Bay Reads - January 2016

7 Best Book Lists

So many books, so little time!  You'll love these "Best Book" lists  - including columnist Carole McKellar's personal faves.

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Many people make resolutions for the new year, but I make lists. I comb the Internet for “Best Books of the Year” lists and dutifully write the book titles in a notebook. The lists provide either a pat on the back for choosing a worthy book or a reading list for the coming year. I love asking readers what books they have enjoyed reading during the year, and I record their recommendations as well.
 
In 2008, I started keeping a book journal in which I write the title, author, and the first sentence of the books I read. I enjoy looking back over each year’s books and remembering my favorites. Four books stand out as my best picks for this past year:

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Carole's Favorite 2014 Reads

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande (A look at the challenges of aging, it argues for changes in the role of medicine.)
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (A memoir in eloquent poetry.)
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill (A witty, quirky tale of a marriage.)
The Story of Land and Sea by Mississippian Katy Simpson Smith (A beautifully written novel about the Revolutionary War in North Carolina.)

Other Top 2014 Faves

Euphoria by Lily King (Anthropologists’ love triangle in New Guinea in the 1930s.)
Deep Down Dark by Hector Tobar (A journalistic telling that keeps you on the edge of your seat even though you know the outcome of the Chilean miners’ ordeal.) 
The Children Act by Ian McEwan (A secular court decides the fate of a sick boy who refuses medical treatment on religious grounds.) 
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff (Amazon picked this book as the number one book of 2015. It’s a story of deceit and love.)
Circling The Sun by Paula McLain (The fictionalized account of Beryl Markham’s life and loves. If you liked Out of Africa, you’ll like this book.)
Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace by Anne Lamott (These essays about family and community are both wise and irreverent.)

Local Book Club Faves

Each January, my book groups meet and thoughtfully select books that we want to read for the year. Some of our choices are more popular than others, and some just lend themselves to lively discussions. I polled the members of my Bay Book Group for their favorite books of the past year:
 
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr was the unanimous pick.
The Story of Land and Sea (mentioned above, but also chosen by Angela Sallis).
City on Fire, by Garth Hallberg (This was not on our 2015 list, but Allison Anderson recommends this book highly, so I hope it makes our 2016 list.)
Ecology of A Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray (Dita McCarthy chose this book, which I wrote about in this column in September, 2015.)
Being Mortal (I certainly agree with Susan Carron that this is a remarkable book.)
 
Our group recently read and discussed Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar, which we loved. We couldn’t get enough of the Woolfs, the Bells, and the rest of the Bloomsbury Group. 

Two books read by my Pass Christian Book Group last year that struck me as remarkable are Someone, by Alice McDermott — an ordinary life told in compact, luminous prose — and The Garden of the Evening Mists, by Tan Twan Eng. Set in Malaysia, this book is a tragic, multi-layered novel of remembrance and forgetting.

Top picks on Carole's 2016 reading list

H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald (A memoir by a woman who learned falconry to relieve her grief after losing her father.)
Souls at Night by Kent Haruf (A man and a woman, both elderly and alone, find companionship through late night talks about their lives and hopes.)
Slade House by David Mitchell (Something of a ghost story, but, from David Mitchell, there will be delightful complexities.)
The Tsar of Love and Tehno by Anthony Marra (Interwoven stories by the author of one of my all-time favorite books, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.)
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin (Forty-three stories by the late writer that many feel should be more widely read.)
A Little Life by Hanya Yanaghara (This book is widely described as challenging, but most people agree that it’s astonishing. It follows the relationship of four friends from school into adulthood in New York.)
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (This is book one of the Neapolitan novels. Book four was published this year to rave reviews. I feel the need to start at the beginning.)
The Buried Giant by Kazoo Ishiguro (Mythic tale of an elderly couple on a quest to find their son in ancient Britain.)

Carole's 10 take-alongs for a desert island...

Another book project that I contemplated as 2015 drew to a close is One Grand, from the New York Times Magazine. The creators ask people to name the 10 books they’d take with them if they were stranded on a desert island. Actors, musicians, and writers are generally featured, but I made my list in case they call. It was hard to commit to only 10 books, and I’ve changed my list a few times. Here are my picks:
 
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (A fictional account of the life of Huey Long of Louisiana and the corrosive effect of power.)
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (The story of a missionary family in 1950s Belgian Congo.)
Selected Stories by William Trevor (Trevor is one of the greatest writers of short fiction in the English language.)
A Quaker Book of Wisdom by Robert Lawrence Smith (The Quaker way is to live more simply, truthfully, and charitably.)
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O’Toole (Run out and buy this book if you haven’t read it. Now!)
The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry (I couldn’t decide which one poet’s work to choose.)
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell (I love every one of Maxwell’s books. He’s not nearly as famous as he deserves to be.)
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (Satire at its finest. This book delights me.)
The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman (Kalman’s whimsical paintings, photographs, and text illustrate a year in her life.)
New & Selected Poems by Mary Oliver (I’m stranded, right? Oliver is filled with the wonder and beauty of the natural world. She’ll calm me.)

The New York Times’ picks for the top 10 books of 2015:

Fiction
1. The Door by Magda Szabo (A new translation of the relationship between a Hungarian writer with the same name as the author and her housekeeper.)
2. A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin 
3. Outline by Rachel Cusk (A meditation on storytelling as told through conversations with a variety of people.)
4. The Sellout by Paul Beatty (Described as a comic masterpiece, this novel explores race and identity in modern America.)
5. The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante (This is the fourth, and final, novel about the lifelong friendship of two women from Naples.)
 
Nonfiction
6. Between the World & Me by Ta-Neshisi Coates (This book won the National Book Award for nonfiction for 2015. It is an open letter to Coates’ adolescent son that distills American history with relation to race.)          
7. Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert
8. H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald 
9. The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf (Von Humboldt was a visionary German naturalist who helped create modern environmentalism.)
10. One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Asne Seierstad

Publishers Weekly Best of 2015:

1. Between the World & Me by Ta-Neshisi Coates  
2. The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf 
3. The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante 
4. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan (This book is a memoir by a writer for New Yorker magazine.)
5. Delicious Foods by James Hannah (I don’t know anything about this novel. The description I found online is hard to distill into a few sentences.)
6. Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas by Christian Kracht (Translated from German; One reviewer compared the book to a Melville tale.)
7. Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan (This epic wins for best title.)
8. Crow Fair by Thomas McGuane  (Stories set in Big Sky Country filled with McGuane’s typical dark humor.)
9. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (A memoir that explores gender identity, sexuality, and child and parenthood.)
10. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History & Warning by Timothy Snyder

I hope these selections will inform and encourage your 2016 reading.  Happy New Year!