Then, we have historical fiction books like We Are Not Free, which looks at the Japanese interment through the eyes of 14 different teens. I think one of the last themes that I've noticed, if this isn't hopefully too many, is that, especially I feel like in fantasy, there are a lot more main characters of color or authors, Own Voices authors being published this year.
Rachel Adams:
Particularly in fantasy, I felt like that was a really big theme this year. There's books like, Raybearer, which is based in African folklore and all of the characters are predominantly black. Then you have, Black Girl Unlimited, which is a magical realism type book about a girl who thinks or imagines that she's a wizard or maybe she is a wizard in real life, it's hard to tell. Then, there's Cemetery Boys, which is based in the brujo, bruja witch theme, and it also has an LGBTQ+ character as well. Those are some of the themes I noticed. Again, I really think this list is super diverse in format and has some really great stories. I think it's a super list.
Emily Calkins:
Great. Thank you. Britta, let's talk nonfiction. Do you see any of those same themes from the children's and teens list on the nonfiction list?
Britta Barrett:
Absolutely. The nonfiction list very much speaks to the zeitgeist of 2020, the election, Black Lives Matter protests and living through a global pandemic. Even just the titles, Rage, Alone Together, and Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me, exemplify that. We see books on the Trump administration, mental health and self care, community, connection and mutual aid and anti-racism and identity for sure from, Caste, which takes a historical view of systemic injustice in the U.S. to Me and White Supremacy, which invites the reader to examine how they may be benefiting from or upholding white supremacy and practices for dismantling that and Hood Feminism, which highlights the lack of intersectionality in white feminism and discourse and opportunities to better address the needs of people of color. What about fiction?
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, the fiction list is really interesting this year. I see some of those same themes. We have, again, a decent representation from writers of color, a couple of, actually, more than a couple of novels by black women some of which deal more directly with themes of race and racism and others of that's sort of more tangential. We have Jasmine Guillory's Party of Two which is a romantic comedy, but does tackle some of these issues of race and privilege.
Emily Calkins:
We also have Transcendent Kingdom by Gyasi and The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. I will say when I started assembling this list, I had this idea in my head that the list was going to be full of comfort reads. Because when I talked to people about what they were reading this year, that's what I heard a lot of. People saying, "Oh, I'm reaching for what's familiar, I'm reaching for romance, I'm reaching for things that make me feel good."
Emily Calkins:
In our book recommendation service, BookMatch, we got a lot of requests for light, fun, happy. I was really expecting to see a lot of that on the list this year. There's definitely some of that. We've got, in addition to Jasmine Guillory's book, Undercover Bromance, which is part of a Bromance Book Club Series. That's really cute and fun and light. But I see more variety, not as many of those fun and feel good things as I thought I might see, but what I do see a lot of on this list is things that are familiar. So authors that we know and love.
Emily Calkins:
In addition to Jasmine Guillory, we've got Louise Penny's book on here, we have Tana French, we have Chris Bohjalian's The Red Lotus which is a thriller, but he's a perennial favorite. Isabel Allende, obviously, really well known. I think there was a sense of, "Oh, we want a known quantity." The other thing that I see a lot of on here is celebrity book club picks. My suspicion with this is that it's also pandemic-related.
Emily Calkins:
Because I think that people were really overwhelmed this year. I know I was really overwhelmed this year, and having someone else tell me what to read was nice, right? It's easy if someone who you already trust is like, "Yes, please, read this great book. I've already vetted it for you. It's a good one." We have three Reese Witherspoon Book Club Picks. We have three from Read with Jenna, we've got an Oprah Book Club Pick, two from the Good Morning America Book Club, and one from the Noname Book Club. So lots and lots of big online book clubs showing up on this list this year.
Emily Calkins:
Then, the other little trend, two other small trends I see. One is, books about librarians and libraries. We cannot resist. Unsurprisingly, librarians can't resist stories about librarians so we have Upright Women Wanted, which is Sarah Gailey's future dystopia, Western with queer librarians.
Emily Calkins:
We have Weather by Jenny Offill, which is also about a librarian. We have Matt Haig's, The Midnight Library, which is a speculative story where the main character is living in a purgatory situation and every book on the shelves of this magical library is a potential life that she might have led. The other little mini trend that I want to shout out, and I don't know if two really counts as a trend, but in the, I think it's five years that I've been leading putting together this list, we've never had a horror title on the list and we have two this year.
Emily Calkins:
We have Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic. This was actually the number one vote getter. We assemble the list partially through staff votes and this was the number one most voted for a title. We have, The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones. So two own voices horror stories. Which again, I think people just wanted something that would grab them. For some people, what grabs them is a romance with a happy ending, and for some people what grabs them is a book that's going to keep you so immersed and so freaked out that you don't end up reading the news for once, you get to stay in your book.
Emily Calkins:
Those are the big trends that I saw on the fiction list this year. I thought that maybe the next thing we can do is, each of us just share a couple of favorite titles. I think we'll go around, we'll start with Vicki. Just do one and then, we'll go around again and you can share a second one. Vicki, what's your first favorite that you want to share with us?
Vicki Huggins:
Okay. My first favorite is from the picture books on the list and it is called Lift by Minh Lê and Dan Santat. It just made me laugh out loud, so I had to talk about it. Iris loves to push the buttons for the elevator in her apartment building. She gets to do it every day until one day her little brother gets to her first. Betrayal! Suddenly, she finds that he keeps getting to it and her parents think it's awesome, but she does not.
Vicki Huggins:
When she finds a discarded elevator button and tapes it to the wall next to her closet door, she thinks that she's just going to push it for fun. But what happens when she pushes it is that, it turns her closet into a magical portal to places like the jungle and outer space. It's a great story of imagination and sibling relationships.
Vicki Huggins:
It has graphic novel style panels. A lot of them don't have any texts, so it means that there's about half and half where the story is told through the art and half where it's told through the text. It's just a great book, it's so much fun. I just love Iris' face when her little brother pushes the button and it just has a big word, betrayal. That's my graphic novel-ish picture book pick.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, I love that one too. That was definitely a favorite in my house this year with my three-year-old. I think probably, partially because there's a new baby and then she is getting used to betrayal and parents giving attention to other people. But yeah. Great, fun illustrations. Awesome pick. Thank you.
Rachel Adams:
My two older kids also love that book. I think any kid with a sibling, a younger sibling will totally love Lift. The first book I'm going to talk about that was one of my top favorites was Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang. This is a nonfiction graphic novel and it's about the author and follows him as he follows the basketball team at the high school that he teaches at. He follows as the team rises in the ranks and eventually makes it to the state basketball championship.
Rachel Adams:
The book reads like a sports documentary. There are, of course, tons of sports scenes and plenty of sports action for those who love basketball. But then, intermixed with that, you also have interviews with the players and the coaches. I really like that part because you really get to know the players lives and the coaches lives and get to see some of the struggles and also discrimination that a lot of the players of color face off the court. It just makes the story a little bit more personal.
Rachel Adams:
Then, mixed in with all of that, then you of course have lots of facts in history about basketball that are also dropped in very covertly between these interviews and action sports scenes. Yang also includes himself as a character in the story. So there are sections about him struggling as an author and a parent and a teacher. I think this part really adds another layer to the story and gives insight into why he wanted to write about this basketball team. He even admits he's not into sports himself, and I think having him as a character really shows how this basketball team inspired him and inspired him to overcome a lot of his own obstacles that he had in his life.
Rachel Adams:
Of course, it's a graphic novel, so we have to talk about the pictures. They are completely colorful and compelling, and I really think this is a great format for a sports story because the pictures helped to portray some of the excitement about the basketball game and also, really show a lot of the diversity in the players and coaches on the team. I want to say that, I am not a sports fan. I am not a sports follower. But this book really spoke to me. Yang is superb at really showing how and why sports are so important, and how being on a sports team can really be a vehicle for inspiring courage, unity, and really a catalyst for positive change. Even if you're not a sports fan, I would totally recommend Dragon Hoops. If you are, I would completely read it.
Britta Barrett:
Maybe that's a good pick for fans of one of last year's best books
Rachel Adams:
Yes, totally. It's very similar. Yeah, completely similar. I think, if you're a sports graphic novel fan, this is a great choice.
Britta Barrett:
Yeah. I wanted to give a little shout out to a comic on the adult list too, which is called, I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf. Could there be a more librarian pick, which features these cute, funny relatable comics about being a bookworm and writing. I think it would just make a great gift for anyone on your list this year. If you're someone who loves reading comics, you absolutely have to check out the library service, Hoopla, it's got streaming movies, television, music, but it's also about comics, which is great.
Britta Barrett:
If you don't want to buy every individual issue of Lumberjanes or something like that, there are so many that you can get on demand. There's no waiting, so you can pick up, I Will Judge You by your Bookshelf, that way. It's part of this greater micro theme of books for book lovers. Emily, you spoke with librarian Nancy Pearl about her book, The Writer's Library. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about that one?
Emily Calkins:
Sure. The Writer's Library is a collection of interviews that Nancy Pearl did with her friend, Jeff Schwager, he's a playwright, and they traveled all over the country interviewing authors. They specifically asked them about their reading lives, which is something that surprisingly authors don't get asked about all that often. It's wonderful interviews. They sat with people in their homes, in places that were important to them. So they talked to Louise Erdrich in the bookshop that she owns in Minneapolis.
Emily Calkins:
They just said, "What did you - what did you read as a child? What writers are important to you now?" All kinds of interesting questions. It's a really charming book that celebrates reading and how joyful and fun reading is. It's another one that I think is a nice gift because you can dip in and out of it and many readers will find at least one writer that they know, and at least one writer that they're not familiar with. So there's a little familiarity and a little surprise in that one too. That's the Writer's Library by Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager.
Emily Calkins:
Okay. First let me say that I had a really hard time narrowing it down to two picks and every book on the Best Books Lists, all 100 titles, I think are worth picking up. But my first pick that I want to share with listeners is Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. It's a book about Gifty. She's a PhD student, she's studying neuroscience at Stanford. As the book opens, her mother is arriving on a plane from Alabama. She is in such a deep depression that she, basically, can't take care of herself and so her pastor has put her on this plane to come and stay with Gifty.
Emily Calkins:
From there, the book goes back and forth from Gifty's present and her life in the lab, and her trying to figure out what's going on with her mother to her childhood, growing up in Alabama. Gifty's parents are immigrants from Ghana and her father eventually goes back to Ghana while her mother stays. Gifty's older brother is a high school athlete with an injury that leads to an opioid addiction. This is such a gorgeous book and I feel like it flew under the radar a little bit this year. It's full of really big ideas. It talks about race, it talks about faith, it talks about addiction and depression and grapples with these ideas of, what are we fated to become? And what do we have the choice to become? Where does free will play into this?
Emily Calkins:
But all of these big ideas are grounded in this one, very real, flawed character. For me, Gifty was just one of those unforgettable characters who stays with you. She's smart, she's curious, she's also deeply wounded by what she's lived through in her childhood. So she's prickly and she pushes people away, but she's not unkind. Yeah, just a really lovely, beautiful book that I picked up and put down a lot of more difficult things this year. Even though this one had some heavy themes, I found it really engaging and beautifully written. Okay, Vicki, tell us about your second pick.
Vicki Huggins:
Okay. Like you, I had a really hard time narrowing this down. There are so many great chapter books and graphic novels and middle grades on this children's list. But my personal favorite was We Dream of Space by Erin Entrada Kelly. It's 1986 and the whole world is watching as the Space Shuttle Challenger prepares to launch. Bird has big dreams of going to space, partly because she loves figuring out how things work and putting things together and partly because space is quiet and her home is not.
Vicki Huggins:
Her twin brother, Fitch, is struggling to control his explosive temper and her older brother, Cash, has been held back and is doing seventh grade again with his two younger siblings, which is very embarrassing for him, obviously, and he feels like he's not good at anything. Their parents are always arguing. Even though they live in the same house, their family just doesn't seem to be in the same orbit. They all seem to live in separate spaces and do their own thing until the fateful day of the Challenger launch changes their lives in unexpected ways.
Vicki Huggins:
Kelly is great at writing kids' emotional lives in a way that makes it feel realistic. Her characters feel like they could be actual seventh graders. It's all told from each sibling's point of view and each character has their own voice, which is something I always look for, if you're going to write it from different characters point of views. It's just a great book. I think most adults are going to know what happened to the last Space Shuttle Challenger.
Vicki Huggins:
Kids may not, which will give them some suspense, but even if you do know about that, I don't think it really changes how you experience, how these kids experience that event. I think it's a great read and a great pick if you like historical novels. As hard as I find it to believe that 1986 is a historical novel, it is. Yeah, it's just a great read.
Emily Calkins:
Great. Thank you. How about you, Rachel?
Rachel Adams:
Again, echoing that I had a very hard time selecting two to talk about. I was like, "Oh, I could talk about so many on this list." But I narrowed it down to one of my definite top five books this year, which is You Should See Me in A Crown by Leah Johnson. It's about Liz. Liz has always done her best to basically avoid the spotlight. She lives in a small, very wealthy and very prom-obsessed midwestern town. She doesn't really feel like she fits in this town because she's one of the only people of color in the town, she's black. She's also pretty poor compared to the rest of the very wealthy people, and she is not obsessed with the prom.
Rachel Adams:
She has decided instead to concentrate on her grades and her musical ability and hopes that it will get her a scholarship to a very elite college. She's banking on the scholarship and then of course the scholarship doesn't come through. Now, Liz is super bummed and she's forced to try and find another way to find the money to be able to go to this college that she wants to go to. She finds the answer in her school's scholarship for prom king and queen.
Rachel Adams:
Her school gives out this very large, I think it's $10,000 scholarship, to the person who wins prom king and the person that wins prom queen every year. If Liz wins, she'll have enough money to go to this very elite school. With the help of her friends and her brother, Liz decides to run for prom queen which of course totally pushes her out of her comfort zone and then hilarity and very awkward situations ensue.
Rachel Adams:
On top of this, Liz is also starting to fall for one of the other girls who was running for prom queen and that girl's name is Mack. Liz really wants to get closer to Mack and maybe start a relationship with her, but she also sees Mack as competition and an obstacle to her winning the scholarship. There's definitely a little bit of a rom-com situation going on in this book as well.
Rachel Adams:
Liz's voice is pure and authentic and it's completely full of snark. I laughed so hard sometimes when she was talking about describing the situations that she was in and the other people at her high school. I think a lot of teams will be able to relate to Liz because she's just such a likable and charismatic character and her snark is very teenage. I also think that a lot of teens and readers will enjoy this book because there is so much other good layered stuff going on in the story.
Rachel Adams:
On the surface, this book seems very light and fun, which, it completely totally is, but there is also a lot of deeper issues being looked at and mixed in with the humor of the story. Things like LGBTQ+ representation, dealing with anxiety, racism, stereotypes, there's complications of first love, looking at friendship and family dynamics. I think all of these issues really put this book above so many other romcom and comedy humor books for teens that came out this year. As a side note, I can totally see this book being adapted for a Netflix series or movie. It just has so much charm and sparkle to it, that I can just completely see it being adapted for the screen. So definitely, one of my favorites.
Emily Calkins:
All right, Britta, what's your next nonfiction pick?
Britta Barrett:
It actually wasn't difficult at all for me to pick this one. I knew, going into this year, that this was maybe going to be one of my favorite books and it absolutely delivered. I love Samantha Irby. She is a fat, black chronically ill bisexual woman, and she somehow makes trauma hilarious. I think she tackles race, class, ability, sexuality, all of these really serious topics. She has as much to say as some of the more literary picks.
Britta Barrett:
Most people don't think of humor essays as being a great source for that, but she's just tremendous. If you haven't read Samantha Irby, you may already know her work from other things. She wrote the absolute best episode of Shrill, the Lindy West memoir adaption for Hulu, the pool party episode. I'm just so thrilled that she's working with Lisa Hanawalt on season two of Tuca & Bertie.
Britta Barrett:
But her new book is called, Wow, No Thank You, which as a title is just a big 2020 mood, could not have come in a better time. It was released early in the pandemic and was just exactly what I needed. She is our patron saint of staying indoors and binge watching bad television, fighting depression with carbohydrates. The book is literally dedicated to Wellbutrin. So much of her writing focuses on the pleasures and perils of living in a mortal human body.
Britta Barrett:
She's not immune to spending too much money on aspirational skincare and candles, but she's definitely not an Instagram influencer type pedaling some idea of perfection. One of her books include recipes, how to make things like a garbage frittata from the vegetables that are going bad in the crisper. I think that's the kind of thing that people love about her work. In her previous two books, Meaty and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, she described being young and broke and going on terrible dates with straight men.
Britta Barrett:
In this book, we find her more settled down. She's moved from Chicago to Kalamazoo. She's married a white lady, she has step-children. I was wondering, "Will this still be funny when there's less chaos in her life?" But she's so incisive that, she always finds something to complain about and definitely delivers on that in this one. Was always an old person. Does not miss the club and an outdoor music festival is basically her nightmare.
Britta Barrett:
I guess now what we're seeing is more of like a fish out of water story. Her wife is the hippie that makes her own kombucha where Sam is more of someone who would chug soda straight out of a two liter. She has step-kids, which was not something that she ever really planned to be a part of her life, and she discusses at great length, in the essay "Detachment Parenting," if that gives you an idea of what it's about.
Britta Barrett:
There are so few black and brown people in her new neighborhood and community that it gives off creepy get out vibes. I'm going to start with a person who lives in a tiny studio apartment and during quarantine, specifically, have flirted for maybe the first time with the idea of, "Maybe it would be nice to have a garden and cheap bread." And like, "What does that trade-off look like moving to the suburbs?" This book is an excellent answer to that question.
Emily Calkins:
Awesome. Thank you. Yes, lots of Sam Irby fans at the library system, for sure. My second pick is Jess Walters', The Cold Millions. This is a historical novel, it's set in Spokane primarily, although also in Montana and in Seattle. So, across the Pacific Northwest in 1909. It's about a pair of brothers. They are basically day laborers. They go downtown Spokane and they get jobs with logging companies or mining companies, and they work for a day and they get paid and then they ride the rails or they sleep in a baseball field.
Emily Calkins:
It's two brothers, Gig and Rye, and Rye is the main character of this book, he's 16. Gig, who's the older brother is involved with the Labor Union movement, which is trying to make these really horrible jobs, poorly paying, very unsafe jobs, better for the men who have them. There's a big day of labor action. Gig is part of the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies. He is arrested and in a moment of desperation, Rye takes his place and ends up being arrested too. Because he's only 16, he becomes a poster child for this movement.
Emily Calkins:
He's taken under the wing of this young woman who is a real historical character, who was leading this free speech movement at the time, and she's fascinating. The whole story goes from there. There was so much for me to love about the story. First of all, I love reading historical fiction where you end up learning a lot, but it doesn't feel like you're learning a lot. I grew up in Spokane and I learned so much about where I grew up reading this story.
Emily Calkins:
Jess does, in this book, what Vicki was talking about in Erin Entrada Kelly's book, which is, writing from multiple points of view and making those individual voices so strong. You never are in a chapter and forget who your narrator is. You always know exactly which character you're with. There's a lot of characters in this book, so I think that takes a really sure authorial hand, and I love it when it's successful. This book has themes that feel so timely. It touches on income inequality and corruption and police brutality and free speech. It feels timely, but it also has this old-fashioned feel of a big novel with lots of characters that's anchored by this wonderful relationship between these two brothers. That's my other pick. It's The Cold Millions, by Jess Walter.
Emily Calkins:
We don't have time, unfortunately, to talk about all of the books on this list, but I did want to shout out, in addition to the conversation that we had with Nancy, we had a couple of the authors that are on this list either featured on the podcast or you can see events that we did with them on our YouTube channel. We had Sarah Gailey, the author of Upright Women Wanted on The Long Distance Book Club episode, and Jasmine Guillory who wrote Party of Two on The Staff Picks episode, We love inclusive romance. Thank you so much Vicki and Rachel for being with us today to talk about Best Books. It's always fun to have other librarians on the show with us.
Rachel Adams:
Thank you so much, it was super fun.
Vicki Huggins:
Well, thank you for inviting.
Rachel Adams:
I really liked it.
Britta Barrett:
We always end up at the end of the year with a few books that were published too late to be considered for our Best Books. Emily, were there any late in the season titles that you wanted to highlight?
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. The big one, I think, that you'll see on some end of your list that didn't make it onto ours because of the timing of its publication was A Promised Land, by President Obama. It's the first of his presidential memoirs. It came out in late November so there was just no way that we could have even included that for staff members to vote on despite having pretty great reviews.
Emily Calkins:
The other one I think that came out a little bit late for the list is, Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. It's a little fantasy novel set in an unusual house that seems to be infinite. It's filled with statues and the tides come in and out of the house and there's clouds and weather inside the house. The book is narrated through a series of journal entries by the main character, Piranesi, and he seems to be one of only two people living in this house. It's a big mystery. How did he get there? What exactly is this place and who is the Other?
Emily Calkins:
This book is exactly the kind of thing that I wanted to read this year. It's super transporting, it's gripping without being too intense or scary, and just had a really fascinating mystery at the heart of it. How about you? Are there things that you wish that you would have shown up on the list, but were maybe a little too late?
Britta Barrett:
Yeah. For me, the main one is, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, by Ijeoma Oluo, which just came out, hitting the bestsellers charts. That's one that I'm still on hold for. But I definitely think, when I do get through to it, it'll be another one of my favorites.
Emily Calkins:
That wraps up our reading for this year. We are getting ready to launch our reading challenge for next year. The categories will be announced very soon and you can check them out at kcls.org/10totry. We'll be back early in the new year to talk about our goals for the next year.
Britta Barrett:
If you want to check out all the Best Books Lists, head to kcls.orgbestbooks.
Emily Calkins:
Thanks, as always, for listening.
Britta Barrett:
Have a great holiday season.
Emily Calkins:
Happy reading.
