Our 2020 in Books: Sarai Seekamp
As a globally unusual year comes to an end and we enter into 2021, we consider the reading that defined each of our 2020s. In this piece, teacher and writer Sarai Seekamp looks back at the novels that brought her comfort and companionship in the midst of the great unknown.
All photos courtesy of Sarai Seekamp.
“You can walk right through a story on the road or in the woods and only hear one word from it, he would say. Or you could sit down inside a story and hear the whole story. Then the story is inside you. You can eat an infinite amount of stories. No one can ever eat too many stories.”
I fell in love many times this year. I filled up new bookshelves and end tables with all the love I discovered in the midst of great trauma, loss, heartbreak, fear, and this great unknown. I know that I am not the only person who turned immediately to the written word in March when a two-week quarantine turned into the now eight-month struggle for so many to maintain livelihoods and well-being during a historical, global pandemic. Novels this year have been a great comfort in many indescribable and inexplicable ways and without them, I’m not quite sure how I would be faring. So, without further ado, here is my year in books. I attempted to do the impossible which is to say I have tried to note the books that stood out to me from a, well, inexhaustible list of stories that have been my companions during this most difficult of years.
The Most Captivating: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
I picked up this book knowing without a doubt that I would love it. Don’t ask me how I knew this, as I am (much to everyone’s disappointment) not clairvoyant. This year was a year of fiction, a year of 500+ page novels, a year of stories about families. I didn’t quite realize this common factor until I sat down to write this list. Almost every book I read this year dealt with the intricacies of family and relationships in ways that I had, up until this point, never stopped to reflect on either with regard to my own family or in the broader sense. In Pachinko, Min Jin Lee paints the truly captivating tale of a Korean family through four generations of working to get by in the 20th century. Lee gives us characters that ask the questions that so often we have a hard time asking ourselves. She encourages us to consider the lives of our elder generations, the dreams and experiences they had long before we were even a thought. She reminds us that family can be, and often is, everything that a person has, and despite the imperfections or hardships that our families are our first sense of identity and self.
The Heartbreaker: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
My dearest and oldest friend practically forced me to read this one and I couldn’t have been happier and more heartbroken at the same time. For those who haven’t read A Little Life, all I can say is that this 800-page masterpiece is wrought with the most profound pain and deepest love that one could ever experience in life. Yanagihara presents this group of friends, accompanied by their trauma and flaws, with the most care and compassion that I could not help but keep pressing forward. For those who have read this piece, how did you make it through without crying every other page and what came after aside from long stretches of time staring off some expanse of sky or grass wondering about the meaning of life? I feel that this book will forever live in a particular corner of my mind, reminding me how all humans crave and require the same thing: to be loved and cared for no matter how much we think we don’t deserve it.
The New Favorite: Mink River by Brian Doyle
Graduating from the University of Portland, and as a native Oregonian, one could not be a stranger to the late Brian Doyle. The man was brilliant on and off the page and I make a point to share his writing with my students whenever possible. That being said, I hadn’t read Mink River until right after the start of quarantine and it was instantly a new favorite, knocking some well-loved novels out of my top ten books of all time. Doyle takes a very real place, with a very distinct history, and entices his reader to fall in love not just with the characters, but with their choices, their behaviors, the inner workings of their minds when they are alone. By the end, I wanted nothing more than to start right from the beginning again, or better yet, to find myself on a stool in No Horses studio watching her create life from timber or listening to Worried Man tell every story that has ever existed. If I could recommend one book from this entire list, it would be Mink River.
The Retelling: Circe / The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Ever a fan of greek mythology and the attempt by so many writers to bring to life the legends of the past, Madeline Miller’s books Circe and The Song of Achilles give the kind of depth of character that I think we’ve always craved. Miller provides in Circe, a brilliant, talented, complex — that is to say REAL — woman in the title goddess. One who loves, and destroys, and cares for, and attempts to exist in the worlds created and ruled by humans and Olympians alike. In The Song of Achilles, she provides the details of the loyalty, love, and sacrifice that serve as the foundation of Achilles’ relationship with Patroclus. I think I finished both in a single week, without stopping much to put them down. It’s the returning to characters that we think we know so well just to be surprised by the passions and weaknesses that we never really stopped to consider amidst all the adventure.
The One I Just Couldn’t Finish: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
I wanted to love this book, I really did. I’ve been wanting to read it for a long time. It seemed like it got a lot of really good reviews and came highly recommended from a number of lit nerds in my life. I even watched the movie and absolutely loved it: the characters, the story, the nostalgia, the grief, the art — everything. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get past the first three pages. To put it simply, it confused me. The writing itself was confusing and that’s not exactly something I like to admit as an English teacher and book lover. And I’m sure if I were to revisit it, I’d have an easier time getting through the piece, but I think it’s better left on the bottom shelf waiting for someone else to devout countless hours to its 790 pages.
“I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.”
The Old Favorite: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Záfon
This year has obviously been a tough one for everyone. Particularly here in the U.S. with the poor management of the coronavirus, a particularly stressful election, the continued violence toward Black individuals, and so many people losing their jobs / attempting to transition to effectively working from home amidst it all has left us all more than a little uncomfortable and closer to downright miserable. Whew. I’m sure I’m not the only one who returned to old favorites to find solace and an escape. The Shadow of the Wind by Záfon became a quick favorite about seven years ago when it was given to me as a birthday gift. I breezed through the 560 pages in just a few days as, once again, I was swallowed up by Daniel Sempre’s 1950’s Spain and discovery of love, mystery, and his own love of literature. This book was exactly what I needed to kickstart my reading rampage again this summer, and I would highly recommend it to those who love a good romance-thriller.
The Final Books of 2020: H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald & Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
I began H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald toward the end of the summer in preparation for her talk with Literary Arts. Unfortunately, this aligned with the start of the school year so I have yet to actually finish the book. However, I have enjoyed learning about falconry and the difference between goshawks and peregrine falcons, and how to cope with the loss of a parent. Memoir always provides a pleasant opportunity to learn about a topic through an individual’s specific experience when otherwise you might not have felt inclined to learn about it at all. Fun fact: T.H. White had a goshawk of his own and wrote a whole book about it… I know what I’ll be picking up in the new year. As for Future Home of the Living God by Erdrich (who is PHENOMENAL for those who haven’t read any of her incredible novels), it is probably the first time that I have genuinely enjoyed dystopian fiction without being sent into some sort of anxiety spiral (thanks, Atwood). It’s an epistolary novel written by the narrator, Cedar, to her unborn child and true to Erdrich’s other books, it carries the weight of every meaningful thought and emotion concerning life, death, companionship, humanity, and everything in between with such grace and care that it almost doesn’t feel like reading at all. It is another novel that I very much look forward to finishing over my winter break before setting off to explore other fictional worlds in the new year.
“A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.”
As a high school English teacher in Portland, Oregon, Sarai Seekamp often finds herself wearing many different hats. After graduating from the University of Portland with a B.A. in English Literature and the University of Southern California with a M.A.T. in Secondary Language Arts, she has spent the past few years writing at her website scienceofluck.com and helping her students find ways of expressing themselves both in and out of the classroom. When she isn't writing or teaching, Sarai enjoys traveling to Ireland and the UK, cuddling with her cats Osha and Sally, and working to change the ways young women experience the world of athletics through her high school's track and field program as the Head Coach. Who says you can't do it all?
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