A Year in Reading: Omar El Akkad

All that follows is the product of serendipity. Almost every book I read this year came to me through some unexpected channel—blurb requests, books picked up at random in literary festivals. Every year I set out with a plan, a list of upcoming releases to look out for, classics to catch up on. And every year, thankfully, I fail.

Here is the best of the accidental rabbit holes into which I climbed this year, the accidental lives I briefly lived. 

The book I’ve thought about the most this year is a novel called by . It takes place in a small city called San Cristóbal, where one daySlowly they begin to sow terror among the residents, and the municipal government goes to greater and greater lengths to hunt them down. If charted the ugliness that follows societal collapse, charts the chaos of societal tyranny, what happens when human beings abdicate their humanity.