Top Books of 2008

Happy New Year, readers.

2008 was a notable year for me personally -- I married Webster and finished grad school. Literarily (is that a word?) it was a great year too; I read over 40 books with almost a third of them being non-fiction and nearly half making the "Top Books" list.

If you read the reviews (click on the book for the link), you'll see that many of these were recommended by you - my readers! Please continue to send recommendations to me, because they increase the number of good books I get to read each year. And don't forget that this blog is updated throughout the year with short reviews of what I've most recently finished.

So without further ado...the list.


Book that most changed my life: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan - Examination of what and how we eat in America today and how to improve it. I still think of what I learned often while cooking or eating.


Fiction I could not put down:

• Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen - Old circus performer looks back on his life
• Run by Ann Patchett - Affluent white family adopts two black children in Boston
• A Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier - Life in the semi-dead world that people go to as long as someone living on Earth still remembers them
• What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman - Mystery about sisters, abducted 20 years earlier
• Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond - Woman loses her fiance's daughter at the beach one day
• Garden of Last Days by Andrew Dubus III - Imagining of one of the hijackers last few days before 9/11 and the lives of the people he interacted with

Runner-up Fiction:

• People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks - Imagined history of the Sarajevo Haggadah
• The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao - Dominican adjusts to life as an immigrant in a memorably voice.
• A Free Life by Ha Jin - Chinese family seeks the American dream as immigrants
• Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon - Women hosts radio show in failing Latin American country
• The Gravediggers Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates - Epic about a woman's life escaping abuse and poverty
• In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar - Coming-of-age book set in Libya in the 1970s.

Great Non-Fiction:

• Leaving Microsoft to Change the World by John Wood - Microsoft Exec is inspired to leave Microsoft and start a global charity for libraries in developing counties.
• When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin - White man returns to Zimbabwe to see the collapse of the country mirrored by the collapse of his aging parents' health
• Monkey Girl by Edward Humes - An examination of the recent fights about intelligent design versus evolution in school systems
• Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls - Woman grows up in abject poverty with unfit parents
• The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman - Gentiles who own a zoo save numerous Jewish families during WWII with nationalistic and naturalistic motivations
  

So that's it for 2008. Here's to a 2009 that is happy, healthy, prosperous, and full of great books.

Love, Sheryl

The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman

I bought this at Borders a couple months ago and really enjoyed reading it. It's a true story about a family who owns a zoo in Warsaw Poland in the 1930s. When WWII breaks out, they become part of the Polish resistance, assisting numerous Jewish families to hide and escape Poland.

The character development was superb. The motivation of both the husband and wife, based on their love of nature and their nationalist, was clear throughout the book. The characters were depicted as greatly compassionate and intensely brave but not without their foibles.

Another thing I liked about the book was a general history of Poland during WWII that explained some of the military and national issues that I had not known. My knowledge of WWII is rooted in Holocaust studies and the impact on the Jewish community, but it was interesting to read about the larger geo-political issues that created that environment.

I also appreciated being reminded of some major figures in the Warsaw ghetto, such as Janusz Korczak, gentile doctor who cared for Jewish orphans and died at Treblinka with them, and Rabbi Kalonymus Shapira, who brought joy and hope to a community in great despair. I did struggle with Ackerman's style of writing sometimes, though, when she wrote of the Nazis journalistically instead of with anger and hate.

Overall, a really interesting read about ordinary people compelled to the extraordinary in a time of crisis.

Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen

This book was on the New York Times' 2008 Notable Books list. I was surprised to find it on the shelf at the library and picked it up right away. The novel is by an American who has studied in Argentina, and her style includes the magical realism commonly found in South American literature. She is also a doctor, which comes through in her writing.

The story follows a psychiatrist who is treating a patient who has disappeared. At the same time, he begins to suspect that there is a woman in his house pretending to be his wife, and that his wife has disappeared as well. As he embarks on a trip to Argentina to track down his wife, we start to wonder if he is losing his mind or experiencing a strange collection of incidents. The unreliability of the narrator becomes a major part of figuring out what is going on.

While I enjoyed the first half of this book, I found the second part, leading into the climax, to be more tedious than anything. The things happening in the book were confusing and I could not find the links and symbolism that should have been there for me to appreciate his breakdown completely. I did think Galchen ended the book well, but I would have appreciated better editing in the middle.

Under the Tree this year

Yay. I received two books from the top of my list for Christmas from my in-laws: Wally Lamb's The Hour I First Believed and David Wroblewski's Story of Edgar Sawtelle. I can't wait to read them.

Hybrids by Robert Sawyer

I flew through this, the last of Sawyer's three books comprising the Neanderthal Parallax, during our delayed flight to Rochester for Christmas. I really enjoyed both Humans and Hominids, and held off on reading this as long as possible.

Like the previous two books, this is about the characters on both sides of a portal that links our world with that of an alternate world based on Neanderthals' not becoming extinct. In this book, Mary and Ponter work out what it means to be a couple in love across these two worlds.

I enjoyed this book but thought that Sawyer tried to cover too many issues in too short a book. Within the 400 reasonably-fonted pages was an attempt to address our penal system, privacy, homosexuality, fidelity, and a few other big items. While I always appreciate the social commentary science fiction enables, I thought this book could have been better without quite so much of it.

That said, I did like the book and will miss looking forward to more books with these characters.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Wow. I first noticed this book when a stranger sat down next to me a brunch a few months ago with it. She recommended it and I've been looking forward to trying it.

This is a memoir about a woman's unusual childhood. Walls grew up as one of four children with two unbelievably creative, irreverent, and irresponsible parents. She moved around a lot as a child, living in intense poverty and often being forced to leave places in the middle of the night due to financial and social obligations her parents didn't fulfil. The family often lives without food, heat, electricity, and other necessities for over a decade.

It is easy for the reader to feel angry towards her parents and the other adults in her life, but Walls does not relate any of that in her writing. She tells her story with compassion and wit - with the eye of an adult but the heart of a child. Her journalistic background (she now writes for MSNBC) shines through as she relates her stories.

I hope Walls decides to share a bit more of her story going forward. I would like to know the details of her life once she grows up which are condensed into a few short chapters at the end of this book. But I am grateful that she decided to share this much - it is a brave book and one that I am happy to have read.

The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III

This was a great book! I had read Dubus' House of Sand and Fog several years ago as part of a now-defunct book club and liked it. However, I had been avoiding this book because it included 9/11 content and while I did enjoy Safron Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I have not otherwise sought out that theme.

Glad I did choose this book though. It's fiction, based on the idea that some of the real 9/11 hijackers were found to have spent time at Florida strip clubs to disguise their devoutness. This book follows several characters through a few days: a hijacker-to-be, the stripper he meets one night, her daughter, her landlady, another patron at the club, and a bouncer.

The characters were all exceptionally well-developed with distinctive voices. The story moved quickly, and the writing was excellent.

River Run Bookstore in Portsmouth New Hampshire

We were in Portsmouth for our anniversary this weekend and stopped by River Run Bookstore. Though small, it had great sections on Science, Mystery, and Sustainability. It was also serving as the neighborhood meeting post that morning - many folks were out of power and heat due to the storm and everyone was comparing notes at the bookstore. There was a great story posted on the wall about how when the store moved locations there was a human chain of volunteers that moved the boxes of books to the new store. Before leaving, we bought two books there for holiday gifts.

Later in the day, we found the sister bookstore to River Run that sells secondhand books - it was tiny, but had lots of appealing books for $5 (softcover) and $7 (hardcover). Webster bought an Umberto Eco book but I used my willpower to avoid both Three Cups of Tea and the Jeanette Winters book, both on my library queue.

Below the secondhand bookstore was a great travel and map store called Gulliver's. We found two books on the Azores, which is looking like this summer's destination for us.

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

I really enjoyed this book. It looked short, but was reasonably dense so it took me a few extra nights to finish. I had seen it on several book lists (I think it was a Booker Prize shortlist) and I was excited when it came up on my library queue.

The book is about a nine-year-old boy growing up in Libya in 1979. His father is rather cold and involved in some sort of secretive political activities. His mother copes (or doesn't) with alcohol. This book follows a few months of time when his father and other family friends are taken by the authorities and he is trying to understand what is going on.

What I most liked about this book was that it told a story from a young boy's point of view without its being a juvenile story. While he is confused about what is happening (though it is clear to the reader), the narrator does not become so childish as to make the book too basic for an adult audience (like in Tomato Girl).

The Regulators by Richard Bachman

I was on a whirlwind tour of several customers with a coworker named Lance when we got to talking about books. Turns out he is a huge Stephen King fan and pointed me towards this book as well as its partner, Desperation by Stephen King, which tells the story from a different point of view.

I really enjoyed this book although it's far from the mainstream fiction that makes up more than half of what I typically read. This book is pure science-fiction with some horror built in. It is gruesome, clever, and creepy. It centers around a quiet neighborhood that begins to experience very strange phenomena one afternoon that quickly escalate into large-scale violence. That description does not do the plot justice, but I don't want to ruin any of the surprises in the story. I had forgotten how good Stephen King's writing can be and it was fun to rediscover him.

I can't wait to get to Desperation to see the other half of the story.