Outside:
while some of us spent our holidays with prize-winning novels and essay collections, others turned to screen adaptations of beloved books. Here’s everything that kept us entertained in the final days of 2020.
What We Read
I just read
Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo, and I can’t recommend it enough. The novel won the Booker Prize in 2019, making Evaristo the first Black woman to have received the honor. Her writing is engaging and singular: there’s little punctuation, and she often breaks up her sentences like poems. The novel focuses on 12 characters, primarily Black British women, some of whom are clearly connected to others and some seemingly peripheral. Evaristo crafts a narrative that spans generations, with each chapter following the life of a different character. Despite the unique structure and style, it’s approachable and compelling I finished all 450-plus pages in five days. Abbie Barronian, associate editor
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Photos: Arches, PhotoQuest/Getty; people: Philippe Beyer/EyeEm/Getty. Art: Petra Zeiler.)
Looking back now, it’s hard to believe we ran a feature story on overcrowding in 2020 that doesn’t contain a single mention of viral loads, the effectiveness of masks, or the ethics of large-scale human gatherings. Mark Sundeen’s January report, which explores how Utah’s five iconic national parks became victims of the state’s genius marketing efforts to attract tourists, now seems like a relic from another era. But one day soon, the pandemic will be in our rearview, and when that happens, the biggest issue facing adventure travel in the recent past how do we protect the world’s most sought-after destinations from being loved to death? is destined to dominate the future. Chris Keyes, editor