Lit Hub Weekly: December 16 - 20, 2019

• For good, for bad, for weird, here are the 100 books that defined a decade. | Lit Hub Best of the Decade
• High comedy and misdemeanors: Liesl Schillinger on the Shakespearean drama at the heart of impeachment. | Lit Hub Politics
• A last goodbye to the writers, editors, and booksellers we lost in 2019. | Lit Hub
• Knives out: Here are the Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2019. | Book Marks Best of 2019
• Halley Sutton on a time-honored Christmas cinematic tradition: watching “The Godfather” with your family. | CrimeReads
• “Yes, it is self-involved.” On the art and etiquette of gifting books. | The Guardian
• A breakthrough review of On the Road “changed the course of literary history.” | The Washington Post
• How did Scrooge become Scrooge? A new Christmas Carol TV adaptation delves into the character’s past. | The New York Times
• From an ongoing row over the Booker Prize to criticisms of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2019 has been a contentious year for global literary awards. | Livemint
• “Writing consumes writers. I think off and on about people I love, but I think about writing all the time.” Peter Schjeldahl on death, art, and writing. | The New Yorker
• “I wanted to create as many black British female protagonists as I could get away with.” Bernardine Evaristo on her Booker Prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other. | Vanity Fair
• In the 1840s, pirating A Christmas Carol was a holiday tradition. | JSTOR
• “As a book publishing phenomenon, young adult literature entered the decade like a lion. . . But now, at decade’s end, YA seems to be eating itself alive.” The tumultuous decade in YA. | Slate
• Virginia Woolf’s biographers have disagreed over how much her experiences of childhood sexual abuse shaped her life. Her most recent biographer, Gillian Gill, argues that we can’t understand Woolf otherwise.  | TIME
• Translators, writers, critics, and booksellers recommend some excellent literature in translation you might have missed in 2019. | Words Without Borders
• A recap of 2019’s literary movie box office bombs, from The Goldfinch to Motherless Brooklyn. | Fortune
• “Mysteries are a comforting narrative structure for managing social shifts and loss.” Rivka Galchen on her daughter’s year of anger and detective stories. | The New York Times Magazine
• “It’s as if the last descendants in the long line of white male literary Calliopes finally petered out, leaving the field wide open.” Is women replacing men as the literary giants the best trend the 2010s? | Vulture
• A list with a twist: the team at Foreign Affairs selects their best political books of 2019 (and thankfully, it’s not US-centric). | Foreign Affairs
• From H.G. Wells to Sinclair Lewis, these six writers predicted elements of life in 2019. | The Washington Post

Also on Lit Hub:

For Elena Ferrante, what distinguishes conventional male and female friendships? • Laura Trethewey on the water-based communities fighting for survival • A season of books takes stock of #MeToo • Mira Jacob on reading Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine • Why (and how, exactly) did early humans start cooking? • Erin Berger visits the weird, wonderful worlds of Jeff VanderMeer • James Tate Hill recommends a few of the best last-minute stocking stuffers around: audiobooks! • When you find out someone won a prize plagiarizing your work • On the Nazi hunters who worked to bring Hitler’s hidden army to justice in America • Meet Richard Sorge, a bad man who became a truly great spy • Rick Moody on Bullet Park, John Cheever’s darkest work • Gabrielle Bellot on John Berger’s final work • Werner Herzog’s prose script for Nosferatu the Vampyre (to be read aloud in his voice, obviously) • The story of Gershon Legman—the original sex-positive hipster intellectual—and his literary crusade to uncensor sex in America • Rabih Alameddine offers an antidote to the “best of” lists with the oddest books he read this year • When an author “loses control” of a character, is it the mysterious work of the unconscious, or the mechanized brain run amok? • Lynda Barry: a comic exercise in building character • When classical music was a Cold War battleground • Lane Moore on the anxieties of adult loneliness • Melissa Woods examines the unlikely overlapping spaces of child-rearing and novel-writing • Enza Gandolfo on seeing herself in the novels of Dorothy Hewitt • Rachel Vorona Cote on the dawn of the era of the feminine excess • On the quiet death of a legendary Parisian bookstore • 11 books inspired by the March family • Novelist and small-town Brazilian mayor Graciliano Ramos’s annual reports are literature unto themselves • Lydia Davis, Jennifer Egan, Tommy Orange, Valeria Luiselli, and more Freeman’s contributors share highlights from their year in reading

Best of Book Marks:

Colson Whitehead, Sally Rooney, Téa Obreht, Marlon James, and more all feature among the best reviewed fiction of the year • Carmen Maria Machado, Jia Tolentino, Robert Macfarlane, Sarah M. Broom and more all feature among the best reviewed nonfiction of the year • Samanta Schweblin, Olga Tokarczuk, Svetlana Alexievich, and more all feature among the best reviewed translation of the year • John le Carré, Patrick Radden Keefe, and Kate Atkinson all feature among the best reviewed mystery & crime of the year • Karen Russell, Edwidge Danticat, Zadie Smith, and Ted Chiang all feature among the best reviewed short story collections of the year • Girl, Woman, Other; The Testaments; Trust Exercise; and Milkman were all award-winners this year • Adam Morgan rounds up the ten best book reviews of 2019 • Jeffrey Colvin recommends five masterpieces of historical fiction • To celebrate its 30th publication anniversary, here are the first reviews of Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life

New on CrimeReads:

Paul French on the rising stars of global crime fiction • The best true crime books of 2019 • 10 (more) crime movies that you forgot take place during Christmas • Kwei Quartey on the importance of supernatural themes in African crime fiction • Olivia Rutigliano on the most famous holiday heist story ever told: How the Grinch Stole Christmas! • Erika Wright gives us a crime writer’s guide to Netflix holiday romances • Elizabeth Penney makes the case for cozy mysteries as the way life should be • L.C. Shaw on our addiction to conspiracy fiction