Happy New Year, readers!
I’m a bit late to the party in sharing my favorite books
from 2016, but it’s been a big year for us!
Web and I both continued working for software startups, his (
Clari) providing a SaaS solution for sales
analytics, and mine (
Infinio) improving
storage performance in virtualized datacenters. If our kids don’t turn out to
be venture capitalists, we’ll be very surprised.
That’s right – “kids” – on May 28th, we added
Micah Julien to our family. He’s a
healthy, happy little guy who is working on sitting up by himself, and eating
an unending supply of cereal. Sasha
turned 3 this month and is thriving in preschool. She is a loving and attentive
big sister, eager to include Micah in all our family activities. Cockapoo Lucy also loves our new addition,
and does a great job cleaning under his high chair.
I read 31 books this year – fewer than in past years, but
still not bad. J I also read a disproportionate number of
“beach reads” during maternity leave and after.
Here are my favorites, in the order I read them. Click on each link to read my full review:
Fiction
Pigs
in Heaven – when a white woman’s adopted Native American daughter becomes
famous, questions about her adoption arise.
Gold –
two best friends who are Olympic ice skaters compete with each other and try to
balance family and friendship over their careers.
The
Last Good Paradise – when a group of tourists, each unhappy in their own
way, vacation on a remote Polynesian island, unlikely relationships and
alliances form.
The
Pearl that Broke its Shell – parallel stories of women living in
Afghanistan in different generations, each trying to survive, by living
disguised as a man.
Station
Eleven – in this character-driven novel, a traveling group of performers
try to survive amidst the chaos and danger of a post-apocalyptic world.
Non-fiction
The Filter
Bubble – commentary on how monetizing the Internet is leading to individual
access to information becoming an increasingly narrow view.
Seabiscuit
– the saga of the most unlikely horse to become a champion racehorse, 1920’s
the people who surrounded him, and the nation’s shared excitement of his rise.
Brain
on Fire – a memoir of a young woman’s family’s quest to get an accurate
diagnosis for an unusual brain disease, after being mis-diagnosed repeatedly.
Tender
Points – my cousin’s book on women, trauma, and chronic pain, in short
vignettes and poems, part memoir, part commentary.
“I have little kids”
Fiction
Little
Big Lies – the lies that several women tell each other, and themselves,
begin to catch up to them in a small town, but in the end, women’s friendship
wins.
Written
in my Own Heart’s Blood – the next of the Outlander books, a familiar romp
through history with beloved characters, and the most puzzling ending of all
the novels thus far
The
Husband’s Secret – a seemingly happy marriage is threatened when a woman
finds some information about her husband he has been hiding
Girl
on a Train –a mystery about a woman whose fantasies about a couple whose
house she could see from the train each day began to intersect her real life.
What
Alice Forgot – after an accident at the gym, a woman wakes up in the
hospital to find that her happy marriage has dissolved and she has more
children than she remembered.
Dark
Places – decades after it happens, a woman helps to investigate the murder
of her family in her childhood home
Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
