My year in reading

I was on Sundial, WLRN’s excellent locally produced show, today talking books with Connie Ogle and to prepare I went through some of my favorites for the year. Here they are along with the answers to some of host Luis Hernandez’ questions.

Number of books read: 51, according to my Goodreads account

Favorite books published this year: Transcription by Kate Atkinson, Circe by Madeline Miller

Favorite work of nonfiction: (I’m still reading this and it was published last year but … wow): Bunk by Kevin Young, an amazing work of scholarship and historical/social analysis about hoaxes, humbug and fakery, from the Sun newspaper’s 1835 Moon hoax and P.T. Barnum to “reality” TV and …

Most immersive reading experience of the year: The seven books (so far) in James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series. I got interested via the TV show, but as usual the books offer a much richer world and so much more information about the characters. Also: they really know how to move along the plot. And the good news: the two guys who write under this pen name seem to be much better than George R.R. Martin – one of them used to work as his assistant – about keeping the books coming despite having an ongoing TV show at the same time.

Best read of the year: The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra. Published in 2015, it’s a series of interlinked stories set in the Soviet Union and after, with a particular painting that ties it together. Brilliant, heartbreaking, beautiful. H/t to my husband Mark for the recommendation.

Biggest disappointment: The Witch Elm by Tana French. Unlike some readers I know (Connie, cough cough), I am willing to go with the sometimes preposterous plots in French’s Dublin murder squad series because I so love spending time with these characters. This book was French’s first where the protagonist was not a detective but was a victim/witness/suspect. But I found it a real slog to spend 700 pages inside that guy’s head. Please go back to the squad room!

Looking forward to in 2019:

Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James, the first in a proposed fantasy series. Yes, please!

Big Sky by Kate Atkinson – a return to the excellent Jackson Brodie series. Thank you!

Tiamat’s Wrath by James S.A. Corey – next in the Expanse series. Keep it up, guys!

There were other books by writers I admire that I enjoyed very much this year. They included: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, Time’s Convert by Deborah Harkness (how fun to return to that world with the unexpected bonus of spending time in late-Colonial Hadley, Mass. Hadley!), Lethal White by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling) and The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden – that’s the conclusion of a trilogy based on Russian history and folktales and isn’t officially published until January, but I got my hands on an advanced copy.

My year in books

The TBR stack is not helped by the holidays and the Key West Literary Seminar.

I never read enough new books to come up with a top 10 of those like the pros do. But I do like to look back on what I read and come up with some recommendations. I read less than usual this year for which I can only blame one thing: radio. Two months of intensive radio school at Transom, and lots of freelancing when I got home, for radio and print, meant I didn’t have as much brain capacity for serious reading as I usually do. Still, I managed to read a few dozen books and made some discoveries.

Favorite work of fiction, overall: Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood

Maybe it’s because it’s the last book I completed in 2014, but I don’t think so. I think this story collection would have stuck with me no matter when in the year I’d read it. Stone Mattress is Atwood’s first story collection in almost a decade and she’s still got it. The stories are dystopian without despair, funny and elemental and shockingly perceptive about our most intense fears. And hopes, too. Lots about aging, which is increasingly terrifying, but Atwood’s wit and humanity make it somehow easy to go down.

Favorite work of nonfiction, overall: True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa by Michael Finkel

I don’t remember hearing about Michael Finkel’s fall from journalistic grace, when he was fired from the New York Times Magazine after making some stuff up. He was no Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass but what he did was bad enough to get him justifiably disgraced. Soon after — in fact at the very moment his disgrace was going public — he learned that his identity had been appropriated by a man accused of murdering his wife and children in Oregon. Finkel, having nothing else to do, struck up a correspondence and eventually a friendship of sorts with his pretender. The book is everything its subtitle promises and there’s no question Finkel is a terrific writer. Read it now and you’ll be extra-informed when the movie version, starring James Franco and Jonah Hill, comes out later this year. More on this book in my September reading roundup.

Favorite work of nonfiction in which I am mentioned in the acknowledgments: The Shelf: From LES to LEQ: Adventures in Extreme Reading by Phyllis Rose 

Full disclosure: I know Phyllis, who spends winters in Key West, and I am even mentioned in this book though not by name. She asked me about library weeding practices when I was working at the Key West Library. This book, though, is not about that so much as it is about the delights and perils of semi-random reading. She chose a shelf, not at random but a shelf nonetheless from her library in New York and doggedly read her way through. Her reports are entertaining, sometimes depressing but always enlightening. And she reminded me of the dwindling pleasures of browsing, of just finding a book by accident. You have to do that on purpose these days.

Favorite historical fiction series: Emmanuel Cooper series by Malla Nunn

Malla Nunn appeared at the Key West Literary Seminar last year and was a revelation for many of us. I’m fond of historical crime fiction anyway, and her books are exactly why I love that genre — because it’s a way to enter another era and follow a character in a time and place there is no other way to reach. And because it’s crime fiction, the fissures in society are exposed. This is especially true in Nunn’s series, which is set in early 1950s South Africa, just as apartheid is taking hold. Our hero, Emmanuel Cooper, is a World War II veteran-turned-detective who has connections at many levels of society and has to navigate an increasingly irrational world while maintaining his integrity. The fact that they’re beautifully written doesn’t hurt, either.

Favorite contemporary fiction series: Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith

You’re probably aware that Robert Galbraith is really J.K. Rowling. I picked up the first in this series, The Cuckoo’s Calling, mostly out of curiosity to see if her insanely readable style would translate from YA fantasy to adult crime fiction. It does, and Cormoran is a wonderfully interesting lead, an Afghanistan war veteran who’s lost his leg and his posh fiancee. And he’s the son of a Boomer rock star. But I really fell in love with this series with the second volume, The Silkworm — so much that I wish Rowling would quit messing around with whatever Potter follow-ups she’s doing and just focus on Cormoran. How many books is it going to take before he and his assistant, Robin, acknowledge that they’re falling for each other???

Favorite graphic work: Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

It’s not really a graphic novel or even a memoir in the style of Fun Home — Hyperbole and a Half is a compilation from Brosh’s blog posts. But it is so brilliant and funny and honest and all of the things that make me so happy that the Internet exists to give people like Brosh a platform. Just read it.

Favorite romance novel: Rogue Spy by Joanna Bourne

I’m reading a little less romance in recent months (increasing employment? Proximity to the Key West Literary Seminar?) — but I read a bunch over the summer and fall and the best by far as the latest in Joanna Bourne’s Spymaster series. Half the time I want to push these books on people who dismiss the entire genre as Fifty Shades of Grey-like in their writing. Half the time, I feel like those people don’t really deserve to get a fun, smart read like this anyway.

Favorite cap to a supernatural trilogy: The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness

I re-read the first two volumes in this series (A Discovery of Witches and Shadow of Night) in preparation for reviewing this book for The Miami Herald … and they got better on re-reading. And she brought it all together in the final volume. Brava! Even though I kind of hate it when a series I love wraps up after only three books, I also appreciate that the author has created a world and a story and moved on .. so we’re not all left hanging out there, Westeros-style. A close second in trilogy-capping goes to The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman, which I also reviewed for the Herald and also liked very much.

Favorite beginning to a new supernatural trilogy: The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway

I just happened upon this in a really nice bookstore in Falmouth last spring. And when I saw the blurb from Eloisa James calling it something like a love child of Jane Austen and Doctor Who .. I was all in. It’s got time travel. It’s got romance. It’s got intrigue. Just read the damned thing and hope Ridgway doesn’t take too long coming up with the next installment.

Favorite book that won me over despite my cynical attitude: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

I picked this up at the same bookstore in Falmouth — I just had to get some reading in after a few weeks of intensive listening — despite some reservations. Because I have a default contrarian attitude toward books like this that are book club/library patron favorites. My fear, I guess, is that they will be manipulative, or treacly, or not as well written as everyone tells me they are (I’m still getting over having to read Ya-Ya Sisterhood for a book club like 15 years ago). But since this one was about books, I gave it a try anyway and damned if I wasn’t charmed, entertained, touched, all of that. A really nice story.

 

 

 

 

Carnegie Medals: In which I (almost) make a literary prize reading deadline

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Every year when the shortlists for various literary prizes — Booker, Pulitzer, National Book Award — are announced, I think hey wouldn’t it be cool to read all the finalists and compare my judgment with the judges? But I never do. This year, however, I had no excuse when the finalists were announced for the Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. This is the second year for this prize, given by the American Library Association — and I would be attending the annual conference in Chicago. I bought tickets to the ceremony and started reading — there were only six books total, three fiction and three nonfiction.

Neither of my top choices — The Round House by Louise Erdrich and The Mansion of Happiness by Jill Lepore (with a serious caveat I’ll get to below) — were the ones chosen by the judges. The winners were Canada by Richard Ford and Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher by Timothy Egan. All six were excellent reads; I highly recommend them and I’m glad I did this. I’ll probably do it again next year. And then maybe take on another project: reading the winners of the various big contests and comparing them to each other.

A couple things I learned along the way:

* I’ve been neglecting my literary fiction — for the last couple years I’ve been on an extended genre jag. Which is cool … but means I’m missing out on some great books. It was good to have a reason to read some of the best current fiction. Canada was probably my least favorite of the three but it was an absorbing, if grim, read. It did feature a few fantastic lines like this one about spending the day at the movies in Mississippi:

“We’d emerge at four out of the cool, back into the hot, salty, breathless Gulf Coast afternoon, sun-blind and queasy and speechless from wasting the day with nothing to show for it.”

And that is EXACTLY what it’s like after you go to the early show at the Regal.

* After reading This is How You Lose Her, I didn’t at all buy the argument that it was misogynistic or otherwise hostile towards women — if anything, Junot Diaz goes out of his way to show what an idiot Yunior is for repeatedly screwing up relationships with smart, cool women. Hence, the title.

* I liked Spillover and I feel kind of guilty for it not being my favorite in the nonfiction category — in fact, it was probably my least favorite of the three — but I’d just like to take the opportunity here to say that David Quammen is an amazing science writer for nonscientists and if you haven’t read The Song of the Dodo, his masterpiece about island biogeography, go do it RIGHT NOW. It’s one of the books I’d grab if my house were on fire. Seriously.

* There wasn’t a theme at all to the choices, but the fiction titles were all coming of age stories, which is interesting since Erdrich and Ford are in the double digits, bookwise. And even more interesting, all three were celebrations of geekdom — Canada’s young hero is seriously into beekeeping, Yunior is a comics geek and Joe and his buddies in The Round House are obsessed with Star Trek: The Next Generation. I liked that about all of them.

* The Mansion of Happiness was the easiest going down of the nonfiction titles and I was glad to see it here since it didn’t seem to make a lot of other year’s best lists, and I admire and respect Jill Lepore as one of those top-notch academics who writes for humans (she’s a Harvard professor AND a New Yorker staff writer). But the book felt more like a compilation of great New Yorker pieces than a cohesive book. I’d already read most of them in the magazine and I still enjoyed reading them again — it was full of fun facts about board games and attitudes toward breast-feeding (like the book called Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes, Drawn out of the Breasts of Both Testaments, published in 1646), the history of library children’s rooms and the publication of Stuart Little, sex education and eugenics (including the fact that the guy behind the Ladies’ Home Journal column “Can This Marriage Be Saved” was a hardcore eugenicist. Lovely).

* This little project helped clarify for me the role of ebooks and ereaders in my life. Obviously they’re great for immediate gratification and convenience and I have no intention of giving them up. But I think I’ll try to limit my use of them on my genre reading, which is really focused on plot and character, and not for nonfiction and literary fiction, where I need to focused in a different way. I bought Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher as an ebook shortly after it came out — but when it came to reading it, I had a difficult time. Which also could have been due to other events in my life at the time. I didn’t finish it before the awards ceremony, which made me feel bad — I was so close to actually meeting my deadline. But I bought a couple print copies at ALA — they were reduced price! And we didn’t have it in the library collection! — and found my reading was much easier when I switched formats. This is not a judgment on the quality or value of different types of books — just an observation of my own reading experience. And means, as I had suspected and hoped, that there will be a continuing role for print for many of us even as ereaders and ebooks find their place in what one marketing dude at ALA called “the reading ecosystem.”

The inevitable end-of-year best list

My list of best books I read this year is composed of books that were published this year, at least in fiction. That’s not usually the case, but I think it’s part of the deal with working at a library (and getting ever-increasing access to advanced review copies, both in print and digitally).

Fiction:

This year for me, fictionally, was all about the sequels. Like everyone else I adored Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning follow-up to her Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall. If you can’t get enough of the Tudor era, having a fine novelist at the top of her form inhabit that era — from a previously underrepresented viewpoint, that of Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell — is literary nirvana.

Also in Tudor-land but with a contemporary, and paranormal, perspective was Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness, sequel to her blockbuster A Discovery of Witches. In this book, the protagonists travel back to the time of Elizabeth I in search of answers about their history, their destiny and the powers of academic scholar and reluctant witch Diana Bishop. The best shorthand description I can come up with for these books is Harry Potter for Grownups.

I also loved Crucible of Gold, the seventh entry in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series Napoleonic Wars — with dragons! No honestly, it’s awesome — of course thanks to George R.R. Martin and HBO dragons have a little more cultural cache than when I first started raving about this series. To be perfectly honest, the last couple entries weren’t as engaging as the first three, but I was invested enough in the series to keep going and I’m so glad I did.  The newest book is definitely back on track. Here’s hoping she keeps going with this story as long as Patrick O’Brian did with his Aubrey-Maturin series.

Nonfiction:

I’m going to go with the collected works of Rick Geary, who does historical true crime in graphic format under the rubric A Treasury of Victorian Murder and A Treasure of 20th Century Murder. I read a bunch of them this year and I can’t pick a favorite. They’re all fantastic.

I also loved Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer, his memoir/meditation on not really getting down to writing a critical study of D.H. Lawrence, though the book does include many interesting considerations of Lawrence as Dyer checks out various Lawrence hangouts. Dyer will be here for the Key West Literary Seminar next month (both sessions!) and I am simultaneously dying to hear him in person and terrified to hear what he’ll have to say about Key West. He is hysterically, viciously funny on the less appealing characteristics of various tourist towns he visits in Out of Sheer Rage so I’m guessing we’ll be in for it from him, sooner or later.

Honorable mentions:

People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry — Contemporary true crime done extremely well, with nuance and compassion. Blessedly free of sensationalism and righteousness.

Live By Night by Dennis Lehane — Another sequel of sorts, a follow up to The Given Day and even better, in my opinion. Set in Boston and Tampa during Prohibition. Fans of Boardwalk Empire should check it out.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn — The bestseller that keeps on going — and for good reason. I gulped this one down in just a couple sittings.

The Twelve by Justin Cronin — Yes, yet another sequel, this one to the post-viral-vampire-apocalyptic The Passage. He jumps around in time and wields a huge cast of characters and you manage to stay with him. As with Mantel and Harkness, I’m now trying not to count the days until the final installment in the trilogy.

I can’t get enough of end-of-the year best lists. If you’re like me you can’t do better than this source, a blog by Large-hearted Boy. In the individual list category, I loved this one. And I appreciate the large-mindedness of NPR in their different categories. They even acknowledge that smart people read romance!

Besties forever

I am unable to resist best book lists of almost any form so I’ve been keeping an eye on the usual end of the year productions. I’m not as into it as some others, like the blogger Largehearted Boy, who amasses a giant list of best lists, or the librarian/bloggers at the Williamsburg Public Library, who take all those lists and turn them into one mega-list (though that list is broken into different categories, mostly for fiction).

Mostly, I keep an eye out for the lists compiled by the sources I rely on most for book reviews — The New York Times and Salon (which has separate lists for fiction and nonfiction). But I have to admit this year my favorite list came from Lev Grossman at Time magazine (which also had separate fiction and nonfiction lists). Perhaps it’s Grossman’s unapologetic appreciation of genre fiction — which was an awful lot of my fiction reading this year. Or, in a related angle, it’s his noticing books that are not the usual suspects — two graphic novels (The Death-Ray and Hark! A Vagrant!) became Christmas gifts in my house this year after I saw them on the list.

My best list consists of books I read this year, whenever they were published — though a large number were indeed new this year (one of the many benefits of working at a library is access to advanced review copies and awareness of newly published works). I chose my favorites with flat-out enjoyment as my only criterion, realizing that many factors go into that.

Fiction: A Song of Ice & Fire, books 1-3, George R.R. Martin (That’s A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords)

Nonfiction: Rin Tin Tin, Susan Orlean.

My top 100

I wonder what it is about lists? Is it staving off death by making sure there’s always something left to do? Is it trying to bring order to chaos? Whatever it is, I’m obsessed with them, both with the “best of” types compiled by various publications and organizations and with my own, books to be read, books I have read, etc.

So I was intrigued to see on Pages of Julia, one of my favorite new blogs, a list of 100 books people most like to read, give and share compiled by a British organization called World Book Night. It’s an interesting list. Julia, a Houston librarian and book reviewer, also has a page on her blog with her own list of 100 “most important/should read/best books”. So as with all excellent ideas, I decided to steal it.

My list of 100 consists of books I’ve read and that have stayed with me, some for decades. When I was a kid I was a big re-reader; I would read some books (the Little House books, the Chronicles of Narnia, Caddie Woodlawn) over and over.  The first 31 of these titles I came up off the top of my head; after that I had to consult my LibraryThing catalog.

I had thought a lot of my personal “best books” were nonfiction so I was surprised to find fiction winning the race here — especially impressive since fiction in series were limited to one entry. I hope anyone who finds their way to this list might come up with some titles of interest — and it may change over time. The last entry is a book I finished reading last night — Susan Orlean’s new book about Rin Tin Tin — which I think is her best book yet.

I hope this list also helps me, and anyone who comes across it, in providing book recommendations. A friend asked me awhile back to name my favorite book — and i blanked. After compiling all of these … I still can’t name a single favorite book. But all of these are books I would recommend to others and would not mind re-reading.

Addendum: Time magazine provides its list of 100 best nonfiction books of all Time. Hmph. I think the only one we share is Mystery Train by Greil Marcus — though it has me considering switching from The White Album to Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. My list will change, by the way. Just yesterday I took out one of the three Jane Smiley titles and replaced it with A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. And I’m always reading!

Is this just fantasy?

Best lists aren’t just for the end of the year — and they’re not just for professional book critics, either. Right now, NPR has a fun exercise going, compiling a list of the 100 best science fiction and fantasy books ever written. They’re soliciting suggestions (five titles at a time) from listeners/readers and in four days they’ve received more than 4,600 posts. Take that, all you reading-is-dead handwringers!

There are a couple rules — you can suggest a series as one of your entries, as long as that series is written by a single author. And YA is banned, which made it a little difficult for me because Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy would have been high on my list.

Still, even though I would not consider myself a big reader of scifi or fantasy, I managed to come up with five. * Here’s my list, in no particular order: Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series (always glad to give this one a mention; it’s alternative historical fiction, Napoleonic wars with dragons and it’s AWESOME). Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, a loopy literary alternaworld to which I will be forever grateful for getting me through the Horrible Hurricane Year of 2005. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis — highly recommended for people who like medieval stuff and/or time travel. American Gods by Neil Gaiman, which needs no help from me but is pretty cool, and will soon be a major motion picture. And The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas, a book about a book that is powerful and strange. Both books, I mean. Just read it.

If you are into books, by the way, and you don’t follow or check NPR’s books coverage (it’s compiled at their website and has the requisite Facebook and Twitter feeds) then you are missing out. And if you prefer to get your radio auditorially but can’t listen to NPR all day long, they do a nice podcast of compilations of their books coverage every week or two.

The Guardian, another bastion of book coverage in the popular media, has also compiled a 100 best list recently, their picks for best nonfiction titles. They solicited reader suggestions after the fact; my contribution was The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen. Amazing book about biodiversity and evolution and island biogeography and if those sound like heavy, dry subjects then trust me, in Quammen’s hands they are not. If and when I have to do a serious weed of my own book collection, this will be one of the last to go.

* Addendum from 8/18/11 — Since writing this I have joined the George R. R. Martin Cult and am midway through the third book in his Song of Ice and Fire series — and they really as addictive as everyone says. Martin didn’t need my help — he still scored high on the final list — and I’m not sure which of my initial five I’d knock out. Either American Gods or the Thursday Next series, which is loopier than straight-up fantasy anyway.