Here are my top 10 favorite books I read this year, with little write ups that don’t want to give anything away:
10. Tacky - Rax King
Well shit, this one hits all the different emotions. It’s hilarious, it’s raunchy, it’s brutally sad, it’s nostalgic, and through it you can live vicariously through someone who refused to waste their youth. This is a memoir, it’s a gonzo trip through drugs and sex and pain and pleasure, it’s a revelation. One of the most honest and open and revealing books I’ve read in years.
9. The Hunger - Alma Katsu
Wow, one of the best written scary books I’ve read. The terror lives in the subtlety as much as the gore, it’s about how fear builds from basic human needs like food and safety. It’s a great and unique setting for a novel too, the American frontier, where anything and everything can kill you. Brilliant!
8. Catch and Kill - Ronan Farrow
Whew. This book is so explosive. It confirm a lot of my biases about how the powerful protect themselves, but the details are still harrowing. It’s well written, funny at times, and mostly just so discouraging about elite circles of power.
7. These Silent Woods - Kimi Cunningham
There were long stretches of this book that were my favorite storytelling I’ve read in years. This story manages to be taut, self contained, tense and high in stakes, emotional without sentimentality. The basic plot of a father doing whatever it takes for his child really cut to my core, but the writing was superb, and it kept me riveted.
6. The Anomaly - Herve Le Tellier
I absolutely loved this book—it completely blew away any minimal expectations I had for it. It made me want to check out more Goncourt Prize winners, more Le Tellier, more sci-fi, more more more. It places character first and story second, but the story is excellent, and it really takes its time to unfold but never feels slow, and it presents beautiful moral challenges that it brilliantly works through. I can’t highly recommend this enough.
5. Heartland - Sarah Smarsh
In the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich, this is a poetic and poignant look at how the rural white working class lives in America. Told as a love letter to an imagined child, the story spans generations of transient heartland women and families in the latter half of the 20th Century. Though the tales within it are familiar, the telling is so clear and honest and revealing, I would recommend it to anyone.
4. Nuclear Family - Joseph Han
I can’t do justice to a pithy, three sentence review of this book. One metaphor that will stick with me is about the Korean-Hawaiian family restaurant caught between generations, trying to stick to its roots but needing to appeal to white tourists. The book covers so much about family and culture and religion and drugs and ghosts and memories and politics, it’s going to stick with me for a long time.
3. Bunny - Mona Awad
I went from wanting to give this two stars and being one of my favorite reads of the year to no stars and feeling entirely unmoored and unsure of what I’d read over the course of this one. The meta narrative about creating reality is a very cool idea, but the story becomes very tough to follow, and the viscera and gore start to feel like the point. This is really interesting, and I’ll be thinking about it for a while.
2. Migrations - Charlotte McConaughey
I will never forget listening to the last hour or so of this audiobook driving from LA to Thousand Oaks, flying past canyons on the freeway, tears streaming down my face. This book contains so much grief for the planet and its dying species that its characters ache. The slow reveal of the story is brilliant and brutal and will leave me thinking about it for a long time. A must read.
1. Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver
I don’t want to say too much to spoil this book, except that everyone should read it. Poisonwood Bible was one of the books that restarted my love of reading after college, and though this book is a complete gut punch, it’s also one of the best I’ve read in many years. Kingsolver at her best is one of the finest living novelists.
