Lit Hub Daily: December 19, 2019

• “Shield Flower found herself bound hand and foot, waiting under guard to learn what her fate would be.” On the death of 13th-century Aztec princess Chimalxochitl. | Lit Hub History
• Rabih Alameddine offers an antidote to the “best of” lists with the oddest books he read this year. | Lit Hub
• “On some level I walk through the world like an adult human version of the baby bird in Are You My Mother?” Lane Moore on the anxieties of adult loneliness. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Melissa Woods examines the unlikely overlapping spaces of child-rearing and novel-writing. | Lit Hub Craft
• Tim O’Brien on becoming a father late in life, and what it was like to narrate his own book. | Lit Hub Audiobooks
• The CrimeReads staff rounds up the bleakest and most beautiful noir fiction of 2019. | CrimeReads
• The wait is over: here are the Best Reviewed Fiction and Nonfiction Books of 2019. | Book Marks Best of 2019
• 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
• Rotten Tomatoes does a deep-dive into which kinds of literary adaptations have had the highest and lowest ratings on their site, in film and TV. | Rotten Tomatoes
• “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
• On the formalism of Twitter, the literary value of memes, and the many ways of reading. | LARB
• From H.G. Wells to Sinclair Lewis, these six writers predicted elements of life in 2019. | The Washington Post
• “I wanted more wildness. I wanted to shrug off my own domestication.” Katy Kelleher on womanhood and the moon. | The Paris Review

Also on Lit Hub: Lynda Barry: a comic exercise in building character • When classical music was a Cold War battleground • Read from A.R. Moxon’s debut novel The Revisionaries.