Best Reads of 2014: Part Six

As my blog mates know, I dread making these yearly lists of favorite reads and think of them as a final exam in electricity and magnetism (my antiperspirant got a challenge during that physics class). Now that I've started listing, though, I'm having trouble finishing. I could go on and on, telling you about books I loved reading last year, and then I could tell you about some of the books I most regret not yet reading!

Some of my most enjoyable reads weren't the best written, but they made me think or were spot-on for my reading mood at the time. Okay, here are more books I liked in 2014.

In a post about giving books as gifts, I suggested Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead, 2014). It was inspired by the attempted assassination of Jamaican singer Bob Marley in 1976, and the (never named) singer's presence and influence permeate this novel. The primary setting is Jamaica over three decades; the primary themes are corruption and power. There's fighting between rival Kingston ghetto gangs and the two political parties that back them, the meddling we've come to expect from our government and the CIA, excruciating poverty, and the rise of the drug trade.

It takes some patience to become acclimated in A Brief History because you're thrown in and expected to immediately start swimming through multiple narrators; prose in various styles, including patois; and a huge cast of characters, although there's a helpful cast list several pages long at the beginning. If you're familiar with Jamaican history, it will enhance your reading, but it's not necessary. The book is as entertaining as other recent memorable books of historical fiction: Elizabeth Gilbert's Signature of All Things (Riverhead, 2013), James McBride's Good Lord Bird (Riverhead, 2013), and Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games (HarperCollins, 2007). If you're a fan of James Ellroy or George Pelecanos, I think you'll particularly enjoy these 675+ pages.

I'm keeping a tight rein on myself, because I love, love, love good books of 700 or more pages, and I don't want to get sidetracked into talking about them. Oh, I can't stand it. I'll just mention a couple: Underworld, by Don DeLillo, which begins with a 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers-New York Giants baseball game and morphs into an epic of the Cold War and its aftermath; and the beautiful, autobiographical A Book of Memories, by Péter Nádas. Then, too, there's Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, about Sugar, a teenage prostitute, who hankers after a better life in Victorian London.

Faber doesn't write the same book twice. His third novel, The Book of Strange New Things (Hogarth, 2014), is a 500-page book of science fiction set in the future. Faber's interest isn't really in technology and science; rather, it's a moving and thought-provoking contemplation about marriage, spirituality, faith, and redemption. Earthlings, whose planet is deteriorating due to climate and economic conditions, are establishing their first extraterrestrial colony on the planet Oasis. The settlement is supported by a shadowy global corporation, USIC, but the native Oasans (sensational characterization, by the way) refuse to cooperate with the settlement unless a new Christian pastor comes to replace the one they've lost. USIC selects a former drug addict-turned pastor, Peter Leigh, whose wife, Bea, remains in England while he goes on a planet-hopping mission to Oasis. Peter and Bea stay in touch through emails, but conditions on Earth deteriorate––and Bea's situation becomes desperate. Peter is caught between his work for God and his love for his ever-more-far-away wife.

Michel Faber's wife died shortly before The Book of Strange New Things was completed. Faber has stated it's his last book of fiction.

I guess 2014 was my year for reading novels that reflected on spiritual redemption; however, you don't need to possess any religious orthodoxy to appreciate Marilynne Robinson's beautifully spare writing about spirituality, relationships, and the human condition. Her Gilead trilogy is set in the tiny town of Gilead, Iowa, during the mid-20th century. These books are quiet, leisurely paced, and character driven. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, elderly Congregationalist minister John Ames writes a long, conversational journal entry about life for his young son to read––or not read––when he's a grown man. The second novel, Home, is set concurrently with Gilead, and features John Ames's best friend, Rev. Robert Boughton, as he struggles with his alcoholic prodigal son, Jack.

Lila (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), which completes the trilogy, focuses on the story of the homeless young woman who appeared out of nowhere in Gilead one rainy day, married Ames late in his life, and bore their son. By the time I finished Lila, I felt I knew a real person. It's possible to read these books in any order or as standalones, but I think they work best read in the order they were written.

It's hard to write about Wolf in White Van (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), musician/song writer John Darnielle's first novel, in a way that doesn't spoil it for a potential reader. It's one of those books in which the way the story is told is not only as important as what actually happens, it's integral to the meaning of what happens. It's about choices, despair, and a search for meaning in a landscape where time and space, and imagination and reality, are fluid. Writing it took a lot of skill.

The facts of the story are these: At age 17, Sean Philips suffers a devastatingly disfiguring facial injury leading to his isolation. He eventually turns the stories he tells himself about an imaginary world into a source of income: a text-based, role-playing game called Trace Italian. It's named after a medieval fortification that featured layers of defensive barricades branching far out from the central fort. Trace players navigate through a post-apocalyptic American landscape, with the goal of finding safety in this fortress. Sean's game was developed pre-internet, but Trace is similar to internet role-playing games in that the repercussions of players' choices determine their journeys. Players snail-mail their choices to Sean, who lives in southern California, and he mails them their corresponding instructions. The game could go on forever without a player reaching that illusory fortress. Then, something happens that takes Sean and the reader to both a beginning and an exit.

Needless to say, this book is not for those who like linear plots or for someone like Sister Mary's friend, who thought Moby-Dick is just a story about fishing. Wolf in White Van deals with alienation and tragedy, and it still haunts me.

Here's another haunting book, Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Knopf, 2014), winner of this year's Man Booker Prize. It's about an Australian surgeon named Dorrigo Evans, who at age 77 is a war hero and recipient of many honors; yet he never feels he measures up and suffers from chronic unhappiness. Is it because Dorrigo lost the one he loved, or is it due to trauma from the war?

Flanagan touches on Dorrigo's service in World War II as he tells us about Dorrigo's life, but then he zeroes in, and we find Dorrigo was one of a group of Australian POWs who worked on the Thailand-Burma Death Railway. (Flanagan's father survived his labor on that hellish Railway and died as Flanagan completed this manuscript.) As his senior officers die, Dorrigo is placed in charge of 700 sick and debilitated POWs. The supplies in the prisoners' medical tent consist of little more than rags and a saw, and some of the scenes in which Dorrigo doctors his fellow POWs were very difficult reading. Painful, too, was comprehending Dorrigo's moral dilemma when every morning he must pick which men will form the day's labor crews.

Flanagan occasionally shifts to the Japanese guards' points of view (during and long after the war), and we come to understand how these men saw dying in the service of the Emperor as the ultimate honor and were able to treat their prisoners so inhumanely. The heartbreak in this book is almost unbearable because Flanagan lets us get to know his characters as individuals, but this is what makes the book worth reading. This is a classic book of war fiction.

A love of apples might be in my genes because my family has lived in Washington state for generations. I'm not quite as obsessional as Leonard Dickinson, who ate an apple every night before retiring (in Cyril Hare's 1939 mystery, Suicide Excepted), but I'm in that ballpark. I collect books about apples, and that's why I  grabbed Rowan Jacobsen's Apples of Uncommon Character: Heirlooms, Modern Classics, and Little-Known Wonders (Bloomsbury USA, 2014). The 320-page book contains more than 150 beautiful photographs and information about 142 apple varieties, including the Knobbed Russet, which looks like "the love child of a toad and a potato." It is organized into six sections: summer apples, dessert apples (for eating rather than cooking or baking), bakers and saucers, keepers, cider fruit, and oddballs (those apples that don't fit neatly into the other categories). It ends with a variety of 20 recipes.

Jacobsen's writing is informative and entertaining. He includes resources for buying apples and growing them and an apple festivals guide. If you've been eating Red Delicious apples all these years because you don't know what else to eat, this book is for you. Of course, it's also for people who don't think of a computer company when they hear the word "apple."

Now you'll have to excuse me, because all this thinking about apples is killing me, and I must eat some apple pie.

Fall Preview 2014: Part Ten

There are too many good books due out this fall for us to tell you about all of them, but let's take a look at the ones I have for today.

The Front Seat Passenger (translated from the French by Jane Aitken; Gallic Books, September 9) will be my first book by the late noir writer Pascal Garnier. It looks like a gem for fans of Patricia Highsmith.

Fabien Delorme returns from Normandy to his home in Paris to discover his wife, Sylvie, and her lover were killed in a car accident. The existence of an affair is a shock to Fabien. He spots the wife of Sylvie's lover, Martine, leaving the morgue and, feeling vengeful, decides he needs to get close to her. Insinuating himself into her life is a little difficult due to the presence of her best friend, Madeleine. This is noir, so I'm betting all of the characters do not have a jolly good time.

John Darnielle's Sean Phillips was severely disfigured in an accident when he was 17 and rarely leaves his southern California home. Sean designed and operates a text-based role-playing game, Trace Italian, set in a future post-apocalyptic America and played through the mail. The reader knows a woman was somehow killed when she obsessively played Trace with her boyfriend. It's no wonder Sean takes steps when two Florida teenagers, Lance and Carrie, decide to play the game in the real world.

Darnielle is the singer-songwriter of the Mountain Goats, and his Wolf in White Van (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, September 16) is saturated in pop culture and shifts around in time.

Marilynne Robinson's books are powerful––yet quiet and moving––meditations on faith and descriptions of life and death in the rural American Midwest. Lila (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, October 7) follows Gilead and Home, continuing the three-generational saga of Congregationalist minister John Ames and his neighbors in tiny Gilead, Iowa.

Lila is a homeless stranger in Gilead when she steps into John's church, seeking shelter from the rain. She returns every Sunday thereafter, and, when he's age 67 in the mid-1950s, the widower John marries her. She begins a new life as wife and mother of their son. In Gilead, we learn about John and his forebears. Lila now tells Lila's story.

Wow, I didn't intend to embark on a reading journey about faith and redemption, but here we are, following the gentle Calvinist Marilynne Robinson with Michel Faber, whose highly anticipated fall novel, The Book of Strange New Things (Crown/Hogarth, October 28), is about a missionary named Peter. USIC, a global corporation, sends Peter to the planet Oasis. The Oasans seem very receptive to Peter, so that isn't the problem. Peter's wife, Bea, lives on Earth, and Bea's letters report an Earth wracked by typhoons and earthquakes. Peter is now torn.

Anyone who read Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, featuring a 19-year-old prostitute in Victorian London, knows that this writer is impossible to pigeonhole. This latest book should be good.

I have a difficult time passing up novels about the rural American West. Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and early reviewers think very highly of this one. They call Braden Hepner, first-time author of Pale Harvest (Torrey House, distributed by Consortium, September 9), a masterful story-teller with "a starkly poetic voice."

Hepner's Jack Selvedge grew up working on his family dairy farm in Juniper Scrag, Utah. He's now 20, and the farm is a shell of its former self. His dreams for the future change when he takes up with the beautiful Rebekah Rainsford, who's reticent about her past.

While I was researching Jane Smiley's Some Luck (Knopf, October 7), it cracked me up to see Kirkus refer to her A Thousand Acres as "Lear in Iowa." Yep, that's it in a nutshell.

Smiley returns to Iowa with Some Luck, the first book in a planned trilogy. Instead of the raging Larry Cook and his conniving daughters of A Thousand Acres, we have Rosanna and Walter Langdon, a loving couple who live on their Denby farm with five very different children: first-born Frank, animal-lover Jo, sweet Lilian, bookworm Henry, and Claire, her father's favorite. This book covers the 1920s through the early '50s, while the children grow up and leave or stay home on the farm. Later books will take the family into the 21st century. I don't expect Smiley to be overly sweet or sentimental.

I'm always interested in what Urban Waite is writing, because he sets his crime fiction in the Pacific Northwest, where I grew up, and he does a bang-up job with a man on the run.

His Sometimes the Wolf (Morrow, October 21) involves a couple of characters whom we met in Waite's first book, The Terror of Living: Deputy Sheriff Bobby Drake and his dad, Patrick Drake, a former sheriff turned drug smuggler after his wife died and he fell on hard financial times, now out of prison on parole. Bobby's marriage is in poor repair so he only reluctantly offers his dad a place to stay. Bobby is still angry at Patrick and doesn't know whether he can trust him. Washing up from Patrick's past is a threat neither man can ignore. Then there's the wolf, the first one to be seen in these parts for 50 years; Bobby joins efforts to rescue it before it is killed by ranchers worried about their livestock.

All of us have our eccentricities, and one of mine is an interest in sieges. Here's an international best-seller about the 1714 Siege of Barcelona written by the Catalonian anthropologist and writer Albert Sánchez Piñol. Victus: The Fall of Barcelona (translated from the Spanish by Daniel Hahn and Tom Bunstead; Harper/HarperCollins, September 9) is historical fiction illustrated with diagrams, portraits, and maps. According to reviewers, this isn't dry history; Piñol brings the siege to life in this novel.

Upon the death of the Spanish king at the turn of the 18th century, Bourbons and Castilians are warring against Catalonians in the War of the Spanish Succession. Maneuvering like a Machiavelli among them and fighting on both sides is Martí Zuviría, a military engineer and tactician charged with the defense of Barcelona against the Bourbons.

In recent years, Chicago writer Libby Fischer Hellmann has concentrated on non-series crime fiction that explores the effect of strife or revolution on the human spirit. Set the Night on Fire involves present-day multiple murder rooted in Chicago's turbulent late-1960s. A Bitter Veil is a thriller set against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution. Havana Lost, set in Cuba, Angola, and Chicago, examines what violence has cost the Pacellis, a Chicago Outfit family.

Hellmann's most recent book is the fourth in what one reviewer calls her "medium-boiled" Georgia Davis series, although it can be read as a standalone. Georgia is a former Chicago cop who is now a private detective. In Nobody's Child (The Red Herrings Press, September 2), Georgia discovers she has a half-sister, Savannah, who is caught up in a human trafficking ring led by a very dangerous old enemy.

For a Western take on Homer's Odyssey: Lin Enger's The High Divide (Algonquin, September 23). Reviewers say they love this book. Publishers Weekly calls it "reminiscent of John Ford's classic The Searchers."

One early morning in 1886, Ulysses Pope grabs a chicken, tucks it under his arm, and leaves his family on the western prairie of Minnesota. He hopes to save his soul by coming to terms with his past. His wife, Gretta, and their two young sons, Eli and Danny, have no idea why he's left or where he's gone. Eli and Danny take off after their dad, hopping trains and following clues to Montana. In a while, heading after her sons and Ulysses, Gretta makes it four Popes on the road (well, okay, five, if you count the chicken, assuming Ulysses hasn't eaten it, and its last name is Pope). All right!

That wraps it up for me today. Tomorrow, we'll see what Maltese Condor has to show us.