My Favorite Reads of 2017
2017 was a good
reading year for me; I almost hit my
Goodreads goal of 75 titles. As I looked back over my reading log to identify
the best books, I initially started with a list of 20. I’ve whittled it down to 15, many of which
were read with my book group, which made them even more enjoyable because of
the richness of our discussions. In
keeping with my preference for fiction, only one was nonfiction (Janesville) and while a few were
published this year, they are all post 2000.
The Nix by Nathan Hill
It took me two plane rides and three weeks to
read this 620-page book, but it was well worth it, and this may be one of my
all-time favorite novels. It is an
extraordinarily well-written book with changing voices, numerous threads that
all come together and a good deal of wit.
The story bounces back and forth between the present, in which a young
college professor is shocked to see the mother who abandoned the family 20
years earlier getting arrested at a political rally and their pasts. Among other things, it is a story about
choices, big and small, and the realization that, unlike the “Choose Your Own
Adventure” novels, in real life you can seldom go back to the fork and take the
other path.
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Another lengthy book, clocking in at almost
600 pages, but worth the effort. Franzen
is a talented writer who packs layers into his exploration of the word “freedom”
and the many contexts in which we use it, from lack of responsibility to others
to the freedom to make irresponsible decisions.
I kept hearing Janis Joplin in the background. The novel follows a family over several
decades.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail
Honeyman
Like A
Man Called Ove and Today Will be
Different , the protagonist of this novel is an eccentric , pained
individual who is healed through the development of friendships with kind
people. Eleanor survives in the only way
that she can and when the reader finally understands her pain, Eleanor becomes
far more sympathetic and admirable. Her
lack of understanding of basic social conventions is often laugh out loud
funny. By the end, Eleanor is a person
you want to both cheer for and hug tightly.
It’s an impressive book from a first-time author who won a writing
contest with her manuscript.
Behold the Dreamers by
Imbolo Mbue
Written by a
Cameroonian author who has spent ten years in America, this is the story of two
couples. Jende and Neni are from
Cameroon, lured to NYC by dreams of the land of “milk, honey and liberty, flowing
in the paradise-for-strivers called America” (19). Jende is illegal, having purposely overstayed
his visa, a concern that sits uncomfortably under the surface for both the character
and the reader. The other couple, Clark,
a broker for Lehman Brothers, and his material and status-obsessed wife, Cindy,
become the employers of the African couple.
Mbue does a great job of building sympathy for all four characters while
also exposing their foibles. As both
couples’ fortunes begin to crumble, the reader gains greater insight into the
immigrant story and why, in the words of our great president, rounding them up
and sending them home isn’t the kindest and certainly not the most feasible
solution.
Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate
This was a wonderful novel that has both
heart-breaking and joyous moments. Alternating
voices eventually come together as the story of poor children who are kidnapped
and sold to wealthy couples as orphans for adoption explains a modern
mystery. The voice of Rill Foss, the
oldest of 5 river children living with their very young parents on a houseboat
in the Mississippi, is compelling and highly sympathetic. The present-day story is that of Avery
Stafford, daughter of Senator Wells Stafford and member of a wealthy socially
placed South Carolina family. While
visiting a nursing home with her father, she encounters a woman she has never
met before who seems to recognize her and who unbeknownst to Avery, pulls her
grandmother’s bracelet from her wrist.
When Avery goes back the next day after a call from the nursing home,
she sees that the woman has a photograph of a couple and the woman looks eerily
like Avery’s own grandmother. The
reader, of course, begins to immediately suspect a connection between Rill’s
story of the past and Avery’s mystery in the present, however Wingate does a
good job of creating a few unexpected twists.
The Underground Railroad by Colson
Whitehead
Totally worthy of the Pulitzer Prize that it
won, Whitehead’s novel reimagines Tubman’s escape system as a literal train
that runs through underground tunnels, bringing enslaved people to new and
sometimes only marginally better places.
Whitehead captures the complexities of both those who attempted to help
and those who sought freedom. “Freedom
was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with
trees up close but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true
limits. Being free had nothing to do
with chains or how much space you had” (179).
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth
Strout
This was a quick read at 209 pages with
double-spaced type and short chapters that created even more white space. The physicality of the book is in keeping
with the story, which contains gaps that the reader must attempt to fill
in. Lucy, the narrator, suggests that
most of us maneuver through the world, “half knowing, half not, visited by
memories that can’t possibly be true” (14).
The main narrative takes place in Lucy Barton’s present during an
extended hospital stay after a surgery leaves her with an infection that no one
can seem to diagnose. Her mother, whom
she has not seen in years, is summoned by Lucy’s husband, and she comes for a
5-day visit, never leaving her daughter’s bedside. During this time, mother and daughter talk
about everything and nothing. Lucy asks
questions about people she used to know in the rural Illinois community she
left many years earlier for the East Coast and where her mother still lives,
occasionally bringing up incidents in their own past, which her mother
dodges. The conversations lead to
flashbacks from Lucy’s childhood and her later relationship with her husband,
William. There are also prolepsies
scattered throughout, letting the reader know that Lucy recovers from her illness
and providing glimpses of her future.
The seemingly simplistic story is actually
about the complexity of family and the long-term effects of poverty.
Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz
If you like mysteries, this one is a
rollicking good time, a very clever story within a story. A book editor receives the latest manuscript
from the small publishing house’s star writer, the author of a mystery series
in the style of Agatha Christie. The
book then becomes the manuscript for about 200 pages, an engrossing tale about
several mysterious deaths in a small English town. This story stops a chapter shy of the ending
and the book returns to the frame story.
When the editor speaks to her boss about obtaining the missing pages,
she finds out that the author is dead, supposedly killed himself. Her boss sends her to his home to try and
find the missing pages and the rest of the book is her growing suspicion and
investigation of the writer’s death as a murder rather than a suicide. She believes that clues that are within his
manuscript point to what really happened – and they do. It’s very ingenious.
Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein
I decided to read this book as a way of
gaining insight into the Trump voter.
Janesville was a prosperous town in Wisconsin, home of the Parker Pen
factory until the 1980’s and a huge General Motors plant that employed a
quarter of the town until 2008. The book
begins with the plant’s closure and its ripple effect on the economy and lives
of the people of Janesville. The book is
a collection of personal stories, tracing the lives of specific individuals
over the next 7 or 8 years. It does
explain the desperation people felt when the main source of employment in their
town disappeared (similar, I expect, to the coal mining regions). Janesville is Paul Ryan’s home town; five
generations of Ryans have lived there.
You would think that Ryan would have more sympathy for state workers,
for those who are in danger of losing health insurance, for those who now
commute hundreds of miles to support their families. The book is a fairly neutral presentation of
events and, although Ryan gets some time, there is neither criticism nor
support offered. Interestingly, Janesville
did not support Ryan in his bid to become vice-president in 2012, throwing their
support for President Obama, nor did he receive a lot of votes for his
simultaneous successful senate bid, however obviously the rest of Wisconsin saw
him more favorably.
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
The novel is replete with references to time,
beginning with the title. Characters are
passing the time, feeling like time passes too slowly or speeding by too
quickly. There is even a discussion of
quantum physics and the concept of timelines splitting with every decision one
makes. One of the main characters is
slyly named Nao, pronounced “now.” The
title seems to be saying “a story for now (which could be a story for
Nao).” As I read, however, I could see
that it is also a tale for THE time being, where the time being is a
person. Nao frequently writes about
humans as time beings, creatures that exist in time, a perspective that people
don’t usually think of.
Ruth, a writer who lives on an island off the
coast of British Columbia with her husband Oliver (which is all true of the
novel’s author as well as her fictional counterpart),finds a ziplock bag that
washes up on the beach. Inside is what
appears to be a copy of Proust’s Remembrance
of Things Past (a work preoccupied with the passage of time and the power
of memory), but it is actually a repurposed book; the pages inside contain the
handwritten journal of a Japanese teenager named Nao. There’s also a Hello Kitty box containing
some objects, including an old watch with the words “sky pilot” carved in
Japanese on the back. The story begins
as Ruth sets out to first, read the journal, and then find out more about the
writer and the family members she describes, including a great uncle who was a
kamikaze pilot in WW2 and a great grandmother who is a 104 year old Buddhist
nun. Ruth begins reading the journal and
then the narrator switches to the writer of the journal, Nao.
Shelter: a novel by Jung Yun
Thirty-six year old Kyung Cho has a lot of
baggage he has never fully dealt with.
The only son of Korean immigrants, he has grown up in a household in
which his successful father is lord and master, a man who not only subjugates
his wife but regularly physically abuses her.
She, her own desires and ambitions suppressed, in turn, takes out her
frustrations on her son. Now, as an
adult, Kyung has little to do with them, refusing invitations to dinner at
their nearby house and vacation opportunities at their beach villa. Also, he has denied them access to his five
year old son, Ethan. Despite efforts by
his wife Gillian (an Anglo from a working class family) to get him to mend
fences, Kyung refuses. The pivotal event
around which the story swirls – a home invasion, robbery and brutal rape of his
mother, Mae, and their housekeeper, Marina - compel him to confront his past
and the consequences of his failure to come to terms with it. This sounds dark – and in places it is, but
it is also a very real story of an individual fighting against cultural stereotypes,
trying to break free of his family’s expectations and figure out who he is
apart from them.
The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel
The Wonder by Emma Donohue
In her second novel, (after Room) Emma Donoghue returns to familiar
territory: an innocent child whose
worldview has been sharply skewed by evil adults and a young woman who is
desperately seeking escape for the child and herself. Set in the 1850’s in a small village in
Ireland, The Wonder also features a
child, 11- year old Anna O’Donnell, the daughter of poor farming parents, who
believes that she is living on manna from Heaven. The word on the street is that Anna has not
accepted food or drink in four months – since the day of her confirmation – and
a committee of townspeople have hired two nurses to participate in a
round-the-clock watch for two weeks to determine the veracity of Anna’s claim
and the possibility of a saint in their midst.
The narrator is Lib Wright, a young widow and a nursing disciple of the
famous Florence Nightingale whom she frequently quotes when in doubt about what
action to take. She is hired by the
committee to pair with an Irish nun who also has a nursing background to rotate
through 8- hour shifts for a period of two weeks at the O’Donnell’s
cottage. Lib is a woman of science and
immediately views her mission as one of exposure; the child cannot possibly be
living without food and Lib is determined to reveal whoever is perpetrating
this hoax. She is initially steely and cold in her treatment of the family,
desiring to keep a professional distance and casting suspicion on all. Her initial examination of Anna surprisingly
reveals a somewhat healthy child, however there are certain indications that
while Anna has probably been eating, she hasn’t gotten enough.
At the heart of the novel are some
significant questions. As posed by
reviewer Sarah Lyall in her September 16, 2016 review of the novel in the New York Times: What does it mean to
give up the most basic human need in the service of something greater than
yourself? Is it an admirable stand, or an abomination? And if you’re an
outsider presiding over someone not-eating himself into oblivion, do you have
the right, or the obligation, to intervene?
As with Room, The Wonder is
about moral responsibility for someone other than yourself, and the courage it
takes against great odds to protect another.
The Space Between Us, Thrity Umrigar
Listening to Meryl Streep’s elegant speech at
the Golden Globes last January, I am struck by a key point that she made: when
people in power use their public platform to ridicule others, “it filters down
into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to
do the same thing.” In other words, it
is suddenly very okay to treat people who are different from you in ways that
are insulting, inappropriate and unacceptable in civilized society. It led me to think, as I have so often done
in the last weeks, about what I believe to be the naïve assumption by those in
our country whom we would call the “have nots” believing that the “haves” - a
billionaire and his cabinet of other billionaires, supported by a Congress of
millionaires - will have sympathy for and do something about their plight. Can
people that wealthy and privileged cross the great class chasm? Interestingly, Thrity Umrigar’s excellent
2005 novel provides one possible answer.
Set halfway across the globe in Bombay, India
and focusing on the lives of two characters, the novel does not pretend to
speak for humanity, yet in this microcosmic look at two women from opposite ends
of the class ladder, it offers a sad commentary on where sympathies often lie
and the falseness of the idea that poverty is easy to escape if you just try. Not only does the author leave the reader
with much to ponder, she creates memorable characters who could be real
people. Set in a society seemingly so
different from ours, it would be easy to pass off the “spaces” as a reflection
of Indian culture and the caste system that still lingers; however, I suspect
that Umrigar is writing about us too.
The Last Anniversary by Liane Moriarty
I am sorry to say that with this book, I have
now read all of Moriarty’s work. With
titles unread, I knew I could look forward to a story that explores deep-held
secrets, moves smoothly between multiple perspectives and back and forth in
time, and which focuses on personal epiphanies, moral responsibility and
growing self-understanding. A review of
the novel referred to Moriarty’s work as “chick lit,” a term I think is pejorative
because it implies female characters wallowing in shallow angst over
relationships with men.
The Last Anniversary is set in the author’s
native Australia on a private island near Sydney that is close enough that its
inhabitants can easily get to the mainland on a jet ski or little motor
boat. The fictional Scribbly Gum Island
is a famous and popular tourist destination; in 1932, sisters Rose and Connie
find baby Enigma alone in her cradle, mysteriously abandoned by Alice and Jack
Munro. The cake on the counter is fresh
and the kettle on the stove is whistling.
The sisters raise the baby and turn the mystery into a lucrative
business, creating a tour of the Munro house that includes artifacts that hint
at various theories as to what happened.
It is true that Moriarty’s books always focus
on women – middle-aged, suburbanites in Australia, but the issues are deeper,
the narrative itself more complex. All
of the main characters struggle with what it means to be a happy and
self-actualized person amid social expectations of what it means to be a
woman. While some of the angst does,
admittedly, have to do with their relationships with men, much of it has to do
with self-acceptance and self-understanding.
