The year’s best and most interesting year-end book lists.
“My collection, The Plan of Chicago: A City in Stories, has an unusual structure – nine linked stories set in nine Chicago neighborhoods – and unusual range. The characters are Black and White, straight and gay, wealthy and working-class. There are immigrants from Poland, Mexico, Ireland, Somalia, and elsewhere. My musical playlist reflects that diversity, which is the city’s greatest strength and, too often, a source of division.”
“This is the soundtrack of my fictional rendition of growing up fatherless in Florida and, later, of raising a son in Southern California.”
“Cursed Daughters is a story that begins in the mid-’90s in Nigeria and ends in present-day Nigeria, and music was one of the tools I used to anchor the characters in their different eras.”
“…it’s a Great Black Swamp-adjacent list. Songs that evoke the vibe of this dangerous, deadly, forgotten wasteland, and the unbelievable story of its deforestation.”
“Over the years, reaching way back to the cassette era, I’ve made a lot of mixtapes and playlists for other people: as gifts and love offerings, courtship gestures, mementos, nostalgic reminders of a shared history, expressions of friendship and affection, and tools for properly educating my kids (along with any other souls in need of musical guidance).”
“Like many debuts, People With No Charisma is a partly autobiographical coming-of-age story. At least, autobiographical in terms of theme, and the protagonist’s disco outfit.”
“I wish I had a magic wand to wave over the compositions listed here, plucking and splicing the relevant phrase or movement from each, marrying the key of one to the next, neatening without sanitizing.”
“‘The Hills are Alive’ tinkles away under the opening of my second memoir, Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, part of which takes place in Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s snug home-away-from-home high in the Alps. But it’s not your dull and boring dip into WWII. My mother-in-law Patricia Lochridge climbed 6,017 feet to his redoubt just after the hills were alive – with furious defeated Germans.”
“Another Bone-Swapping Event tells the story of an unlikely year when I found myself stuck, due to Peru’s draconian lockdown, in the jungles of the upper Amazon.”