This is my fifteenth year writing this end-of-year list, and this was as great a year for reading as ever.
Let's start with FICTION.
Of the 74 books I read this year, 56 of them were fiction. These were the best ones, which under no
circumstances could I rank so I will share them alphabetically:
Beantown was a beautifully written novel about a small town high
school hockey team whose success will bring (or stand in the way of) important
resources and fame to a failing town. The adults invested in the team are as engaged as the children, and this
story of one of their seasons was lovely and heartbreaking. The sequel has come
out and I am eager to see what happens, but dread saying goodbye to the town.
Gone to Soldiers did not seem like a Marge Piercy book as much as it
did one by Leon Uris. It was a sweeping saga, with dozens of main characters,
taking place during WWII. Some
characters are Jewish victims in Europe, others are American, and still others
are soldiers. All their lives connect, although some not right away. I
couldn’t wait to see what happened to everyone. This was a bittersweet book, and unforgettable.
Speaking of unforgettable, The Great Alone still gives me chills when I
think about it. After a family relocates to rural Alaska at the behest of the
husband, whose intermittent mania has moved the family many times, they learn
just how remote their new home is, and just how real the dangers are of living
in this place. The women are isolated and, sometimes, powerless; the heroine
comes of age in rural Alaska, and is someone easy to root for.
Somehow I missed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay along the way. I read Chabon’s wife
Ayelet Waldman’s book last year and it reminded me to try him again. Well this was superb. It was about a pair of cousins who become
comic book writers. There’s no better
way to explain the plot, but this was a saga – a wonderful story with love, heartache,
disappointment, history, intrigue, and even a little magic. I would describe this is genre-busting. Love love loved it.
The Martian, better known as a movie, was a great book. It was about an
astronaut who is stranded on Mars, and his relentless efforts to communicate
with Earth. It reminded me a lot of
Apollo 13, where it’s really a humanitarian problem disguised as an engineering
problem. Can he generate enough food,
electricity, and water to keep himself alive?
And can he keep his morale up enough to care?
I’m hardly the first person to recommend Sing, Unburied, Sing but damn it
was a great book. It was about a family in Mississippi, who is struggling with race,
drugs, incarceration, and poverty. Held together by a strong inter-generational
family structure, the family does their best to love and to support each other,
but don’t always succeed. Probably the
most beautifully written book, language-wise, I read this year.
The Power had a really unique premise. Women all over the world suddenly start to be able to emit
electricity. While it makes them
powerful in some situations, they don’t always use it with the best intentions.
And men who fear the power also act in dangerous ways. Terrifying,
empowering, and timely, this was a really thought-provoking novel.
In the same genre was The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, an Atwood-esque dystopic novel
about a world where a fever has killed most women. Childbirth becomes very dangerous,
and as a result, there are few pregnancies and babies. The narrator of the book
is a woman who masquerades as a man for her own safety, who begins to help
women with pregnancy and childbirth. Can’t
wait to get to the sequels.
Still on the topic of fiction, there are 14 other books that also really liked.
The Female Persuasion was a novel about a mentorship between a conventional
college student and a famous feminist. The Lost Family was beautifully written
story about a man who lost his first wife in the Holocaust and the new life he
tries to build with his second wife. Fruit of the Drunken Tree was a very
lyrical novel about two young girls – one the daughter of an affluent family,
the other the family’s maid – and their relationship in tumultuous Bogota, Colombia.
Pachinko was an epic about several generations of Koreans when Korea
was occupied by the Japanese. In The Twelve-Mile Straight, a woman births two babies,
one white and one black, and the consequences in her Georgia town are far
reaching; this is probably the book I was most surprised wasn’t more
heralded. I had a good time with Elinor Oliphant is Completely Fine, a quirky book about a grown woman on the autism spectrum
who makes her first friends. And Chemistry
was a quick but lovely read about a young scientist who struggles with her
personal relationships.
This Is How it Always Is was a thought provoking story about how a well-meaning
family handles their elementary-aged child who comes out as transgender. In a
similar theme, That Kind of Mother is about a white woman who adopts the child
of her black nanny, when the nanny unexpectedly dies.
Finally, but certainly not least, five books that I read taught me about
other parts of the world: Stay With Me was about a young couple who struggle
with infertility in Nigeria; Home Fire is about a set of siblings whose lives span
across London, the U.S., and the Middle East; Exit West is about a young couple
who escapes an unnamed country similar to Afghanistan; The Constant Gardner brought
me to Kenya through the eyes of a British diplomat; and Behold the Dreamers is
about a young family from Cameroon trying to make it in New York City.
And on to NONFICTION.
The remaining 18 books I read were nonfiction. By far, my favorite was The Lost, which was a
memoir written by a man searching for the family members lost in the Holocaust.
I read several wonderful memoirs about parenting and being parented: The Motherhood Affidavits, about a woman who keeps
having children, while her husband struggles to build a small-town law firm; Priestdaddy,
about a woman’s unconventional upbringing by her Catholic priest father; Educated,
about a woman’s abusive childhood and victorious reclamation of her life through
education; and I'm Just Happy to Be Here, by a favorite blogger of mine who struggled with substance
abuse as a young mother, and finds her way to be a good mother.
Both Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir about a white man growing up in
Appalachian poverty, and Between the World and Me, a letter the author writes to his son about what he should know about growing
up black in America, opened my eyes to rich and marginalized cultures within
the U.S.
The Boys in the Boat was a great story, meticulously researched and depicted, about an underdog rowing team from University of Seattle and their unlikely trip to the Berlin Olympics of 1936.
And if you just need a sweet read, that isn’t thick with plot, or
death, or adventure, or tangly relationships, then I can highly recommend Anne
Lamott’s Almost Everything, which is none of those things, and very funny, and
also very, very hopeful.
Sheryl
