My Favorite Reads of 2019

I tend to read contemporary novels and very occasionally contemporary nonfiction, but they are not necessarily books that are hot off the press.  Thus, I don’t have a “best books of 2019,” but rather a “favorites” list based on what I have read during the year.  Several of these were books I read with my book group, lending themselves to rich discussion. 

In no particular order:

Improvement by Joan Silber is a series of short stories that take place in the same fictional universe, linked by the relationships of the characters.  The individual stories are compelling and the characters well drawn.  A motif of Turkish carpets and tapestries runs through the book, mimicking the weaving together of these various people and the way their lives touch each other.  The book raises questions about the degree of responsibility we have for the choices others make as a consequence of our own choices. Silber also invites the characters and the reader to consider what loving another person means and how far one is willing to go for love.

The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher is the comical sequel to Dear Committee,returning the reader to the world of Payne University (an appropriate pun for the distress it engenders) and picks up with Schumacher’s skewering of university politics.  The Economics Department’s march to not only take over the physical space of the English Department but to, in fact, eliminate it all together as a useless subject, is led by its chair, Roland Gladwell.  It is with great reluctance that Jay Fitger, the protagonist of the earlier book and now the newly appointed English Department chair, assumes the responsibility of his department’s survival which, he quickly learns begins with obtaining unanimous consensus on a Statement of Vision, a necessary step to secure funding.  The various eccentric characters in his department are loathe to agree to the importance of anyone else’s niche area over their own and the suggestion that perhaps it is time to eliminate Shakespeare as a required course for

English majors creates an uproar. Schumacher has created a genuinely funny satire of this insular world, one to which anyone in pretty much any large organization can relate.

Meg Wolitzer’s topical novel, The Female Persuasion, poses important questions:   What does it mean to be powerful?  What does it mean to make a difference?  How do gender roles impact each of these?  Greer Kadetsky is a college student who becomes the victim of unwanted pawing by a suave fraternity boy, and it is with this incident that the novel takes off:  the relationship between men and women and how women can get power to assert themselves as equals. After the university gives him the proverbial slap on the wrist, Greer goes to hear a campus talk by famous feminist Faith Frank (think Gloria Steinhem) and Greer suddenly sees that attaining equity for women can be accomplished on a much larger playing field. Greer becomes enamored with all things Faith, and after college manages to land a job with Faith’s new foundation which is committed to helping women around the world. As time passes, Greer grows disenchanted with Faith’s political hypocrisy (the foundation is bankrolled by a venture capitalist).

The 7-1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton requires a little stick-with-it-ness in the beginning but it is worth hanging in there.  The narrator wakes up at night in a forest with no idea who he is or where he is or why he utters the name “Anna” and feels a sense of alarm that she is in danger.  Over the next few hours, we get some of the answers to these questions; a man disguised as a plague doctor tells the narrator, who has had strange sensations of being more than one person, that he is, in fact, one Aidan 

Bishop, who will be provided with 8 different hosts, each time reliving this same day.  He must solve the mystery of who kills Evelyn Hardcastle by the end of his last host day.  The game is afoot.

There, There by Tommy Orange  is a collection of inter-related stories that feature different characters, all of them urban Native Americans, who eventually come together at a pow-wow in Oakland, CA. There is not so much a continuous story arc as there are relationships between the characters that eventually emerge.  The book opens with a prologue that provides both history and commentary about the American Indian.  “We’ve been defined by everyone else and continue to be slandered despite easy-to-look-up-on-the-internet facts about the realities of our histories and current state as a people” (7).  Orange’s audience seems to be non-native Americans both in his mini-history lesson but also with the characters he creates. His characters are achingly real, people sometimes caught between the past and the present.  

A good reminder that nonfiction can be as compelling as fiction is Tara Westover’s Educated, her memoirs of growing up in a remote part of Idaho with parents who are survivalist fruitcakes.  Tara eventually escapes her abusive home after basically teaching herself enough to get into college and then on to Harvard.  The book explores the consequences of poverty and motifs of truth, lies and memory run throughout.  

Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid is told retrospectively through fictitious interviews with members of the 70’s rock group, The Six, and one of their lead singers, Daisy Jones. Reid manages to create a  compelling narrative of the band’s rise and fall through the conversations, which sometimes provide conflicting recollections and perspectives.   Right at the height of their popularity, the band falls apart; the writer (a persona Reid assumes) wants to find out why, crafting the interviews into a book. 

Set in a Colorado town resembling Boulder, The Gifted School by Bruce Holsinger revolves around the creation of a school for gifted students and the sudden competition among people who have been friends for spots for their children in the school.  As is frequently the case, some of the truly gifted children can get overlooked due to family and economic circumstances while the average or above average offspring of well to do parents jockey for position.  The story effectively alternates perspectives to create a sense of drama, one that anyone who has ever sat on the sidelines of an 8 year-old’s rec league ball game can appreciate when perfectly normal people go nuts when competition is involved.  

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens grabbed me with the lyrical descriptions of the coastal marsh and the development of the two timelines.  The story begins when 5-year-old Kya Clarke watches her mother walk away from their marsh shack in high heels and carrying an old suitcase.  The subsequent years are filled with the leaving of others – her older siblings one by one and finally her alcoholic, abusive father who is the cause of all of the partings.  Kya is left alone to raise herself and she spends her days wandering through the marsh, feeding the gulls, collecting and cataloguing the natural life around her.  The narrative jumps ahead 10 years to the death of Chase Andrews, a handsome young man from a well to do family in town.  The investigation of his death and the subsequent accusation of murder pinned on Kya eventually dovetails with the first narrative.  The trial is reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird:  the evidence presented is easily disputed and the jury is predisposed to convict as Kya has been the victim of rumors, gossip and ridicule all of her life.  

Margaret Atwood’s long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (34 years ago), The Testaments,answers the questions of what happened to Offred/June and how Gilead falls.  The Hulu series’ first season was based on the earlier book, but with its success, seasons 2 and 3 extrapolated out.  Atwood’s sequel leaps ahead of the show, fifteen years after the first book ends, focusing on three characters:  June’s two daughters and Aunt Lydia. As with the first book, what’s happening for the reader is distant past in the world of the novel.  The alternating narratives of the three characters turn out to be documents found many years after the fact and are, at the end, puzzled over by researchers and historians. I love the series and I feel like it was an easy leap into the book, but if you haven’t watched the television series, it would make sense to re-read Handmaid, to better resituate yourself in the world of Gilead.  Several friends have said that the world of Gilead is too depressing (and depressingly close to modern times) but the sequel is a much more optimistic book about the power of saner people to bring down a patriarchal system of oppression.

Last year for Christmas, I gave my brother-in-law a copy of Washington Black by Esi Edugyan, which he read in a week and passed back to me calling it a terrific book.  It took me until October to get around to it and I heartily agreed with his judgment.  The protagonist, Wash, is a child slave on a plantation in Barbados, when the novel starts.  He is spirited off the island in a hot air balloon by the brother of the plantation owner, a scientist and inventor who recognizes Wash’s intellect and sense of curiosity.  The writer combines the at times magical with the brutality of slavery and prejudice, which Wash faces daily even when he becomes a free man.  As Ron Charles in his review in The Washington Post points out, the novel “raises provocative questions about the way privilege poisons even those who benefit from it.” 

For mystery fans, I recommend Jane Harper’s The Lost Man.  Set in the Australian outback, the book begins with a mysterious death:  a man lies dead beside a grave in the middle of the desert, an irregular circle in the sand around the grave.  He is 9 kilometers from his car, which is fully stocked with food and water and which has been left on a rocky outcropping, and he is miles away from where he said he was going that day.  Thus begins a perplexing and ultimately well-crafted mystery.  Harper does a good job of capturing a sense of what life is like in this large and relatively barren country that dominates the interior of Australia.  The reader – and some of the characters – wonder why anyone would choose to live out there, so isolated from society and so threatened by the daily forces of nature.  When they go out in a truck or car, they must carry extra fuel, water and food supplies at all times as well as a satellite radio.  The family at the center of the story has a ledger in which people write where they are going when they leave and when they expect to be back so that if they don’t show, others know where to look.  It is a bleak existence.  The story plays with themes of redemption and forgiveness and asks whether there are actions that are never forgivable.

You  have to appreciate fantasy – definitely Harry Potter, The Raven Boys, The Magicians – to enjoy the Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, but having said this, it was for me a highly entertaining and compelling story.  I listened to it to and from a drive to the beach, so the reading experience was less disjointed than a usual audio book might be.  This fantasy novel focuses on college students on the Yale campus who belong to a mysterious society, the Lethe, whose job is to monitor the magical practices of the other eight secret societies.  Bardugo, a graduate of Yale, bases her story on real societies there but adds the magic and its policing.  The various societies specialize in different forms of magic, e.g.:  talking to the dead, prognosticating (which is Bardugo’s humorous explanation for the great success with the stock market that Yale alum often have), creating illusions, and causing people to act as supplicants, obeying one’s every desire.  Galaxy “Alex” Stern is a young woman run amuck in LA; having gotten in over her head with drugs and bad characters, she is found by the police in an apartment surrounded by her dead friends.  Absolved of any wrong-doing, she finds herself approached by a dean from Yale who suggests that she has certain traits that would make her an ideal candidate for the college and Lethe House, in particular. Bardugo does a good job of creating a three-dimensional character in Alex, a young woman who doesn’t immediately realize her own inner strength and who, for too long, sees herself as a mess-up who has once again landed in the wrong place.  When she is left without guidance and she is unsure of who else to trust, she mines her own inner strength and powers of deduction.  

Virgil Wander by Leif Enger is a novel in which nothing much happens yet the characters are so well developed and the language is so well crafted, that it ends up being a highly satisfying read.    The novel is set in Greenstone, Minnesota, a has-been town on Lake Superior and although it seems populated by more than its fair share of eccentric and/ quirky characters, I wonder if you were to do a deep dive into any group of people, they’d all come across this way.  It’s really a character-driven novel; we can see these people, hear them as they talk to each other, and desperately wish for them to resolve the sometimes minor and often major dilemmas in their lives.  Virgil, the titular character and narrator, is around 45, single (a past love only alluded to), and the owner of the Empress, the town movie theatre that sells twenty tickets on a good night.  The story opens shortly after a fairly significant event in Virgil’s life:  driving in a snow storm, he misses a curve, goes over a cliff, and ends up in Lake Superior.  Serendipitously, he is seen by a fisherman, who hauls him out and gets him to the hospital.  Virgil suffers some memory loss and finds himself reaching for words he knows he knows but just can’t grab out of the ether, often, humorously enough, adjectives.  Virgil is also struggling with his non-profit movie house, his ten-year crush on a beautiful widow, and the knowledge that he has 170 reels of vintage film left in a closet by a previous owner, film that doesn’t really belong to him.  With Virgil and other characters, the idea of time moving on while people fumble to figure out who they are or what their role is pops up frequently.