Clara's Favorite books of 2018

I'm about to make this into a video over on my YouTube Channel, so by Jan. 1 there will probably be a video there with essentially the same content, but here are my favorite books I've read this year. I'd love to hear yours as well!

New Fiction to me:

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

This is a City drama not only the story of the two title characters, but of everyone in their social web. It’s beautifully written and the way it pulled at my heart reminded me of Neil Gaiman’s Ocean at the End of the Lane.

Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor

This is book two of the Binti series-- They are Afrofuturism where the main character travels away to University in another galaxy, and in this book she returns home, but is changed.

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferante

You have probably already heard about this book, its the first in a series, and the series has recently been airing as an HBO show. It’s an Italian personal drama about a young girl and her friend, and it’s gorgeous and devastating.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

A book of suburban American life, with especially striking perspectives on motherhood. It has a bit of a Middlemarch feel to it, in that just as you’re beginning to feel totally unsympathetic to a particular character the narration moves so you see things from their perspective.

Favorite Rereads: I did a lot of comfort reading and rereading to balance out all the reading I did for my prelim doctoral exams. So if we’re friends on goodreads you may know that I read a ton of children’s lit this year, most of it reread including

Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling

I was going to a summer intensive learning how to read Elizabethan secretary hand and was coming to the end of each day pretty brain dead, and listening along as Harry faces trauma after trauma was oddly comforting. I finished the Battle of Hogwarts on the metro into DC; weeping quietly.

The next two are books that I think of as explicitly in conversation with each other, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle and When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead. This fall was the first time I taught my own course at the University of Minnesota, and I gave a lot of challenging readings to my students, but at the end of the semester while they were doing individual research I had them also read these two books so we had something to talk about in class. I thought it worked surprisingly well.

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner

These are some of my very favorite books full of little secrets for the rereader, and they just get better every time I read them. Not everyone loves them, and the first book can be especially jarring on the first read, but to my mind reading now for the 100th time, it feels like I can see the author setting up the dominos to all crash down by the end of the book.

And some non-fiction:

Daring Greatly and Rising Strong by Brene Brown

At this point I feel like everyone’s heard of Brene Brown, but if you haven’t, she is extraordinary and doing incredible work with how we handle shame and vulnerability. I’ll link to some of her TED talks if you’d like to get a taste. https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability?language=en

https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame/transcript?language=en

Liturgy of the Ordinary by Tish Harrison Warren

I sometimes struggle with “Christian Life” books as they can seem either very cheesy or entirely out of touch with the culture but this book was pretty wonderful, tying the elements of the Anglican church into the everyday chores and activities of the day. For example, “Sitting in Traffic” pulls together with the liturgical year and “an unhurried God” It’s a gorgeous read.

Switch: How to Change things when Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath

I know of these authors from their wonderful book Made to Stick, which I also teach pieces of to my students. This book was really encouraging and exciting to read as I was finding myself stressed out and discouraged to hear again and again that change is possible, and there are clear doable methods for making it happen. If you have big new year’s resolutions planned, it might be a nice book to try and accompany those changes you’re going to make.

Thoughts sexual assault and proof

Our judicial system is based around proof; anyone accused is innocent until proven guilty. That burden of proof is high. The idea is that it is better for one hundred guilty persons escape than one innocent person should suffer. This is a very good ideal, and in most cases I am eager to find ways to be more merciful, with a greater eye to restoration and education rather than punishment. But where this ideal of the necessity of proof gets troubling is in crimes which by their very nature are private, are intimate, are difficult to prove.

When I heard that a colleague of mine had raped his exgirlfriend in grad school I thought, “Was she really raped, though? If she were raped, wouldn’t she tell the authorities, and seek justice? Just saying bad things about her ex doesn’t seem like the way to make things right.” It took me a while to listen to what was going on, and learn. What I didn’t know is that she was specifically advised by her therapist not to take the issue to court. She had dated her rapist in the past, and (as the therapist said) there’s not a jury in Virginia that will find him guilty. Even with a rape kit (DNA samples and all), even with photos of her torn flesh, there’s no way to meet the burden of proof. There is still an idea of rape happening in dark alleyways with masked strangers, not trusted friends, romantic partners, or authority figures, and it is hard to combat the cultural story of what rape is, especially when the other person in the court is saying, “that’s not true.” It is very, very hard to convince everyone that the victim is telling the truth and the perpetrator is lying, and so the price of going through the ordeal of seeking justice without hope of justice, was a price too high to pay.

Since then I’ve heard many, many of my friends and acquaintances’ stories of sexual abuse, assault and rape. I hesitate to add my voice to the mix, because my own experiences as the recipient of sexual harassment or touch I didn’t consent to seem pretty minor compared to those of many of the women (and men) around me. But I’ve been listening. And I’ve been thinking. And I worry that our ideal of the burden of proof is bringing about the opposite of its intention. Perhaps it is appropriate for crimes like robbery, or any nonviolent crime, but if we put the burden of proof so high on cases of rape? It’s no wonder people don’t report, or don’t until there is so much at stake that it’s worth the cost. Because if we fill in the characters of the actual situation many in our country face today, the proverb could be: better 100 rapists rape innocents without legal consequences, than one innocent lose their freedom without cause. And I know, it’s not only men doing the raping, and it’s not only women getting raped, but a system that rewards aggression and stifles those who stand up for themselves seems like a system that needs changing.