My Favorite Reads in 2016

At the risk of sounding smug, I surpassed my Goodreads goal of 70 titles this year.  I have friends who can match me title for title, but I mention my statistic to give you a sense of how much better the following books were than 60 others that I read.  To make my top list, a book had to be very engaging and fairly well written.  While most of these titles will not go on to become literary classics, they were all satisfying and worthy reads.  In no particular order:

NOVELS

Under The Harrow by Flynn Berry

A mighty fine first novel that is a literary mystery that starts with a woman’s discovery of her sister – dead – when she arrives for a weekend visit – and her attempt to solve the crime, discovering much about her sibling – and closest friend - that she did not know.

Ready, Player One by Ernest Kline

A futuristic, sci-fi novel, the story is told through the eyes of a teenage boy whose virtual reality self is more real than the actual world he inhabits.

My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry by Frederik Backman

This is one of a trio of books by Backman that I read this year (including A Man Called Ove and Britte-Marie Was Here), and they were all good. The novels all take place in the author’s native Sweden (and are translated) and there is definitely a European feel about them.  The protagonists are all charming and despite some dark moments, there’s also a good deal of humor.  My favorite might be “My Grandmother,” told through the eyes of a little girl, but I just finished "Britte-Marie" and it was great too.  

Truly Madly Guilty by Liane Moriarty

While I think this author’s best work is Big, Little Lies, I enjoy everything she does.  The pivotal event surrounds something that occurs at a neighborhood barbecue.  The narrative jumps back and forth in time and the reader doesn’t know what actually happened until two-thirds of the way through.

Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell

This is a novel that is wildly popular with high school kids as the two protagonists are teenagers, but the issues are very adult and Rowell creates both realistic voices and poignant moments.

LaRose by Louise Erdich

Erdich almost always writes about Native Americans, reflecting her own heritage, and this latest from her is no exception.  I thought her book from a few years ago, The Round House, was one of the best books that I have ever read – a hard act to follow – but LaRose proves to be equally intriguing and complex.  Erdich weaves together the contemporary story of a man who, because he mistakenly shoots the son of his best friend while hunting, gives his own son to the family, with flashback sections to several decades earlier, and to a story that appears in infrequent fragments about an Indian girl and a white trader in the 1800’s. 

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

This is an earlier title by the author of the prize-winning The Goldfinch, and I liked this one better.  It is the story of a group of friends at a small New England college whose secret leads to more secrets and hard choices.

The Mare by Mary Gaitskill

I wrote about this title several times this year.  It’s a very literary book told in alternating points of view about a teenager from the Bronx who escapes to the countryside for a few weeks in the summer through a program designed to expose disadvantaged children to a different life.  The woman who takes her in and who introduces her to horses turns out to be as needy in her own way as the child.

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

A modern re-telling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Sittenfeld does the original justice as she transplants her story to modern-day Cincinnati.  If you are familiar with the original, all the more fun to see the parallels, but you don’t have to know Austen to enjoy this novel of family complexity and the search for love. 

Euphoria by Lily King

Based very loosely on a couple years in the life of Margaret Mead, Euphoria tells the story of a dangerous love triangle between an Australian man, a British man and an American woman, all cultural anthropologists, set in 1930’s Papua New Guinea. 

NONFICTION

It’s a short list because I am an unapologetic reader of fiction, however I’d like to recommend two titles:

My Salinger Year by Joanna Radkoff

Radkoff takes you through her first job in New York in publishing in the late 1990’s as the assistant to the woman who represented J.D. Salinger.  The book is not really about the famous author, as the title implies, but rather about a great coming of age story that sheds an interesting light on the publishing business and which captures the aura of NYC.

In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson

Actually any book by travel writer Bryson is a good time.  Part history and geography lesson, part commentary on his travels, Bryson includes laugh out loud anecdotes and makes dry quips that make you feel like you are there with him.  This title, published in 2001, chronicles several overland treks through Australia, “the most dangerous continent in the world.”

And on my nightstand. . .

Read Me a Story, Part 2

When I took a job 19 years ago that required me to commute 30 minutes one way, I began checking out books on CD from my local library.  My road rage went down and sitting in traffic was less annoying if I was listening to a book.  With the innovation of downloadable audio books (also from my library) and a smart phone, I discovered even more opportunities for listening.  Now, when I walk most mornings, I plug in my ear buds and hit play in Overdrive (the app that communicates with my library) and I’m off.  Thanks to modern technology (again, my smartphone), I can continue my book when I am driving (as it syncs to my car) and while I’m cooking or painting.  In this way, I usually finish an audio book in a week or two, part of my secret of reading so many books in a year.

As to that, I long ago quit thinking about whether listening to a book really constitutes “reading” it.  It’s true that it is a different experience than turning a physical page or swiping on my Kindle.  It’s hard to go back and find a passage from earlier and impossible to highlight or write margin notes.  For those reasons, I generally don’t listen to a book that my book group will be discussing, but for pure pleasure, having a professional reader essentially tell you a story is wonderful.

The quality of the reader is definitely an issue and I have returned some books without finishing them because the reader was so grating or too monotone.  There are writers who insist on reading their own work and generally, I have found that to be a bad idea.  One exception is David Sedaris, a humorist writer of essays and short stories.  Sedaris isn’t everyone’s taste; he drops the f-word frequently and he is unapologetically gay (so if that bothers you, skip forward), but I think it’s hard to find someone who tells a better story and he makes you laugh out loud.  Having discovered his audible books, I would not conventionally read one; he’s just that good with his voice.  Another author who reads his own work is Bill Bryson, the travel author.  I recently listened to In a Sunburned Country, his book about his travels in Australia.  Bryson is rather dry – not unlike much of Australia’s landscape, as it turns out – but he also makes frequent understated observations that, with his delivery, can also make you chuckle aloud.  A third writer who narrates her own books that I listened to this year is Donna Tartt (My Secret History).  Tartt has a soft, Southern accent that I initially found at odds with her setting of an elite New England college, but she grew on me.  I got lost in her story and forgot she was there.

Most authors hand their work over to actors or professional readers.  One of the best books that I listened to this year was a science fiction novel by Ernest Kline entitled Ready, Player One.  The novel was read by professional actor Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher on “Star Trek, the Next Generation” and a recurrent role as himself on “The Big Bang Theory” ) and, in addition to the great voice acting, Wheaton was a particularly good choice for Kline’s allusions to space movies and t.v. shows, creating inside jokes for sci-fi fans. 

It is fun to begin listening to a book and realize that you recognize the voice – not because the reader is famous or a friend, but because the voice has told you other stories.  I quite coincidentally listened to two books narrated by Rebecca Lowman within a month of each other:  Curtis Sittenfeld’s Sisterland and Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park.  The latter actually alternated two voices, Lowman’s and that of a male reader, each portraying one of the title characters.  The Mare, a novel by Mary Gaitskill that I have written about before, is read by four different voices, a technique that emphasizes the different points of view offered in the novel and which works to help you keep the narration straight without the benefit of written chapter titles in front of you.

And then, having stumbled upon a series via audio book and loved the reader, I find that I want to listen to the next one too.  Such is the case with Alan Bradley’s series featuring 11 year-old sleuth Flavia DeLuce.  Jayne Entwistle, who I am guessing is a 20-something British woman, perfectly captures the whimsy and wonder of young Flavia’s voice.   One of my favorite listens this year was Fredrik Backman’s My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry.  His reader, Joan Walker, also narrates his newest, Britte-Marie Was Here.  She’s quite good with the interior contemplations of her protagonists, reflecting their angst, their joy and their revelations about themselves.

When my daughters were children, I read them to every night, usually for 45 minutes to an hour.  We started with picture books, moved on to the multiple adventures of the Magic Tree house kids and on to the complete Harry Potter series. We bought audio books for long car trips (first as cassettes and then as CDs – we had all of Harry Potter in both versions).  I credit this nighttime reading as well as the excellent voice of Jim Dale (“This is Listening Library. . .”) with enthusing my youngest daughter with a true love of listening to books.  She has her own Audible Account (where you pay for books rather than borrowing them) and – don’t tell – she’s shared her password with me.  My 83 year-old mother visits “the old people” in nursing homes each week and she brings along books to read to them.  Even though she was never a teacher, she reads like a veteran first grade educator, doing voices, and I think she enjoys the experience as much as her listeners. My conclusion?  It doesn’t matter how old you are – hearing a good book is good for the soul. 

Read Me a Story, part 1

As I started my second year of retirement this fall, I decided that I needed to do more volunteer work, and I remembered an organization to which I had give money in the past:  The Reading Connection. A nonprofit started by some Arlington teachers 27 years ago, TRC is committed to putting books in the hands of children who might otherwise not become readers.  Two incredible statistics that I learned when I attended the September orientation are: 

·      A child needs to hear approximately 1,000 stories before s/he can begin reading alone.

·      If a child isn’t reading on grade level by the end of third grade, the correlations between dropping out of school, getting arrested, and other sad fates go way up.  WOW.

·       

To that end, TRC sends volunteers weekly to 12 different sites in Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax, DC and Montgomery County.  The sites are typically affordable housing complexes or transitional housing situations.  Each weekly read-aloud has a site-specific theme.  We read books around that theme to the whole group for about 20 minutes and then divide the children into smaller groups to read an additional 15-20 minutes.  There’s an organized activity designed to extend the theme in some way, and the hour ends with the children selecting a book from a collection provided by TRC to add to their own libraries. 

I go two Monday evenings a month to a site in Arlington where our themes have included Pancakes, Ideas and Imagination, Halloween (where the activity was "turn your friend into a mummy), Around the World and, just this week, Fantastic Beasts (inspired by my viewing of the new J.K. Rowling movie and a wonderful exhibit at the Denver Science Museum on extinct animals).  The fun parts (from my point of view) are finding the books and sharing my enthusiasm for reading with the kids.  I like doing voices and making the reading an interactive experience.  

In addition to the readalouds, TRC also runs workshops for parents to teach them about reading to their children.  If you live in the DC area and would like to volunteer or just donate money to buy books for children, check out their website:  www.thereadingconnection.org.