List o' Book Lists

I love list. And no, I'm not just looking at things and saying I love them. Lists make my life possible: grocery lists, To Get Done lists, I Do lists (what I call my wedding to do list), contact lists, and, of course, book lists. With the end of the year always comes a deluge of "best of" lists, and none are more enticing to me than the best books lists. It is a special sort of joy to read through a list of books that come highly recommended that you haven't already read so that you can, naturally, put them on your To Read list. I've collected here some of the Best Books of 2013 lists that I appreciate for one reason or another:

NPR's Book Concierge: Our Guide to 2013's Great Reads

This year, NPR decided to forego a list and has created an innovative, interactive site of tiled book covers that you can adapt to your reading preferences. I'm quite smitten with this design.

75 Notable Translations 2013 (World Literature Today)

Luckily, it seems like every year more and more contemporary fiction books get translated. This list is a real resource, in my opinion. Scroll to the very bottom to see WLT editors' picks for best translations of the year.

Riot Round-Up: The Best Books of 2013
Self-described as a list "as eclectic and indiosyncratic" as the Book Riot bloggers are, this list has a few books I just can't wait to read, and many more I hadn't even heard of this year. Who doesn't like hearing about new books?

The Overlooked Books of 2013 (Slate)
If you're interested in what Slate editors consider to be the books from 2013 that you haven't heard about but should have, then here you go.

Independents' View of 2013's Best Books (The Guardian)
We can't forget about our friends across the pond, and independent bookstores throughout the United Kingdom provided The Guardian with their picks for books of the year.  

Favorite 2013 Books of 50 Famous People (The Wall Street Journal)
I'm always intrigued by what famous people are reading--and in this case, who The Wall Street Journal thinks of as famous and noteworthy. There are some pretty interesting picks on this list.

River City Reading's Best Books (and Blogger Voices) of 2013
I appreciate this list because it features 10 books that are the compiler's favorites of the year along with the thoughts of her favorite reviewers and bloggers.

100 Notable Books of 2013 (The New York Times)

This list is on the lengthy side, including 50 non-fiction and 50 fiction titles, and has enough suggestions to perhaps keep you reading until the next decade.

The 10 Best Books of 2013 (The New York Times)

If 100 is too many titles to digest, NYT narrowed their list of 100 notable titles down to their picks for the 10 best books of the year.

2013 Puddly Awards (Powell's Books)

Okay, so technically this award was given in early 2013 to great 2012 books, and you'll have to stay tuned for the 2014 award nominees for the best of 2013 books (thus its position on the list). The webpage provides numerous great titles from the previous year from Powell's Books readers. Also, how cute is the name Puddly Awards?

Happy reading in 2014!

Christopher Lord’s The Edwin Drood Murders: Being the Second Dickens Junction Mystery

There is a special place in my heart for all things Charles Dickens. There was even a time in my life where I wanted to go to graduate school to become a Dickens scholar. To this day, my copies of my Dickens Norton Critical Editions are some of my most beloved texts. I am part Dickensian at heart, so when this book crossed my path, I could not resist it.

From the title, you may have guessed that there is a First Dickens Junction Mystery—The Christmas Carol Murders. Sometimes I am resistant to starting a series without reading the first book first, but in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, I decided to dive in to Drood, and any concerns I had about missing out on backstory were assuaged before long. Lord has a way of referencing the previous story in an easygoing way when pertinent to the plot without it being tiresome. The premise of the story is that there is an annual conference of Dickens scholars, more specifically Droodists, who meet and primarily speculate on the ending of Dickens’ last, unfinished work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. During the course of the conference, some nefarious events unfold, including murder. Dickens Junction resident, conference coordinator, and Pip’s Pages bookstore owner Simon Alastair takes it upon himself to solve the mysteries at hand—all the while being impeccably polite and making sure to be courteous to the local law enforcement and not step on their toes. While Alastair is a great novice detective, I must admit that I beat him to the punch and solved the mystery fairly early on. From there, I raced through the pages so I could confirm my suspicions about the culprit and motives, and I soaked up every delightful Dickens reference and allusion along the way. While vastly different from a Dickens novel, there was one similarity: the numerous cast of characters in the book reminded me of the same feeling of trying to keep all the characters straight in Bleak House. Overall, this is an amusing, light read for the literary minded, especially during the holiday season.

Lord, Christopher. The Edwin Drood Murders: Being the Second Dickens Junction Mystery. Harrison Thurman Books, 2013.

Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior

To read a Barbara Kingsolver novel is to enter a well-described world with memorable and flawed characters rooted in a sense of place. Having read The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible, I knew I'd be in the hands of a capable storyteller whose narrative would masterfully evoke a deeper meaning. Flight Behavior is a book about so many things--environment, family, loss, dreams, and experience--but all those things seem to fall under one big thing: change.

I wanted to read Flight Behavior because of its plot about the environment, and the book was surely an elegant way to tell a literary story with an important message about nature, both in the sense of flora and fauna as well human nature. The main character, Dellarobia, really becomes quite the heroine as she works through her personal issues and changes that parallel the environmental change that occurs on their land. At first, when a monarch butterfly population uncharacteristically migrates to Dellarobia's hometown, it is seen as a blessing, and while in some ways the opportunities the butterflies create for Dellarobia and her family are a blessing, the more Dellarobia learns about the butterflies, the more she realizes this change in migratory direction puts the survival of the butterflies at risk. And so it goes that we see how one change in course, one variance in flight behavior, can gain problematic momentum if the course is not readjusted. This is true for Dellarobia, who struggles to find her true course and struggles to come to grips with the consequences (good and bad) that changes may have. The novel suggests that this, too, is true for the environment, for as the global community continues on its unnatural course, the realities and consequences of global warming only accumulate and the chance to correct the course becomes more difficult and the possibility of doing so less optimistic. However, I think what we are meant to learn from our heroine Dellarobia is that, no matter how difficult, it is not too late to try to correct where you went wrong and to try to make the world, and your own personal world, a more thriving place, and at the very least set an example for those around you.

Kingsolver, Barbara. Flight Behavior. New York: Harper / HarperCollins, 2012.

Cathy Marie Buchanan’s The Day the Falls Stood Still

I’m always cautious of historical novels that have any form of the word “romance” anywhere in their descriptions, because things can turn real slutty real fast. I picked it up this summer because, like I mentioned about John Banville’s The Sea, I’m in what seems like a never-ending quest to read the books that are sitting unread on my bookshelf. Who could resist a World War I era story set at Niagara Falls? If nothing else, the book seemed like it would be a light, summer read.

Instead of a light summer read, though, I found a story with an overwhelming theme of loss. Our heroine, Bess, is seventeen when her father loses his well-paying job at a power company that generates power from the flow of the river racing over the falls. This sets in motion a series of unfortunate events and, as such, Bess needs to makes the standard choices regarding love and independence and deals with—you guessed it—loss. I’ve already covered the loss of employment and the loss of money, but there is loss of family members and dealing with death, loss of innocence as a generation of young men goes off to war, loss of friendship, loss of faith, and, the most unique element of the story, loss of the natural river flow as industrial companies siphon off water for their operations. This is where the romance comes in: as it happens, Bess marries the strong, hunky Riverman, who is the stuff of legends and whose grandfather was the original stuff of legends, because of their ability to read the river, sense shifts in the wind that causes ice bridges to melt, and knows just how to fish the dead bodies (loss again!) drowned in the falls and swirling around the whirlpools and eddies. See what I mean about being a little heavy for a summer read? In any case, Bess had just enough moxy to keep me picking up the book, and the story certainly got me thinking of my own family visits to Niagara Falls, and I can certainly say I’m glad the Falls still inspire a sense of wonder in us.

Buchanan, Cathy Marie. The Day the Falls Stood Still. New York: Voice / Hyperion, 2009.

Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Through a round aperture I saw appear,

Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,

Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.

                                                                      - Dante Alighieri's Inferno

In this story of Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian immigrant to Washington DC, who owns a small convenient store, his friend declares these words from Dante’s Inferno to be the most perfect lines of poetry ever written. Stepha’s friend Joseph, who is an immigrant from Congo, considers Dante’s words as he’s coming out of hell as a parallel to the experience of an African whose life in his home country is hell with only glimpses of heaven. A third friend, Kenneth from Kenya, resents Joseph’s tendency to find metaphors in their American life for their former lives in African nations dealing with harsh corruption and oppression. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that each member of this trio represents a different perspective of coping with the change and sense of belonging that these immigrants encounter.

Sepha, our narrator, struggles with maintaining motivation to run his shop, and there is a sense in the story that he comes up as mediocre in the view of his family and friends. He wants to fit into a life in America, but at the same down is weighed down by wanting to go home and knowing that would be an act of simultaneously moving forward and going backward—a tension that he indicates can truly only be felt by an immigrant. Representing another perspective, Joseph not only admires Dante’s works, but also writes his own poetry in the style of the Commedia. The difference is that his work is without a heaven and traces the history of the Congo from King Leopold through Lumumba to Mobutu. He is constantly aware of the sense of history of the African continent and consistently initiates a trivia game with his friends where they name a dictator, coup, and its year, and this game showcases his function as the memory keeper, of sorts. Kenneth, on the other hand, has immersed himself in his American life as a businessman. While the struggles of Sepha and Joseph are strongest within themselves, Kenneth is fully accepting of his life and his work—it is the people around him who tend not to see him as the American businessman he wants to be viewed as. He has no sentimental attachment to the thought of returning to African where his illiterate father was oppressed and had nothing. His struggle for acceptance is demonstrated in the stories about his boss who is, perhaps unintentionally, demeaning and does things like ask Kenneth to take one of the team and come into the office alone on Christmas. Kenneth, while embracing the opportunities and sense of accomplishment he feels, urges the same in Sepha and Joseph, often finding their reluctance to cope the same way he has frustrating. 

To me, the African continent, its history, its present, and the ways it is perceived are fascinating. So often, this giant continent gets generalized in some extreme ways, seemingly forgetting that the prevailing effects of post-colonialism are different across nations, and often dependent on the practices of the colonizing nation. Despite its huge population, I think African-authored stories involving Africa are underrepresented in the literary canon—the two obvious canonical African texts being Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart, of course, only one of which is written from an African's perspective (in fact, Chinue Achebe has a bit to say about Conrad in the essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”). As much as The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears takes place in Washington DC, what the stories of the three main characters demonstrate over and over again is how ever-present their past in Africa is in their present.

Mengestu, Dinaw. The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears. London: Riverhead / Penguin, 2007. 

John Banville’s The Sea

In the never-ending quest to read the books that have sat unread on my bookshelf for several years, I picked up The Sea. Perhaps its soothing, green-toned cover drew me to it, or perhaps it was the fact it was on the top of the stack. In any case, I didn’t know quite know what to expect. The blurbs on the back cover raved about the writing, as blurbs tend to do, but they weren’t far off. When literary prose is
as captivating and intelligent as Banville’s, it hardly even matters what the storyline is. Take for example this line: “What are living beings, compared to the enduring intensity of mere things?” This is the kind of sentence that stops to make you think, and it captures the melancholia that pervades this story about a man coping with a death by trying to find comfort in an uncomfortable past.


Banville, John. The Sea. New York: Vintage International, 2005.

Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room

I’m always on the quest to read more international literature, and as such, I rely a great deal on Europa Editions, who specialize in publishing and translating literary bestsellers from around the world. I especially gained a significant amount of respect for them when I heard Muriel Barbery, the author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog (and one of my favorite books), speak at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books about what a collaborative translation process went through with Europa Editions. Even though In a Strange Room is not a translation, I still consider the Europa Editions insignia as a stamp of literary approval, and Damon Galgut’s book was no exception—especially as a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.

What I liked most about this book was the way it captured the tension—that comes with traveling—between experience and the feeling of being removed from that experience. In my humble opinion, true traveling is not only a journey between one geographic point and another, it is also a personal journey dependent on deep internal reflection on one's self and one's culture. Often, there is little distance between having the experience and reflecting on the experience. Galgut captures this two-state experience with shifts between the first and third pronouns as he refers to himself. Switches between “I” and “he” parallel the experience of traveling and knowing you are having experiences, but also feeling as if you are looking at yourself as part of a story or narrative. His shifts also serve to echo his transitions between feelings of connectedness and feelings of isolation and loneliness. It was easy to identify with his moments of deep connection with strangers he met as he lets change and companionship dictate his travels, which quickly changed to moments of isolation and loneliness upon the consideration of the unarticulated relationships with his companions. 

Galgut, Damon. In a Strange Room: Three Journeys. New York: Europa Editions, 2010.

The Time I Met The Subversive Copy Editor

I have a long relationship with style guides. For most of my academic career, I was loyal to MLA. We were close, and I loved the laissez-faire attitude it had—almost anything went in the relationship so long as you were consistent. But at a certain point, I just wanted more from a style guide. It wasn’t MLA; it was me. APA and I got to know each other well because of some freelance work, but we never got serious. I admire its brevity and attention to social scientific concerns, but we are just friends. CMOS, however, is the style guide love of my life. Its big, comprehensive index; its bright, colorful jacket; its sturdy, thick binding; its detail-oriented rules and abundant examples—what’s not to love about The Chicago Manual of Style? 

So, imagine my excitement when I got to meet the editor of the CMOS online Q & A forum, Carol Fisher Saller (@SubvCopyEd), who just happened to pay a visit to the University of Illinois Press last week, which just happens to be my place of employment. Carol Saller is a manuscript editor at the University of Chicago Press, and many know her as The Subversive Copy Editor. Her book by the same name is a delight to read, and the cover is pretty darn amazing, too.

 

She signed my book!

In all the excitement of meeting her, I apparently referred to University of Chicago Press as University Press of Chicago—how embarrassing! I had a zillion questions for her: As a manuscript editor, how was the process of having your own manuscript edited and put through production? Or was it perfect already? Do you have any other books in the works? What is the process of updating the new editions of the CMOS like? How do you come up with rule changes? Is it like 12 Angry Men with everyone seriously debating in a room? Do you have a running list between editions? What’s on the list right now? Will you sign my book? 

 I didn’t get to ask all my questions—I had to hold back on my crazy vibe—but that didn’t matter. Hearing her speak was wonderful. We even found out that she got her start as a freelancer in the Chicago office of our very press! She is a great storyteller, and she was a charming guest. She shared many stories of the various types of submission the Q&A receives, and she discussed the large, dedicated following of the style guide and the Q&A. One thing is certain: I’m not alone in my appreciation of CMOS.

Saller, Carol Fisher. The Subversive Copyeditor. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009.

Chloe In Memoriam

I know this blog is usually about reading-type things, but what's the point of having a personal blog if you can't write about whatever you want? Today, I want to write about Chloe, who went to cat heaven this morning.

Chloe is my mom's cat. In fact, I got my mom Chloe as a birthday gift when I was in high school. It was a kind of sneaky affair. My mom had wanted a cat for awhile. She had grown up with a cat, but my dad sometimes has trouble with allergies (as it turns out, his cat allergies aren't all that bad). One year, though, my dad inadvertently booked reservations at the Grand Canyon over her birthday weekend, and so he was away. In my mind, this created the perfect opportunity for my mom to get a kitten. For her birthday, we went to the Humane Society to get a cat, and we came home with Chloe. For her first few weeks, as she got used to her new home she lived in my bedroom, and I got to play with her to my heart's content. Who doesn't love being woken up by an adorable, rambunctious kitten? Throughout her kittenhood, Chloe was a playful, friendly, good-natured cat. Occasionally, you'd go to pull out a chair from the kitchen table and find it strangely heavy because this was one of Chloe's prime napping spots. As an adult, she was motherly towards the other cats in the house, and her favorite spot just happened to be wherever my mom was. It is awful to lose a pet who had been a part of our family for so long, but the memory of the happiness she brought us will certainly outlast our sadness today.

"Used Battery's Only"

This is clearly an apostrophe disaster of epic proportions. In a mere 12 words, the person who wrote this sign managed to use an apostrophe twice where no apostrophe belongs! What is truly special to me is that the apostrophe is not only used incorrectly twice, but it is used incorrectly in two different ways. As you can see, the first apostrophe is used instead of adding an "ies" to properly pluralize the noun battery. The second apostrophe is added to the verb creating some sort of mutant contraction.

Upon seeing this sign, my first impulse was run through the store, find a red Sharpie, and add some edits. Then, on second thought, I decided to take a picture and blog about it instead.

Jamie Ford's Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

I came by this book in what just might be the best way possible: a UIP colleague with good taste in books recommended it, and it was free. I admit that when I first heard the title, I was skeptical. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet sounded like it could easily be a romance novel or a Nicholas Sparks book—neither of which I am much interested in reading. However, the book got off to a good start based on its opening setting alone: Lake View Cemetery in Seattle. Now, normally this location would not necessary be appealing, but I had just coincidentally finished The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein, which also takes place in Seattle and features Lake View Cemetery, so I found myself feeling like I was part of a meta literary situation. Could Henry Lee of Bitter and Sweet have crossed paths with Racing’s Denny as he walked his dog Enzo through the streets of Seattle and by the cemetery? How old would Denny have been during 1986 when Henry Lee was exploring his past? If we took the fictional cemetery plots in each story, would they be near each other? As these two literary worlds collided in my imagination, I found myself getting drawn into the two worlds of Henry Lee: his past and his present. 

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is the story of a teenage Chinese boy, Henry, and his Japanese classmate Keiko as they experience Japanese internment. The fact that her and her family are tragically carted away by the government puts a damper on their blossoming romance, but the most interesting aspect of the book is Henry’s existence in three different racial climates and his position as an outsider in all of them. Henry and Keiko meet when they both receive scholarships to an otherwise all-White school. Their scholarship has them on lunch duty and cleaning after school, and their classmates make their lives difficult through their mocking and racism—even though Henry is Chinese, and Keiko identifies as American, the students call them both Japs and traitors. Henry is American-born to strict, traditional Chinese parents, and Henry struggles to belong among them due to his father’s racism and resistance again modernity. Henry’s friendship with Keiko and the fact that non-Asians do not distinguish him as Chinese allows him to navigate the Japanese neighborhood and witness firsthand as Japanese families hide or destroy their family heirlooms to avoid being accused of being traitors and are taken from their homes. The only situation in which Henry and Keiko share a sense of belonging is in their experience of the truly American tradition of jazz music.

Throughout the novel, the narrative switches between 1986 Henry and 1940s Henry. The narrative switches are quite an effective strategy that weave his past experiences with the modern reopening of a hotel where Japanese families hid their precious belongings before being interred. (The discovery of the items on the news was the event that inspired his reminiscences in the first place.) As Henry looks for traces of Keiko in the newly discovered stash, he finds himself opening up about his past to his son and resolving long-held issues of anger and guilt toward his father and the disappearance of Keiko. The personal relationships make this book endearing, and the historical aspects of the Japanese internment that are the basis for the story make the book a worthwhile read.

Ford, Jamie. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. New York: Ballantine Books, 2009.

Garth Stein's The Art of Racing in the Rain

The Art of Racing in the Rain was published early in 2008, but I didn’t hear about the book until early in 2009 when Garth Stein came to Changing Hands for an author event. I can’t recall if I went to the bookstore for the event specifically, or if I was there on a book buying binge and decided to stay for the event, but I remember how engaging Stein was, and I added it to my To Read list. I told my Dad about the book, and for the first time I can recall, my father mustered up his inner bookworm and beat me to reading a book, and he was a fan.

The plot of The Art of Racing in the Rain is perfectly fine as far as stories go, but it is the narrative perspective that is the true treat: the narrator is a dog. The entire story is told by Enzo, a dog named after a legendary racecar driver and owned by a talented driver who struggles to balance his dream of racing with his familial duties and hardships. Garth Stein created an intriguing dog and smartly called attention to the fact that Enzo is an unusual dog in his powers of perception and human-like will power, that, as a reader, it becomes easy to buy into Enzo as a trustworthy narrator. Everyone is inclined to think that their dog is special: that their dog almost knows what they are thinking. Well, Enzo’s loyalty and insight into his person’s life helps to confirm this thought in us all and makes is possible to entertain the notions of what is going on in our own pet’s mind.

This is a heart-warming, heartstring-pulling, and heartfelt story. It is a sweet read with a unique charm. While it has its literary moments, its biggest appeal is Ezno. What could be less cliché than a third person narrator who is, in fact, man’s best friend? Especially one who so elegantly articulates thoughts like, “I will often admire a beautiful sunrise, but I will never consider the sun as a champion for having risen.”

Stein, Garth. The Art of Racing in the Rain. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.