Releases I'm Ready For, Winter 2017

Whatever else 2017 has in store, at least there are still good books on the horizon. I've been especially anticipating these winter releases:

→ DIFFICULT WOMEN by Roxane Gay (January 3): The wait is already over for this short story collection, and I'm nearly finished reading it. I am a huge fan of Gay's writing, whether it's fiction or essay, and these stories are as hard and beautiful as I expected. These are examinations of pain and loss and the difficult lives that produce difficult women, and they're written with nuance and power.

→ THE YOUNG WIDOWER'S HANDBOOK by Tom McAllister (February 7): McAllister is one of the hosts of Book Fight, a conversational literary podcast I look forward to every Monday morning. He's reported periodically on the long process of getting his first novel published, and I'm excited to finally read it. The story follows a young man suddenly widowed who embarks on a road trip with his wife's ashes, and it promises to be both sad and funny.

→ LINCOLN IN THE BARDO by George Saunders (February 14): I was one of the many who became aware of Saunders's wonderfully weird stories after the success of his 2013 collection. His career began much earlier, but he's only ever published shorter works, so this novel has been highly anticipated. The main character is Abraham Lincoln, who mourns the death of his young son during the Civil War by visiting the cemetery, where he encounters the ghosts of other people buried near the boy. It's a strange, fascinating premise that I expect Saunders will pull off with style.

→ THE BOOK OF ETTA by Meg Elison (February 21): I recently raved about Elison's gripping post-apocalyptic tale, THE BOOK OF THE UNNAMED MIDWIFE, and I'm glad the followup is nearly here. This sequel takes place somewhat later, featuring a different character who is mentioned at the end of the first book. I'm eager to return to the intense world of the story and explore further.

→ EXIT WEST by Mohsin Hamid (March 7): I read Hamid's previous novel, HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA, and while my review was lukewarm, I've been curious to read more of his writing. This upcoming novel sounds great, involving a love story in a war-torn land and magic portals that allow instant immigration. I can't wait to start reading!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times spoke with President Barack Obama about the role of books in his life and presidency: "To this day, reading has remained an essential part of his daily life. He recently gave his daughter Malia a Kindle filled with books he wanted to share with her (including One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Golden Notebook and The Woman Warrior). And most every night in the White House, he would read for an hour or so late at night -- reading that was deep and ecumenical, ranging from contemporary literary fiction (the last novel he read was Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad) to classic novels to groundbreaking works of nonfiction like Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow and Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction." The interview transcript is also well worth reading.

2016 By The Books

After a new year begins, I like to take a look back at my reading trends and favorite books from the year before.

In 2016, I read 35 books. In last year's roundup, I reported that I'd just managed to match the 36 books I read two years previously (the in-between year was an outlier of record reading). I was intending to at least hit and ideally surpass 36 this time, and I thought I'd squeeze in some short books at the end if necessary to reach the magic number, which nicely averages out to three books a month. Of course this plan was kind of silly, and I decided not to let it bother me (too much) that I fell just short of the earlier number.

I'm always going to experience some disappointment over the number of books I read in a year, because there are always more books than I have time to read. I find a pace of three books a month generally workable, and it lets me get to a decent selection of the books I'd like to read. However, on occasion I end up reading when I really ought to be writing, not just because it's more fun but because I feel responsible for reaching my book quota, and again, that's kind of silly. I hope I can arrange my time to enjoy roughly the same number of books in 2017, but I'm also going to try for a more sensible approach, so we'll see how it goes.

Over time, my reading has shifted toward new releases as I become increasingly tuned in to various sources of book news. This year I got especially organized about tracking and reading books as they were published (next week I'll share another installment of Releases I'm Ready For). As a result, two-thirds of the books I read this year were published in 2016. A handful of others were 2015 catchups, a few more from the earlier years of this decade, and only three from before that, with nothing published before the 1990s. I'm happy with the variety of stories and styles I'm getting from contemporary books, so I have no particular plans about changing my selection habits, but again, we'll see what happens.

I did really well this year at choosing good books. I still don't have the hang of abandoning a book I'm not enjoying, but that wasn't an issue this year, because I was pretty happy with everything I started. (I'm not counting sampling the opening pages and quickly determining a book's not for me.) Sure, I did read some books with flaws or frustrating elements, but even those had good qualities that outweighed the problems. So if you're looking for reading suggestions, check back through my monthly reviews. I recommend everything!

Of course, I do have some favorite picks, which I've wrangled into categories:

Family: Stories about family relationships are my favorite genre and made up approximately a third of my reading this year. COMMONWEALTH by Ann Patchett (December) is a standout depiction of a family over time, with nuanced characters and situations, an unusual chronological structure, and perfectly observed details. THE NEST by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney (March) throws highly flawed family members into a crisis and cleverly weaves their problems and conflicts into a gripping, vibrant story. Family dynamics are more of a subplot in ENTER TITLE HERE by Rahul Kanakia (August), which portrays a high school senior's disastrous ambition through a compelling, unexpected plot and masterful handling of a tricky structural conceit. All three of these novels convey real, difficult emotions with a solid dose of humor, and they all contain characters I came to love despite their often terrible behavior.

Speculative: Out of my various science fictional and related interests, post-apocalyptic reading has been a staple for me in recent years, but I only read one such book in 2016 (insert comment about current events). THE BOOK OF THE UNNAMED MIDWIFE by Meg Elison (November) really scratched my apocalyptic itch with the gripping, brutal story of a woman surviving a world devastated by disease. Another favorite novel this year in the broader speculative genre is LOVECRAFT COUNTRY by Matt Ruff (February), a deft and thoughtful tale that subjects its characters to both supernatural horrors and the horrors of racism in 1950s America. 2016 introduced me to STORIES OF YOUR LIFE AND OTHERS (also February) by Ted Chiang, a 2002 collection of brilliantly written short stories that explore wildly original science fiction concepts.

Historical: I've always enjoyed reading good historical fiction, though I think it's only recently that I've noticed this preference. THE QUEEN OF THE NIGHT by Alexander Chee (February again!) is an intricate, suspenseful story of an opera singer in 1880s Paris and the complicated path she traveled to obtain her fame. Like any strong historical novel, it demonstrates an immense amount of research and uses that knowledge in service of character and plot, and the same is true of my top book pick of 2016: The amazing HOMEGOING by Yaa Gyasi (May/June) covers 250 years, depicting the impact of slavery on the United States and Ghana through vivid snapshots of each generation that expertly bring characters fully to life in the space of a chapter.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Atlas Obscura, Eric Grundhauser reports on The Highbrow Struggles of Translating Modern Children's Books Into Latin: "In addition to Green Eggs and Ham (Latin title: Virent Ova! Viret Perna!!), the Tunbergs have also translated Dr. Seuss classics How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Quomodo Invidiosulus nomine Grinchus Christi natalem Abrogaverit) and The Cat in the Hat (Cattus Petasatus), as well as Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree (Arbor Alma)."

December Reading Recap

I'm closing out my 2016 reviews with recommendations for the two books I read in December:

→ COMMONWEALTH by Ann Patchett starts with an adulterous kiss at a christening party that breaks up two marriages, creating a new family of stepsiblings united only in resenting their parents. I'm hesitant even to share that brief summary, because the kiss and almost everything that happens in this novel emerges as an unanticipated development. The story jumps back and forth across decades, presenting big and small moments in the lives of the characters as they navigate family dynamics, growing up and growing old, and the problems of remembering and retelling shared experiences.

I am in awe of the way this novel manages to convey the story of an increasingly sprawling family by focusing on a small set of incidents that often aren't the scenes I expected to play out. While the reader gets to spend more time with some characters than others, each family member is portrayed as a full and nuanced individual. I especially enjoyed seeing how various siblings and parents clashed or connected and watching these relationships change over time. This family felt real and unique, and I cared about everyone's fate, so the novel delivered all that I hope for (but don't always find) in a family drama.

Patchett is an incredible writer at every level. Her sentences are crammed with well-observed detail, but the casual, comfortable language always provides a smooth reading experience. Even at serious moments, Patchett teases out the humor in mundane human behavior and interactions. I was impressed by the deft handling of the book's idiosyncratic structure, which frequently skips past major events and then gradually fills in the details of what happened. Like so much in this novel, the manner in which the story unfolds was a delightful surprise.

Commonwealth joins my list of favorite family stories, and I heartily recommend it to other fans of the genre. If you've read it already, I suggest this Bookworm interview in which Patchett discusses her decisions in crafting the novel as a whole and some specific scenes.

→ THE SYMPATHIZER by Viet Thanh Nguyen opens at the end of the Vietnam War, as Saigon falls, or is liberated, depending on perspective. Those different perspectives are at the core of the novel, because the narrator acts as an officer of the Republic of Vietnam's National Police while secretly serving as an agent of the communist Viet Cong. During the attack on the capital, he escapes and resettles in Los Angeles, where he previously attended college and studied American culture. Once in the US, our protagonist continues living a divided life, working in the Department of Oriental Studies at Occidental College (a dichotomy not lost on him) and conducting covert operations for both sides of the Vietnamese conflict.

There's a lot happening on every page of this novel, particularly inside the narrator's head. As he announces at the start, he's "a man of two minds," and much of the story explores how a person (as well as a country) can cope with duality. Plotwise, a lot also takes place, including some extremely tense and intensely violent scenes, but the events are spaced apart by more cerebral sections and somewhat detached from each other. Though I found the slow pace a challenge at times, most of the book kept me fascinated.

The novel is packed with cleverly constructed sentences that often take a darkly funny turn. Some gems: "Over the next few days, we wept and we waited. Sometimes, for variety, we waited and we wept." "I barely even had the opportunity to sleep, since a sleeper agent is almost constantly afflicted with insomnia." "She cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary." I look forward to reading more of Nguyen's great writing in his upcoming story collection, THE REFUGEES.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ A few months back, Emily St. John Mandel crunched the numbers at FiveThirtyEight on books with "girl" in the title: "A number of patterns emerged in our analysis: The 'girl' in the title is much more likely to be a woman than an actual girl, and the author of the book is more likely to be a woman. But if a book with 'girl' in the title was written by a man, the girl is significantly more likely to end up dead."

→ This week, Adrian Liang of The Amazon Book Review points out a hopeful new trend (also mentioned by Mandel), books with "woman" in the title: "I sometimes have this horrible suspicion that, consciously or no, a book title is whispering, 'Read about "girls." They're less troublesome than women.' ... More troublesome 'women,' please." (Thanks, Book Riot!)