My 10 Favorite Books of 2011

Because I like to excoriate myself whenever possible, I will start this post off with a shameful confession: I did not read one single paper book this year. I’m all digital, all the time. I didn’t even want my Kindle when I got it two years ago because I was so committed to the physicality of books and bookstores and my bookshelves. What I’ve found, though, is that not carrying books around and finding places to store books is incredibly liberating. With my Kindle, I can get nearly any book I want, any time, any where. I can carry hundreds with me at all times.  It’s intoxicating. However, being the kind of person who no longer supports my neighborhood bookstore except by browsing feels awful. Just not quite awful enough to make me buy actual books.

These are books I read in 2011–some were published earlier. This is  in order of when I read them, not in order of preference.

1. Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell

I loved this book so, so much. It is bleak and relentless and I couldn’t put it down. I still think about Ree Dolley, the main character. The language and imagery in this novel is utterly genius.  It will break your heart, and that’s what I want literature to do for me, to move me hard in a direction I didn’t necessarily intend to go.

2. Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson

For my money, the literary mystery genre exemplified by Kate Atkinson and Tana French is the most exciting trend in publishing, even better than my beloved dystopian young adult novels. I will read anything that either of these authors write, and this latest installment of the Jackson Brodie series scratched my itch nicely. I wish someone would tell me when the next Tana French book is coming. Both women write books that I would call off work to read.

3. Game of Thrones and Kingkiller Chronicles series

This is one of those times when I’m a little glad I don’t carry books around in public any more; number one, these fantasy epics are huge, and number two, I don’t really need the world to know that I am a 36-year-old woman who likes books about dragons–I have enough strikes against me–but I am, Blanche, I am.  I’ve been a committed sci-fi/fantasy reader for years, but I find I’m not fanatical enough for the true fanatics and that people who don’t read these genres are quite snobby about people who do. Oh well. Both of these series were compulsively readable. Y’all remember how weird I got about Game of Thrones.

Another magicky book I quite enjoyed this year was Among Others by Jo Walton. One basic truth of my life is this: if magically gifted children are doing something in a boarding school anywhere in the British empire, I need to be a part of it. I could write an entire blog based on this idea.

4. Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

I read an excerpt of this somewhere before I read the entire thing, and I was totally hooked. Alligator wrestlers! Much like the above rule about magical children in boarding schools, if a family is experiencing tragedy and growth on a difficult-to-reach island or in a swamp, I’m all over it. I don’t know what this says about me–perhaps that I find my own life really, really boring. Hmm. (Remember the Tillerman series by Cynthia Voigt? I wanted to be Dicey sooooo badly.)

5. Divergent by Veronica Roth

Do you ever wonder how it happens that something comes along and magically fills a ravenous need that no one knew existed before the solution arrived? I’m talking, of course, about the Hunger Games trilogy and the legion of dystopian imitators it spawned. The need these books were filling was mine mine mine.

I think the part of me that loves all dystopian fiction is the same part of me that is pretty sure humans are going to be decimated by something in my lifetime, and that we’ll all have to learn to survive, and I’m reading these books as a way of studying for that eventuality. Except I’m not really studying because I don’t really  believe that! They’re kids books! It’s a lark! Now say again what the secret symbol is that’s on the people who are going to survive? I want to make sure my mom and sister have it.

I will read nearly anything if someone says it’s like Hunger Games. Divergent and Birthmarked were my favorites this year.

6. The Moonflower Vine by Jetta Carleton

This sweet but stout novel about grown daughters coming home for a weekend on the Ozark farm where they grew up was originally published in the 1940s and re-released last year. I loved it for the multilayered story and strong characters, but also for the awesome details about rural farm life and how juicily the author portrayed them. It made me want to bathe in an icy creek on a hot day, and pick berries and eat them at a picnic table.

This is another little fetish of mine, left over from my Laura Ingalls Wilder fangirl days: I want to read about every whorl on the stick of your butter churn, baby. Tell me slowly–how did it taste? How did you make it? Did you store it in the cool, musty cellar, where it glowed in shaft of sunlight? Swoon.

7. The Slap: A Novel by Christos Tsiolkas

I’ve tried to like Tom Perrotta, I really have, but I can never really get there. Something about suburbia stories written by men doesn’t sit well with me; male authors tend to write about playground life at a remove that feels sardonic, even though it’s just supposed to be “refreshing” or something. (Related: Paige and Aidan’s longtime nanny is leaving and a man is taking her place. I was shocked right down to my egalitarian toes to learn that my visceral reaction upon hearing this news was a strong, STRONG disbelief that men are able take care of children as well as women. If I did not love the children in question, I think I would never have let myself know that, but it’s true. Marry me!)

Anyway, The Slap  is a novel of suburbia set in Melbourne, Australia. It hits all of the same notes Perrotta usually does–boredom in marriage, infidelity, how we raise children and what the right way to do it is. It’s all so familiar, but the antipodean twist gives it a new sparkle. (I like a lot of books from Australia and New Zealand, as I think about it.  Road from Coorain or The Bone People, anybody?)

8. The Great Night by Chris Adrian

Listen, if someone told me, “Hey, you should read this po-mo retelling of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in San Francisco,” I would be like, “You and I are probably not going to end up best friends.” But Chris Adrian just does it for me. Gob’s Grief, his first novel and the first one I read, employs nearly every literary device that I dislike–what, a Walt Whitman cameo! And a character invented purely to expound at length upon the author’s obsession with an arcane topic (photography in this case)!–but I loved it anyway. Adrian is a former divinity student and a current medical resident, and I knew that without even looking it up. I want to marry him. This book satisfied me deeply.

9. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett has my number, and I wish she would use it so we could hang out. I’ve read everything she’s ever written (except, oddly, Bel Canto) and I love all of it. This was my favorite book of 2011. Lost in a Central American jungle and trying to solve a medical mystery related to conception? You had me at “lost”.

I also read Truth and Beauty this year, Patchett’s memoir about her friendship with the late poet Lucy Grealy. I read Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face long before I started reading Patchett, and it’s one of the most affecting and moving stories I’ve ever encountered. They are hard books, but gorgeous.

10. Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks

This is an oddly sympathetic story of a confused and adrift registered sex offender living under an over pass with his sex offender brethren in Florida. Its the only place they can legally stay, because of restrictions on how close they can live to a school or day care. I’ve disagreed with nearly every characterization of this book I’ve seen, and I’m still not quite sure how to feel about the protagonist, known only as The Kid.

What’s the best book you read this year? Next up for me is The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. I have a good feeling about it.