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
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