In 2021, I decided to start recording the best novels I read in a year–anything I award four (or higher) stars. This year and going forward, I’ll split them up into half-years (or maybe quarters if I keep reading so many good books!).
Fantasy
I’ve found a new favorite! I loved just about everything about V. E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue…the prose, the main characters (except for one…more on that in a moment), the plot, the pacing, and even the ending! I loved how sad it could make me feel at the thought of everyone I’d ever known and loved being gone for 50, 100, 300 years, and being the only one to remember them. And I loved Addie’s spirit and found her determination inspiring. I found this so difficult to put down during the day while I had to be at work.
What I especially enjoyed about this was the relationship between Addie and Luc. Yes, I’ll admit, I was rooting for a slow burn love story between the two of them. I was conflicted on how I felt about this by the end, because I picked up on more and more red flags from him as the book went along. (I know, I know, besides the immediately obvious factor of him being a god of the darkness who cursed her to the situation she is in. Besides that, there were other things later that made me more uncomfortable with the idea of a relationship between the two of them. Still, part of me yearned.) All that said, I couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome than what did happen. I really enjoyed everything about the ending.
Regarding Henry (and yes, that is a Harrison Ford reference): I just did not like this guy. He makes this more of a four and a half stars than a complete five for me. Henry was so boring and, frankly, pathetic. I mean, seriously, what a stupid, whiny man-child. At least by the end, I understood the reasons for some of this behavior. But it doesn’t make up for the fact that I had to put up with it until then. I found him hard to accept as a love interest for Addie, and I remain unconvinced that she ever really did love him. (And this, of course, only left me rooting more for the god of darkness, even with that becoming a worse and worse idea all the time.)
This one is going to stick with me for a long, long while.
Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi was a short book and quick read. But I decided to mull it over a bit before writing a review. Not because of the star rating–this was easily a full five stars–but because I wanted to sit with my emotions about it before trying to describe it to someone. This story was visceral.
Before beginning, I already knew that Susanna Clarke was one of my favorite authors. Her ingeniously-written and magical faerie tales set in an alternate Regency England were perfectly prepared to my taste. And her worlds of Faerie have haunted me since I first saw the show of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (which I watched before reading the book). They reminded me of recurring dreams I have had over the years in a world that, in part, is reminiscent of Narnia’s Charn–another favorite for the same reason. So when I found out that she had written a new book that was set in another world very similar to Charn, I had to read it right away.
With a picture of a faun on the cover, an epigraph by Uncle Andrew of The Magician’s Nephew inside, and a reference to the faun “standing in a snowy forest and speaking to a female child”, I was appreciative right off the bat of the recognition given to C.S. Lewis for inspiration. And Piranesi’s world itself gave me nearly the exact feelings of eeriness and awe that I have harbored all these years for both Charn and the Wood Between the Worlds. (It was because of these feelings that The Magician’s Nephew has always been my favorite Narnian chronicle.)
In the beginning, before I knew exactly what was going on, the book felt a bit like if The Truman Show took place in Charn, where Truman is all alone apart from occasional visits from one other sinister character. At least, that’s the sort of experiment I thought was taking place. To avoid spoilers, I won’t speak to how right or wrong I was about that. As it went on, it began to also resemble, in some ways, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, in some ways Castaway, and in others, a more sci-fantasy version of a Crichton novel. (Timeline was the one I kept thinking of.) And later I discovered that one of the characters literally is the descendant (apparently, based on the name) of Uncle Andrew, placing this somewhere in the realm of the good kind of fan-fiction.
I couldn’t help but Google the book while I was reading it. Not for spoilers, of course, but for insight from Clarke. And I found a quote where she said, “I always liked Charn better than Lewis liked Charn”. I related to that a lot. As mentioned above, Charn has long haunted me. So when I came to the following quote, I actually thought the character of the Other was meant to be Lewis, in Clarke’s mind:
“‘But there isn’t anything powerful. There isn’t even anything alive. Just endless dreary rooms all the same, full of decaying figures covered with bird s***.’ He fell into an unhappy silence.
“I have known for many years that the Other does not revere the House in the same way I do, but it still shocks me when he talks like this. How can a man as intelligent as him say there is nothing alive in the House?”
As I made my way through this quick read, I kept finding myself longing to linger with Piranesi inside his world. I wanted to take in the sights and just slow down to enjoy the description. And yet I was compelled to press urgently onward for answers and explanations, because nothing, absolutely nothing, would make sense until I had them.
I’m adding this one to my shelf. I foresee a reread in its future.
Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish was a really delightful book. I can’t pretend to have been anything like a stranger to its plot, given that I love the movie and have watched it several times. So there wasn’t much that was surprising about it to me. And I have to say, perhaps because of my love for the film, there were things about it that I liked better than the book.
I thought it was interesting that in the movie, the town of Spectre seems to have been a combination of the book’s Spectre combined with the book’s town with no name. I really enjoyed that eerie, surreal part of the story in both the book and the movie. And the town with no name in the book was even creepier than the Spectre in the movie. A hellhound that eats bits of people every time they try to leave, until there’s nothing left? Unless it approves of your soul, of course. Also, the story of the woman who lives in Spectre’s swamp is spine-tingling! What was wrong with her? Was she a witch? It’s left to you to wonder.
There were definitely aspects of the movie plot and characters that I missed. But I did like that the son in the book is way more likeable. And the book ends on a very similar note to the movie, with a similarly heartwarming scene. It has some good jokes mixed in, too.
It’s short and sweet, and a fun read whether you already love the movie or have never seen it.
Mystery/Thriller
Stuart Turton’s The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle was a fun read, even if I had to work a bit to keep all the facts straight in my head as I went along. This creative book is like a combination of Agatha Christie, Groundhog Day, Black Mirror, and Westworld. So as you might imagine, there is a lot going on before you even get to the many characters and plot twists which the author so remarkably managed to coordinate. I was amazed at the skill it must have taken to put this together.
That said, I was very unsatisfied with the explanation for the whole setup. I was hoping for a much bigger payoff by way of details about how and why exactly it worked. I let a lot of those nagging thoughts go throughout the book because I expected later there would be answers. But then there weren’t. So that annoyed me.
This definitely kept me guessing. There were some mysteries I partially solved, but not all by any means.
I felt very fond of some characters, and despised others, but either way, I had strong feelings about almost everyone! I really disliked the footman, though. Not just as a character, but as part of the plot. He kind of felt like a MacGuffin for me a lot of the time.
Overall, though, this was so inventive and such a great read! It left me still wanting more. I could see the author potentially giving us another one someday (hopefully including more rules of the world!). I would pick it up immediately.
To start with, The Stranger is my second Harlan Coben book. I wasn’t a big fan of the first one I read (The Boy From the Woods). What brought me here is that I saw some of his Netflix shows (starting with this one, actually) and was captivated and knew I had to read his books someday. And then someone gave me these two.
So even though I’d already watched and loved The Stranger, I still read the book, knowing the approximate ending. (I’d forgotten some of the details along the way.) I remembered enough to know that I loved Richard Armitage’s Adam more than I loved the Adam in the book. (Not that I was wholly surprised by that–I love Richard Armitage. He’s what got me into Coben in the first place.)
The other issue with the characters was that there were so many of them with minor roles, I started getting them confused after a while and stopped trying very hard to keep track.
The book was similar to the show in that, despite knowing what was going to happen, I was still hooked as the characters figured it out. It was still a page-turner, even though I knew the ending.
It was different from the show in that I didn’t much care for Adam or anyone else. Johanna was cool. And Adam was okay; it wasn’t that he was unlikable. He just didn’t grip me, and he made choices that felt stupid to me some of the time. That always bothers me a lot.
Still and all, I quickly read this book to the end. One of my favorite reveals from the show, unfortunately, didn’t happen–the character wasn’t even there, I don’t think. So there were definite differences in plot. Anthony Stewart Head’s character also wasn’t there, as it’s mentioned early on that Adam’s father is no longer living.
I’ll be checking out other Coben books, and probably a lot of them.
I’m only recently getting into thrillers, which it turns out is a genre I really enjoy for a quick escapist journey, but is very hit-or-miss. Anna Pitoniak’s Necessary People was a hit. I’d never heard of the author, but the plot synopsis got my attention right away. Who can’t relate to the obnoxious story of the mean girl getting everything she wants and still wanting to ruin your life?
This kept me gripped from beginning to end. Not so much wondering who was going to possibly murder whom, but just wondering what awful thing was going to happen next, and how our “heroine” was going to overcome it–or whether she would.
What did annoy me about the story was how much of a doormat the main character, Violet, was. She just laid down and took whatever disrespect was dished out to her by Stella and Stella’s awful family, who all believed they were better than her. I wanted to gag every time she just went with it. At times, she struck me as unintelligent because of it, even though she was touted as being smarter than the average bear. It made me wonder whether some of Stella’s observations of Violet were truer than Violet wanted to believe. In that sense, the book was great because it left me wondering about those things hours after finishing it.
I loved that this book was full of colorful, distinct characters. Most of them were not likeable, but a few were. I’ll leave you to decide whether Violet fits into that group or not.
Dystopian
I was really unsure how to rate Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. I first read this book, as many do, for Honors English back in high school, and I loved it. It has stuck with me through the years in a dark, emotional sense. And of course I remembered the overall gist of it. Over time, though, most of the details and the writing style evaded me, and I found myself longing to read it again. I finally did so this past weekend. And I’ve got to say that it did not live up to my expectations quite the way I had hoped. Whereas in high school, this felt like the quick read that it is, this time around felt like a trudge through muddied waters as I waded past filler after filler after filler. The word I kept coming back to in my mind was abstract. The writing style struck me as very abstract, like reading Proust (and I have never been a friend of Proust’s). It took too many seemingly unrelated words to say everything. Having never read any of Bradbury’s other work before that I can recall, I don’t know if this is his normal writing style or if it was the nature of the piece. It frequently reminded me of when I read The Handmaid’s Tale (which I enjoyed considerably less than the television show, despite the plot being almost identical, because of this same tendency of muddying the writing). I wondered if Atwood had knowingly employed Bradbury’s purposely obnoxious technique of confusing every thought in the main character’s head with a lot of meaningless words just to show how confusing her dystopian future was, or if this was only a coincidence.
So I almost gave this only three stars because of my feelings about the writing style. Like with The Handmaid’s Tale, if that was the reason for it, then I can at least understand it. But it made the read less enjoyable. I don’t know why I felt so much differently in high school.
And although I picked up this book with an expectation of what the overall message would be, I can’t say that I wholly agreed with it. It felt as much like an argument against censorship as it did an argument against technology. And for no good reason that I could see. The characters who were addicted to technology were pitiful caricatures; Montag’s wife was about the most annoying, mindless character imaginable. I felt nothing for her apart from hate. Yet I wanted to sympathize. This woman filled every moment of her time with radio and some weird combination of television and video chat because she had no alternative to occupy what little of her mind there was. Considering the world they lived in, where people didn’t know what conversation was, and if they did, they were killed for it, how could I blame her for that? It really felt like Bradbury wanted me to. Instead I blamed her for her extreme selfishness and stupidity. It was as if Montag was married to a 13-year-old instead of a grown woman. And whereas I think in high school when I read this I saw these features as the reason for her addiction to technology, now I wonder if I’m supposed to believe she is the way she is because of her addiction to technology. Hence, technology equals evil. That’s probably too simplistic; maybe it’s not either/or, neither nature nor nurture 100%.
What saved this is that I did find the bleakness and the hopelessness that I wanted to find, that I remembered from high school. I craved the warm, fuzzy feeling I had back then when I put the book down, relieved to find myself back in a world that still wasn’t quite as bad as all that. It did deliver on that front, though not as forcefully, perhaps, due to all that trudging through the muddy waters of the abstract that I apparently overlooked at 15.
Humor
I just had the pleasure of reading John Kennedy Toole‘s classic A Confederacy of Dunces for the first time ever. I can’t believe it had never crossed my path before, but I knew absolutely nothing about it. As soon as I saw his name, I knew I had heard references to Ignatius J. Reilly before, but could not recall any of them to put the book in any kind of context. I had no idea what to expect–certainly not one of the funniest books in existence! The entire way through, I laughed at all the larger-than-life, zany characters and their (often self-inflicted) plights. It was unbelievable how much I detested Ignatius! But as disgusting as he was, he had me in stitches constantly.
So that we could share in the experience, I read this to my boyfriend (the one who recommended it to me, as he loves it). And it has lots of great dialogue that was so much fun to say aloud. We both kept chuckling, and he told me I do a great Ignatius. By midway through I could finally speak the dialects with some rapidity and an almost natural air, only rarely stumbling. We both delighted in the whole experience. The whole way through, I kept insisting that Ignatius secretly wanted to bleep “the Minkoff minx”; I just knew it (even if Ignatius didn’t). Was I right? Well….
Young Adult
Wow, what to say about Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep? First of all, I added it to my Book of the Month list because as a kid, I always fantasized about going away to boarding school. And occasionally, I still look back and wish I could have gone. This book is essentially a four-year summary of what it is like to do so.
The story is told in first-person by Lee, the main character. But Lee is looking back on the events years after they have occurred. This created the perfect melancholic mood for this story, which felt, though I devoured it in only a few days, as though I had really lived with these characters for four years. They became like family to me over the course of the book. And at the end, I felt like I had awoken from a dream of another life where I had gone to this school with these people.
I’ll be honest–I hated the main character. That’s the only thing that made me waver in my feelings about the story. I spent the entire book longing to switch places with Lee and take control over her life, because just about every single decision she made was a stupid one. Lee did not appreciate what she had. She squandered every opportunity she was given. She was so unfriendly and unpersonable and did not know how to smile. It was so frustrating. That’s not to say that she was not occasionally relatable–at times, she was. But most of the time I found her so unlikable and obnoxious in the extreme.
However, I was able to accept her unlikeability, because she is made to pay for her poor choices again and again. She never learns from them, sadly; they don’t change her for the better or even for the worse. But all the consequences from her poor choices and refused opportunities beat her over the head again and again, until it all culminates into really horrible things at the end.
But the fact that she’s telling us about the events from the future gives the whole book a calming air. We know she’s survived. And she must have grown in some way because some of her reminiscences sound fond and her perspective less ungrateful.
What really made me love this book, though, was (as mentioned before) that in a dreamy sense, I felt like I had lived through her story. I grew to love many of the side characters, despite all of their flaws. I wanted to be friends with them, too. And I still wish I could have gone to boarding school. I would have made more of myself with the opportunity than Lee did, that’s for sure.
For more book recommendations and my current reading list, check out 7 Reasons to Join Book of the Month Club. Also, see part two of my best novels of 2022 here.
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