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