2016 closing out. And thank God before any more celebrities die.
Interestingly, our of fifty three books I had less 'favorites' than ever before.
The other thing I noticed which was obviously influenced by the election, is so many of the books I chose I called 'relevant' to what was happening in the country. That and I'm sure at times I got lazy in writing reviews.
As always not everything was written this year, and the following are in no particular order.
2017 for me is definitely going to mean reading more, and spending far less time on social media than I have in the last year. I wish you all a hopeful, safe, and loving New Year for you and yours.
And please let me know what books you've loved! You can find what I'm reading on Goodreads.
Best
Brett
I loved this book and what a daughters senior year applying to Harvard does to what seems like the family who has it all. Nora and Gabe are both highly successful in their respective professions. They live in Marin County, have three beautiful girls, yet when their oldest, Angela begins to go through the process of applying to college, the wheels come off the bus. Over a year the narrative switches between members of the family with each of them struggling with their own individual hurdles. Fast paced, funny, and imbued with a load of heart this is the perfect summer read, and or book club pick.
https://www.amazon.com/Admissions-Meg-Mitchell-Moore/dp/1101910143/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483215050&sr=8-1&keywords=the+admissions
First time novelist Yaa Gyasi has knocked it out of the park with this literary debut. Effie and Esi are two sisters born into different tribes in Ghana. One gets married to a white man and begins a life of splendor, while the other is sold as a slave and shipped to America. Through alternating chapters we watch their descendants through the years as tribal clashes continue through Africa and in America wars lead to slavery to the great migration. This is a book to be swallowed in big gulps for maximum impact, with each generations story even more fascinating than the one preceding it. Gyasi is a truly writer to take notice of, and I can't wait to see where her imagination takes her next.
https://www.amazon.com/Homegoing-novel-Yaa-Gyasi/dp/1101947136/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483215719&sr=1-1&keywords=homegoing
This summer I said that Nathan Hill had just written one of the best books if not the best of the year. For me it was all that. Big, expansive, and terribly funny, he satires everything from politics, to the Internet, to online gaming, and the media. Spanning fifty plus years the story centers on Samuel Andresen-Anderson, an unhappy college professor, struggling writer, and player of 'World of Elfquest'-a vaguely veiled, 'World of Warcraft' game. With his novel deadline now passed, and a publisher ready to sue for breach of contract, he desperately ends up turning to the one person who abandoned him over thirty years ago and is now at the center of the media firestorm for assaulting a conservative governor-his Mother. Despite Hill's book taking place in the sixties before the Democratic convention and in 2011 before the Republican one, Hill's commentary can't help but feel painfully relevant to today such as: "it's no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it's sanctimony", and when Walter Cronkite is watching the riots taking place in Chicago before the Democractic convention, 'Anyone who thinks television can bring the nation together to have a real dialogue and begin to understand one another with empathy and compassion is suffering a great delusion.' Hill is being compared to Irving and I think that's a legitimate claim, both in his absurdist humor and his touching way he threads the delicate and complicated lines between parents and their children. It's not just a great first book, but a great book period, that's soon to begin production on HBO with Meryl Streep as the estranged mother.
https://www.amazon.com/Nix-novel-Nathan-Hill/dp/110194661X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483045710&sr=8-1&keywords=the+nix+nathan+hill
There were multiple times in Tim Murphys sprawling, ambitious, yet hugely intimate novel that I expected these characters to cross paths with Jude and Willem from Yanigahara's, 'A Little Life', or any one of Maupin's colorful cast of 28 Barbary Lane. And if, like me, you loved those two worlds then this should feel like visiting an old friend. Murphy's backdrop is the lower East side in the eighties at the start of the AIDS epidemic, and it's the disease that propels so many of these characters into inevitable intersections. It starts with a young bohemian couple who are both artists, Milly and Jared, who live in the Christodora, a rehabbed condo building adjacent to Tompkins Square Park. Their neighbor is a hunky gay latino whose personal tragedies move him to AIDS activism which drives the center of the story. The thread that links them is a young abandoned boy named Mateo whose mother died of the disease soon after she gives birth to him. The book stretches over fifty years as these people grapple with identity, family, life, death, drugs, and loss. And despite writing what could feel overwhelmingly depressing, Murphy manages to infuse a massive shot of hope into the story, leaving this reader more than satisfied
https://www.amazon.com/Christodora-Novel-Tim-Murphy/dp/080212528X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483051465&sr=1-1&keywords=christodora
The gay coming of age novel is pumped with new and invigorated life with the addition of Haddad's terrific and exciting debut 'Guapa'. Told over the course of a single day in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, young Rasa is not only trying to find his cultural identity in a country torn apart from war, but his awakened sexual identity, as he and his lover are discovered one morning by his overbearing and severe grandmother. Told over the course of one turbulent day with flashbacks, Haddad has written a story that feels overwhelmingly relevant with the current political discourse about Muslims, xenophobia, and homophobia, and one that deserves a broader audience than its limited target.
https://www.amazon.com/Guapa-Saleem-Haddad/dp/1590517695/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483140763&sr=8-1&keywords=guapa
Spanning nearly fifty years in the lives of two families that come together after an affair, Patchett again shows what a terribly gifted writer she is. The non linear story telling shifts back and forth across decades focusing mostly on the various children and what happens to them over time. There's a beautiful simplicity to her writing, with characters I felt were so familiar and fully realized, from the beautiful Beverly who leaves her husband for her neighbor Albert, to the sons and daughters whose lives are now forced together and ultimately bound by tragedy. I absolutely loved these people and the places they inhabited.
https://www.amazon.com/Commonwealth-Ann-Patchett/dp/0062491792/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483055987&sr=1-1&keywords=commonwealth+ann+patchett
Cries of black lives matter resound through this brutal history lesson told through the eyes of a young slave Cora who escapes from her hellish life on a Georgia plantation. Whitehead portrays the railroad as a literal thing with stations hidden under trap doors in houses or abandoned buildings many of which the young heroine works through in her attempt to escape the clutches of slave catcher Ridgeway. Whitehead has written a tough but necessary history lesson about race that continues sadly to play out on our modern landscape.
https://www.amazon.com/Underground-Railroad-National-Winner-Oprahs/dp/0385542364/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483216294&sr=8-1&keywords=the+underground+railroad
Nominated for the prestigious Prix Goncourt in France, this sexy, page turner follows two friends Samuel and Samir who are in love with the same woman, Nina. When Nina chooses Samuel, Samir moves from Paris and relocates to New York where he becomes a highly successful lawyer. But the story only begins there as we see what the next twenty years has in store for this threesome, and how time and circumstance shapes their futures both together and as individuals. So smart,darkly funny,and so utterly compelling, it's a timely read for what's currently happening throughout the world.
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