The saying “reading is like taking a journey” is gross and cliché as all hell (and saying things are cliché is also cliché), but it exists for a reason. The exciting thing about reading a good book is that it allows you to travel somewhere beyond your own world, but without having to spend money on a plane ticket, and without ever having to take time off of work or leave your house. Reading inspires traveling; you read about a place, immerse yourself in it, and feel an unceasing need to go to that place to experience it first hand. No matter what I do in a year, no matter where I go or who I am with, I always make it a priority to pick up a few books along the way. These are my favorite books that I read this year, and why. I also read some lighter books, and am not a masochist I swear, but the books that make you think for a long time afterwards are the best kinds of books.
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”
Middlesex is probably my favorite book of all time. I have never devoured any book like I devoured Middlesex. I had seen it sitting on various bookshelves throughout the past several years and had never known that in its pages it contained a story about a family throughout a century, starting with grandparents who grew up and fled Greece for America, ending with the youngest of the generation, a hermaphrodite boy, raised as a girl and never quite feeling like he fits in his own skin. I found his journey absolutely enrapturing and felt so many emotions as I made my way through the pages. Books never make me tear up (except for My Sisters Keeper in high school, but I was also very moody and sobbed if someone looked at me sideways), but this book did. It explores gender, sexuality, race, Aegean history, revolution, coming of age. And it DELVES into those themes. It is not shy. It may be a little off putting for some people to pick up a book about a hermaphrodite, but ugh, it is so good.
Still Alice by Lisa Genova
“My yesterdays are disappearing, and my tomorrows are uncertain, so what do I live for? I live for each day. I live in the moment. Some tomorrow soon, I’ll forget that I stood before you and gave this speech. But just because I’ll forget it some tomorrow doesn’t mean that I didn’t live every second of it today. I will forget today, but that doesn’t mean that today didn’t matter.”
Okay, so I said I don’t really cry at books right? I cried at this one too. I am sounding like a hypocrite here. The story is such a sentimental and up-close look at what it means to have Alzheimer’s disease, focusing on an incredibly intelligent mother, wife, and Harvard professor who develops early-onset at age 50. The story of her first forgetting little things, like asking the same question twice, to her losing her way in her own neighborhood and then forgetting the face of her youngest daughter. The author does a brilliant job at making you feel like you are part of the suffering family, and I think that is what really makes the book so worthwhile and powerful.
The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman
“Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes: so tangled that you can’t tell which is which until you’ve shot them both, and then it’s too late.”
I picked up this book after many months of hearing about how absolutely breath-takingly beautiful it was, so I figured I’d go ahead and give it a shot. The story is basically a story of morality, the consequences that come from allowing selfishness to rule your decisions. A PTSD-suffering WWI vet lighthouse keeper and his wife are living off the coast of Australia in the 1920s, having suffered several miscarriages, and one day a dead man and a crying baby wash up on shore. The couple decides to keep the baby, not alert the authorities about the father’s death, and raise the child as their own. The narrative is simple and focused, delving into the depths of the human psyche and making you question the fine line between right and wrong as you sympathize with morally ambiguous characters.
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
“Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.”
The first time I tried to read this was when I was a senior in college and I checked the book out of my school’s library to take with me on spring break in Florida. Shockingly enough (seriously, you won’t believe this) between drinking straight from the keg at the pool, playing flip cup on the beach, and sleeping on the hotel room floor, I didn’t get any reading done. Two years later I decided to try again. And I’m glad I did. The story is about four Chinese women who came to America during WWII, their lives in China, and their four daughters’ lives as Chinese-Americans who have trouble identifying with the culture of the older generation. As a second generation American (my mother being a first generation American daughter of two Peruvian parents), these are the types of stories that speak to me, and learning about life in China and Chinese traditions was just a bonus.
Fruit of the Lemon by Andrea Levy
“I didn’t want to be black anymore. I just wanted to live.“
Another book about immigration and learning where you come from, yippee. This novel details the life of a young first-generation Jamaican British woman who lives in a white world, pursuing white friends and love interests and never demonstrating any curiosity about her parents’ lives before sailing to England aboard a banana boat. Over the first half of the book, she slowly begins to understand that being black in a white world means something, and the second half of the book is her traveling to Jamaica for the first time to discover who she is and where she comes from. Fruit of the Lemon was written in 1999, but the themes are shockingly applicable to present day, STILL. Racism is alive and well, and young people still do not know a lot about where they come from. I blew through this book, so it was an easy read, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have some thought-provoking themes, as well as a glimpse into several generations of a family rooted in Jamaica and living all over the world.
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer
“She knows what it is to be sad and miserable, but those emotions are almost enjoyable. They throw moments of happiness and laughter into sharper relief.”
You know when you go to a library or a bookstore and just pick a random book off the shelf? That was this book. It is set during WWII, the protagonist not a person but a house, loosely based on the Villa Tugendhat in the Czech Republic. The story follows the various inhabitants of the house throughout the years, starting with a wealthy Jewish couple who are forced to flee at the start of the war, followed by Nazi forces, Soviets, and the people who come to restore it. This was such a good book. The writing was eloquent, and I loved how the house was the constant “character,” representing transparency and light, a place for the characters to sit and reflect on their dreams and fantasies. And WWII literature is some of the most affecting and captivating literature because of the poignancy of the time.
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
This book is also set during WWII (if you know me, you know this is one of my most frequented eras in literature and also it is probably one of the most popular eras for authors to write about, I would guess), two parallel stories: one about a blind French girl forced to flee her home with her father after Germans attack Paris, and a young German boy who joins the Hitler Youth to lend his skills with math and fixing radios. Ultimately, the stories collide and it is beautiful. Seriously, this book was so good. Goosebumps good. It was also horrifying. I have read a lot of WWII literature, but I have not read much about how young, impressionable boys were brainwashed by the Nazi party, because committing atrocities was the only way they could survive. Doerr’s writing makes it so that you fall in love with both children, which makes the subsequent events of the book even more heart-breaking. I will be thinking about this book for a long time.
The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult
“Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.”
I have been hesitant about Jodi Picoult recently, since I started reading her books in middle school and after my initial awe and worshipping wore off I realized that her books were sort of formulaic and I stopped reading her for a while. My mom recommended this book to me, so I decided to moisten my Jodi Picoult draught (ew, moisten. Sorry). I dug into this book right before my trip to Eastern Europe, where I visited a lot of old Jewish ghettos, as well as Auschwitz itself, and the book gave me so much context for my trip. The “storyteller” refers to the narrator’s grandmother, who survived Auschwitz as a young woman, and her story is heart-wrenching, horrific, and sad as hell. It makes you wonder how anyone survived and was able to continue on the rest of their lives. It also focuses on forgiveness, through the narrator’s storyline, by making you ask yourself if a Nazi contributes evil to the Holocaust, then later lives a life of charity and good, does that person deserve forgiveness? The book makes things less black and white than you might think. I loved this book so much. Please read.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
“This is why you must love life: one day you’re offering up your social security number to the Russian Mafia; two weeks later you’re using the word calve as a verb.”
Satirical, unique, and relatively light, if you need a break from reading about war and death and tragedy, the book is written in a series of letters, notes, emails, and a bright teenager’s commentary, which gives us a look into the life of a successful yet troubled architect and mother Bernadette, her genius husband working at Microsoft, and her daughter Bee, who has a heart defect. It is surprisingly funny as it makes fun of the privileged housewife bubble and the elitist Microsoft bubble, the humor in the vulnerabilities of the characters. It was nothing at all what I expected, and I only ended up reading it because my roommate read it before me and the bright blue color was pretty. It is a fun book inside the pretty cover, though. Plus, they go to Antarctica. That is cool.
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards
“You can’t stop time. You can’t capture light. You can only turn your face up and let it rain down.”
It is 1964, there is a massive snowstorm, and a doctor is delivering his wife’s twins. The boy is healthy and strong, and the girl has Downs Syndrome. Shocked, the doctor takes the girl, tells his nurse to bring her to an orphanage, and tells his wife that the girl died in childbirth. The nurse keeps the girl and raises her herself, which seems like a happier ending for the girl, but the story continues to follow both the nurse and the family throughout several decades and reveals the agonizing consequences of the man’s decision on everyone, especially the mother. It’s crazy that one big decision, one big, heavy secret, can pivot a person’s life so much that it changes who they ultimately are, and where they ultimately end up. It’s a sad book, but a great concept and a touching story.
I will be doing a lot more traveling in 2017 and am hoping to therefore read A LOT MORE. Reading is one of those things you don’t do for a while because you’re preoccupied or unfocused, but then once you actually do pick up a book, you’re like “damn why have I not been reading every day?” My 2017 goal is to read two books a month, and I’m going to try to read across all genres, since there’s only so many WWII/Holocaust novels one can read before going dead inside. Cannot wait to see what I find!
What was the best book you read in 2016? What did you love about it? I’d love some suggestions!
