Best Reads of 2014: Part Five

It's hard to believe we're a week into 2015. I've already been swept into a maelstrom of deadlines, so I sat down tonight and quickly composed my list of favorite 2014 reads. I'll tell you about half of them today and the other half tomorrow. A different day or more reflection might have generated a different list; no matter, you can be sure I enjoyed the following books.

I love novels set in boarding houses, such as Muriel Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington. In places where unrelated adults are forced to live close together, eccentricities and resentments bloom like mold on old wallpaper. Sometimes escaping a fellow boarder is nearly impossible, and if you're British, there's the stiff upper lip to maintain and the manners demanded by civilization to remember. Of course, it's one thing to be irritated beyond all reason or to be bored to death––and another to actually be done to death. For example, Mrs. Bunting lies awake at night straining to hear whether her secretive upstairs boarder will leave the house in Marie Belloc Lowndes's The Lodger, made into a silent movie by Alfred Hitchcock. The lodger is obviously a gentleman despite his shabbiness, but could he be the serial killer terrorizing Victorian London? He's so odd, but his rent comes in so handy!

There's an excess of dark secrets among the six tenants and the unsavory landlord of the seedy bed-sit at 23 Beulah Grove. In Alex Marwood's The Killer Next Door (Penguin, 2014), an incident one stifling London summer night unites the six tenants, who normally are extremely careful to mind their own business. What they don't know––but, we do––is there's a grisly reason for the bed-sit's bad drains. I stayed up much too late reading this weirdly chilling book, chock full of great characters and settings and laced with dark humor. It's perfect tension-filled suspense for a night you're looking to be creeped out.

After that book, I was casting about, looking for another boarding house setting, when I came across the name of Patrick Hamilton, an English writer who lived a hard life and died too young. In Hamilton's Hangover Square, a deteriorating George Harvey Bone resolves to win or kill conniving small-bit actress Netta Longdon in World War II-era London. It's a wonderful, memorable read, so I was thrilled to find a book by Hamilton I hadn't read, The Slaves of Solitude (originally published 1947; NYRB Classics, 2007). It's late 1943, and we move from the larger setting of the World War against fascism to the smaller war set in a suburban London boarding house, where the genteel Miss Roach, and others, have taken refuge from the London Blitz. It's impossible not to identify with this decent woman as she suffers through dinners with the bullying and pompous Mr. Thwaits, a villain worthy of Dickens, and takes tea with a brash American lieutenant. It's a lovely read, especially when accompanied by endless cups of tea and cookies you can choke on when you laugh at the superb dialog.

A boarding house or city under siege setting; themes of identity, memory, justice or redemption; crime fiction set in foreign places; satire; dystopian fiction; experimental fiction.... I have so many reading joneses I can barely begin to list them. I picked up Jesse Ball's Silence Once Begun (Pantheon, 2014) because I wondered what narrator/character Jesse Ball would discover during his investigation of the Narito Disappearances case in 1970s Japan. Eight people disappeared from villages in Osaka Prefecture, with only a playing card posted on their door to provide a common clue. From the opening pages, the reader knows thread salesman Oda Sotatsu isn't guilty of the crime, yet he confesses and then stands mute thereafter. Ball is a poet, and his book, the majority of which is in interview form, is a lyrical, disturbing, and fascinating exercise in how one goes about learning the truth. I'm still mulling over Ball's observations about the nature of justice and obsession.

There are never enough quiet nights when you get to select what you feel like eating or drinking and pair it with a book you feel like reading. This winter, a good accompaniment to hot coffee and a thick slice of gingerbread is The Devil in the Marshalsea, historical fiction by Antonia Hodgson (Mariner, 2014). If you're working on your New Year's resolutions, even better. Trust me, you'll be motivated to improve yourself after watching Tom Hawkins go to pot in 1727. He lands in Marshalsea Gaol, an infamous London debtors' prison where prisoners are divided––according to their ability to pay for food, drink, and protection––into the horrible Master's side and the infinitely more horrible Common side. (I need to check my Dante's Inferno for the corresponding circles of hell.) Tom may earn a get-out-of-jail-free card if he discovers who murdered his recent cellmate, Captain Roberts. Of course, Tom's culprit will have to suit Sir Philip Meadows, Knight Marshal of the Marshalsea. Hodgson's first novel is atmospheric and features believable characters. I'm pleased it's the first in a proposed series.

I was on the train, trying so hard to be quiet reading Lenny Kleinfeld's Some Dead Genius (Niaux-Noir Books, 2014), laughs were coming out my nose. It's Kleinfeld's second comic hardboiled book about Chicago homicide detectives Mark Bergman and John Dunegan (see Read Me Deadly's review of the first, Shooters & Chasers, here). Mark and Doonie investigate a bizarre series of murders set in Chicago's art world (great observations on the valuation and marketing of art), and it can be read as a standalone. As the reader, you're clued in to the bad guys' scheme and watch the cops play catch up, but the twisting plot and fast pace keep you only a bit ahead of the cops. Kleinfeld's writing is original: hip, vivid, and playful. The closest I can come to describing its flavor is to say it's like reading a seriously amped-up Elmore Leonard with an "adults' eyes-only" rating for profanity and sex. Despite the X-rated language and all the characters' cynicism, the cops are very nice guys. I like that a lot.

Last March when I reviewed Andy Weir's The Martian (Crown, 2014) (see review here), I predicted it would be one of my favorite books in 2014. And it is. The book begins when American astronaut Mark Watney is erroneously presumed dead by his Ares 3 crewmates and abandoned alone on Mars without any ability to communicate––or leave. Mark, who has a great sense of black humor, is determined to survive until the next manned mission to Mars. Unfortunately, that's scheduled for four years from now, and the food, water, and air will run out long before that. Mark is a botanist/mechanical engineer/Mr. Fix-It, and we read journal entries in which he describes a goal (say, creating water), how he means to do it, what went wrong, and how he'll fix it. His scientific explanations are clear, and his jerry-rigging is fascinating. After a few months go by, satellite pictures convince NASA Mark is still alive. Then, the loneliest man in the universe gets a little less lonely, and his goals change. It's hard to beat this book for its combination of inspiring, entertaining, and interesting.

I don't speak Chinese, and I hadn't read any Chinese science fiction before Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem (translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu; Tor, 2014). Cixin Liu is an engineer, and his book is hugely popular in China. Ken Liu's smooth translation maintains the original's Chinese flavor and adds some helpful explanatory footnotes at the bottom of the appropriate page. It's a two-threaded story featuring two scientists: Ye Wenjie becomes an engineer on a 1970s covert military project that seeks to establish contact with extraterrestrials after she loses her physicist father during the Cultural Revolution; Wang Miao, a modern-day nanotechnologist, begins to play a mysterious video game set on another planet called "The Three-Body Problem" after he is asked to help a police investigation into a series of scientists' suicides. These threads eventually connect in a very satisfying way.

The Three-Body Problem is heavy on the science and tech; however, the scientist-characters drive the plot, and Liu is interested in big questions about the human experience. I don't think physics classes or previous knowledge about the Cultural Revolution are necessary to enjoy this book, but they definitely enhanced my enjoyment. Liu's slowly emerging story is mesmerizing. The second book in the Three Body trilogy, The Dark Forest, will be published by Tor on July 7, 2015, and I can't wait to read it.

There are few ways to describe Celeste Ng's exquisite first novel, Everything I Never Told You (Penguin, 2014), that don't include the word "sad." The first sentences are heartbreaking: "Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet...." And that's not the only thing "they" don't know about Lydia. Lydia is the middle and favorite child of  Marilyn and James Lee. The Lees moved to a small town in 1970s Ohio, where James, a Chinese-American whose parents immigrated to this country, teaches at the local college.

Both parents are bruised people who see Lydia as a vehicle to fulfill their dreams: Marilyn wants her to be the doctor she herself had hoped to become, instead of a housewife; James's desire is for Lydia to be popular at school. When Lydia's body is found in a local lake, James and Marilyn fall to pieces. Nathan, their oldest child and bound for Harvard, thinks Jack, a young James Dean type, might have something to do with it, while Hannah, barely registering in the family as the youngest, has another idea. This book takes a sensitive look at the hurts we suffer when we fail to fit in or measure up to expectations. It's also a terrific examination of magical thinking, family dynamics, and human resiliency and must be read to the unexpected end.

I'll be back tomorrow to tell you about my other 2014 favorites.

I'm fantasizing about reading in the snow. Our high temperature today was 81.

The Martian and the Chicken from Hell

OD-ing can happen to you. For example, Harry Bosch and Harry Hole are wonderful, but too much of their company day after day, and they become those dinner guests who have forgotten how to go home. Or, take the case of reading a lot in the same subgenre. By the time you get to the seventh straight book of espionage, it's like eating nothing but pizza for a week.

It's good to cleanse your reading palate. Read something different from your usual fare. No matter what you commonly serve yourself, you can't go wrong with one of the two books below. They're different, period.

Calling all geeks: your ship has come in. But science-phobic people who scratch their heads at the idea that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen can still enjoy The Martian by Andy Weir (Crown, February 2014). You can even skim the scientific details and get the gist, but I hope you don't. Weir, a long-time outer space aficionado, explains it very clearly. I know already this will be one of my favorite books this year.

In a nutshell, it's about astronaut Mark Watney's quest to remain alive after his Ares 3 crewmates, who believe he's dead, abandon him on Mars without any means of communication. Mark is a botanist, a mechanical engineer, and a Mr. Fix-It. He's also blessed with a terrific sense of black humor and determination to survive. He'll need both, as he'll run out of food and water long before the next mission to Mars arrives in four years. We read the journal entries (beginning with "I'm pretty much fucked"), in which Mark records his goals, games out how he'll overcome the problems involved, and then explains why those efforts failed and what he'll try next. It's fascinating to read about NASA's back-up systems in the Hab and rover and to watch Mark go about his jerry-rigging, which never becomes repetitious. I became attached to this inventive and likable astronaut and laughed as he breaks up the water making and farming with droll comments about his crewmates' love of 1970s TV and disco music. Mark is just so darn human.

Russia recently brought back mice and newts
from an orbit around Mars (Getty photo)

A few months after Mark was left, satellite pictures convince a thunderstruck NASA that he is still alive. Then, the novel alternates between Mark's journal entries, Ares 3 in space, and NASA on Earth. (I loved the response from China's space program and the American agency's in-fighting and political maneuvering; NASA's PR woman gushes that CNN's top-rated show in its time slot, The Watney Report, will engage the public in Mark's situation, and this means more money from Congress.) This is the best kind of Robinson Crusoe-in-space novel: a plan is formulated to bring Mark, the loneliest man in the universe, home. I finished it with a renewed respect for the crazy nobility of astronauts, the can-do attitude of scientists in the face of no time or money, and the good in humankind. It's an out-of-this-world read.

Speaking of out of this world, maybe you saw the recent Washington Post article about the discovery of dinosaur fossils at the Hell Creek Formation in North and South Dakota. The fossils form a picture of "a freakish, birdlike species of dinosaur—11 feet long, 500 pounds, with a beak, no teeth, a bony crest atop its head, murderous claws, prize-fighter arms, spindly legs, a thin tail and feathers sprouting all over the place."

This "Chicken from Hell" would delight Prof. Lars Helland and Dr. Erik Tybjerg at the University of Copenhagen in S. J. Gazan's The Dinosaur Feather (trans. from the Danish by Charlotte Barslund, Quercus, 2013). It would also thrill Canada's top scientific magazine editor, Jack Jarvis, but it would enrage his old friend, University of British Columbia paleo-ornithologist Dr. Clive Freeman. These men are combatants in a debate that has engaged scientists for 150 years: are birds present-day dinosaurs or do they originate from an even earlier primitive reptile?

Sifting through the arguments about this question is Anna Bella Nor, a single mother who's frantically writing her master of science dissertation at the University of Copenhagen. She's always full of rage. Her three-year-old daughter, Lily, is a handful. Anna isn't on the best of terms currently with her parents, and she has no time for her old friends. Anna loathes her dissertation supervisor, Prof. Helland, for being unavailable and impossible to talk to when he is available. Recently, he has been looking and acting very strange. When he's found dead, sprawled in his office reclining chair, his severed tongue on his lap, it barely grieves Anna, who now must depend on the guidance of the reclusive Dr. Tybjerg, who disappears into the University's Natural History Museum, and her office-mate, Johannes Trøjborg, who looks weird and is weird, albeit kind. She barely has time for "the World's Most Irritating Detective," Søren Marhauge, Denmark's youngest police superintendent.

Søren is 37 years old, and "he could identify a murderer from the mere twitching of a single, out-of-place eyebrow hair, he could knit backward, and everyone he had ever loved had died and left him behind." Although he has a perfect record for solving criminal cases, his losses have left Søren a big, unresolved mess. His long-term girlfriend, Vibe, has now married another man. At the same time Søren investigates Helland's murder—and, shortly thereafter, another death in this case—he finds himself investigating his own past in order to understand his unhappy present.

Joining him in parallel personal odysseys into the mysteries of their pasts are Johannes and Anna. Unlike these three Danes, Canadian scientists Jarvis and Freeman don't do their own digging; writer Gazan excavates their joint history for us. This makes for a very unusual book, in which everyone—detective, suspects, their connections, and the reader—is trying to figure out questions involving identity, in one form or another. In addition to this interesting "all-hands-on-deck" approach to various mystery investigations, Gazan, who earned a biology degree, serves up an incredibly fascinating scientific debate. Her experience in academia is reflected in the book characters' believability. They engage in a genuine scholarly search for information that's affected by their personal biases and professional jealousies, as they race to publish and defend their findings. I read this book at the suggestion of my fellow Material Witness, Periphera, who knew I'd appreciate Gazan's depiction of the forces that drive university research and politics, and the biological knowledge that gives her book some very unsettling moments and a highly unusual (thank goodness!) method of murder.

So, take your pick of these two distinctive books. A yen for surviving in outer space or a look at the dinosaurs that walked the Earth long ago and still fly among us? Or don't choose between them: I highly recommend them both.