Hello, and welcome to my annual holiday book buying guide! Sort of the best of my year’s worth of reading, sort of an exhortation to buy stuff through my affiliate links to Amazon (feed my book addiction!). The rules: books listed were those read between Thanksgiving last year and Thanksgiving this year. I have two categories, fiction and non-fiction, with a bonus special category. Basically, these are the books I think are worth buying for you or someone you know who loves to read. That is, if I had to pick just a few.
Fiction
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
/ Michael Chabon (my review)
- For your reader that likes the long family sagas, this will be perfect. It follows immigrant Jewish Czechs through the years in New York City and elsewhere. But this will also appeal to the geeks too! See, the main characters are intimately involved in the Golden Age of comic books around World War 2. In addition, the language geek will be thrilled as well, as Chabon is a master of description.
- The Road
/ Cormac McCarthy (my review)
- Science fiction for the literary geek. Literary fiction for the science fiction fan. Everyone wins! It’s a post-apocalyptic landscape trudged by a father and son trying to survive. But unlike typical post-apocalyptic fare that you find on the science fiction shelf, this one is spare rather than voluminous. Everything focuses on father and son.
- The Lies of Locke Lamora
/ Scott Lynch (my review)
- Swashbuckling fantasy that is just a little different. No band of misfits on a quest. No powerful wizards in high castles. No one ring to rule them all. This is a thieves caper, like The Italian Job set in semi-medieval times with a few dashes of magical stuff. If your fantasy reader likes seven volume epics, this is the first entry in one. If, like me, he likes self-contained stories, the bonus part is that each book in the series is pretty self-contained so you don’t have to wait a year to find out the end to the story.
- The Speed of Dark
/ Elizabeth Moon (my review)
- An autistic person must decide whether or not to take a cure that permanently removes his autism. Unlike a growth on one’s arm, autism isn’t malignant (though perhaps it doesn’t quite fit the definition of benign either) and it isn’t separable from who the person is. Will removing the autism make our hero not himself anymore? That’s something he has to worry about. The story is written with love and insight for autistics; Elizabeth Moon is the mother of an autistic person.
- Fahrenheit 451
/ Ray Bradbury (my review)
- I re-read this classic work of science fiction this year, and it holds up. Kind of an alternate version to Orwell’s 1984 of how totalitarianism could look. A particularly American version where we do it to ourselves rather than have it imposed on us.
- Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls
/ Matt Ruff (my review)
- I have no idea if this is an accurate portrayal of multiple personality disorder or not, but holy damn is it engrossing! The main character is a mostly functional MPD sufferer who encounters another MPD sufferer and then must decide whether to help her or not. There’s a few plot twists I won’t reveal that will make you think.
- Parable of the Sower
/ Octavia Butler (my review)
- A great post-apocalyptic story. Some of the ideas in it are fairly typical for the type of story, but I loved the aggressively multi-cultural perspective. The leader of the band traipsing across the countryside is a female black teen from Los Angeles, and that seems natural in the book. It should seem natural in the real world, but it isn’t.
Non-Fiction
I didn’t really read as much non-fiction this year, and what I did read didn’t really impress me overall. However a couple books did stand out.
- The World Without Us
/ Alan Weisman (my review)
- The book looks at the question, what would we leave behind if humans suddenly disappeared from Earth? Weisman describes what happened in already abandoned cities, as well as looks at things like plastics, wildlife, and pretty much everything else that man has touched in a few hundred years. Just how powerful are we? Perhaps not as much as we think.
- Transit Maps of the World
/ Mark Ovenden (my review
- This one might not be for everyone, but I found the maps and diagrams for the world’s subway systems to be fascinating. I’m sort of a map geek, though by no means am I a subway geek. The book stirred my desire to travel to places just to see where I could go without having to drive.
Bonus Worst Book of the Year (still in print) Category
For the best of categories, it only matters whether I’ve read it over the last year. This category is here for you to pick a book for someone you don’t really like. As such, I’m assuming you don’t want to go traipsing around from used store to used store looking for it, nor do you want to deal with used sellers on Ebay or Amazon who will flake. You want your booby prize and you don’t want hassle. So this book has to be still in print. Competition was fierce this year, but the winner
is:
- A Case of Two Cities
/ Qiu Xiaolong (my review)
- A crime novel where the detective does no investigating! He quotes poetry and thinks about the crime and solves it! Dull, plodding, and makes no sense. Worst book of the year was a close call between this and the Madeleine L’Engle A Wind in the Door
but in the end, at least that had a moral I didn’t completely disagree with (just mostly).
Now go out there and buy books for your family, friends, … or by me something from my Amazon wish list! Someone out there has got to be rich enough to buy me The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection
