2015 was a big year for me. I stared a Master's degree, my first child was born, I saw Paul McCartney and a new Star War. Consequently, I thought I would have precious little time to read for pleasure this year. As luck would have it, this was also the year I discovered I could take out audiobooks from my local library. The ability to "read" while walking the dog and rocking the baby meant that I was able to polish off 60 books this year. I thought I'd cobble together a Top Ten list (technically fourteen—there are two trilogies) to share some of my favourites. Looking at the list I'm a bit surprised by the number of children's and YA novels. I guess that's where my head has been since becoming a father.
Here they are:
10. The Fatal Eggs, Mikhail Bulgakov (1925). It's not his best work (The Master and Margarita is one of my favourite novels), but The Fatal Eggs, like all of Bulgakov's works, is a brilliant example of Soviet satire, mixing black comedy, sci-fi, and a dash of classic horror. After a strange virus kills off most of the country's chickens, a famous scientist named Dr. Vladimir Persikov figures out a process to make eggs develop faster, and ends up accidentally sending a plague of over-sized and aggressive snakes, ostriches and crocodiles across the USSR—a biting satire of the cold-blooded policies of the Stalinist period.
9. When You Reach Me, Rebecca Stead (2009). If you know me, you know I'm a sucker for time travel. I'm also a sucker for gritty realism with an element of the fantastic that lurks in the background and is never really explained (Miyazaki's films, for instance). When You Reach Me is an enthralling depiction of 1970s New York City, a touching coming-of-age story, and has an element of time travel that lurks in the shadows. It follows an eleven-year-old girl named Miranda who starts receiving mysterious notes that seem to come from the future. Warning: Don't read it if, like me, you're simultaneously reading A Wrinkle in Time. There will be spoiling.
8. General Sun, My Brother, Jacques Stephen Alexis (1955). This is considered one of the three pillars of Haitian literature. It's the heartbreaking tale of a young Haitian family trying to eke out a living in the tumultuous 1930s. Like many of their contemporaries, they eventually make their way to the sugar fields of the Dominican in the months leading up to the tragic Parsley Massacre. Alexis was a leader of the Haitian communist faction, so when Papa Doc Duvalier came to power the novel was promptly banned. It is an important depiction of the victims of a fragile nation, and a picture that is unfortunately still relevant today.
7. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins (2008-2010). I don't often read things that are in vogue. I prefer to wait until the hype has died down. I like works with staying power, with universal themes, not just the flavour of the month. So I was hesitant to pick up The Hunger Games. As it turned out, I was hooked by the time Katniss said "I volunteer as tribute" on page 22. Collins built a complex and compelling dystopia on the historical precedents of gladiatorial contests and reality TV. The author is a television writer by profession and I've never seen such a clever critique of the way we consume media.
6. The Time Machine, H.G. Wells (1895). I read three other Wells novels this year, and enjoyed them all. But as noted in number 9 above, I'm a sucker for time travel. I won't say much about this well-known and well-loved classic, except that its an intriguing glimpse into the way the late-nineteenth-century British intelligentsia conceived of the world—its past, present and future. The serene and dainty Eloi and the vulgar Morlocks, decedents of the working class and the leisure class respectively, could only be imagined by an author from industrial Britain.
5. The Space Trilogy, C.S. Lewis (1938-1945). I've read this trilogy previously but I came back to it this year. As the story goes, back in the 1930s, the golden age of science fiction, Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien made a deal that one of them would write a story about time travel and the other, space travel. They flipped a coin to decide who would write which. In the end, Tolkien never finished his time travel manuscript, but Lewis ended up writing a three-part space odyssey. As always, his narrative is grounded in a Christian critique of the intellectual climate of his day—given that he wrote it during the Second World War he had a lot to criticize. The series follows the fantastic story of philologist Elwin Ransom (loosely based on Tolkien). In the first two books he travels to Mars and Venus where he encounters many wonders and dangers, and learns much about the way Earth might have been if not for the Fall of Man. In the third, which takes place on Earth, Ransom and a wide cast of characters including the historical Merlin join forces to stave off an invasion from beyond space and time.
4. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame (1908). I typically don't like novels that have next to no plot, but Kenneth Grahame's classic The Wind in the Willows is an exception to this and countless other rules. It's a series of lovely vignettes about Messrs. Toad, Mole, Badger and Rat, which slowly develop into a loose story about how Mr. Toad lost and regained his ancestral home. The timeless characters make it worth the read, but my favourite thing about the novel is the ambiguous relationship between humans and animals. The creatures wear clothes and drive cars and eat fine meals with cutlery, but they also fight against and succumb to their animal instincts, to "those mysterious fairy calls from out of the void." The humans in the story (yes there are humans too) treat Mr. Toad like a person, but they're perfectly aware he's a toad, and they also keep horses and go fishing. At one point, while he's is in jail, Toad speaks to the jailer's daughter who is very fond of animals and asks him all about his friend, though "of course she did not say she was fond of animals as pets, because she had the sense to see that Toad would have been extremely offended." I'm a fan of that kind of sustained ambiguity—like the camera crew on The Office, it doesn't quite make sense but it works. The Wind in the Willows, as a novel, doesn't make a lot of sense, but it works wonderfully.
3. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, Roald Dahl (1977). I read a significant portion of Dahl's corpus this year, but this one stood out as my favourite. The BFG was great, Matilda was good, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator was bizarre. I'm typically not the one to say that an artist's more obscure work is my favourite. I can admit that a writer's best-loved novel is quite often his or her best novel, but Henry Sugar is, as the title indicates, a wonderful story. The book is a compilation of six short stories and a novella (Henry Sugar). The short stories are mostly good, but the novella is excellent. It's the story of a wealthy and self-centred bachelor, Henry Sugar, who learns to see without using his eyes. The story unfolds slowly, and uses a meandering story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure, but the hilarious, heart-warming and unexpected conclusion is worth every page.
2. Holes, Louis Sachar (1998). I just finished reading this today, so I haven't had much time to critically reflect on it, but at the moment I'm crazy for Sachar's Newbery Prize-winning tour de force, Holes. It's possible I was predisposed to fall in love with this YA novel because the Wayside School stories, which I read when I was ten, were formative for my sense of humour. Holes is the intersection of three different stories: 1. Stanley Yelnats, after being wrongfully convicted of stealing a famous baseball player's shoes, is sent to Camp Greenlake (a facility for juvenile delinquents) and forced to dig one hole every day; 2. in 19th century Lativa, Stanley's no good, pig stealing great great grand father is struck with a curse that stays with the Yelnats family for generations; and 3. 110 years previously, in the town that used to be on Greenlake before the lake dried up, a tragic love affair takes place between a pretty young school teacher and a poor local onion salesman, ending with one of them becoming a famous outlaw. The three stories dovetail beautifully amid hilarious antics and death-defying adventures. I will definitely be reading this to my baby as soon as he can understand words.
1. The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham (1951). I love stories where something unimaginable takes place—a natural disaster, an alien invasion, or whatever—and we get to see how different people adapt to the new normal. John Wyndham was a master of this type of story. His novels The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos both follow a similar structure. But Triffids is in a league of its own. Imagine if one day everyone in the world, except for a select few, woke up blind. Throw in a worldwide infestation of carnivorous plants and you have The Day of the Triffids. Written during the Cold War, the novel is a warning that one day mankind might very well destroy itself. It follows a biologist (and triffid specialist) Bill Masen as he tries to navigate a world turned upside down. Society collapses and different groups cleave to those few with sight, each of whom have their own views of how the new order should compose itself. At every turn hope and despair hang precariously in the balance. It is truly a masterpiece. Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, called it "an immortal story," and I would have to agree.
So there's my list. In 2015 I read an average of five books a month, so in 2016 I'm going to try for 72. Leave a comment below if you have any recommendation.
