I wanted the artfulness and sway of lyric structures- Dan Chiasson’s The Math Campers (Knopf, 2020) Jorie Graham’s Runaway (Ecco, 2020) Prageeta Sharma’s Grief Sequence (Wave, 2019) -as well as critical and insightful intelligence that could interrupt my assumptions about race and art- The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings (One World, 2020), Ed Pavli ć ’s Let It Be Broke (Four Way Books, 2020). More than ever, I found myself reaching for books that could further my understanding of the environmental and political challenges as well as the global contagion that defined much of the year. The narrator, Perdita Weeks, does an excellent job of capturing the many moods of the characters, both mortal and divine, and despite my prejudices (would it be a sort of grey-eyed Athena in Monterey?), I was entirely won over by Miller’s rich mythic world, with its selfish immortals and hapless humans, and her spirited, event-filled (i.e., Homeric) storytelling. I wasn’t sure what I was going to make of this enormous bestseller, which I ended up listening to as an audiobook. Keeping with the Homeric theme, I also set my sights on Circe by Madeline Miller (Little Brown, 2018). These inventive additions to the Homeric canon feel as timeless as the Odyssey itself, and a book I was pretty sure I was going to like turns out to be a book I absolutely love. It allows us to see immediately what is so brilliant about this book: the deep familiarity with the source material, the strangely fresh and yet classical-feeling prose, the boundless imagination of the author. The original features a longish introduction, setting the book up as a found manuscript with a complicated backstory and introducing its putative decoder in the character of a professor of modern languages with “some small fame in cryptographic circles.” While all of this is amusing, the decision by FSG to strip away the conceptual envelope and present the “Lost Books”-brilliant short riffs on the characters and events of the Odyssey and Iliad -without commentary was a good one. Not everyone will be able to get their hands on the original edition, but it’s an interesting comparison. I’ve had The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason (FSG, 2010) on my To Read list for years-possibly since it first came out in 2007 from a tiny independent press in Buffalo, NY, called Starcherone Books, but definitely since it was republished to acclaim in an edited version by FSG.

From bestsellers to indie treasures, in e-books and audiobooks and good, old-fashioned print, in verse and prose, from short story to history, here’s a sampler of what we’ve been reading. As we approach the end of this crazy year, the staff of Harvard Review would like to share the books that got us through the past twelve months.

Uncanny valley by rachel anna wiener