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By David Eisler &#160;When I started working on a PhD in American literature back in 2017, I didn’t want to let reading become a chore, something I had to do for work rather than something I wanted to do for fun. So, I made sure to keep finding things to read on the side, books I’d take with me on my daily bus commute or read in the dim, quiet light of the evening before going to sleep. Some are what I like to call “literary palate cleansers,” or books I read in between the many war novels I’m reading for my dissertation. My taste is somewhat eclectic, along the spectrum from hard science to science fiction, with the scale weighted just a bit more heavily toward contemporary American fiction these days. A few years ago, I started keeping a running list of all the books I read. Every December, I like to go through that list and pick out which ones I enjoyed the most. Before the ball drops on 2020, I’m happy to share 11 of my favorites (okay, one is a series of three books, but still) that I read in 2019. From time travel and war to fantasy, history, and dinosaurs, I hope this list has a little something for everyone. Race and AmericaOctavia Butler,&#160;Kindred&#160;(1979) and Colson Whitehead,&#160;The Nickel Boys (2019)Both of these novels deal with race in theAmerican south, but in totally different ways.&#160;Octavia Butler’s Kindred&#160;isa mix of historical fiction with a dash of sci-fi—Dana, a middle-class blackwoman living in California, travels back in time from 1976 to early-1800s Marylandwhere she is assumed to be a runaway slave. The reason for her time travelingis never really explained other than through her connection to Rufus Weylin,the son of a plantation owner who seems to “pull” Dana to him every time he’sin mortal danger. Butler plays with concepts of time in severalways; there is a nonlinear relationship between how long Dana spends trapped inthe past (which ranges from hours to months) and how much time has elapsed inher present—more than once she returns to discover that it is still the sameday as when she went back in time. Reading the novel forty years after it waspublished adds yet another dimension of historical consciousness as well, and Kindredis ultimately a brilliant mediation on the inexorable connection between pastand present, between individual and national history, and the continuedrelevance of race in American culture. I don’t know why it took me so long tofind Octavia Butler, but after Kindred, I’m hooked. It’s honestly one ofthe best books I’ve read in a while, probably the best book I’ve read allyear.&#160;Colson Whitehead’s latest novel, The NickelBoys,&#160;is almost equally good, but takes a more traditional realistapproach as a historical novel.&#160;The Nickel Boys&#160;is about asegregated boarding school in&#160;Florida, known as The Nickel Academy, in thelate 1950s and early 1960s. You probably know where this is going—racism,abuse, cruelty, servitude—and in my mind that’s part of Whitehead’s point. Hestill finds a way to make things surprising, though, and the novel has one ofthe best endings I’ve ever read. Whitehead based the story on the DozierSchool for Boys, a real reformschool in northern Florida that Whitehead learned about on Twitter.The Dozier School had weathered decades of allegations of abusive treatmentagainst its students over its more than one hundred year history, including a still-climbingnumber of unmarked graves uncoveredby anthropology students from the University of South Florida. As if tounderscore the continued urgency of Whitehead’s chosen subject, the real DozierSchool was only shut down in 2011.Contemporary War FictionElliot Ackerman,&#160;Waiting for Eden (2018); Nico Walker,&#160;Cherry (2018); John Renehan,&#160;The Valley (2015); David Abrams,&#160;Brave Deeds (2017)My PhD dissertation deals with contemporaryAmerican war fiction, so it’s notsurprising that a big chunk of what I read falls into that category. In fact, fourteenof the novels I read this year were about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Ofthese, Elliot Ackerman’s Waiting for Eden and Nico Walker’s Cherrywere the best, with honorable mentions for John Renehan’s The Valley andDavid Abrams’s Brave Deeds.Ackerman’s Waiting for Eden is a slim(not even 200 pages!) but immensely powerful novel that is one of the best worksto come out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps because itspecifically does not try to be about the wars themselves. Eden, one of thenovel’s main characters, is “the most wounded man from both the wars,” and thestory is told from the perspective of an unnamed fellow Marine who was killedin the same explosion that left Eden hospitalized for the rest of his life. Theeasy comparisons to Larry Heinemann’s 1987 Paco’s Story (which alsofeatures deceased comrades as a collective narrator) and Dalton Trumbo’s 1938anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun (whose protagonist is also a limblessmute who wishes to die) don’t do Waiting for Eden enough justice. Thenovel is haunting without giving in to what could have been an easy despair,preferring to take a more philosophical approach to the consequences of war onthose who are left behind, especially in a nation with an all-volunteermilitary.Nico Walker’s&#160;Cherry, on the otherhand, reads more like a confession, and with good reason: Walker, a former Armymedic who served a tour in Iraq, wrote the novel from prison.I didn’t want to like Cherry, but it surprisedme with a depth that I didn’t really appreciate until I’d finished it andstarted reading through my notes. The unnamed first-person narrator comes froma middle-class family, but he’s clearly troubled, dabbling in drugs anddropping out of college before volunteering to join the Army. He (the narrator)deploys to Iraq, witnesses the horrors of war, then comes home and becomes afull-blown heroin addict. Things don’t really get any better for him.The novel’s reception focused mostly on howautobiographical it is—Nico Walker is actually in jail for grand theft auto,and for all intents and purposes the novel borrows liberally from his actualexperiences. But&#160;Cherry&#160;is the perfect example ofwhat&#160;happens when you throw the words “A Novel” on the cover of a book; byreading it as fiction rather than memoir, it takes on characteristics far greaterthan the sum of its narrative parts.&#160;As for the other two novels, JohnRenehan’s&#160;The Valley&#160;is an exciting blend of war fictionwith&#160;the detective novel genre, and it’s probably the best depiction I’veyet read of what it actually feels like to be a junior officer on a combatdeployment. And&#160;David Abrams’s Brave Deeds, skillfully narratedfrom the unusual third person plural (“we”) of an Army squad on a missionthrough hostile territory to attend a beloved squad leader’s funeral, hasshades of Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato&#160;(1978) as well asHomer’s Odyssey. Science FictionN.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy (The Fifth Season (2015),The Obelisk Gate (2016), and The Stone Sky (2017)I’d had my sights on these books for a whilenow, and they did not disappoint. The world-building is impressive, thecharacters complex, and the revelations slow and subtle. Jemisin became thefirst African-American writer to ever win the Hugo Award for bestsci-fi/fantasy novel, and the only writer to ever win the award for three consecutiveyears. &#160;Forgetyour preconceptions about the fantasy genre when you come to these novels. Theydescribe an Earth in the future that feels eerily familiar but fundamentallychanged in ways that feel logical and extraordinary at the same time.Civilizations have risen and fallen for thousands of years, building andrebuilding, planning and preparing, all while a subset of humanity known as“Orogenes” has evolved the ability to manipulate energy and temperature in waysthat have powerful consequences, both physical and social. In a society thathas already designated its people according to “use-castes” (such as laborers,healers, breeders, engineers, and leaders), Orogenes are the ultimate outcasts,banished to highly controlled training schools if they aren’t killedimmediately upon discovery. The novels have a strong subtext of racial issues (thereis even an equivalent of a racial slur for the Orogenes), and Jemisin paints awonderfully representative picture of race, gender, and sexuality, unwilling togive in to the patriarchal tropes that often plague the fantasy genre. In theend, though, Jemisin seems more interested in asking what makes us human and exploringthe whole range of emotions that comes with the answer.Non-FictionJill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018); Steven Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of the Lost World (2018)Jill Lepore’s These Truths is a big bookbut well worth the investment. Billed as a comprehensive history of the UnitedStates, Lepore’s mighty tome is both engaging and ambitious. One has to marvelat Lepore’s writing stamina, maintaining the same quality she is known for in herNew Yorker articles and holding it for nearly 800 pages. Lepore does animpressive job finding the echoes between our current historical moment andother points in American history. Specialists on certain topics may feel thatshe doesn’t spend enough time or detail on this or that, but her purpose is todraw the broadest contours of American history and reveal the path that broughtus to where we are today.Finally, because I have a four-year-old son wholoves dinosaurs, I found myself drawn to StevenBrusatte’s fascinating and enjoyable The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs.Brusatte’s narrative history of dinosaurs and paleontology explains all the scientificdetails in readable prose, and had the unanticipated bonus of proving to me theimportance of reading outside your own academic field—by the time I finishedthe book, I had new ideas for my own research in literature and culture studies.Go figure! If you’re interested in dinosaurs and want a general introductionthat goes beyond what you might read to your kids, this book is great.That’sit for this year, even though there were other titles from my to-read pile thatI just couldn’t get to, including Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Overstory (2018), Jennifer Egan’s historical novel Manhattan Beach (2018),Ted Chiang’s acclaimed collection of sci-fi short stories Exhalation (2018) (okay I might still read this before New Year’s), and theoreticalphysicist Sean Carroll’s The BigPicture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (2016). Happy reading and see you again in2020! Aboutthe AuthorDavidEisler is a PhD candidate at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies. Hisdoctoral dissertation focuses on the relationship between civil-militaryrelations and contemporary American war fiction. Prior to beginning his PhD,David was a research analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses nearWashington, DC. He also served five years on active duty in the United StatesArmy, earning the rank of captain and completing overseas tours in Germany,Iraq, and Afghanistan. David received a BA in astrophysics from CornellUniversity in 2007 and an MA in international affairs from ColumbiaUniversity’s School of International and Public Affairs in 2014.Getin touch:&#160;@david_eisler,&#160;www.davidfeisler.com