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 Five

It's been so warm I can barely remember what it's like to put on a sweater. I'm looking forward to the day my lemon cookie needs a hot tea rather than an iced tea accompaniment. Then I'll pick up my tea, a cookie, and one of these books, and head for the comfy chair.

I have a bone to pick with Random House, American publisher of English novelist David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks. Why do we get the kinda boring cover at the right, while the Brits get Sceptre's feast-for-the-eyes cover below?

The Bone Clocks has already been long-listed for the Booker Prize, but it must dog paddle across the Atlantic before arriving on our shores next Tuesday, September 2nd. It is apparently very ambitious and the "most Cloud Atlas-y" novel Mitchell has written in the last 10 years. Publishers Weekly's starred review even asks, "Is The Bone Clocks the most ambitious novel ever written, or just the most Mitchell-esque?" Yikes! Sometimes "ambitious" seems to be code for "You're going to have to force yourself to finish it so you can discuss it around the water cooler," but Mitchell's books are invariably interesting even if somewhat maddening.

Like Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks is long (640 pages), with six overlapping narratives. The story is told by five narrators, including Holly Sykes, whom we first meet as a feisty 15-year-old girl running away from home in Gravesend, England, in 1984. Holly isn't a typical teenager. She has heard voices she dubbed "the Radio People," and she's somehow become involved in a spiritual war between these "soul-decanting" Radio People and the "Horologists" of the Marinus from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, who are trying to stop them. This is a genre-straddling novel of sci fi/horror/fantasy/realism about free will and destiny. By the time it winds down, we've observed Holly for 60 years.

It's been a few years since I read Timothy Hallinan's The Fear Artist (see review here). I'm pleased to see the next one in the series, For the Dead (Soho Crime), will be out on November 4th. These books feature American writer Poke Rafferty, his Thai wife, Rose, and their adopted-off-the-streets daughter, Miaow, now in junior high.

Life is going well for the Raffertys, and they are preparing to welcome another member into their family. Then Miaow and her boyfriend, Andrew, buy a stolen iPhone and discover it contains pictures of two disgraced and murdered police officers. This discovery jeopardizes the lives of the entire family, since the Bangkok police investigation of the officers' deaths is not on the up-and-up. For their safety, the Rafferty family may need to depend on someone who has betrayed them in the past. The warmth of feeling between these characters and Hallinan's plotting, witty descriptions, and knowledge of Bangkok make this an unusual and appealing series.

Don't you love it when you unexpectedly come across something new by a writer whose previous book you enjoyed? Anybody who has ever been involved with house-sitting would appreciate the surrealistic Care of Wooden Floors, by journalist Will Wiles, in which our narrator, a nameless British copywriter, house-sits a gorgeous apartment for old friend Oskar, a somewhat obsessional classical musician. Oskar has notes for Nameless everywhere, but there are three major rules: don't play around with the piano, take good care of the two cats, and don't let anything happen to the French oak floors. Do I need to tell you Nameless breaks all three rules in a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad way? Then things really spiral out of control.

That book is Kafkaesque, and so is Wiles's next, The Way Inn (Harper Perennial, September 16, 2014). Neil Double would have flummoxed everyone on the old TV series What's My Line?. He's a conference surrogate, hired to attend a business conference so someone else won't have to. Wearing a cheap suit, staying in an anonymous hotel room (his favorite hotel brand-name is the Way Inn), listening to boring speakers, and eating tasteless food suits Double's personality and life philosophy just fine, until he makes the mistake of mentioning his occupation to Tom Graham at a Meetex conference about––wait for it––conferences. Graham works for Meetex, and he takes great umbrage about Double's doubling in for the legitimate conference attendee. Double's life assumes the quality of a nightmare. There is no guarantee the answer to his problems is the mysterious Dee, a woman who hints to him about strange secrets in the Way Inn.

It's hard to think of a crime-fiction writer more versatile than Donald E. Westlake. He wrote under his own name and several pseudonyms, and his series protagonists ranged from the comic, unlucky crook Dortmunder to Parker, a cold-hearted and violent professional thief. Westlake also wrote screenplays, such as Payback and The Stepfather. When he died at age 75 in 2008, Westlake had won lifetime achievement awards from the Mystery Writers of America and the British Crime Writers Association. And he was still going to his office, where he typed all his manuscripts on his manual typewriter.

As a Westlake fan, I cannot wait to read The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany, edited by Levi Stahl, with a foreword by Lawrence Block (University of Chicago, September 24, 2014). This is a compilation of material, such as previously published and unpublished essays, pieces from an unpublished autobiography, a history of private-eye fiction, letters, interviews, appreciations of fellow writers, some recipes concocted by his characters, an essay by his wife Abby, and more. Westlake was insightful and funny. Even people who have never read his fiction would likely enjoy this book.

Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (Coffee House, distributed by Consortium; September 1, 2014) won the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. It's McBride's first novel, and it looks like a doozy. It's about a nameless girl, born into a poor, rural Irish family with an older brother she adores, a very abusive Catholic mother, and an absent father. The brother's operation for a brain tumor leaves him with physical and mental deficits and also deeply affects his family.

We follow the girl through her childhood to college, and there are upsetting aspects involving sexuality. She narrates the whole 227 pages in an Irish lilt, in what is less a stream of consciousness than an interior monologue with ungrammatical sentence fragments or a word or two. Most punctuation, except for periods, is missing. Reviewers say the effect is thoughts too inarticulate or rapid for complete sentences. Here's an example:

Suddenly. She's all here mother. She. With scalding prayers. Forgotten her old lash phone calls. Am I not here? I. Give me a good punch on my face. Stop. It's fine now. It's fine now isn't that why you came? To pick up. Bits and pieces. Let her do her thing. Name of the father but shhh. Lead us not into temptation. That's right. All very well. I. So I won't utter a single. No. I will. Do this. I will do this for you because. I can."

This book is definitely not for everyone, but it sounds like an unforgettable read.

Turn up the reggae music and light one up if you've got one, because I'm going to tell you about Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead Hardcover, October 2, 2014). It's a 560-page epic, set primarily in Jamaica, as well as in New York, covering several decades of violence, poverty, and corruption. Although Bob Marley isn't mentioned by name, one can assume he's "the singer" whose attempted assassination in December 1976 is prompted by a political rivalry. Marley, his wife, and his manager are lucky to escape, and the wounded singer goes into exile in England. The novel's headcount and dozen narrative voices (Marley's isn't one of them) are hardly affected.

The major characters are low-level thugs and big baddies, such as hit man John-John K and Copenhagen City gang kingpins Papa-Lo and Josey Wales; politicians from the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the People's National Party (PNP); CIA agents worried about the spread of communism; journalists, including one from Rolling Stone; and Nina Burgess, whom PW calls "undoubtedly one of this year's great characters." Nina begins as a Kingston receptionist, sheds one identity after another, has an affair with the singer, and ends up in New York before the book ends.

Mathematicians work their tails off on problems that have stumped their predecessors for centuries, and what happens when they solve them? An outer-space alien from Vonnadoria kills Andrew Martin of Cambridge after Martin solves the Riemann Hypothesis, and then the alien takes Martin's place so all evidence the Hypothesis was ever solved can be obliterated (Matt Haig's The Humans).

In Stuart Rojstaczer's The Mathematician's Shiva (Penguin, September 2, 2014), Rachela Karnokovitch, a brilliant mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, reportedly solves the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, but then dies of cancer and takes its solution to her grave. Her meteorologist son, Sasha, hopes to bury her with dignity; however, dozens of mathematical geniuses arrive in Madison, and, instead of sitting shiva with the family, do everything they can think of to discover Rachela's secrets, such as ripping up floorboards and holding a séance. Excerpts from Rachela's memoir of fleeing Poland as a child during WWII are shown in flashback.

Author Rojstaczer is a former professor of geophysics at Duke, and his book looks like a lot of fun, even for those of us who started formulating excuses for missing homework as soon as our math teachers assigned those terrifying problems with the two trains leaving the station at different times and traveling at different velocities. PW calls Rojstaczer's book "hugely entertaining."

Have you read Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games? It's an epic centering around two men: Inspector Sartaj Singh, one of the few Sikhs on the Mumbai police force, and his pursuit of the Indian gangster Ganesh Gaitonde. This 928-page doorstopper even has a glossary of Mumbai slang in the back. It's a great read, and I've been looking forward to reading whatever else Chandra might write.

Finally, here it is. Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty (Graywolf Press, September 2, 2014) is "part literary essay, part technology story, and part memoir" of traveling from India to the United States and of working as a programmer before becoming a writer. Chandra explores the connections between the worlds of technology and art, and the cultures of code writers and artists. This is a must read for me.

Tomorrow we'll take a look at more books Sister Mary is putting on her list for fall.