At the beginning of 2016, I set my Goodreads goal to read 75 books. So, how did I manage to almost double that total? One word - audiobooks. My day job involves a lot of work on a computer, so I have plenty of time to listen to things. While I do subscribe to a few podcasts, and listen to them regularly, I make a point to listen to a few audiobooks every month. My local library gives me access to audiobooks through a digital streaming service called Hoopla, and also stocks a pretty impressive array of books on CD. Through the year, I've determined that I really enjoy the audiobook format for certain types of books. The first are celebrity memoirs, but only when the author narrates her/his work. In particular, Julie Powell's Julie & Julia and A Life in Parts by Bryan Cranston were really great listens...it feels like you're having a chat with these really interesting people. Another great set of audiobooks are the Complete Arkangel Shakespeare collection. One of the great series I have read this year was the Hogarth Shakespeare Series. Before I read any of these retellings, I made a point of re-reading the source play. I own massive, omnibus of Shakespeare's Complete Works, so reading the play isn't the problem. What is the problem is being able to connect with the material, because it's meant to be performed for an audience, not read like a book. The Arkangel productions are full cast recordings of the plays, which allows me to follow along in my omnibus and really appreciate and enjoy the story.
With all the books I've finished this year, it was really difficult to decide on which ones I really loved. I finally decided to settle on 5 categories, and five favorites in each. Not all of these were published in 2016, and they are listed in no particular order. Here we go -
Poetry
- Crow by Ted Hughes - A grotesque and emotional collection of poems about a crow who embodies all sorts of elements of earth, history, humanity, religion, and time. Written in the aftermath of Sylvia Plath's death, it is an all-engrossing reading experience.
- Hold Your Own by Kate Tempest - An intersection of Greek myth, gender, sexuality and the experience of being human
- The After-Party by Jana Prikryl - A debut collection that takes the reader from New York to Italy, to Eastern Europe, and to Canada. The poems are deeply rooted in a sense of place, yet are imbued with motion.
- Errata by Michael Allen Zell - A poetry pamphlet from a small, New Orleans press, focusing on the preparation for and experience of the failed 1984 Louisiana World's Fair.
- Why God is a Woman by Nin Andrews - In this collection of prose poetry, the concept of traditional gender roles in patriarchal culture is turned completely on its head.
Short Stories
- Minnie's Room by Mollie Panter-Downes - A collection of stories that explore the changing British society after WW2. Republished in 2002 by Persephone Books, most of these stories were original published in The New Yorker between 1947-1965.
- Good Evening Mrs. Craven by Mollie Panter-Downes - Giving readers a sense of everyday life in England during WW2, this collection explores those on the Home Front who deal with the fear, loss, and inconveniences of war. Republished by Persephone Books in 1999, these stories were written between 1939 and 1944 and appeared in The New Yorker.
- Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman - This is constructed as a series of hypothesized dreams that Albert Einstein had, regarding the nature of time and our human experience of it. Each is short, vivid, and altogether the work is a fascinating thought experiment on the different ways to consider time.
- Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra - How do you discuss a work of fiction that is disguised as a Chilean college entrance exam from 1993? This doesn't follow anything remotely resembling a traditional narrative structure, but is playful, sarcastic, and devastatingly human.
- Whatever Happened to Interracial Love by Kathleen Collins - A group of 16 stories, of wildly varying lengths, that plays with the concept of White Gaze and the experience of black people in America in the 1970s. The author was also a groundbreaking filmmaker, and this shines through in many of her stories.
Essay Collections
- The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison - Exploring a wide variety of situations and, more importantly, the people who occupy those situations. The theme of empathy runs throughout the essays, even though the particular topics diverge from one another quite a bit.
- Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman - A celebration of the author's love of books, the written word, and all things literary.
- Women in Clothes by Sheila Heti - Part social psychology, part gender study, part documentary, part fine art. It's a real mixture of graphics and text that work to build a convincing idea of what "clothing", "beauty", and "woman-ness" means in our society.
- The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson - One of the most thought-provoking collections I've ever read. The author identifies herself as a person of faith, but takes a positively humanist perspective on the world.
- I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crosley - A very insightful, funny, and honest collection of personal essays. I thoroughly enjoyed each and every essay, which is atypical for me. I especially enjoyed reading about her miniature plastic pony collection!
Non-Fiction
- No Surrender by Constance Maud - Published in 1911, at the height of the Women's Suffrage movement in Britain, this work masterfully straddles the line between journalism and historical fiction. This was republished by Persephone Books in 2011, a century later.
- The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson - Like her partner that Nelson writes about here, this book defies categorization. It's part memoir, part part poetry, part cultural criticism, part inter-sectional feminist manifesto, and part gender study.
- March (books 1-3) by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell - A graphic memoir trilogy of Congressman John Lewis' life from his beginnings as the son of a poor sharecropper, to his education and his activism during the Civil Rights era, and finally his political career. It's truly inspiring!
- Talking Back Talking Black:Truths About America's Lingua Franca by John McWhorter - A fascinating argument in favor of recognizing African-American Vernacular English (Black English) as a separate dialect of American English. Most White Americans understand Black English to be a broken and error-filled form of standard American English. It comes down solidly in the realm of linguistic racism - a topic before which I was unaware.
- An Indigenous People's History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - This book challenges the dominant narrative of the founding and development of the USA, presenting an alternative (and more historically accurate) perspective from the people who resided in the North American continent before the first European settlers arrived.
Fiction
- Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn - A native Jamaican who now lives in the USA, the author uses this story to explore post-colonial ideas of class, sexuality, family, tourism, beauty - Jamaica itself.
- Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson - A very atmospheric novel about a family of women living in a small lakeside town in Idaho. It envelops you in its quiet, poetic, and dreamlike prose, like a hand-crocheted and infinitely soft blanket.
- Human Acts by Han Kang - The fulcrum of this book is the Gwanjgu Uprising in South Korea in 1980, and the government's brutal response to it. It is an interconnected narrative of person, time, and location, but it really is the spirit that lives within the prose that makes the story so powerful.
- The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead - This is an incredible book, pulling no punches about the harshness of life for a dark-skinned person in mid-19th century America. There are moments of joy and comfort, but they are infantismal compared to the brutality and overwhelming suffering. Yet, amongst all the darkness, there is a sliver of hope.
- A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride - The prose of this novel is written in fragments, which gives it a kind of poetic musicality and rhythm. Essentially the story of a young girl and her unhealthy brother, this story includes graphic portrayals of physical, emotional, sexual, and verbal abuse. Despite this darkness and bleakness, this is the most heartrendingly beautiful book I have ever read.
Here's to another great reading year in 2017! Cheers!
Librorum annis
