2019 WaPo's best books

By Ron Charles   Email EL James greets fans at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Bethesda, Md., in 2012.    This decade coming to an end may be remembered for its record stock market, the ascension of a demagogue or our inaction on climate change. But book folks should take a moment to acknowledge the Era of EL James. From her humble beginnings posting “Twilight” fanfiction under the pen name Snowqueens Icedragon, James eventually developed one of the most valuable literary franchises in history. Originally published by a small Australian press, her “Fifty Shades” trilogy was already a phenomenon by the time Vintage picked it up in 2012 and amplified its reach by approximately 8 gazillion times. The books broke all kinds of records (fastest selling, worst written, etc.), inspired a chemistry-free series of movies starring Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, and forced every journalist on planet Earth to rewrite the same article about the rise of mommy porn. No matter what you think of James’s books, there’s no denying her extraordinary impact on the publishing industry. Her success helped create a viable market for countless other erotic novelists (and satirists) who had been consigned to the shadows. Random House made so much money from “Fifty Shades” that in 2012 every single employee got a $5,000 bonus. Since then, James has continued to publish by regurgitating the “Fifty Shades” books from Christian’s point of view (“Grey,” “Darker”) and introducing a whole new set of oversexed characters (“The Mister”). All told, this decade James sold more than 152 million copies, which if placed end-to-end would probably enjoy it. The National Book Foundation's Literature for Justice program has selected five books to help advance public understanding of mass incarceration: Asha Bandele's "The Prisoner’s Wife" (Scribner), Susan Burton and Cari Lynn's "Becoming Ms. Burton" (The New Press), Angela Y. Davis's "Are Prisons Obsolete?" (Seven Stories), Rachel Kushner's "The Mars Room" (Scribner) and Danielle Sered's "Until We Reckon" (The New Press).   One of the distressing elements of our country’s grotesque penal industry is its effort to keep prisoners from reading books. The Human Rights Defense Center reports that Kansas has abolished its old banned books list only to adopt a new list that’s shorter but equally unreasonable. The novels now judged too dangerous include “The Overstory,” by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers; “The Bluest Eye,” by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison; and — seriously — John Grisham’s “The Innocent Man.” PEN America, which has been concentrating this year on inmates' access to books, released a statement saying, “If a Pulitzer Prize-winning book falls short of the prison system’s purported criteria of ‘literary merit’ and can thus be banned, it’s hard to imagine what books would pass muster under the state’s standard.” Sadly, this is not a problem isolated to Kansas. The Appalachian Prison Book Project recently shined a light on a program in some West Virginia prisons that gives tablets to inmates but charges them — by the minute — to read books downloaded from Project Gutenberg’s free online library. (A similar scheme was spotted in New York prisons last year by Prison Policy Initiative.) Fortunately, we finally seem to be waking up to these and other abuses. This year has been marked by moving books about prison life, including Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Nickel Boys”; Albert Woodfox’s memoir, “Solitary”; and Reginald Dwayne Betts’s new poetry collection, “Felon.”