By Jill Norgren

It is the end of the year and I want to write about a handful of books that I read over the past months and thought were really fine. I am wary about using the “best books” sobriquet. Judgment about books is so intensely personal. That said, each of the following books, most but not all published in 2020, caused me to make deals with the devil so I could put aside other responsibilities and just read.

First up, Michelle Obama’s Becoming published by Crown in 2018. I waited until this October to read the former First Lady’s memoir. I wanted to absorb what she was willing to tell of her life before I went on to her husband’s story. It is a strategy worth recommending. Like their marriage, the two memoirs fit together well. Her narrative has tremendous feel-good, as Mrs. Obama speaks with appreciation about America’s working class. She advocates for educational opportunities and strong families. And she is unflinchingly honest about what is required of a politician’s family.

Read with her book, Barack Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land, published in mid-November (Crown). It has more heft, more humanity because Michelle has introduced us to him. Barack Obama writes with grace and honesty. His language is crisp but not cool. Newly experiencing the security imposed on a president, he writes, “it felt as if I now lived in my own portable ghost town.” Clarity defines his discussions of policy and politics including the former president’s description of the Republican’s strategy of “all-out obstruction,” a strategy congressional Republicans followed with unwavering discipline for the eight years of Obama’s administration.

A Promised Land is absorbing and accessible. Read after Joe Biden’s victory, Obama’s book helps us to understand the strategies guiding the decisions of the new president-elect as Biden forms a government and maps out what he seeks to accomplish in his first hundred days. [And, for added fun, if you want to learn how Lincoln did it, get Ronald C. White’s eminently readable book, A. Lincoln: A Biography (Random House, 2010.]

Does good fiction rely on character or plot? Noted writers James McBride and Elizabeth Strout do not force us to choose. Strout’s 2019 novel Olive, Again (Viking) reprises the irascible Olive of Crosby, Maine. The interwoven stories present interesting plots but it is Olive who controls the page, ill-tempered but grounded in even deeper feelings of decency. Her stories are brilliantly observed and can leave you breathless with surprise. Hundreds of miles south, in Brooklyn, New York James McBride’s main character, Sportcoat, runs us ragged in the 2020 mystery novel Deacon King Kong (Riverhead). Like Olive, Sportcoat has been thrown into the maelstrom of aging and loss. Where Strout examines relationships McBride mines for the makings of community and the cost of violence. In each, there is the poignancy of older characters chasing life.

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