These are the favorite reads of the year from our beloved, venerable, veteran bookseller Liz Whaley. She basically reads for a living, and these were the ones she thought were the very best in 2013 (plus a few older ones, too).
The
Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
My favorite read of the year, this is an old-fashioned
novel in terms of plot and as exploration of morality, fate, love, and
betrayal. Theo Decker at 28 looks back
on his life and the day he and his mother were at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art when an explosion rocked the building and killed his mother. A devastated Theo survived and when he
escaped, he took a Dutch painting, “The Goldfinch,” by Fabritius. Theo, whose father had left some time ago,
now an orphan struggles with his guilt over having the stolen painting. Written with beautifully chosen
sensory images, gorgeous prose, and a stunning lyricism, the novel also has
suspense. New York City, Las Vegas, and
Amsterdam are richly described. Tartt
puts us not only in the places but in the hearts and minds of the fascinating,
complex characters Theo meets along the way.
You
Are One of Them by Elliott Holt
Sarah Zuckerman is a
shy, lonely10-year-old living in D.C. in the 1980s. Her father has returned to his native
England; her mother is agoraphobic. When
Jenny Jones moves into the house across the street, Sarah’s life takes on new
meaning and brightness. Cold war
rhetoric is heating up, and one rainy day the two girls distract themselves by
writing to Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov seeking peace. Jenny is invited to visit the USSR. She becomes an international media sensation,
and then she and her parents die in a plane crash. Ten years later Sarah receives a mysterious
later suggesting Jenny’s death may have been a hoax. She sets off for Russia to learn the
truth. A gripping tale superbly
told.
The
Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin
A highly original
short novel told from the point of view and in the voice of Mary, mother of
Jesus. An old woman and a widow, she
looks back over her life and that of her son.
The powers that be watch her, not wanting her feelings made known to the
world. She remembers Jesus as a
rebellious boy and young man, and she worried when word of his miraculous
powers became known. When Pilate and the
Romans were calling for his crucifixion, May recalls trying to get Jesus out of
Jerusalem. When people tell her that he
died so that the rest of us could have eternal life, she says it wasn’t worth
the sacrifice. A truly fascinating read
which became a big one-woman hit as a play on Broadway.
The
Last First Day by Carrie Brown
I was awed and
thrilled by this quietly strong and pervasively beautiful interior novel. Peter and Ruth, in their late seventies, have
been at Derry, a private boarding school for boys in Maine, for 50 years. Peter has been headmaster for the last
40. Ruth tells this story from their
marriage to this “last first day,” historically the first day of school each
year in September. Ruth loves Peter
dearly, but she often regrets having done nothing with her Smith degree except
serve, unpaid, as headmaster’s wife. In
Part I, she goes back and forth, but it is in Part II that we get a full
account of her unhappy childhood.
Poetic, lyrical, but understated, this novel haunts me, and I look
forward to re-reading it at some point.
And
the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
An epic novel
spanning 61 years from 1949 to 2010 and ranging from Afghanistan to Greece,
Paris, San Francisco, Pakistan, and London.
Weaving back and forth in time, the novel introduces a variety of
characters and shows ultimately how they are related in some cases, how they
disappear from one another’s lives and eventually re-appear. The history of both the Russians and the
Taliban in Afghanistan impinges on the characters’ lives, but there is violence
too of a personal and familial type.
Betrayal, loss, love, and redemption all figure in this beautifully
written novel.
Someone
by
Alice McDermott
Going back and forth in time, McDermott weaves the story of
an ordinary woman, Marie Commeford, from adolescence until old age. Using well-chosen sensory images to give us a
real, palpable sense of Marie’s world, and that of all the people around her,
McDermott writes in spare prose but with perfectly chosen details. As this Irish American’s tale unfolds with
its depiction of love, loss, marriage, birth, and death, it is not dramatic--
there are no huge events--but it’s so lovely, so human.
Ten
White Geese by Gerbrand Bakker
A woman academic
has lost her job because of an affair with a young student. She has disappeared, and her husband has no
clue as to her whereabouts. A mysterious
novel which unfolds slowly, it begins in a house she has rented in Wales. Ten white geese graze in a field next to the
house. Gradually they are picked off by
a fox so they are eventually down to four.
The woman is an Emily Dickinson scholar who throughout the novel is
focused on the poem beginning “Ample make this bed.” By the end we understand
this focus. Haunting, mesmerizing,
unique.
The
Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud
The title suggests
Bertha Mason, but as Nora Eldridge, the protagonist, says, “We’re not the
madwomen in the attic,” but rather “the quiet woman “at the end of the third-
floor hallway.” At 37 Nora is a popular
third grade teacher who has given up her dream of being an artist whose
ambition was to create meticulous shoebox-sized dioramas of the living spaces
of women heroines like Woolf, Dickinson, and Edie Sedgwick. How Nora becomes attracted to a new Lebanese
student, Reza, and his parents, and how initially they pull her back to her
dream make for a wonderful, suspenseful read.
Life
After Life by Kate Atkinson
On a cold and snowy
night in February, 1910, a daughter, Ursula Todd, is born to a banker and his
wife. She dies before taking a
breath. In another chapter on that same
night Ursula is born and does not die.
She grows up, appearing to die at various other times, but then reappearing.
In 1930 she kills Adolph Hitler. Does
this alternate dying and surviving give her the power to change the world? Imaginative, often funny, and poignant, this novel
is stunningly original and is also a novel about storytelling.
Canada
by
Richard Ford – “First I’ll tell about the bank robbery our parents
committed. Then about the murders,
which happened later.” So begins this
absorbing novel told by Dell Parsons, now 65, looking back on the time when he
and his twin sister, Berner, were 15 and living in Great Falls, Montana. Why and how the parents rob the bank is made
credible as Dell recounts his life from the time they are arrested to his
journey to Canada and the strange people he lived with there. Ford constructs a riveting story.
Other
noteworthy reads: Stoner by
John Williams, a classic novel from 1965 that has been re-issued several times,
written in the pure, plain, uncluttered style of Willa Cather and Kent Haruf,
tells the life story of William Stoner; The Gravity of Birds by Tracy
Guzeman in which birds, art, a missing painting, love, and passion all play a
part; The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, a long novel following the
intricate lives, the joys, and sorrows of a group of people who meet one summer
at a camp for artistic and creative adolescents; The Professor of Truth by
James Robertson, an interesting novel that raises questions of truth, justice
and morality based somewhat on the Lockerbee bombing in Scotland in the 1980s.
Some
good mysteries: In
The Dinner by Herman Koch, set in
Holland, nothing is what it seems to be in this taut, ominous novel; Ghostman by Roger Hobbs – A terrific
noir thriller in which every chapter ends with a cliffhanger; Standing in Another Man’s Grave by Ian
Rankin – John Rebus, going against the rules and with his instincts, tries to
find a girl gone missing since 1999; Leaving
Everything Most Loved by Jacqueline Winspear finds Maisie Dobbs doing much
soul searching as she investigates the murders of two Indian women; The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert
Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling) a superb literary mystery with Cormoran Strike as
the appealing 50ish protagonist, a down-and-out private investigator; How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny –
the latest Armand Gamache mystery, terrific as always.
Three
good nonfiction: Wild: From Lost to Found on the
Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed; Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala – heartbreaking memoir of a woman
caught up in the Tsunami in Sri Lanka in 2004, beautifully written; Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a
Women’s Prison by Piper Kerman – a fascinating window into the author’s
time in prison years after getting involved with drug dealers.
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (Hachette)
I am crazy about this book. Why, you ask? It may have been the New York Times website screenshots with photos of the arrestingly beautiful girl who floats around the center of the story. It may have been the mythology of Stanislas Cordova himself: a famed filmmaker whose movies have inspired madness and violence, and which have driven him into hiding on a huge, Gothic estate in upstate New York. Whatever it is, it grabbed me by the shirt collar and didn't let go for 600 pages or so. Pessl has created a lovely band of characters whose relationship brings a touch of levity to an otherwise dark story. Her writing is crisp and the story is addicting.
Get ready for a powerful story set in Chechnya of a young girl who loses her family, the broken doctor with a painful past who takes her in, the man the girl’s father called his best friend, and a village elder, a man who has seen it all and still can’t believe what he’s experiencing. Learning about the Chechen experience alone is worth the price of admission, considering especially that it happened in the very recent past, much of it not covered by Western media (at least, as a teenager, I feel like I only knew of the atrocities happening there obliquely at best). Marra’s writing is just exquisite, and the story of the characters spinning toward their separate, mostly tragic, fates is done with an honesty and authenticity that felt respectful of the many true stories undoubtedly hiding behind Marra’s fiction. 
Someone by Alice McDermott (Macmillan)
Here’s my warning: don’t read this book if you don’t want to know just how crappy the crap you’re eating is! This is an extremely detailed, in-depth look at the processed food industry, focusing specifically on the different ways that salt, sugar, and fat have been used to tempt us, trick us, and completely transform our palate. Moss focuses a lot on the companies and individuals who have attempted over the years to decrease the amount of salt, sugar, and fat in their products, but who were stopped because without these ingredients, many of the foods simply don’t hold together. Add to that the pressure companies face from Wall Street to constantly increase sales, and there isn’t much incentive for these huge companies to go healthy. One of those books that manages to be equally entertaining and appalling.
Some of you may remember hearing about the patients stuck in hospitals in New Orleans during Katrina. I think many of us either heard it and forgot it, or didn’t catch it in the flurry of news stories about that city and that storm. I remember hearing about the Super Dome and FEMA, about President Bush’s flyover and the Ninth Ward. The story about what happened to the patients in one of New Orleans’ most beloved hospitals, Memorial (known for decades before as Baptist), is an important story that needs to be told. Fink takes us day by day through the storm, from the day when staff & family members sought refuge in the hospital because they optimistically, and foolishly perhaps, thought it was the safest bet, to the day when the hospital’s parent company chose not to send additional rescue helicopters, to the day when decisions were made about which patients would make it out and which would not. It’s a terrifying story, with many important lessons. Let’s hope the right people read this book, and make changes accordingly. 
This book has so much going on. I’ll just tell you, because you’d find out pretty quickly anyway, that this book starts with a boy drowning, dying. It’s pretty awful, but keep reading. Keep reading because he, Seth, wakes up, and because the story he has to tell is pretty amazing. When he wakes up, he realizes that he is back in his childhood home, which is impossible because it’s in England and he died living in America. It also makes no sense because he’s completely alone--there isn’t another soul on the street he lived on, anywhere at all. Where is he? Is this the afterlife? Is it hell? Seth flashes back to his previous life, to how he ended up drowning, and to what led up to it. It’s a heartbreaking story. But don’t worry-- this book isn’t all sadness and loneliness. Seth soon realizes that there is something he can do to change his situation, and he gets to work. The author delivers some great characters and great twists, with a crazy ending you won’t see coming. Great follow up by Ness to another really special book, A Monster Calls.
The
Goldfinch by Donna Tartt 
I love our sales reps. I truly do. They work really hard for us and are all so enthusiastic about books and indie bookstores and the publishing industry. Part of their job is to get their accounts excited about their company's upcoming titles, so we'll buy more copies and help them create buzz. Publishers love buzz. It might be their favorite word. Buzzzzzz. Buzz is the goal because it creates sales and can send a title into the pop culture stratosphere. The type of book your neighbor, mother-in-law, dental hygienist, and the random guy on the bus all tell you that you simply must read. Gone Girl started with buzz. So did The Girl with Dragon Tattoo. So did The Hunger Games (a very quiet little buzz that grew to a deafening decibel). Sometimes the books deserve the hype, sometimes they really don't. (I won't name names...frankly, it would take too long.) 
