Top Books of 2011

Happy New Year, Readers.

2011 brought lots of exciting changes.  I started a new job within Dell in February, which led to an extraordinary year of learning among a wonderful new set of people.  The startup for which Webster worked was bought over the summer and he is adjusting to working for a large company, but enjoying the challenge.  Webster and I went to Belize in February and Spain in August.  Lucy - well, c'mon, she's a dog.  But she's great. 

I read over 30 books this year.  Looking at the list, I see that only 6 of them were non-fiction, which is not what I would have estimated.  Also notable is how many of the books were set in a different time and place.  What is it I'm trying to escape? 

Here are my Top Ten favorites in alphabetical order:

Lots of people read and recommended Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.  It was an intersting story - a poor black woman with an aggressive form of cancer dies, and her cells are used for decades without her family's knowledge or approval.   What was most interesting, however, is neither the science nor the socio-economic circumstances, but the relationship that forms between the author and the family.  While completely anathema to pure journalistic values, it turned the book into more of a memoir, which I really enjoyed reading.

I'm still not sure I really know what Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann is about, but it was good.  It interspersed stories about several New Yorkers during the summer of 1974 with the story of Phillipe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers.  The writing was excellent and I was overwhelmed by how the characters' lives (at least ten different people) ultimately intersected. 

I read The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli on a long weekend getaway to Toronto. It's a love story about a young American photographer in Vietnam durng the war, the older American she falls in love with, and his Vietnamese assistant.  It's also a strong commentary on what it means to chronicle a war.  I thought this was a near-perfect book - writing, plot, characters.  I still don't know why this didn't get more positive press.
 

Meredith A. recommended Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson and it was a great read.  Not dissimilar in style to Alexander McCall Smith, this book was a fun story about a proper English gentleman who falls in love with a Pakastani neighbor, much to the chagrin of his materialistic son.  The situations in the book are simple, but it is the irony and tenderness with which the story is told that I liked the most.

Makers by Cory Doctorow is the most creative book I read this year.  I read it while we were in Belize and it kept me up late at night.  The story is set in the near future and is a wild ride through 3D printing, innovation, crowdsourcing and all sorts of other things.  The density of Doctorow's ideas was difficult to keep up with, but fun.  As a techie, I found it really amazing how Doctorow could take technical ideas and make them social ideas. 

When I picked up Our Kind of Traitor at the airport on a business trip, I wouldn't have expected it to land on my end-of-year list.  Sure, le Carre is a famous author in his genre, but I think of most spy books as fun airport reads and little else.  However, this one stayed with me all year: the way le Carre makes this story unfold is unlike any other airport book I've read.   The cover of my copy has an ambitious quote from the Globe and Mail: "Let me be specific, I think the man deserves the Nobel."  See for yourself.

Something about Outlander by Diana Gabaldon caught my eye in the bookstore.  When we went to Spain with Tyler and Jena in August it was the most perfect beach read.  The improbable story is about a woman who reunites with her husband in Scotland after WWII only to accidentally time travel back to 18th century Scotland and be accused of being a British spy.  I'll leave the rest of the 500+ narrative to the author, only to say that it's the perfect mix of trash and historical fiction.  (The first sequel of five more books - Dragonfly in Amber - was more of the same.)  

 

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson was one of the first books I read in 2010.  I remember reading it and thinking, "if I like everything I read as much as this, it will be a good book year."  The novel is about a Japanese-American man accused of murder in a small town off Puget Sound.  It takes place in 1954, with the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII still fresh in the memories of the townspeople.

State of Wonder was the book I was most excited to get my hands on in 2011, as Ann Patchett is one of my favorite authors.  This book was about a young woman sent into the Amazon by her pharmaceutical company to find a researcher who has been difficult to contact and a colleague who died under mysterious circumstances.  The descriptions of the setting were detailed and evocative, the characters were complex, and the plot was surprising. 

If I had to pick a favorite book this year - which I'm NOT doing - it might be Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum.  At the very least it was a viscerally memorable book.  Narrated by the daughter of a woman who survived during WWII, this basic narrative is outlined on the book jacket: all Trudie knows of her early life is a photo of herself, her mother, and a Nazi officer that she finds hidden in her mother things.  It is the way the story unfolds, and the burden that children carry even when they don't know the entire truth, that grabbed me.  Thanks to Terry M. for putting this on my list several years ago.
 

And then these are the other books I really, really liked.

The Big Short, Michael Lewis' book on the current financial crisis, and The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr's comparison of the cloud computing revolution to the introduction of centrally made electricity, were two nonfiction books that both took strong points of view on current topics while explaining them in English.  Yes - I know what a credit default swap is.

The Given Day is a novel about Boston in 1918-1919, during the Policeman's strike.  Dennis Lehane, known more for his pop culture books like Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River, paints a vivid portrait of the city during that time, including race relations, union politics, and Babe Ruth.

The Passage by Justin Cronin fulfilled my post-apocolyptic quota for the year.  A whopping 784 pages of the world ending, the survivors figuring out what to do, and oh, yeah, epic battles with vampire-like glow sticks.  Great fun.

The book club I recently left read both Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez (historical fiction about slave women who traveled on vacations with their masters in the U.S. during the 1840's) and A Thousand Cuts by Simon Lelic (about a school shooting and bullying - in a few different ways).  I liked those books and miss that book club.

Well that is it for 2011.  Best wishes for a wonderful 2012, with lots of health, happiness, and, of course, great books to read.

Sheryl

Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon

I really enjoyed Outlander and this is the second book in the series about a woman from the 1940's who time-travels back to 18th century Scotland.  This book starts twenty years later in the current time (the 1960's), when she visits Scotland with her daughter.  In this sequel, in the past, she and her husband Jamie travel to France to try to prevent a bloody revolution in Scotland. 

The book was a continuation of Outlander and I enjoyed it in a similar way.  While some of the fun of the first book was the novelty of the time travel and the story, the plot in this book is still compelling.  There was more historical information to keep track of in this book too.  Finally, I liked how this book also starts to play around with some of the metaphysical problems with time travel.

Looking forward to reading the next book in a few months.

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

Yuck.

This book was the first pick of a new book club I just joined. By the author of Devil in the White City, this book is about Ambassador Dodd, the American ambassador to Germany.

I guess the story of his being the ambassador is interesting enough. Considered by many to be underqualified, he moves his family to Germany in the 1930's, refusing many of the benefits in housing and transportation that are offered an ambassador. His daughter, estranged from her husband in the U.S., becomes well-known in German society and I can't describe her as anything less juicy than a hussy. She sleeps with Nazis, Fascists, and several notable writers, seemingly blind to the potential damange it could do to her father's career.

I really disliked the writing style: it felt like I was reading something really dry for school. Occassionally, Larson would foreshadow something very deliberately, but I never appreciated the payoff. I know his previous books were well-liked, but I'm not sure if I'd try them.

Boomerang by Michael Lewis

Generally speaking I like Michael Lewis and this book was pretty good. Mostly it was a chronicle of his visits to several countries with massive economic problems in 2011: Iceland, Greece, Germany, Ireland, and California. (OK, California is not a country but he covers San Jose and some surrounding towns with similar attention.) I think it started as a series for Vanity Fair. He covers each country in its own chapter, exploring the parts of each culture that contributed to their economic issues. Iceland's insular nature, Germany's quest for external perfection, Greece's friendly corruption - each of these qualities discussed using Lewis' personal experiences with people he meets there. Unlike many of his other books, he doesn't make any grand conclusions in this one. Rather, reading it is like getting a set of detailed emails from a really smart friend who is traveling the world to figure out what is happening in the world economy.

Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum

This book was excellent.

I've read a lot of Holocaust literature, starting in junior high school both as part of my Hebrew School curriculum as well as on my own.  I remember novels like When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit and Number the Stars, as well as memoirs by Frank, Frankl, and Weisel, among many others.  At some point as an adult I (guiltily) felt a little overwhelmed by how much about it I had read and stopped choosing these books. But in recent years I got a lot out of books like Sarah's Key and The Book Thief. 

When Terry recommended this a one of her top 11 books - ever- I bought it.  It had sat on my shelf until last week. And, wow - t was one of the most impactful things I've read in a long time.  It was heartbreaking and emotional and not a book I will forget for a long time.

As the book jacket explains, Trudy is a college professor who has grown up in Minnesota after surviving WWII in Germany as a child.  Her only knowledge of her father is a photo her mother Anna keeps hidden of the two of them with a man in a Nazi uniform.  I kind of thought that I could figure out what the story was going to be about, but in fact I was reasonably off-base.

Indeed some of the book takes place in Germany during the war, and the reader learns how Anna comes to have a relationship with a Nazi. But the circumstances are not what I expected.  The balance of the book, told in alternating chapters, takes place in current times, where Trudy is trying to understand her past through a research project.  She knows that she does not know the entire story...but Anna won't talk about it and Trudy has grown up knowing it is a missing piece of her history.

Part of what made this book so compelling was that the narration was unflinching.  Blum never used a metaphor, or ended a scene leaving the reader to imagine an atrocity.  It was also compelling because the characters were really good.  Neither Anna nor Trudy was expressive, but they were both characters I rooted for. 

Definitely recommended.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Like many avid readers, I was a huge fan of Eugenides' Middlesex and anxiously awaited the arrival of this novel.  I enjoyed it, although not as much as I did Middlesex. 

The story is about a young woman named Madeleine, her boyfriend Leonard, and her platonic friend Mitchell.  The story follows them from their senior year at Brown University in the early 1980's  (and some flashbacks to earlier times) through their first few years after graduation.  Madeleine and Leonard meet in a class about literary criticism; the "marriage plot" in the title is an oft-returned-to basis for the classic novel that, the class suggests, is dead. After college, Mitchell goes to India to further explore his ideas around religion, while Madeleine and Leonard navigate post-college life together. 

I didn't know the book took place in Brown when I chose it - I picked it based on author alone. I was delighted to recognize the setting and to learn that Eugenides went there too.  His descriptions of the end of college were very well-done.  I so keenly remember the parties after college ended, and the friends who struggled in ways Madeleine and Leonard and Mitchell did.  This entire book was kind of what I had hoped Emperor's Children to be. 

And even thinking about the book as if I were not a Brown grad, I would have liked it.  Madeleine was a really well-constructed character, and it was hard to believe her author was male.  All the characters were well-developed, even some of the minor ones, like Madeleine's sister and her roommates. I also enjoyed reading about Mitchell's trip abroad, and appreciated Eugenides' description of Leonard's struggles with mental illness.

I am not sure everyone would like this book, but it did capture a very specific place and time; one I remember quite vividly.

Incidentally I caught an interview with Eugenides on NPR the other night, too.