eMusic’s Best Audiobooks of 2012
A good book is a funny thing. Sometimes we know from page 1 that a book is going to be a classic, while others are a slow burn, and we’ve made it through to the end – perhaps a few times – before we realize we just can’t stop reliving that one climactic scene or fixating on a turn of phrase.
Over the course of 2012, this happened to us a lot. Most of our favorite books were slow-burn stunners, ones that woke us up in the middle of the night weeks later. There were a few showpieces and, for once, a few books that deserved every second of the publicity they received. By December we were walking around brimming with all of the fantastic books we’ve read – like burning sage, this list is a cleansing opportunity to let them all go and get ready for next year.
With only 40 slots to fill, it was inevitable that some great books got left off, and we hope you’ll fill in the gaps with your favorites in the comments. Here are our best books of 2012.
40. David Levithan, Every Day
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David Levithan has spent the last 10 years writing about teenagers in love in many different forms — from the whirlwind angst of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist to the sensitive happy-go-lucky treatment of gay teen life in Boy Meets Boy. His most recent novel complicates the theme, following A, a character who wakes up inside a different person's body every morning and must learn to live their life... without disruption before starting over again the next day. Falling in love with Rhiannon upends all of A's coping mechanisms, as he foregoes normalcy to be with her every day. Meanwhile, her reciprocation questions both the characters' and our deep-seated beliefs about attraction, sexuality. The result is a beautifully crafted allegory for the confused, all-consuming, thrilling, baffling nature of first love.
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39. Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue
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After five long years, Michael Chabon came back with this sweeping novel of the collision between nostalgia and progress in the borderlands between historically black Oakland and hippie-white Berkeley. With a jazz-funk soundtrack, a cameo appearance from soon-to-be President Obama, and the creation of the greatest black action hero since Shaft, no novel has had such a deep respect for the way pop culture shapes our identities since High Fidelity.
38. Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
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It was the mid-’90s when cult classicist Mark Leyner released his last novel. Known for his antic prose, free-associative humor and postmodern mind games, Leyner now appears, in retrospect, to have been eerily prescient, his early work like drafts of the sort of Internet culture we’re all now accustomed to.
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In The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, we get multiple and recursive narratives: not only the biography of Ike Karton, an unemployed New Jersey butcher,... but also the story of the universe’s very origin, as well as its eternal pantheon of gods, who no longer get along and spend all their time in Dubai, squabbling on the top floor of a skyscraper and obsessing over Ike’s fate.
The book is an epic, a supernatural oral tradition infinitely revised. Its every aside and mistake is part and parcel of what the gods, who are in fact recanting it in real time, intended. Even your reaction to the story — your enthusiasm, your boredom, your break for a snack — has been predetermined.
In the Internet Age, we take infinite scrolling, constant distraction, and the existence of a never-ending collective story as matter of course. In that light, the strangest thing about The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is how un-strange it seems.
37. Keigo Higashino, Salvation of a Saint
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It seems as if Japanese detective novels as a whole are more finely crafted than their American counterparts, with a flair for bone-dry absurdity and psychological twists that would seem forced in less skilled hands. Case in point: Keigo Higashino's Salvation of a Saint, the latest installment in the adventures of Detective Galileo, an erstwhile physics professor who made his first appearance in The Devotion of Suspect X. Galileo's calculations point... the police in ever-more-preposterous directions as they try to unravel the murder of a philandering CEO. The minutiae of modern Japanese urban life coupled with astonishing flights of logical speculation combine to make a truly gripping, original thriller.
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36. Maria Semple, Where’d You Go, Bernadette
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The story of a family of flawed geniuses, written as a semi-epistolary novel in diary entries, letters, fragments of conversations, and government reports, Where'd You Go, Bernadette could easily veer into uber-twee Wes Anderson territory; instead, it's a sharp, hilarious delight made even better by one of the best adult-playing-teenager narrations we've ever heard. It helps that author Maria Semple is a longtime comedy writer — most recently for the beloved Arrested... Development —and that the story is a searing satire of life in Seattle.
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35. Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy
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The title of Shalom Auslander’s debut novel is as tersely comic as the prose it contains. If a previous book of short stories (Beware of God) suggested that the author might deserve a place within the hallowed tradition of literary Jewish pessimists, his newest effort confirms it. Hope, a gutsy book with a gutsy premise – begins when a man named Solomon Kugel hears tapping noises coming from his attic. Kugel follows... the sounds and discovers a living, elderly Anne Frank residing in the uppermost reaches of his farmhouse in upstate New York. She’s working on a novel; what Kugel heard was the typewriter.
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To this living arrangement, add one tyrannical hypochondriac of a mother, one semi-sympathetic wife and one toddler. Then stir. The result is a satire that transcends its clever conceit thanks to Auslander’s unmistakable voice. That voice, incidentally, is one that some listeners will recognize from This American Life, where the writer often pops up with stories that bridge the territory between soul-crumpling and hilarious. What make for a brilliant radio piece, it turns out – economy, rhythm, stylishness without frippery – make for an equally beguiling novel.
34. Richard Zacks, Island of Vice
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Island of Vice is like a greatest hits of the tropes of historical nonfiction; you've got a skeptical look at Victorian mores, an investigation of the seamy underbelly of a city, an age-old struggle that still echoes today, and a beloved historical figure playing an unexpected role. Like Rudy Giuliani a century later, it turns out that Teddy Roosevelt spent years attempting to clean up New York, which was apparently nothing but... brothels and opium dens in the 1890s. Roosevelt was New York police commissioner at the time, and his attempts were mostly thwarted by Byzantine regulations and double standards. A compelling portrait of a town at a turning point, the book moves quickly along, buoyed by anecdotes and letter excerpts that add levity and character to the essential plot.
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33. James M. Cain, The Cocktail Waitress
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OK, so this one's kind of a cheat. James M. Cain, the classic noir author, wrote The Cocktail Waitress in the 1970s, right before his death. But the novel languished in fragments for 30-plus years, and was only just assembled and published this year by intrepid editors, so we get to count it as one of the best books of 2012. While it's not Cain's best (with Mildred Pierce and ... href="http://www.emusic.com/book/james-m-cain/the-postman-always-rings-twice/10026306/">The Postman Always Rings Twice just a few of his many, it's a tough crowd to compete in), the master of dark, moody suspense still looms large over contemporary mystery authors.
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32. China Mieville, Railsea
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Moby Dick has retained a particular hold on the global literary imagination in the century-and-a-half since its publishing. Some writers have been seized enough by Melville’s epic to spin off new stories based on its characters, while others have taken on the theme of Ahab’s suicidal single-mindedness to frame new tales of obsession. China Mieville’s Railsea is a new literary heir on the scene: fantastical, post-apocalyptic and, like its predecessor, packed with... equal parts exhilarating chase and incisive reflection on the nature of the chase itself. In this case, the one doing the reflecting is Sham ap Soorap, a bumbling young introvert who finds himself taken on as a doctor’s assistant aboard the Medes, a mole-hunting train on the railsea. In this never-stated, probably-future time, the earth (if it is the earth) is covered with mile after mile of snared and tangled rails, and, like the seamen of yore, those who ride the rails form a culture unto themselves. And, oh yes, I said “mole-hunting” – out of the ground on which rails are laid come all manner of vicious, burrowing creatures, from pesky carnivorous rabbits to vicious ferrets to the bounty of the Medes: the moldywarpe, a bad-tempered giant mole. One particular moldywarpe, an ivory-colored one, no less, has taken the arm of the Medes captain, and it has become the life’s aim – the “philosophy,” as Mieville puts it – of Captain Naphi to track down said moldywarpe and harpoon it to kingdom come. At heart not a hunter but a dreamer, a would-be salvor (salvager of ancient junk), Sham gains a quest of his own when he learns of a place that’s unsullied by the endless snarl and clatter of the rails. Railsea enchants by its language alone, and reader Jonathan Cowley proves expert with Mieville’s invented vocabulary and his rollicking, alliterative sentences. Intended for readers of all ages, Railsea will enchant any reader who understands what it’s like to want something and to burn with the dream to discover it.
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31. J.R. Moehringer, Sutton
30. Alice Munro, Dear Life
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Alice Munro has been quietly, guilelessly dominating the field of the short story for nearly 50 years and shows no sign of slowing. Maybe it's her Canadian-ness that keeps her flying below the radar, even after having won PEN, O. Henry, National Book Critics Circle and Man Booker awards. Or maybe it's the finely drawn, intimate quality of her work – no showy flights of language, no mystical beings or tricksy maybe-real-maybe-imagined... characters, just people writ small living lives that are at once infinitely relatable and emotionally universal. This collection is no exception, which is to say that it is essential reading.
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29. Etgar Keret, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door
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It might seem a bit odd to call Etgar Keret’s collection a delight; it’s 35 stories about loneliness, alienation, depression and death that shoot out at a blistering pace. But there’s a disorienting hopefulness to many of them. Narrated by a who’s who of literati, artists and actors, including Dave Eggers, Miranda July, Stanley Tucci and Neal Stephenson, Keret’s stories exist in worlds of magical realism. Bodies literally unzip to reveal entirely... different people underneath the skin and dreams become portals to new, entirely real dimensions — where life is still unpleasantly banal. These are places in which everything is ordinary and nothing quite makes sense.
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Keret is Israeli, and much of Suddenly is an examination of that nation’s psyche, battered as it is by suicide bombings, isolation, and ideological division. In “Healthy Start,” one of the standouts in this strong collection, the actor Ben Foster narrates the story of Avichai, a man who, after being left by his partner, finds that no one quite seems to know who he is. Mistaken for several other men, he decides to abandon his own identity as easily as others have abandoned him.
For these characters, the more unpleasant parts of life are made simultaneously more and less ordinary compared to the stranger events that befall them. Death is still something terrifying, incomprehensible, and sad, but is it any more so than finding an unpleasant German man inside one’s lover? Keret’s stories, in all of their sweet distress, say no.
28. Baratunde Thurston, How to Be Black
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Attention, black people. Listen up, white people. Hey, everybody. Baratunde Thurston — author, political blogger, cable-news talking head, comedian, tech nerd and the digital director of The Onion knows what you know and what you think you know about black people in America. He’s got 30-plus years experience as an African American. He’s heard the same things you have, from the stereotypes and the sad-but-trues to the diluted history lessons and popularly... accepted narratives. And he’s not buying them.
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“In the age of President Barack Obama, all of them are limiting and simply inadequate to the task of capturing the reality of blackness,” he writes in the introduction to this funny, poignant, biting (and a little bit baiting) memoir/satire. “In this book, I will attempt to re-complicate blackness.”
From there he intertwines his personal journey (raised by his mom, simultaneously enrolled in a mostly white prep school and a “black power boot camp,” cleaned toilets/took classes at Harvard) with sometimes silly, but more often straight-faced and subtly scathing, chapters like “How to Be the Black Friend,” “How to Be the Black Employee,” and “How to Speak for All Black People.” Along the way he solicits input from a “Black Panel” of experts, mostly fellow writers and comedians (and all black except for that dude who wrote Stuff White People Like). There are plenty of tiny heartbreaking and hackle-raising moments in How To Be Black — race is serious business in America, after all — but the book is also funny as hell.
27. Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers
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Katherine Boo's National Book Award-winning work could be described as Slumdog Millionaire without the Bollywood flash, but that would be missing the point. Yes, it's an unblinking look at life in the Mumbai slums, but it's at once much bigger and much smaller than that. It's a piece of journalism that shows how the unfathomable economic disparity of modern India is complicated by a new myth of upward mobility, drawing into relief... the concept of the American Dream and its own devastating effects. It's also a personal story of a handful of people; some happy, some not, living mundane lives and affected by grand tragedy. Not just pawns in a reporter's chess game, they are allowed to exist on the page in all of their complicated, human nature — a rare feat, indeed.
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26. John Hodgman, That Is All
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John Hodgman, Daily Show Resident Expert and celebrity glasses-wearer, completes his trilogy of Complete World Knowledge with this compendium of fake facts about wine and sports, tips on being a deranged millionaire and how the world will end. More comedy album than straightforward audiobook, That Is All features celebrity cameos from Paul Rudd, Patton Oswalt, Rachel Maddow and more, skits and original music. Fans of Hodgman’s highly formatted, stylized print books may... hesitate about listening to what is essentially a book of lists and trivia, but wonder no more — by the time you get to the audio wine tasting, you’ll be hooked.
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25. Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles
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What if you woke up one morning to discover that the earth’s rotation had begun mysteriously slowing overnight? And what if you were also a sixth grader, unable to do anything but watch while your world changed around you? This is the premise of Karen Thompson Walker’s compelling debut novel, in which 12-year-old Julia tries to navigate the difficulties of middle school in a world where tides, fault lines and magnetic fields... have all gone awry; days stretch into weeks; and animals and plants are dying en masse.
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If The Age of Miracles were a standard-issue sci-fi yarn, the story would center on the race against time to save Earth from certain doom. Instead, Julia is stuck in her California suburb, the lengthening days and nights merely one more uncontrollable thing. So what if the slowing forewarns the end of all human existence? It’s exactly as incomprehensible and inevitable as adolescence itself. The earth is slowing down, and Julia’s best friend will barely speak to her anymore; the birds are falling dead from the skies and her parents’ marriage is falling apart; people are crazy and people are crazy.
The story is narrated not by adolescent Julia, but rather by a 20-something Julia, recalling the events of that pivotal summer. “I remember,” she says, often, and, “That was the last time.” She is prone to pensive, melancholic metaphor: After the slowing, she says, “We all had a little more time to decide what not to do. And who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret?” Hers is that wistful nostalgia earned only by time, one in which the meaning of small things is acquired in hindsight. Would you watch more closely the last bird you ever saw in flight? Would you say goodbye to the people you love?
Despite its dystopian urgencies, the book moves quietly, softly, driven by characters rather than plot: a state of affairs both odd and fascinating for a book whose central premise conflates adolescence and apocalypse. But then, how does adolescence end? There is no satisfying denouement. There is only the gradual slide of one self into another, and the matching realization that one’s world will never again be quite the same.
24. Timothy Egan, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher
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In the hierarchy of historical eras, turn-of-the-century America is about as low as it gets; it's all dusty frontiersmen and hoop skirts, long stretches of open country and stilted Victorian talk from politicians with ludicrous facial hair. Not so for Timothy Egan, the gutsiest, most balls-to-the-wall chronicler of the American experience writing today. Winner of the National Book Award for The Worst Hard Time, Egan has a knack for... cutting through the flowered speech and dirt to craft page-turners from decades of bureaucratic red tape. Short Nights is a biography of a little-known photographer who set out to, grandiosely, document every Native American nation on the continent. Surprise, he failed, and his failures both professional and personal make for a compelling narrative of a country in flux.
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23. Lydia Netzer, Shine Shine Shine
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Lydia Netzer creates a sci-fi folk tale with her debut novel, weaving together an epic love story that transcends (literal) space and time, vibrant characters, and, naturally, robots.
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In Shine Shine Shine, Sunny, a congenitally bald little girl and Maxon, an autistic boy, fall in love and eventually get married. Flash-forward to the future, when Maxon becomes an astronaut on a risky, high-profile mission to the moon while Sunny remains at home, raising... their lovably robotic son, Bubber, gestating their second child, worrying about her dying mother and relinquishing her reliance on wigs as she struggles to maintain a normal life at home. Except that “normal” in this story is so not normal. There’s a recurring theme of learning how to be human and learning how to read emotions that applies sweetly to both the robots and the humans in the book.
22. Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
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We thought we were done with apocalypse novels too, really. But then along came Peter Heller's The Dog Stars, which somehow manages to be full of hope and beauty in the midst of the hideous struggle for survival. After an epidemic wipes out most of humanity and leaves the survivors infected with a deadly virus, our hero Hig spends as much time remembering the good from his former life and admiring the... natural beauty that remains (and in fact flourishes) in civilization's absence as he does fighting off marauders and searching in vain for friends in a savage wasteland. It's a potent reminder to stop and smell the roses — even if you're not being chased.
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21. David Foster Wallace, Both Flesh and Not
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This posthumous collection of David Foster Wallace’s essays as published in various outlets over almost 20 years of his prolific career has its faults, as so many posthumous publications do. But while some of the 15 essays included have not aged well, when it works, it’s a reminder of the startling joy that truly great nonfiction The book draws its title from Wallace’s gorgeous essay on tennis phenomenon Roger Federer, which... opens the collection and which showcases his most dexterous moves as a writer — the breathtaking descriptive prose, the philosophically rigorous language interrupted by funny, humane, and surprising colloquialisms. It’s a rigorous and pleasing read, one that offers satisfactions and challenges both (as the title implies) material and abstract.
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20. Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth
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We’ll go on record as never having been particular Ian McEwan fans, especially when he writes female characters. Maybe that’s why Sweet Tooth’s Serena Frome is such a delight – her simultaneous arrogance and palpable need for guidance post-Cambridge will ring painfully true for anyone who was once a know-it-all college graduate. Tied up in her personal development is a labyrinth of a story about the crumbling British espionage system in the... 1970s, at the end of the empire, as the old boys’ methods lost favor and they scrambled to stay current. While the gimmick of the final chapter’s reveal is bold choice that, understandably, lost this book a lot of fans, it’s a charming twist that belies the book’s real strength: as a fairy tale of a young woman’s self-discovery.
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19. Zadie Smith, NW
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The title of Zadie Smith’s fourth novel refers to the neighborhood of North West London, where, for Smith’s characters, the main currency is voice. NW is structured around three voices in particular: Leah Hanwell, her best friend Natalie (nee Keisha) Blake and Felix, a young man whose brief section forms the pivot point around which the two women’s stories circle and collide. The daughters of Irish and Jamaican immigrants, respectively, Leah and... Natalie leave the neighborhood for college and brief plunges into the world beyond. Leah returns as a social worker and Natalie as an upwardly mobile lawyer, allowing Smith to chronicle a brilliant and nuanced range of spoken language. This also makes listening to the audiobook a particular pleasure, as the readers skillfully voice the dialogue-driven text. As Natalie reflects, listening to her mother gossip ruthlessly, “People were not people, but merely the effect of language. You could conjure them and kill them in a sentence.”
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NW‘s central contradictions rest in this succinct proposal, referring not only to the novelists task but to Leah and Natalie themselves, who face their own conjuring acts of self-reinvention and parenthood. Using fragmented chapters and a looping chronology to dilate what might have been a fleeting, faceless headline of neighborhood violence, Smith makes it clear that what’s at stake is the capacity for empathy – her characters’ and our own.
18. Paul French, Midnight in Peking
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It’s very easy to write a decent true crime story, and very difficult to write a great one. Paul French’s Midnight in Peking should be required reading for all who plan on attempting the genre at some point; it’s a remarkably drawn tale of the end of the era of white decadence in the “exotic Orient” circling around the sensational murder of a young British woman in Peking (aka Beijing) in the... 1930s. Government officials from both sides confounded the investigation, which French details for the first time in 80 years. Overwrought and not entirely academic in places, the story is so gripping and evocative that factual vagaries go by unminded.
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17. Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
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Since the end of the Riot Grrrl glory days of the early ‘90s, the word “feminist” has somehow made its way back onto the list of slurs thrown like a hot potato at women who talk about gender equity, make uncommon personal grooming decisions or simply speak seriously about anything unpopular. Caitlin Moran, the British essayist who has been writing hilariously opinionated, outspoken, confessional criticism since the age of 16, takes this... regression to task, weaving an appeal for more strident feminists around her formative lessons on femininity. Moran describes it as “an update of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch written from a bar stool” — while it is exactly as boozy and profane as that sounds, it’s also more touching, more hilarious and, ultimately, more convincing. Moran may singlehandedly haul feminism off of the scrapheap and back into the public discussion, where it belongs.
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16. Patrick Somerville, This Bright River
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Patrick Somerville’s fourth book is one of those novels that’s both epic and intimate. Written from multiple first-person perspectives – all of them dead-on, authentic and hilarious – the novel tracks mysterious pasts, families in distress, substance abuse, and a favorite topic (rightfully so) of any novelist: social awkwardness. The story is mainly told by Ben, a brilliant, recovering drug addict, and Lauren, a doctor escaping a tragic marriage, who are former... high school classmates now returned to their hometown of St. Helens, Wisconsin. Somerville (The Cradle, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature) has a blessed gift for sharp, witty dialogue, and the plot zooms, which makes This Bright River an ideal audiobook experience.
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15. Charles Yu, Sorry Please Thank You
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Charles Yu is very smart. Some might argue too smart for his own good, but hiding under the formalist gymnastics and technical jargon in the stories in Sorry Please Thank You is a deep well of empathy and tenderness. Toying with sci-fi tropes, Yu turns the genre on its head with a deadpan stare into the heart of modern alienation as he effortlessly describes impossibilities like a machine designed to fulfill one's... greatest desires, a corporation that outsources the experience of pain, and the day-to-day realities of living inside a video game. Full of bleak humor and conceptual absurdities, Sorry Please Thank You is a delight that will surprise you with its ability to inspire some serious soul-searching.
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14. Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis
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If you aren't already convinced that Indian literature is more than tales of colonial bad behavior, languid tropical scenery and upward-striving urchins, stand back and let Jeet Thayil drive the final nail in that coffin. Narcopolis is about Mumbai, yes, but more importantly it's a narrative of addiction, masterfully told from a multitude of perspectives in a beautifully harsh, poetic language. The city's underworld shift from genteel opium dens to the rough... desperation of the heroin trade serves as a mirror for the protagonist's descent, riots in the street serving as a backdrop to his ruin and rebirth. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this meticulously crafted book dazzles with its skill without ever feeling forced.
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13. Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
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In two consecutive books, Hilary Mantel has succeeded in accomplishing the impossible, a feat neither Shakespeare nor Showtime could achieve: making the political machinations of the reign of Henry VIII as gripping as a Tom Clancy thriller without resorting to heaving bosoms and bloody murder scenes. Following Thomas Cromwell, Henry's personal fixer who dealt with everything from arranging that first fateful divorce to prosecuting would-be traitors, all the while avenging the murder... of his own mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, the novels are relentlessly modern, told entirely in the present tense. Throughout, Mantel weaves in historical detail as effortlessly as she might mention Will & Kate. No wonder Bring Up the Bodies brought Mantel her second Man Booker Prize; we'd put money on the yet-to-be-published third part of the series taking the trifecta.
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12. Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King
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Dave Eggers’s latest protagonist, A Hologram for the King‘s Alan Clay, is a hollow man. Not in the T. S. Eliot “this is the way the world ends” sense, but the in the globally emasculated, forever-middle-management sense. He’s Willy Loman without the rage. In his past fiction, Eggers has often had an international focus. Unsurprisingly, his latest work retains that focus — but twists it around the average, recession-era American businessman.
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The down-on-his-luck... businessman may be the trope of American fiction in the last 70 years, but in presenting Alan Clay as such, we’re more aware of his everyman qualities. A “ghost” to his family, he’s holed up in King Abdullah Economic City (also known as the Arabian desert), designing holographic communications software with a team of contractors. Ruminating on his place in the world, we see the hints of a drive behind Clay — a new technology in a new economic power may make him a wealthy, and potentially worthwhile person.
But truthfully, A Hologram for the King is all about emptiness. The vast tracts of the desert, the literal insubstantiality of connecting-via-hologram — not to mention the bland quality of Dion Graham’s narration all underline the degree to which Eggers’s Clay claws at relevance as the cohesive bonds of his life come apart.
11. Louise Erdrich, The Round House
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Returning to the some of the same characters and geographies as in her 2008 novel The Plague of Doves, Louise Erdrich’s National Book Award-winning book is a wrenching work centered on three members of the Native American Coutts family in the aftermath of the rape of Geraldine Coutts, wife of tribal judge Bazil and mother of Joe.
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In a departure from Erdrich’s prior novels, The Round House’s sole narrator is the 13-year-old Joe,... voiced with honesty and conviction by Canadian First Nations actor Gary Farmer (best known for his featured role as Nobody in Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 acid western Dead Man). As his mother’s rape forces Joe to try to reconcile his own teenage desires with the reality of sexual violence, the crime finds itself in a dead zone of prosecution due to the overlapping jurisdictions of tribal, state, and federal law. The Couttses must balance their need for closure with their longtime efforts toward tribal sovereignty. As the investigation drags on, Joe remarks of his mother that “with all that we did, we were trying to coax the soul back into her. But I could feel it tug away from us like a kite on a string. I was afraid that string would break and she’d careen off, vanish into the dark.”
Erdrich’s prose offers a compelling look at the grey areas of justice, sex, love, family and ethnic identity, while Farmer’s narration allows the Coutts’s North Dakota reservation to creep slowly under your skin until you feel an integral – if silent – part of the community.
10. Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I’m Home
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Carol Rifka Brunt's debut novel, about a teenage girl coming to terms with her uncle's AIDS-related death in 1980s New York, is an unapologetic tearjerker. It's also a beautifully painted coming-of-age story and a nuanced, intimate portrait of the AIDS epidemic in its early, shadowed days. Protagonist June is caught up between taking care of her late uncle's partner, himself dying, and keeping peace with her family, whose rabid disapproval of their... relationship belies their fear and confusion about the disease. It's easier to blame one person for being the source of infection than to try to grasp the political magnitude of the epidemic's vicious spread and pernicious misinformation; as June uncovers these nuances, she finds herself further and further distanced from her parents, whom she once believed infallible, and from the childhood innocence we all enjoyed once upon a time.
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9. Moshe Kasher, Kasher in the Rye
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Crammed into comedian Moshe Kasher's semi-preciously titled memoir are at least four separate, well-wrought memoirs: of being the hearing child of two deaf parents; of the parenting paradigm shift between his mother's secular liberalism and his father's deepening involvement in an orthodox Jewish sect; of growing up white in the predominantly black, relentlessly poor city of Oakland, proving ground for some of the '80s' most brutal, tell-it-like-it-is hip-hop; and of becoming an... addict at age 13, hitting rock bottom before his senior year of high school. Somehow Kasher manages to tell all of these stories well, with a hard self-awareness that leaves no room for the self-pity that could (rightfully) permeate the exposure of such painful experiences. Shot through with Kasher's dry wit and featuring some truly laugh-out-loud scenes, Kasher in the Rye is the disabled/religious/racial addiction memoir you didn't know the world needed.
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8. Cheryl Strayed, Wild
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At 26 years old, Cheryl Strayed was lost: A recent divorcee (and recent/former heroin user), she couldn't find her way out of a years-long funk after losing her mom to cancer. So she decided to do what very few 26-year-olds would think to do: got rid of all her things and with little hiking experience set off on a solo, 1,100-mile trek through the Pacific Crest Trail in California and Oregon. In... Wild, Strayed beautifully tells the story of her adventure with Monster, her over-stuffed backpack, and the people she meets on the trail — most importantly, herself.
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7. Lauren Groff, Arcadia
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All utopias fail (seen one around recently?), but the undoing of the titular hippie commune in Lauren Groff’s fantastic second novel is exceptionally spectacular and heartbreaking. Of course, there are cracks in Arcadia from the beginning: the endless influx of Frisbee-tossing d-bags, the shady weed deals, the labor disputes, the charismatic guru whose teachings on equality are undermined by his own weaknesses. It’s a hot mess.
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Still, for little Bit Stone, the first... kid born on this secluded stretch of upstate New York farmland, the place is a verdant wonderland stocked with fresh produce, fresh air, an extended family of oddball characters, and sexual awakenings at every swimming hole. It’s also the only home he knows, so when the real world finally drops by to tear Arcadia apart, it’s devastating — for Bit, for his wayward crush Helle, for all the dirty ol’ bohemians and new age types who’d worked so hard to build the place, for the readers who’d half-seriously started daydreaming about life off the grid.
Groff, who turned heads with 2008′s wonderfully cockeyed family drama The Monsters of Templeton, has built something unassailably beautiful in Arcadia. Her sentences are lush, vivid, sensual things that twist and sprout in surprising but natural directions. Like Bit, the story goes where it goes, leaping forward in years and leaving familiar places for scarier frontiers. And when the world at large seems ready to collapse the way Arcadia did, it’s tragic and truthful. Lots of dystopias succeed, after all.
6. Christopher Hitchens, Mortality
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Originally published as a series of extended essays in Vanity Fair, the seven chapters that make up the meat of Mortality are vintage Christopher Hitchens: robustly philosophical, witty, blunt. The astonishing part is that their subject is Hitchens' own impending death. Begun shortly after his diagnosis with esophageal cancer and ending with a chapter of fragments left unfinished on his deathbed 18 months later, Mortality is mostly memoir, a clear-eyed self-assessment threaded... through with the stubborn refusal to resort to exceptionalism or fatalism. While dying with dignity has long been upheld as the ideal way to go, Mortality shows there's an even more desirable end: death with honesty.
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5. Jami Attenberg, The Middlesteins
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In the depths of the obesity crisis, beset on all sides as we are by first ladies urging healthy habits and celebrity chefs revealing the hidden costs of fast food, it takes serious bravery to write about eating as lovingly as Jami Attenberg does in The Middlesteins. At the center of this family drama/black comedy is Edie Middlestein, whose relationship with food has been bringing her unequivocal joy from the liverwurst of... her childhood to the suburban Chinese food of her present. Diabetic, under strict orders to change her habits or die, Edie continues to eat in a noble, grandiose way. With her waffling, doubting husband gone and her grown children dealing with their own unhappinesses, Edie is free to draw a future for herself we're taught to believe is pitiable – until you see how happy it makes her. An entertaining portrait of suburban Jewish life and an eater's rhapsody, The Middlesteins' Edie may just be the most heroic character of the year.
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4. Anthony Shadid, House of Stone
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It’s a little strange, hearing author Anthony Shadid graphically describe the toll a missile exacted on a Lebanese village in House of Stone; strange because one is immediately reminded that Shadid himself died suddenly and much too soon in the Middle East, though he couldn’t have known it as he wrote of victims choking on sand and dismembered corpses. Yet if death continually haunts House of Stone (as a veteran war correspondent,... Shadid saw his share of it), the book relentlessly pursues the life that goes on in death’s stead and gives it meaning.
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House of Stone‘s narrative concerns the reporter’s efforts to rebuild his great-grandfather’s house in Marjayoun, Lebanon, which was destroyed by an Israeli rocket in 2006. What comes of this effort is part national saga, part family history, and part tale of a stranger in a strange land. Shadid finds no shortage of amazement at the time and money he puts into a house that the Lebanese think should simply be destroyed. Suppliers cheat him, necessary parts prove difficult to find. He must clean human refuse out of the house’s water tanks. Interwoven with Shadid’s trials as he attempts to rebuild the house is an account of the histories of his family and their land, and it is here that House of Stone shines most brightly. It is almost as though Shadid, aware of how much of the story is not told by journalists like himself (“Television and the craft I practice show us the drama, not the impact,” he writes), now makes his best effort to fill in those spots. The result is a book that leverages Shadid’s keen reporter’s eye, complementing it with the emotion and in-depth engagement wrung from a family story. It is a tale of history with a heart, grounded in those familial bonds that we all have in common.
3. Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise
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There's no question about it: Nate Silver is this year's big winner. With the possibility of a sophomore slump gleefully held over his second presidential election at the helm of his blog, FiveThirtyEight, by pundits from both sides of the spectrum, Silver had a lot riding on his math. Thankfully, as he elaborates in his book, The Signal and the Noise, that math is basically foolproof. While the book is... not the victory lap he so richly deserves, it's just like Silver to give us something better, a measured call for continued logic in all arenas of speculation, from weather to finance to, yes, politics. As public debate becomes less about fact than about manufacturing drama, this call for open-eyed analysis may be our last hope for sanity.
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2. Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her
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Some books, like some songs and movies, can be so achingly sad they’re pleasurable, and that’s the perfect balance Junot Diaz strikes with This Is How You Lose Her. The melancholy and pain of the displacement, romantic breakups and losses of loved ones in Diaz’s collection of loosely connected short love stories is balanced out perfectly by the writing’s snappy dialogue, dark wit and frank sexuality.
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Diaz fans will recognize Yunior, the subject... of several of the stories, from Diaz’s first collection, Drown, as well as from parts of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Diaz reads his own work in the audiobook, lending an even more distinctive tone to some already memorable narrative voices. Latin idioms are sprinkled throughout the stories with only context in the way of explanation, making the listener feel as though he or she is eavesdropping on a hyper-intelligent, vulgar person telling a really good story – to interrupt for clarification would throw things off entirely.
This Is How You Lose Her will make listeners appreciate the simple joys of friends, lovers, work and the home, as well as the poetry that can be found when any of those can fall into discord.
1. Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
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We will confess to reading the print version of Gillian Flynn’s third novel, Gone Girl, before listening to the audio version, tearing through it hungrily one lost weekend, feeling resentful of all interruptions, staying up later than usual to read just one more chapter. It is a book of twists and turns — page after page keeps the reader enthralled — but at the end of the book, when all is revealed... in this tale of a marriage gone awry with the wife gone missing, there’s a sensation of finally knowing everything at last. All the mysteries were revealed — why would one need to listen to the audiobook?
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And yet Gone Girl — a New York Times bestseller that has been optioned for film by Reese Witherspoon’s production company — is so engaging and funny, and the narrators Julia Whelan and Kirby Heyborne do such a knock-out job with the quick-witted prose, that it was simple to get sucked right back into the story all over again. Time flies with this audiobook, just as it did with the novel. Start listening, and suddenly it will be two days later.
As for the plot, well, this is one of those books the less said, the better, so as to not reveal too much to the reader. But if we must: It is about Nick and Amy Dunne, two writers, late of New York, who move to North Carthage, Missouri, when the money runs out. Nick says of himself, “I have a face you want to punch.” Amy used to make up quizzes for women’s magazines, and is the child of two famous children’s book authors who made a fortune off writing about her. Gone Girl alternates between their perspectives. And whether you love them or hate them (and you will likely feel all kinds of emotions with this book), you will not stop listening until you get to the very end.
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