It’s a wrap

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It’s a wrap

December 17, 2015 by patebooks

Coming up with a year-end list of favorite books is a piece of cake for me. They’re the same books I’ve been wrapping up as presents for my favorite people. Fa la la la!

One is my 2014 top book — Emily St. John Mandel’s beautifully written Station Eleven, now out in paperback. A dystopian novel, for sure, but also a hopeful one. I gave it 5 stars — “amazing” –on Goodreads, something I rarely do. This year, for example, my only 5-star rating went to Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life, which was both tragic and triumphant in its depiction of friendship over time, the ways in which the past impinges on the present. Dark and immersive, it was often as hard to read as it was to put down. I first read it as a digital galley, so I’m giving it to myself for Christmas. (Last year, I gave myself Station Eleven).

As to what books I’m giving to others, one of my friends from Maryland gets Anne Tyler’s latest Baltimore novel, A Spool of Blue Thread. Gently comic, it recounts the story of the Whitshank family, whose members charm and exasperate with their mild eccentricities as they negotiate domestic life. Tyler has such a gift for illuminating ordinary lives so they seem extraordinary.

I’m giving J. Ryan Stradal’s wonderful first novel Kitchens of the Great Midwest to a friend who knows her way around a kitchen and also appreciates fine fiction. It’s about young chef Eva Thorvald, and “about” is the operative word. Each chapter reads like a short story told from the perspective of someone linked to Eva, including her chef father, a high school boyfriend, a jealous member of her supper club, and a woman whose peanut butter bars are snubbed by foodies but not by Eva. A few delicious-sounding recipes are included but it’s the words you’ll devour. I did.

Another friend who’s already read Stradal’s novel is going to get The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra, who wrote A Constellation of Vital Phenomenon. This collection of interwoven stories is just as lyrical and poignant. It begins in the 1930s with a Russian artist working as a censor under Stalin, who becomes obsessed with a painting of a prima ballerina. The ballerina appears in a later story, while others feature soldiers, prisoners, brothers connected by places or photographs, families and memories, and one particular painting. The book came out in October, but I’m just getting to it. I can’t read everything, you know, which is why I always read other year-end lists, looking for what I might want to read next. Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, which is a favorite of many, including President Obama, is next on my list.

Back to wrapping. The magical fairy tale of a novel, Uprooted by Naomi Norvik, will go to a fantasy fan, and I’ll also tell her about Sarah Prineas’ Ash & Bramble, another once-upon-a-time retelling I read recently. Erin Bow’s The Scorpion Rules is the first in a series called Prisoners of Peace, and will appeal to readers of The Hunger Games and Divergent.

I read so many good mysteries and thrillers this year that I could wrap into the New Year. Terrific new series entries from Laura Lippman, Walter Mosley, James Lee Burke, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, plus stand-alones from Karin Slaughter and Paula Hawkins. I began the year with Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train and I’m ending it on another high note with Christopher Fowler’s Bryant and May and the Burning Man, both funny and timely.