At the start of
every year I set reading goals. For 2017 My goals were this: 6 works of
fiction, 1 historical biography, and 1 other non-fiction. 8 total books. It was my assumption that in a
year of celebrating the end of Annie's time in medical school, a summer of
moving, and finding a new teaching job, I wouldn't have as much time to read as
I might like… So I settled on 8.
1 year
later and my number ended up a bit higher… Counting audio books ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
my total this year was 20. 11 works of fiction (one a re-read), 6 works of
non-fiction (including 2 biographies), and 3 audio books (great for driving
back and forth to North Carolina.)
In the interest of
sharing this year's crop of winners, I put together a quick blurb about each
one of them, including a quick gut-feeling rating system between 1-10.
As I went back and
looked at my notes I remembered some of these very fondly, and others I recall
the waste of time that they were. But books, like life, aren't always what you
want them to be - that's part of the joy. They can surprise you or disappoint
you, inspire you or leave you in the dumps. But just like life, you know in the
end you'll always end up coming back for more.
So here's to a great
year of reading, and hopefully an even better one in 2018.
FICTION
- My favorite of the summer. Nothing flashy about it, this was just a brilliant concept done with impressive storytelling prowess. You will finish this book in 1-2 days. It is that good. You will not be able to put it down. Superposition and Infinite realities make this science fiction work one that I couldn't stop thinking about. Hell I'm still thinking about it.
- Clocking in at 784 pages, this one took me a while to get through, but I promise you it was worth it. Just going back to read a few of my favorite excerpts from the book had me a bit misty eyed remembering how beautifully Tartt wields the English Language. At times unnecessarily lengthy, she makes it completely worth it with the occasional line that completely takes your breath away, like this one that still occasionally stops me in my tracks.
- "And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky - so the space where I exist, and I want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime."
- Told as a dialogue between over 100 different characters, mostly ghosts, the magnitude of work put in to each character astounded me here. One of my absolute favorites of the year. A quick read, I knocked the whole thing out on a day of traveling to Mexico. The story itself is interesting, though not gripping (Abraham Lincoln entering the graveyard to visit his recently deceased son). But the depth of emotion and the reality of human nature addressed via the ghosts' journeys to accepting their own mortality had me teary-eyed and feeling on a flight full of strangers.
- This felt like someone took one of my old childhood sports novels and turned it in to an adult version just for me. A small town Canadian hockey team isn't the type of book I would usually pick up, but something about it called to me, and I'm glad it did. One of the key characters in the work, Benji, was probably my favorite of any I've read this year.
- This one came as a recommendation, and another lengthy piece, it is worth it for different reasons than the Goldfinch. While the Goldfinch spoke at times of a depression and despair that I couldn't understand, Freedom was one of those books where you can somehow see yourself in every single character in the book. It was as if every character represented some stage of my life, or someone in my life presently. It also gave me this stanza, which perfectly summarizes my own experiences with attention and compliments.
- "she believed that it was because she was selflessly team-spirited that direct personal compliments made her so uncomfortable. The autobiographer now thinks that compliments were like a beverage she was unconsciously smart enough to deny herself even one drop of, because her thirst for them was infinite."
- NC Book Club Book #4 - From the author of Silver Linings Playbook. I Knocked this out in a few days on Christmas Break. If Hillbilly Elogy is necessary non-fiction to understand the psyche of our current populist right wing, then The Reason You're Alive is its fictional counterpart. This is a quick read, 200 pages, spent in the head of a vietnam war veteran watching the world change around him and seemingly forgetting him. A dynamite read for our current political and social climate.
- Great fiction read for any fan of American History. Whitehead takes the history of black America and weaves it beautifully and at times heartbreaking-ly into a single slave narrative. The twist of an actual freedom railroad operating underground made for fascinating imagery.
- Not sure why I hadn't read it yet - I picked it up around the 20 year anniversary and knocked it out in 2 days. Of course it lacked the magic of the originals and the screenplay format made it annoying at times, but it answered a lot of questions about Time Turners that I'd spent way too much time debating in my lifetime. If you haven't read it yet and you're, like me, a Potter nerd - it's worth it mostly due to the little time you'll have to put into it..
- Not great, not bad. An interesting read that was meant to keep you hooked from the get-go, it kept me intrigued enough to finish, but the story itself wasn't the most believable and only one character was properly developed. Don't recommend, but it's far from wasted time.
- Maybe it's because I audio-booked Girl on the Train that I enjoyed it so much, but I was anything but impressed by Hawkin's second novel. Predictable throughout and the story seemed at times just a re-write of Girl on the Train. My fear after reading this is that Hawkins will be adopting the model of Grisham, Cussler or Child: Books that will never let you down if you know what you're looking for, because they're all pretty much the same thing in different iterations.
NON-FICTION
Paul Kalanithi - When Breath Becomes Air - 9.5/10
- I can't remember a book that made me feel like this since I finished the 7th Harry Potter in 2007. I'm talking Where the Red Fern Grows level heartbreak. Paul Kalanithi was finishing his residency in Neurosurgery when he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. This was his attempt to chronicle his life and experience. What he ended up doing was reshaping my view on humanity, on religion, on human nature. Kalanithi was initially a philosophy and English literature student before switching to medicine, so this book reads more like a humanist manifesto than the story of a dying neurosurgeon. This book is not easily forgettable.
- As a white man this was the most challenging book I picked up this year, but I would argue it could also be the most important. You don't have to agree with Coates or with his view of the world. You can even vehemently disagree with it. But reading this is important because you should try to understand it. To empathize with it. Even if you don't agree with Coates you can feel the fear and the hurt he has in this series of letters written to his teenage son. In our current racial climate this should be required reading if only for the discussion it provokes.
- Recently made into a movie, this has proven to me one thing: I never want to explore the Amazon… Colonel Fawcett, a famous British Explorer with the Royal Geographic Society, famously disappeared along with his son and son's best friend while searching for El Dorado, or as he called it, Z. Similar to Splendid Savage, this book chronicles the life of a man who never seemed content. The world needs men like this, but I'm pleased that I do not happen to be one, as Fawcett's life, and his family's, were made difficult in many ways by his obsessions with the Amazon. Probably the best historical NF work I've read since Devil in the White City.
- My first North Carolina book club read - A historical biography of Frederick Russel Burnham. A scout, a prospector, an explorer, Burnham lived an unbelievably fascinating life. For a history teacher I usually don't read a ton of biographies, as they typically end up taking me a year to get through, but this one held my attention. One of the most fascinating characters I've ever read of.
- At some point this summer I needed something positive to pull me out of the hole of reading the news and realizing nothing was going to change. That the world we were living in was the new normal. This series of essays written almost 10 years ago was an enlightening view of how activism really works. We expect movements or protests or boycotts to be immediately successful, but they rarely are. Instead change, like most else in life, comes gradually and often comes with steps in the wrong direction. But progress, in the end, always wins out.
- "To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable."
- John C. Bogle, founder of Vanguard Investments, in writing about the ideal way to handle our personal finances, ended up penning the perfect explanation of why our financial systems crashed in 2008 and why it will undoubtedly happen again. Too much speculation, not enough investment. Our financial system values speculation and hitting it big (see, Bitcoin), but no one values long-term investment anymore. A short-read, It's a great one to slowly work your way through so you have time to digest it all.
RE-READ
Madeline L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time
- Childhood classic - had to give it a read to prep for the upcoming Disney remake!
AUDIOBOOK
(I just don't invest into audiobooks quite the same way I do into physical books, so in fairness to these books, I'll just list them below)
- Stephen King - 12.22.63
- Ben Winters - The Last Policeman
- Paula Hawkins - Girl on the Train
NOW READING
Everything that Remains - a Memoir by the Minimalists
Ron Chernow - Grant
Anything you read this year that you think I should pick up? Comment or shoot me a message! I am always in the hunt for a good book, and my list is rapidly expanding.
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