Best of 2014: The Books Edition

I am folding two things together: My Cephalopod Coffeehouse review with my Best Books of 2014 overview. Goodreads has made it so easy for me to locate my best reads of the year: I simply sort books by publication date to filter my 2014 reads from all the rest, then look for my 5-star books within that 2014 subset. (A longer list would include my favorite books all around that I've read in the past year, but I'm trying to be a bit more concise.) Here are those books, in order of publication date (most to least recent).

The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell: Reading this novel was like watching a good season of Doctor Who, with magical timey-wimey vampire things instead of Daleks. We follow the life of Holly Sykes, whom we meet as a lovelorn teenager in 1980s England, and we follow into a post-apocalyptic near-future. Mitchell's previous novel, Cloud Atlas, had lots of narrators with their own distinctive voice, and he does that again here, though The Bone Clocks is more cohesive than Cloud Atlas. While there is some darkness and some didactic bits about how foolish humans are, overall Mitchell seems like he is having a fantastic time here, and I couldn't help but have fun along with him. Named a Best Book of 2014 by The Telegraph, NPR, The Guardian, the New York Times, Goodreads, Buzzfeed, and the editors of Amazon. In fact, every single "best of" list I Googled included this book.

The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters: Another reliable English novelist with another reliably great book—and my best read of December. The Paying Guests is set a century ago in post World-War-One England, which was a very rough period in English history. So many men were fed into the maw of that horrible conflict that women ended up practically alone for a generation, and this novel is partly about that: Protagonist Frances Wray and her widowed mum are ex-aristocrats trying to scrape out a living and keep their home afloat. They have to take in lodgers to make ends meet, and that's where things get interesting. The couple that moves into their home introduces romance and chaos to the staid Wrays, and things get both sexy and deadly pretty quick. Named a Best Book of 2014 by most of the above outlets as well.

The Bees, by Laline Paull: When I say this is a story told from the point of view of a bee, I mean that literally. A bee. With six legs and antennae. Her name is Flora 717, and she's a lowly sanitation worker in a hive that's run like North Korea ... which probably pretty accurate. Paull seems like she knows her bees, but she also manages to anthropomorphize Flora 717 believably enough to get readers (at least, this reader) to empathize with her. Flora has to cope with outside threats (weather, wasps, pesticides) and inside threats (the priestess caste of bees), and is individualistic enough to change her own circumstances.

Dreams of Gods and Monsters, by Laini Taylor: The conclusion of Taylor's stunning YA trilogy. I do not understand why Taylor is not way more famous than she is. I like the Hunger Games and all, and Divergent and the Maze Runner were OK, but this is the real business. I guess I shouldn't exactly compare it to those others, as Taylor's trilogy is not dystopian. It's fantasy. But it feels very similar, because it's about a modern teenager coping with giant forces beyond her reckoning. Karou is the teen, and when we meet her she's just a blue-haired kid in Prague who happens to be an apprentice to a couple of actual monsters. Chimaera, to be exact. Then she falls in love with a really pissed-off angel bent on annihilating everything she holds dear. I absolutely inhaled all three of these books. I would strongly recommend them to any teenager (or adult) who likes Twilight, because there are some similarities but Taylor is such a superior writer. I mean, it wouldn't take much, but she is amazing. Puts everyone else to shame. And her female characters aren't klutzy hapless wimps (or banal killermachines with boobs).

Redeployment, by Phil Klay: A short-story collection written by an actual Marine who served in actual Iraq. Klay (rhymes with "fly") is also an incredible writer who brings the horrible reality of war to gritty life. You know, I didn't have to live this war, but I'm part of the democracy that chose to send these men and women into the fray, so I kinda feel I owe it to them to really face what we've put them through. It's been a miserable decade of war. The least we can do is listen to the soldiers who walked through the mud and blood. This is fiction, but it doesn't feel like it. It feels like a confession, and our job is to hear it out. Named a Best of 2014 book by NPR, The Guardian, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Kirkus Reviews, Goodreads, Buzzfeed, the President of the United States, and the editors of Amazon. Also, winner of the 2014 National Book Award for fiction.

Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill: This slight book takes what appear to be scraps of insight the narrator/author scrawled on receipts or backs of envelopes and through some sort of narrative alchemy turns them into a great novel. The narrator is unnamed, but she mirrors Offill's life closely. You have to assume this is highly autobiographical, and that's part of the charm. A story you think is real is processed differently, with more adrenaline, than a story you know is fiction. There's the thrill of voyeurism here, watching someone's life unravel spectacularly. With so many books circling around extraordinary events (super-flus, terrorist attacks, zombie uprisings), it's refreshing to see a gripping story that's just about ordinary life, with all its sadness and joy and terror.

The Other Language, by Francesca Marciano: Of all the books I read this year, this is the one I want to go back and read again. Some books, like Gone Girl, are incredibly-written and demand five stars for craft, but are not exactly a pleasure to read. This book was delicious. All my metaphors about reading it involve food; there is something so sensuous about the prose it can't be described any other way. It's luscious. It's tasty. It's also not a novel, but a short-story collection, which (if I'm sticking with the culinary metaphor) turns it into something like a feast of tapas. Each story is set in an exotic locale (Venice, India, Kenya) and features mostly female protagonists dealing with some sort of crisis. The crises move the story forward but each story is as much about place as it is about people. Take this collection with you on your next beach vacation—or in place of it.

We Were Liars, by E. Lockhart: Honorable mention goes to this YA novel, which only got 4 stars from me for various little complaints—mostly stemming from the fact that I'm not the target audience—but which I have been recommending to every teen I know. I checked it out from the library for myself, but I ended up buying it for my kids for Christmas and I will harass them until they read it. I'd maybe describe it as a mix of King Lear (the mad patriarch and his wretched daughters), Wuthering Heights (star-crossed lovers from disparate social spheres), and the Great Gatsby (the decadence and dissolution of the terribly rich). It is also an intense mystery with a shocker of an ending. And you can finish it in a day.

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: July 25

I finished no books in June, due to my long, painful commitment to finishing Charles Dickens' Bleak House. But then a couple books I'd been waiting for arrived at the library for me, so I put BH aside and jumped happily into those. After that, something got unclogged in me and I began reading everything in sight—I even finished Bleak House. All told, I got through seven novels in the first three weeks of July. Don't be too impressed with me, though, because of number of them were novellas. I do love me a short-short book.

From least to most liked, here's a rundown. (Skip to the end if you just want the Coffeehouse minimum of "best book read.")

7. Unwind by Neal Shusterman. A YA dystopian thriller aimed mostly at teen boys. It's kind of nice to see a YA dystopian with a boy protagonist, and my teenage son certainly enjoyed this book. (He's also perfectly willing to read books with girl protagonists.) I like to read what my kids read, especially if they ask me to and if the book seems provocative in some way. "Unwind" is meant to be provocative, but although I did fly through the pages I never really felt that provoked. Big issues are dangled in front of the reader but not fully explored. Perhaps the rest of the series does more exploration. (There is one scene that is quite disturbing, though not at all graphic, and it is the strongest scene in the book. But ... be forewarned. It's creepy as hell.)

6. Bleak House by Charles Dickens. I feel strange putting a Dickens book this low on the list and this close to a YA thriller, but there you have it. I have read and loved other Dickens novels, but this one was a slow, difficult read for me. It picks up at the end, but at nearly a thousand pages long, there's just too much tedious filler. You can tell he wrote this in installments. Beautiful imagery, though. I would still recommend this to any student of writing, but I'd read tiny chunks of it over a very long period of time. Savor the little word paintings, don't worry about the story. (SparkNotes is extremely helpful for keeping the convoluted plotline and dozens of incidental characters straight.)

5. We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. Another YA thriller, but this one is set in modern-day reality. Well, reality-ish. The narrator of this slim novel is highly unreliable, as you might expect from the title. You can't be entirely sure if the story you're being told is what really happened—and you're not sure the narrator knows, either. Lockhart combines elements of King Lear, Wuthering Heights, fairy tales, and M. Night Shyamalan to create something that feels both epic and creepy. Three wealthy teenage cousins and their outsider friend decamp to a posh island for summer vacations, along with their mothers (who are sisters) and their grandfather, the controlling patriarch. Yep, that's the King Lear part. Tension is simmering among the adults and one summer things come to a terrible climax. But the exact nature of the disaster is withheld from both the narrator and the reader till the end, turning this into a mystery/thriller of sorts. I read this before my kids, but have recommended it to them.

4. Prayers for the Stolen by Jennifer Clement. In the fictional town of Guerrero, Mexico, all the children born are either boys or girls masquerading as boys. If word gets out that a girl is born, the drug lords will whisk her off as soon as she hits adolescence. The mothers not only raise their daughters as sons (cutting off their hair, blackening their teeth, uglifying them in any way they can), they dig holes in their yards and stuff the girls into the ground as soon as they hear any car approaching. To be a girl in Mexico is to be an inevitable victim of human trafficking; the lesson of this novel is that even your mother can't save you. Not the most uplifting of stories, but Clement removes us from some of the suffering by taking a poetic, distant tone. It's also a very short novel, which maybe it shouldn't have been. It's similar to The Kite Runner and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena in that it explores the effect of war on civilians who just want to be left alone ... except both of those novels really get into the inner world of the suffering protagonists and the outer world that created the chaos. Clement sort of skims over it; it's an impressionist painting. A pastel Monet slur of a minefield. (Note: although this novel does feature a teenage girl, it's not YA. It could be read by teenagers, but it's not written for them.)

3. Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill. Even shorter than Clement's book, this tiny little gem is an impressionist painting of a marriage. And you know, whenever you hear, "it's about a marriage," that it's not going to be all sugar and rainbows. The poetic-impressionist thing works better here than it does in Clement's book, probably because the subject is so much more minute. A marriage is a thing you can peer into with a microscope; a country spiraling into war and chaos, less so. This novella is absolutely lovely and heartbreaking. If you are like me, you will find yourself underlining every passage. I recommend listening to Slate Magazine's audiobook club discussion of the book, hyperlinked above.

2. The Other Language by Francesca Marciano. A short-story collection featuring mostly Italian protagonists (Marciano lives in Rome) who are strangers in various strange lands. Although each story is about someone dealing with some sort of trouble—stories don't exist without conflict—I felt as if I was on an exciting globe-trotting vacation the entire time I read it. The book was so deliciously written I wanted to eat it when I was done. I rarely read things again but I was so transported by these sumptuous stories I will almost certainly be revisiting them.

1. Redeployment by Phil Klay. Another short-story collection, this one dedicated to men, mostly soldiers, who've been chewed up and spit out by our horrific decade of war. Klay himself is a veteran, a former Marine who served in Iraq. I thought he captured the speech and mindset of the soldier extremely well; it's not always flattering and it's definitely not for the faint of heart. But it's genuine, or as genuine as this civilian can imagine it to be. (Reviewers who served in the military agree that it's very accurate.) This book was published only a few months ago and has been received well ... I expect to see it on most Best of 2014 lists, and no doubt it's going to to earn a number of literary awards. Not only is the writing excellent, but it's something every American can benefit from reading ... no matter how you feel about the wars we've been fighting.

Please visit the other Coffeehouse reviews, starting with our tentacly host here!