Chloe's Best of 2016

I really, really enjoyed doing this! I'd read 50+ books in a year before, but I'd never tried to write about them. Come to think of it, I don't think I've written a review of a book since I had to write book reports in middle school, so this was a whole new world. I noticed a few things about my reading habits as part of this process. The first is that I remember way more about books when I write about them. I'm a fast reader--possibly too fast--and I tend to consume books. By forcing myself to take time with a book afterwards, to pick out passages and process my thoughts, I actually remembered what I read much, much better. Go figure. The second is that in trying to get to 50, I read way shorter books than I usually do. I haven't decided yet how I feel about that. On the one hand, I think it got me out of my comfort zone and pushed me to read things that I wouldn't have otherwise, but on the other hand, I really love long, immersive novels, and I didn't read as many of them this year as I have in the past. I'm considering setting a page count for myself for this year instead of a number of books, but maybe that defeats the purpose of this whole endeavor.

Either way, this has made me a more careful, thoughtful reader, and I've loved getting to see what everyone else is reading. Christopher got me into this mess and lent me or directed me to many of my favorites this year, so I'm very grateful to him and his belief that I would be better at this than I have been at Learned League.

Here are my top 10 from 2016:

10. The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson

This was totally engrossing partly because it was so beautifully written and partly because North Korea is an insane mystery of a place. Some of the moments from this are still bouncing around in my brain.

9. A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark

Mrs. Hawkins was one of my favorite characters from this whole year. I'd never read Spark before, and her heroines have been so much fun to get to know. Mrs. Hawkins was especially entertaining and her advice to live by has stuck with me.

8. I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson

This was by far my favorite YA novel this year. It was funny and sad and sweet and had way more depth than I've come to expect from YA writers. I've toyed with the idea of writing my own YA novel, and this book reawakened that idea for me. We need more books like this one!

7. Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz

I'm obsessed with my dog, and this book has made me, if possible, even more obsessed. I refer back to it constantly, and it's given me a deeper understanding of what exactly is going on in her adorable little head.

6. The Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro

This book was a beautiful, poignant description of the pain of female adolescence, but what stuck with me was the bevvy of quirky, funny, driven female characters. I never get books full of women I love, and Munro really delivered with this one.

5. Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast

I love Roz Chast's cartoons, so I expected to love this, but I was suprised at how touched I was by it. Because it's a full length graphic memoir, she can go deeper than the beloved neurotic sarcasm that drives her cartoons, and I got to see a side of her that made me love her even more.

4. For White Folks who Teach in the Hood by Christopher Emdin

I wish I'd read this book years ago, and I wish I could force it on every such white person I know (especially the ones I work with). Emdin's wisdom and outrage have made me a better teacher and a better advocate.

3. The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty

This was a total surprise favorite. I read it because it was short and Christopher told me to, and I just loved it. It was beautiful and strange and I loved it.

2. The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra
This was the closest I got to a Russian novel this year (shame!), and I loved how weird, sad, and intricate it was. The sweeping scope, the bizarre characters, and the occasional moments of redemption made it an abiding favorite.

1. A Little Life by Hanya Yanigahara

Looking back through this list, I seem to be even more of a sucker for sad books than I previously thought (perhaps another takeaway for the year). This book was the saddest and best of them all. The characters are gorgeously broken, and Yanigahara weaves them together in gripping, heartbreaking ways. This has made it onto my all time top 10 for sure.

Honorable Mention:

Trauma Stewardship by Laura van Dermoot Lipsky and Connie Burk
This was not a particularly well-written book, but it was probably the book that most directly influenced my personal well-being. The authors' road map for how to manage your own stress and trauma while guiding others through their own has been invaluable. This is another one I wish I'd read years ago.


Next year, I'm aiming for more lady writers, more writers of color, and not entering into December with ten books left to read. Thanks for bringing me on!

Robinson by Muriel Spark

Jimmie and I were quite put out. My attempts to teach the cat Bluebell to play ping-pong were partly inspired by a desire to impress Miguel. He seemed to think it was an unworthy idea. Jimmie, who had been suffering from delayed shock, although his physical injuries had been slight, went so far as to attempt a cart-wheel on the patio, and suffered a nasty nose-bleed as a result. Miguel was indifferent. 

Muriel Spark's Robinson tells the tale of January Marlow (not Jan, thank you) and her months as a castaway on Robinson, an island in the middle of the Atlantic where her plane has crashed. Marooned with her are two other passengers along with Robinson and Miguel, the island's proprietor and his young, adopted son. The castaways arrive in June and are stranded until the pomegranate boat arrives in August. January entertains with her observations of her companions and life on the island until helps arrives.

Robinson is a reluctant host (he lives by himself on an island for a reason), and while he does his best to care for his guests and keep the peace, he remains withdrawn and enigmatic to us and to January. He does, however, encourage the narrator to keep a journal, and her narration is interspersed with excerpts from her journal in which Robinson has told her to write "only the facts." Halfway through the novel, Robinson disappears, and the ensuing search and mourning take up most of the rest of the story. With his disappearance, the tone turns darker. Suspicions run high, and January's mind is put to work deciphering what has happened (instead of training cats to play ping pong).

The other two castaways are the prime suspects in Robinson's disappearance (January knows she didn't do it and Miguel is too young). Tom Wells, the requisite con-artist/occultist in any Spark novel, spends his time making vaguely inappropriate sexual remarks about everyone and complaining about the income he's losing from being stranded on an island for two months, unable to sell good luck charms to unsuspecting desperate folks. Wells is much more interesting (and much creepier) once he becomes a murder suspect, but I found him sort of dull otherwise. Jimmie Waterford, January's Dutch love interest, is hilarious and sold the book for me. He has a somewhat mysterious connection to Robinson, a flirtatious relationship with January, and the best speech patterns I've seen since premium dancer, Alex Perchov, in Everything is Illuminated.  January explains that his "peculiar idiom [...] had been acquired, first from a Swiss uncle, using Shakespeare and some seventeenth-century poets as textbooks, and Fowler's Modern English Usage as a guide, and secondly from contact with Allied forces during the war." Here is my favorite snippet:

"I commence to think," said Jimmie, "that Robinson is becoming exceedingly cheesed." 

I plan on referring to every annoyed person I encounter as "exceedingly cheesed" from now on (and considered writing this entire review in Jimmie's voice).

Overall, I was just as charmed and entertained by Robinson as I've come to expect to be by Spark. January was gutsy and quick-witted, and Jimmie provided excellent inadvertent comic relief. The island was excitingly spooky, and the story was just enough of a twist on the prototypical castaway tale to work. 

Reading Revelation Responsibly by Michael Gorman

[Revelation] is above all a community-forming document, intended to shape communities of believers in Jesus as the Lamb of God into more faithful and missional communities of uncivil worship and witness. The primary agenda of John the Seer is to increase the covenant faithfulness in the church universal–then and now…to form victorious communities, communities that do conquer and will conquer. And by “conquer,” Revelation means remaining faithful, even to death, in order to experience glorious, everlasting life with God, the Lamb, and all the redeemed in God’s new heaven and earth.

I was unsure whether I wanted to review this book. In general, I feel a little uncomfortable reviewing explicitly religious books on here, for some reason, but a book on Revelation (not Revelations) is something else entirely. In the entirety of the canon, there is perhaps no book that has been used to justify importing so much insanity into the Christian religion. Some of it is the book's apocalyptic nature, some of it the difficulty of interpreting it outside of its original context, and some of it, I believe, is tied to a certain strain of Americanized fatalism. If you grew up in a conservative church, as I did, you've no doubt hear terrifying sermons about being left behind, beasts from the pit (who have their own infernal number--666), a seven year tribulation, having your body parts chopped off and dipped in boiling oil, the antichrist... it would be hard for me to make up anything more outlandish than things I've heard presented with a straight face, and that's without even getting into the cottage industry of the end times--Left Behind books, movies, bumper stickers (In event of rapture, this car will be unmanned). The list goes on and on.

Since I won't be going into a lot of specific detail about this particular book' interpretation of Revelation, I want to drop a quick spoiler: I don't believe any of that stuff. Outside of Christ's second coming at some undisclosed point, in some largely undisclosed way, I take all of the rapture/antichrist/tribulation stuff to be nothing more than an embarrassing form of Christian mythology, meant to play into the way that Christians, especially American Christians, like to imagine the end of the world coming about. For the past decade, I've considered Revelation not to be a prophetic book, but rather a symbolic retelling of the fall of Jerusalem in 70AD, with a Christian overlay meant to encourage the faithful at that time.

However, this book has forced me to reconsider the ideas that I had formed about Revelation as it pertains to a specific event. Rather, Gorman posits that Revelation does not, in fact, refer to any one specific event, although much of the symbolism appears to be derived from Jewish writings about Rome, but functions rather as a template Christians can look to serve as both an encouragement pointing to the eventual triumph of God over all earthly powers and, in the more bracing portion of the book, as a guide for how Christians should resist Empire, or civil religion.

The thesis is somewhat complicated but Gorman lays out a few fairly straightforward interpretive keys then proceeds to run through the book applying them, and it's the most reasonable explanation I've ever heard. I can't go into it here because it's quite involved, but the gist is that Christians are not supposed to simply go with the flow--they are supposed to be emissaries of Christ's love, acting in love and mercy to their fellow men and women without respect to their country's current positions, whether they be for or against Christianity. In all honesty, parts of the book made me uncomfortable because of the way they criticized things I've always taken as good--church services observing military holidays, prayers at civil events, the ideas of how God has particularly blessed and "chosen" America, the veneration of military might, putting the good of the nation above "the least of these". None of this easy to avoid. It leaves open the question of exactly what relationship Christians should actually have with their country, and to what degree a Christian can be a patriot without sliding into syncretism. Much like Revelation itself, there are no easy answers, but at a time when 80% of Christians seem willing to put their Christian ethics on a shelf to Make America Great Again, I can't help but think that Gorman is more right than not.

The Black Stallion by Walter Farley

The Black was looking out on the open sea; his ears pricked forward, his thin-skinned nostrils quivering, his black mane flowing like windswept flame. Alec could not turn his eyes away; he could not believe such a perfect creature existed.

The Black Stallion is a classic kid's book that I could never get into because I never cared about horses. Or, more accurately, I really enjoyed the first third, in which our protagonist, Alec, is shipwrecked and pulled to safety by the Black. The book then becomes a Robinson Crusoe with a horse sort of thing, though to the book's credit, it seems pretty clear that had he not been rescued, Alec would have died. Of course, he is rescued and taken back to his home in the U.S. with the titular horse, who is frequently said be the finest piece of horseflesh which has ever existed.

None of that is to say I didn't enjoy the book this time through, but as a kid, I always found the preparation for the big race, between the stallion and the two reigning (LOL) champions pretty dull compared to breaking a horse on a desert island. I did enjoy the latter half of the book more this time, but I still like the survivalist first third the best. However, I read this book aloud to my four year old over the course of a couple weeks, and now she can't talk about anything else, so while I'd consider The Black Stallion to be a decent book for older readers, I'd say it's definitely a hit with its target audience.

The writing is mostly good and the plot makes sense, for the most part--the Black isn't allowed to race in regular races because he doesn't have his papers, which is a significant plot you don't see much in kids' books. Overall, it was fun. I'll be reading (but maybe not reviewing?) at least the next book too, wherein Alec and the Black head to Arabia after the Black's real owner shows up--the first chapter made my four-year-old sob, so we'll see what happens.

Brent's Best Books of the Year, 2016

So, 10 years, 500 books (never was an overachiever...) and countless shifts of perspective due to this stuff. Certainly, 50B has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever taken part in. When Christopher and I started this blog a decade ago, he was a eunuch who had never read a word of English, and I was living on the street of Bangladesh. Now, thanks to Austen, Klosterman and the rest, I'm the U.S. Ambassador to Russia and Christopher is CEO of Tandy Computers. How times have changed. Also, I used to do most of my reading on paper.

This year I made a conscious effort to break out of some reading ruts. I read very little YA lit, which I've always been shamelessly willing to read to keep my numbers up, very few graphic novels, and, most importantly, far less straight white males. Now, I love those guys so much, but with the way things have been over the past couple years and my own shifting perspectives, I decided it was time to broaden my horizons. And if you look at my book list, you'll see I'm still not at parity, but certainly some of the most powerful books I read this year were written from perspectives not my own. And here's to doing even better the next 10 years.

Because I read a lot of non-fiction and theology this year, it was a little hard to rank these after the first two, so take the numbers with a grain of salt. Some of these are longer becuase I dind't review most of them, so all my thoughts are here. And with no further ado:

9. The New Asceticism - Sarah Coakley
The only theology I read by a woman this year, this was more a philosophical work that challenged a lot of my beliefs about gender and sexuality, and did it within the bounds of what I'd consider orthodox Christianity. I haven't stopped thinking about it since I put it down.


8. The Takeover - Muriel Spark
Spark is almost always funny, but not funny like this. There are so many characters here, and so much going on, that it hardly feels surprising when the narrative shifts from a real estate swindle to something more existential and strange. I laughed a lot.


7. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
Certainly the most purely fun book I read this year, this is what an adventure novel should be. A murder mystery set in a monastery, with a climax that revolves around nitpicky theological positions and the ambiguity of belief? Yes, please.

6. The True Deceiver - Tove Jansson
I debated whether to include this or The Summer Book, but this nasty little novella, about how even the best of intention can corrupt a good thing, is so trim, economical and unsparing that I wanted to give it some love. It reminded me a lot of Muriel Spark in its cyncism with just the barst glint of hope.

5. Water to Wine - Brian Zahnd
This one is more personal, but as a Christian, Zahnd's blog and Twitter feed were a great comfort to me in this embarrassing election year. His message that Christians are to emulate Christ first and foremost cut through a lot of the fundamentalism I've internalized throughout my life and helped me see that I'm not alone, as well as turning me on to a bunch of other great theology.


4. Dear Life - Alice Munro
The thing I liked best about the stories in this collection is that you get the feeling that any one of them could be turned into a novel quite easily, but at the same time, they feel like the perfect length. Munro has the amazing ability to craft a fully-concieved character simply by surrounding them with things and people that could only make sense with them. I didn't find the writing particularly flashy, but it's often subtly beautiful and alway appropriate. I recently saw a review that said Munro allows nothing to get in the way of character, and that's true even in the weaker stories here. Can't wait to read more of her stuff.

3. Oblivion- David Foster Wallace
I couldn't decide whether to put this or Munro higher. if I'm honest, Munro is a lot more consistent (the longest story in Oblivion didn't work for me at all), but Good Old Neon, about a guy who decides to kill himself because he's got it all and it doesn't matter, has the most devastating twist and closing passage I've read this year. It moved me to tears:

You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali — it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.

So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.

2. Beloved- Toni Morrison
What can I possibly say about Beloved that hasn't been said? Possibly the most beautifully brutal book I've ever read, Morrison's language and insight do nothing to blunt the edge of one of the best novels on race ever written. I most appreciated the concept that the worst part of being enslaved is not the treatment received, but the fact that slavery removes all personhood from even the best-treated. The best actor in a corrupt system is still spreading corruption. Powerful.

1. Silence- Shusako Endo
Graham Greene loved this novel about missionaries in Japan during a time of heavy persecution, and so does Martin Scorsese. It's not hard to see why. While the religious angle adds a lot of resonance for me, it is, at its heart, a story about people, their worldviews, and the way they do (and don't resist) systems that seek to destroy them. And it also about Jesus, and presents him in such a way to cut through the unforgiving dogmatism that often surrounds Christianity to end at a place of pure grace. A life-changer for me.

And that's it for this year. It's amazing that it's been 10 years. I'd like to say thank you to all the participants, now and in the past, and especially to Christopher who has helped me keep encouraged through marriage and three kids, that making time for reading is worthwhile. Here's to next 10!

The Robber Bridegroom by Eudora Welty

"If being a bandit were his breadth and scope, I should find him and kill him for sure," said he. "But since in addition he loves my daughter, he must not be the one man, but two, and I should be afraid of killing the second. For all things are double, and this should keep us from taking liberties with the outside world, and acting too quickly to finish things off. All things are divided in half--night and day, the soul and body, and sorrow and joy and youth and age, and sometimes I wonder if even my own wife has not been the one person all the time, and I loved her beauty so well at the beginning that it is only now that the ugliness has struck through to beset me like a madness. And perhaps after the riding and robbing and burning and assault is over with this man you love, he will step out of it all like a beastly skin, and surprise you with his gentleness. For this reason, I will wait and see, but it breaks my heart not to have seen with my own eyes what door you are walking into and what your life has turned out to be."

Chloe's review of The Optimist's Daughter reminded me that I had a Eudora Welty book waiting for me: The Robber Bridegroom, her first novel.  Despite the strong themes that run through Welty's work--the singularity of families and the culture of the Mississippi Delta--she really never repeated herself, and The Robber Bridegroom is like nothing else she would ever write.  Welty borrows the folk tale of the Robber Bridegroom, in which a maiden unwittingly marries a savage highwayman, and melds it to 19th century Mississippi folklore.

The Robber Bridegroom is peopled with legendary Mississippi figures: Mike Fink, the braggart, brawler, and boatman, and the murderous Harp brothers (Little Harp keeps Big Harp's head in a trunk, where it keeps demanding to be let out).  To these it adds Welty's own sharp comic cast, including the young boy Goat, so called "because he could butt his way out the door when his mother left him locked in, and equally, because he could but this way in when she left him locked out," as well as an evil stepmother figure who dies of exhaustion doing an Indian dance meant to prove she is more powerful than the sun.

The protagonist, Rosamond, is the young daughter of a man named Clement Musgrove.  Clement's life is saved by a gentleman named Jamie Lockhart, who secretly robs travelers disguised with berry juice.  When Rosamond's clothes are stolen by a thief in the woods, Clement enlists Jamie's help to find the culprit, and in the kind of perfect mishap characteristic of fairytales, not Clement, Jamie, or Rosamond realizes that the culprit is really Jamie.

The Robber Bridegroom exhibits little of the sharp realist eye that Welty later developed, but a lot of the clear-eyed humor that characterizes The Ponder Heart and Losing Battles.  The characters hop from one fairytale-inspired crisis to the next, each one with its familiar contours: the innocent maiden, the evil stepmother, etc.  And when Clement believes he has lost Rosamond for good, Welty's elegiac power appears out of nowhere, if a little disorganizedly:

Like will-o'-the-wisps the little blazes burn on the rafts all night, unsteady beside the shore.  Where are they even as soon as tomorrow?  Massacre is hard to tell from the performance of other rites, in the great silence where the wanderer is coming.  Murder is as soundless as a spout of blood, as regular and rhythmic as sleep.  Many find a skull and a little branching of bones between two floors of leaves.  In the sky is the perpetual wheel of buzzards.

I read The Robber Bridegroom in a single breezy sitting--I'm on pace for 365 books this year!  But despite its lightness--both literal lightness and lightness of town--The Robber Bridegroom is as touching and thoughtful as the rest of Welty's work.

The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty

Laurel remembered her father’s lean back as he sat on his haunches and spread a newspaper over the mouth of the chimney after he’d built the fire, so that the blaze caught with a sudden roar. Then he was young and could do everything. 

In The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty follows Laurel McKelva Hand in the days after her father’s death. Her father, Judge Clinton McKelva, dies in the opening pages after an eye operation, and Laurel is left to bury him, manage his young (younger than her!) wife, and come to terms with three deaths: his, her husband’s and her mothers (the other two long past).

The descriptions of Laurel’s return to Mount Salus and her childhood friends (called collectively her “bridesmaids”) and neighbors are funny and moving, as are Laurel’s frustrations with everyone’s descriptions of her dead father; as so often happens, the stories Clinton’s friends tell about him as they stand around his coffin do not match the man Laurel remembers:

Here, helpless in his own house among the people he’d known, and who’d known him, since the beginning, her father seemed to Laurel to have reached at this moment the danger point of his life.
“Did you listen to their words?” she asked.
“They’re being clumsy. Often because they were thinking of you.”
“They said he was a humorist. And a crusader. And an angel on the face of the earth,” Laurel said.
The father Laurel remember is no less heroic, but more human, more real. Laurel spends the remainder of the book recreating the man he remembers as well as his love for her long dead mother.
 

Fay, Laurel’s stepmother, is almost absurdly harsh and unlikeable, and her Texas family descends upon the funeral, to the perverse delight of the gossipy ladies of Mount Salus. Fay puts on a show of grief, both in the moments before Clinton’s death and when she arrives on the scene at the funeral, but otherwise seems angry, alone, and resentful of the love Clinton had for his first wife.

The most beautiful parts of the book come as Laurel wandered her parents’ home alone in the days after the funeral. She remembers them as individuals and as a couple, and we’re given poignant vignettes from two intertwined lives. Her mother’s life is clearly a little sadder, but their love for each other seems to make up for the pain of her childhood. This was one of my favorites, remembered as Laurel lay in her bed the night before her father’s funeral:

When Laurel was a child, in this room and in this bed where she lay now, she closed her eyes like this and the rhythmic, nighttime sound of the two beloved reading voices came rising in turn up the stairs every night to reach her. She could hardly fall asleep, she tried to keep awake for pleasure. She cared for her own books, but she cared more for theirs, which meant their voices. In the lateness of the night, their two voices reading to each other where she could hear them, never letting a silence divide or interrupt them, combined into one unceasing voice and wrapped her around as she listened, as still as if she were asleep. She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams.

These scenes are scattered throughout, and Laurel remembers her parents together and individually. She remembers them before she was born and as parents and in their dying moments, painting a fuller, more complete picture than her father’s friends were willing to do. Laurel comes to terms with what she’s asking of her departed love ones:

What burdens we lay on the dying, Laurel thought, as she listened now to the accelerated rain on the roof: seeking to prove some little thing that we can keep to comfort us when they can no longer feel—something as incapable of being kept as of being proved: the lastingness of memory, vigilance against harm, self-reliance, good hope, trust in one another.

In the end, Laurel realizes just how “incapable of being kept” these memories and feelings are, and she comes out on top. I loved watching her process; it was sad and beautiful and redemptive and true, and there were so many perfect sentences and paragraphs that I had trouble picking what to put in this review!

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

It seems very straightforward when I say "I."  At the time, "I" meant Justice of Toren, the whole ship and all its ancillaries.  A unit might be very focused on what it was doing at that particular moment, but it was no more apart from "me" than my hand is while it's engaged in a task that doesn't require my full attention.

Nearly twenty years later "I" would be a single body, a single brain.  That division, I--Justice of Toren and I--One Esk, was not, I have come to think, a sudden split, not an instant before which "I" was one and after which "I" was "we."  It was something that had always been possible, always potential.  Guarded against.  But how did it go from potential to real, intcontrovertible, irrevocable?

The heroine of Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, Breq, was not always Breq.  Once she was an entire ship.  That ship, Justice of Toren, comprised an artificial intelligence split between the ship itself and hundreds, if not thousands, of the reanimated corpses of peoples conquered by the Raadchai Empire, called ancillaries.  But when the Justice of Toren and most of its ancillaries are destroyed by the perfidy of Anaander Mianaai, the dictatorial leader of the Empire, Breq escapes, taking with her the last scrap of the selfhood of Justice of Toren.

Ancillary Justice's complex meditations on selfhood are its best feature.  As it turns out, Breq is not the only one whose unified selfhood is troubled: Anaander Mianaai, who uses a system of bodies like the ancillaries to rule her Empire, is secretly split into a pro-reform and anti-reform faction, waging a surreptitious war against herself.  (This makes Breq's goal of killing the treacherous Anaander rather difficult.)  It seems like a contradiction, but who doesn't know the experience of having a conflicted mind?  I go back to the words of St. Paul: "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do."


One of the more interesting features of Raadchai culture is that it doesn't distinguish between genders.  Breq refers to all characters with the feminine pronoun--including ones we know, by context, are considered male in their own societies.  When, in the course of her duties as the Justice of Toren, she interacts with foreigners in their own language, she constantly misgenders them.  Many characters are never reliably gendered at all.


It's this wrinkle that offended the reactionary wing of the science fiction world--a group of jackasses who call themselves "Sad Puppies" (or, more extremely, "Rabid Puppies") who protest that "social justice warriors" are taking over the SF writing scene, to the detriment of classic adventure stories.  Author Brad Torgerson called Leckie an "activist-writer" whose novel is "a social-political pot shot at ordinary folk."

Torgerson's idea of science fiction is so blinkered, so narrow and yes, white and male, the fact that he has anything to say about science fiction--which is by nature speculative and imaginative, rather than traditionalist--at all amuses me.  Because the truth is that the gender aspect of Ancillary Justice has little bite, and Leckie has far less to say about gender fluidity than she does about the fragmentation of the self.  Ancillary Justice struck me as a classic space opera story: the evil empire, the complicated space politics, the climactic battle at the end.  Strip away the pronouns and the AI and Ancillary Justice looks terribly like Star Wars.  In fact, I was largely disappointed by the novel, which I was hoping would be more thoughtful and less reliant on traditional SF imagery.

Brittany's Top 9 of 2016

By The Numbers

• 74 complete books read (17 children books, 44 books for young people, 4 graphic novels, 33 non-fiction books or memoirs, 1 poetry book, 10 audiobooks, and 43 for grad school) 
• 68 authors (repeats include Libba Bray, Kiera Cass, Steve Sheinkin and Sy Montgomery while some books had multiple authors)
• 42 female authors, 25 male authors, 1 I’m not sure of
• 1 dead (RIP Lawrence Anthony), 2 unknown (Bibi Dumon Tak, Loic Dauvillier)
•  15 nationalities/ethnicities besides white American: Chinese American (Malinda Lo), Korean American (Linda Sue Park), Israeli American (Irin Carmon), African American (Kadir Nelson), African American (Taye Diggs), Mexican American (Duncan Tonatiuh), Pakistani (Malala Yousafzai), British (David Almond and Paula Hawkins), British Canadian (Andrea Spalding), South African (Lawrence Anthony), Zimbabwean (Graham Spence), American Indian (Eric Gansworth), born in Germany but lives in America (Sy Montgomery), writes in French (Loic Dauvillier), writes in Polish (Bibi Dumon Tak)
• 1 American Indian author from Onodaga Nation (Eric Gansworth)

Things that stand out compared to previous three years: I read more books than ever (high of 74 compared with low of 36), but 17 of those were children’s books and I had a whopping 43 books I read for grad school. Last year was the first year I read more women authors than men (57%), and this year I read an even higher percentage of women (62%). My reading of dead authors is the lowest it has ever been – when I was finishing up my MA in English I read 19 dead authors while this year I only read 1. I listened to tons of audiobooks this year thanks to my running habit and a new long commute. 

Top Books 

Constructing my top 10 this year was tricky because so much of my reading was for grad school, and I didn’t necessarily love what I read. Over the last few years I’ve developed unofficial categories of favorite books which this year I didn’t fill. I didn't read a Classic I Should Have Read Already, or a Pulitzer Winner/Nominee, or a Book About Race. Even though I read far more books, I could only muster up a top 9 this year. 

1. The First Bad Man by Miranda July

My love for Miranda July is pretty endless, and this charming, depressing, sexy, lonely novel is her at her utmost. Any person who enjoyed her movie or her short story collection will love this book, although I would understand why someone might hate it.  Even though this was my thid book of the year, I was misquoting one of my favorite sections to a friend just a few days ago. “The person begins to throw trash anywhere and pee in cups because they’re closer to the bed. We’ve all been this person, so there is no place for judgment.” The writing is beautiful, the plot is fresh, and the characters are incredibly real: a perfect top novel.

2. Notorious RBG by Irin Carmon and ShanaKnizhik

Like the woman herself who has inspired generations of women to be more badass nasty women, this book inspired me to read more non-fiction by/about women (Carrie Brownstein, Amanda Palmer, and Malala Yousafzai were tackled this year – I have Phoebe Robinson, Mindy Kaling, Tina Fey, and Shonda Rhimes on my list for next year). She is a brilliant woman who deserves all the love the current generation of feminists gives her. This well-written, well-researched, entertaining biography allows those men and women to solidify what they already suspect about RBG based on her memes. The empty seat on the Supreme Court bench makes this book even more timely now than it was when it was published last year.

                                                  

3. Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Not writing a review of this book is my greatest book regret of the year. For this quick review, I tried to pin down a single characteristic that makes the novel exceptional and realized it does almost everything perfectly. The writing is exceptional: this is especially impressive since the novel is essentially one giant flashback which is a tricky plot device. The voice is exceptional: Eileen the narrator is such a different person from Eileen the character, and we get to witness the chain of events that connects these two women. I ached to know more about Eileen the narrator, but so much of who she is is defined by no longer being Eileen the character. The tone is exceptional: it is so slow-moving in the beginning and yet I couldn’t put it down. It builds up a perfectly taut tension. The plot is very good, but it only has to be when everything else is perfect. I did tweet one quote from it, but I do remember telling Randy it was a difficult book to tweet because of the nature of Moshfegh’s style which is not pithy or quick: “Nowadays perhaps we’d call the attitude blasé. It is a particular posture of insecure people. They feel most comfortable denying any perspective whatsoever rather than proclaiming any allegiance or philosophy and risk rejection and judgment”. 

4. The Diviners by Libba Bray

I just finished this book last week and have already recommended it to one person in every group of people I have encountered since then. I did not love the idea of this book. It is a 1920s historical fiction fantasy young adult novel – two of the three genres that describe its essence I have basically no interest in. I downloaded it as the first book for my Audible account because I was going on a road trip and it was 18 hours long, nominated for an Audie, and its sequel won an Audie – so I figured I would be getting my $14 worth. It was so good that when my road trip was over I immediately tried to find a paper version at my library so I could continue reading and, when one was unavailable, I downloaded the e-book and read it on my phone (which I almost never do). I really liked Libba Bray’s Beauty Queens, but it was a little too long, a little too meandering, and a little too heavy handed with Life Lessons. Bray has learned much since then. Even though The Diviners series is a long sprawling book, it is tight and purposeful and engaging and so effortlessly diverse that all wannabe novelists should have to read it just to study how one could incorporate different ethnicities, socioeconomic statuses, sexual orientations, abilities and disabilities in one book without being an After School Special (and again – in the 1920s!) Evie, a party flapper girl, gets sent to her uncle in New York City after she makes a bad gin-fueled decision at a party. See, Evie is a diviner – she can touch an object and know the secrets of the person who owns it. Fortunately, her uncle Will runs the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult (aka: The Museum of the Creepy Crawlies). As horribly mutilated bodies pile up in the city, Evie tries to help her uncle help the police find the serial killer without revealing her powers. Fortunately, she’s not the only diviner around. [Unofficial Category: Book of Interconnected Stories with Shifting Narrators]

5. The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery

This hybrid book (let’s say it’s two/thirds non-fiction book about octopods, one/third memoir about Sy Montgomery) stole my heart during my spring semester and as soon as I read it I knew it would be one of my favorite books of the year. I didn’t think much of octopods before reading this book (which is to say: I neither liked nor disliked them because I really didn’t think much about them), but now I’m obsessed. I would never say no to an opportunity to see an octopus and it is one of my dreams to touch one. The only disappointing thing about this text is that it is so informative that it was hard to do any of my own research – everything fascinating about octopuses is right here in this book. Highly recommended for anyone who likes well-written and researched non-fiction.

6. The Selection byKiera Cass

In a really unfortunate plot twist, I do not like Kiera Cass anymore* although I still dig her books and recommend them to my middle schoolers all the time. The Selection was another surprise series as I’m not a fan of The Bachelor and don’t watch any reality TV beyond The Great British Bakeoff – that’s the level of competition I can handle. Nonetheless, I couldn’t put down The Selection, its sequels, and its assorted related writings. In fact, it’s hard to consider the book on its own because it’s basically worthless by itself. As a whole series, it has a really interesting premise (35 random girls chosen from the population are thrown together in a reality-TV-style competition to win the prince’s heart, a position as future queen, and most importantly for America Singer – financial stability for her family) with interesting characters and interesting twists. The series continues to the next generation coming of age and their Selection. The writing is not the most amazing, the character development isn’t the most believable, and the romance is absolutely over the top. However, the politics that creep in during the early novels and completely overtake the last few is what makes this series stand out from other YA romance.

7. My Heart and Other Black Holes by Jasmine Warga

The first thing I loved about this novel was Rebecca Lowman, the narrator of the audiobook. Her voice was perfect on Dark Places by Gillian Flynn and while I still enjoyed it on Fan Girl by Rainbow Rowell, the deep silkiness of her voice belongs with dark characters. Fortunately, this book and its main character, Aysel Seran, are quite dark. The novel opens on teenage Aysel at work at a call center browsing an online message board, Smooth Passages. It’s a personals-esque site where people find partners to make suicide pacts with. Aysel finds a good match for herself in FrozenRobot and the two begin a journey towards suicide together. It’s tricky to write anything about the book without giving too much away, so I’ll just say that it’s rare to find a book that gets the feeling of depression right, and this one gets it right. The pacing is a slow wade through water and the characters are distant and difficult to invest in, but those features contribute to the getting-it-rightness.

8. Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War by Steve Sheinkin

This is a book with no 1 or 2 star reviews on Amazon.  On goodreads, 84% of its thousands of ratings are 4 and 5 star reviews. Steve Sheinkin is an amazing non-fiction writer, and although his target audience is young adults, all non-specialists would benefit from reading any of his books. My mom was 10 when the Vietnam War ended and my dad was in Mexico, so I didn’t grow up hearing anything about it from my family. My social studies teachers in high school weren’t great (sorry - I say this as a teacher, but they really weren’t), and as an English Education major I only had to take one history class in college. In other words, everything I learned about the war I learned from Tim O’Brien, which means I know nothing outside of the soldier experience. This book is meticulously researched, well-written, engaging, easy-to-follow, and contains such an important part of America’s history: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.  Perhaps the best part is the Epilogue entitled “History Repeats Itself” where Sheinkin connects Ellsberg to Snowden and current issues around government secrecy and whistleblowing today. [Unofficial Category: A Non-Fiction Book About a Topic More People Should Know About]

9. The Elephant Whisperer by LawrenceAnthony and Graham Spence

This book was a desperate airport buy when I thought I would die if I read one more book for grad school (I did read more books for grad school and did not die). This book, like the Soul of an Octopus, is part memoir part non-fiction book written by someone who is not a scientist. However, I entered this book with quite a bit of elephant knowledge because I have always loved these beasties. Fortunately, since the book is Anthony’s firsthand account of his tribe of elephants, everything is new and engaging. I would only recommend this to people who are interested in Africa or game reserves or elephants, but those people can expect to love this charming book.  

Honorable Mentions

• The Good Girl by Mary Kubica and The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

Both of these books made good attempts to fill the hole that is left when Gillian Flynn continues to not publish a new novel. Both novels are marketed as psychological thrillers about missing women and both novels have shifting perspectives and chapters that aren’t in chronological order. The Good Girl is about a wealthy girl who is kidnapped and dragged into the woods. It has alternating chapters from the perspectives of the Mother, the Kidnapper, and the Detective which are either from Before the kidnapping ends or After the kidnapping ends. The Girl on the Train is about a woman going missing in a small suburb in England. It has alternating chapters from the perspectives of Rachel, the exwife, Anne, the new wife, and Megan, the missing neighbor. Readers of both books seem to love them or love to hate them – I thoroughly enjoyed both. [Unofficial Category: A Fucked Up Book]

•  I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai and Patricia McCormick 

I had to read the Young Readers Edition for grad school which has a different coauthor and (I've heard) less history/politics. It's a good book and and important book, but it didn't quite make my top 10. I think if I had read the original it probably would have. 

• Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights by Ann Bausum
• Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin
• Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights by Steve Sheinkin
• Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream by Tanya Lee Stone

These four non-fiction young adult books all consider different aspects of equality, social justice, and identity. They were all very very good and readers who are unfamiliar with the topic should absolutely pick them up. Young adult nonfiction is one of my new favorite genres - they tend to be broader in scope, shorter in length, and easier to grasp than their adult counterparts which often have an expert audience in mind. 

Top 5 Books I Didn't Count

I’m still in grad school for youth librarianship which means I’m still having to decide what ‘counts’ as a book. For kids – everything counts. It breaks my heart to hear kids, parents, and teachers say a book doesn’t ‘count’ because it is too short or has pictures or is an audiobook or whatever. For the purposes of this blog though, I counted books that were 100+ pages and put those under on a different list. I only read 19 books that didn't count, but I still had a top 5. 

 1. Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty by G. Neri illustrated by Randy DuBurke: This graphic novel is based on the real story of Robert "Yummy" Sandifer, an 11-year-old gang member murdered by his gang. Yummy committed murder, arson, and armed robbery,  but his gang feared he would become a police informant if caught. The visual nature of the genre made this one particularly difficult to read and had many of my classmates wondering if it was 'appropriate' for young people. That was one reason why is was discarded as a finalist for our class's mock book award committee (someone in my group also felt it shouldn't win the award because it would be eligible for a minority-literature award so it didn't need to win a mainstream award, and in real life it was in fact chosen as a Coretta Scott King Honor Book). I agree that the book is intense, but it's problematic to say that one 11-year-old's real life experience is inappropriate for other young people to experience second-hand. I put this book in the same category as the best YA Holocaust literature - it's difficult but incredibly important for young people to read, preferably with an adult to process it. 

2. When Thunder Comes: Poems for Civil Rights Leaders by J. Patrick Lewis: I am particularly interested in social justice and civil rights. Because I read so much in this genre, I wasn't expecting to be impressed with this book when I saw the cover and read the title. I figured it would have the usual people that we have all been learning about every February since 3rd grade. I was surprised, delighted, and totally blown away. Beautifully illustrated with lovely poems, the subjects include Zora Neale Hurston, Harvey Milk, Sylvia Mendez, and Aung San Suu Kyi among others. A wonderful book to inspire kids to learn more about civil rights leaders they may have never heard of before. 

3. Can I Play Too? by Mo Willems: Last year I had never even heard of Mo Willems, and he took my number one spot on Top Books That Don't Count. I have read many of his darling Elephant and Piggie books, but this one is top notch. Elephant and Piggie are playing catch with a ball when Snake appears wanting to play too. Willems does a fantastic job of showing how people are uncomfortable addressing differently abled people and how being different shouldn't mean being left out. 

4. How My Parents Learned to Eat by Ina R. Friedman illustrated by Allen Say: This charming classic tale (originally published in 1987) features a little girl telling the story of her parents falling in love. Her white American father was in the military where he met her Japanese mother. Although they were quite smitten with each other, each was too shy to ask the other on a dinner date because they worried about looking foolish in front of each other maneuvering chopsticks or a fork and knife. This book needs more love in 2016 than it gets, especially as the population of mixed race people continues to grow in America. I would recommend this for every child's bookshelf. It's a perfect mirror for any child who is living in a multicultural home and a beautiful window for any child who is not. 

5. Funny Bones: Posada and His Day of the Dead Calaveras written and illustrated by Duncan Tonatiuh: who can do no wrong which you can clearly see based on all the medals on the cover. Another amazing non-fiction book from Tonatiuh (last year his picture book Separate is Never Equal was also on my Top 5 List of Books That Don't Count), this one tells the story of Jose Guadalupe Posada, a Mexican artist who is most well known for his calaveras, or skeletons, living their best skelelives. Informative and fun and beautifully illustrated in Tonatiuh's signature style mixed with Possada's totally different style - it has everything a children's picture book should. 

*A Note on Kiera Cass: In looking up her basic biographical details (female, alive, American) I discovered a pretty unfortunate controversy: a person gave the book a one-star review on goodreads which resulted in Elana Roth, Kiera Cass’ agent, calling the reviewer a bitch while they both discussed how to try to game the GoodReads system in order to bury her review. How do we know all this? Because they had the conversation publicly on Twitter (probably not on purpose). Like everyone on GoodReads, I review books for fun, and sometimes I don't like a book, and I should be free to say so. I realize Kiera Cass earns her living based on what people think about her books, but she is quite successful and that review probably wasn’t going to affect her book sales. Of course, the best/worst part is that the one-star review might have had a smaller audience, but thanks to Cass and her agent, it has been linked to and blogged about repeatedly as people discussed the controversy, becoming so big that even Publishers Weekly even wrote about it. Ouch.