book stack tuesday : my best of 2014

I read a lot.

It all started when I was a kid. Under a quilt with a flashlight, staying up far past my bedtime, I cheated sleep for the love of the word, those pages I longed to touch and move, one by one, from the front of a book to the back (in magazines, however, I read from back to front). Pippi! Daddy Longlegs! Biographies with soulful pencil portraits! Mrs Piggle Wiggle! And, at a preternaturally young age, Ayn Rand; I shudder to even admit that, and I have the owner of the local bookstore to blame for it–she wanted to recruit me to the Dark Side, I believe, and invited me to her Ayn Rand book group at the tender age of 14, an age by which I already wore bifocals, my eyesight having failed under those quilts, according to my mother.

Luscious, tactile, books. Oh, the smell, nose in that crevice. Those words, ciphers of black ink on white, so ripe with meaning and emotion. The true creation of a world. From small town America to everywhere, late at night, alone in the dark, an orb of light showing me the way 2 round inches at a time. I grew into a mantra I thought I created myself, and perhaps I did: Never leave home without a book, a sweater, an index card, and a pen.

For the past seven years, I have hosted a book club at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, NC, focused on “Bridging Differences.” Some of my favorite books from this year were read for that group. Others were public library discoveries (ah, the serendipities of the shelves!). And still others were read as part of the 37days Book Club during this year.

Each year, I read a few books that will stay with me–from all those sources, and more. Here is that list for 2014:

Wonder by R.J. Palacio – I love complex books that don’t talk down to kids or young adults. My younger daughter, Tess, has read this book dozens of times, but would never let me read it aloud to her at bedtime, until this year. What we found together in those evenings of “just one more page! just one more page!” was a world not unlike Tess’, in which difference was front and center. In the case of Wonder, it is a physical difference; not so in Tess’ case. We wrote the author this year, and told her Tess’ story and affinity for Wonder. She wrote back with a signed bookplate for Tess’ dog-eared copy and a copy of her new book, 365 Days of Wonder. Such is the life of a child who believes that authors are to be accessible and told of their impact. Emma used to do the same, calling authors in England to ask why they always included a pair of round eyeglasses in every illustration. Only as an adult did I allow myself to stand in the cold outside Astrid Lindgren’s house in Stockholm and silently tell her of her impact on this red-headed child.

 The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell – I stayed on the library reserve list for this for many, many weeks. And then it arrived. Bedtime came earlier and earlier as I looked forward to breaking open its pages again. I got to page 360 before it was due at the library for the next person in line. People advised me just to keep it and pay the overdue fine. But it wasn’t the fine that stopped me–it was all those other people waiting to read this brilliant book. So I returned it and put my name back on the list. I’m still #17 on the second wait list. But my friend Nancy took matters into her own hands and gave me my very own signed copy for Christmas. David Mitchell is a brilliant writer. You really should quit your job today and dedicate your life to reading everything he has ever written. He is a writer drunk with the possibilities of language, of plot, of structure, of the human experience.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson – Another writer to leave your life behind for. Just you, a spare little bookcase full of her novels, and time. Marilynne Robinson is a writer’s writer. From a review in The New Yorker about Lila, I offer this:

“But most of the time Robinson’s people aren’t actually starving; they’re just alone. That is the final meaning of her insistence on her characters’ own point of view: because they don’t see the same reality, they are consigned to solitude. Lila tells us that, as Ames’s wife, she was just as lonely as she had been before she married him. And the horrible, or at least extremely arresting, thing is that Robinson doesn’t entirely regret the situation. Lila, soon after the birth of her son, begins having fantasies of opening her front door and walking back out into her old life, and taking the baby with her:

But she imagined the old man, the Reverend, calling after them, ‘Where are you going with that child?’ The sadness in his voice would be terrible. He would be surprised to hear it. You wouldn’t even know your body had a sound like that in it. And it would be familiar to her. She didn’t imagine it, she remembered that sadness from somewhere, and it was as if she would understand something if she could hear it again. That was what she almost wanted. Life without comfort, without love, that is the real life, and Lila would like to understand why. This is an unflinching book.“ Turns out, I love unflinching books.

Orfeo by Richard Powers – Oh, Richard. You could write a phone book, and I would read it. My favorite living author. Brilliant beyond brilliant, and gracious beyond brilliance.  Cerebral. Okay, again, stop everything and read all his novels first to last. And then let’s have tea and discuss how unfair it is for a writer to pen every sentence like a symphony. Idea Man, keep those novels coming, please.

Remember Me by Laura Hendrie – I’ve saved the best for last. Why the best? Because I had no idea I would journey into such a richly textured story. Because I didn’t know this writer, and all I want now is more, more, more. Because I could envision each character, each nuance, each situation in such vivid detail. Oh, I didn’t want it to end.

You can follow my reading on Pinterest. Sometimes I forget to pin books I’ve read, but it’s a reasonable estimation. You’ll find I tend to enjoy hard, dark, complex, literary fiction. It’s the English grad student in me.

What were your favorite reads of 2014?

(Illustration for the NYTimes by Pieter Van Eenoge)