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.

What's Making Me Happy: December 5

We had such a nice Thanksgiving, with two of my cousins and their spouses joining my parents and in-laws, my brother and his family, and my own four-family. My cousin and his wife announced they will be adding to the family ("We're hoping it's a pony," said my cousin-in-law, patting her round tummy), which was excellent and welcome news. We all caught up, chilled out, ate dinosaur—aka "turkey"—and generally enjoyed ourselves.

Yes: living where we do, "enjoying ourselves" involves hiking as much or more than football, but lookie! So pretty. It's worth it.

As for the recommendation part of WMMH, I have a few things. If you have not already discovered the Serial podcast, that's my first pushy thing. You gotta. It's so good. A spinoff of the beloved This American Life podcast, Serial follows (so far) the story of Adnan Syed, imprisoned in 2000 for the murder of Hae Min Lee, his ex-girlfriend. Lee and Syed were both in high school when the murder occurred. It's a true story, a fascinating look under the rug of the American legal system, and a gripping whodunit. Following that hyperlink should get you started, but if you have iTunes you can also find it there. I also recommend the Beyond Pod podcast player for those with smartphones.

Once you are thoroughly hooked by Serial, you can go meta and find the podcasts-about-the-podcast. Our favorite so far is Slate's Spoiler Special. Slate does "spoiler specials" on all sorts of things, mostly movies, but since Serial has gone viral they've dedicated a specific discussion to each Serial episode. They analyze and gripe and speculate and basically stand in for you and all your besties having an awesome chat-debate over coffee or wine.

We have also fallen in love with Transparent, a fantastic show on Amazon Prime about a 70-year-old parent who has come out as transgender. Jeffrey Tambor plays Maura, who was assigned a male gender at birth and has just gathered up the courage to embody her female identity at this late stage in life. Her three adult children react variably to her announcement, and season one (the only season so far) deals primarily with this first stage: come out, cope as best you can with repercussions. It's done with utter compassion. It's funny but Maura is never the object of a joke. It's too explicit to watch with young kids, but if you can stand the awkwardness of watching sex scenes with your family, I highly recommend watching it with your teenagers (or, suggest they watch it on their own and discuss it with you later). It's brought up loads of great discussions in our family.

"...my whole life, I've been dressing up like a man.... This is me."

We're also entranced with Black Mirror, a British sci-fi show which just became available on Netflix. It's like the Twilight Zone, in that each episode is a self-contained story; there is no through-line. The continuity comes from theme, which might best be described as "techno-angst." This show is also not for the faint of heart or for the li'l kiddies. If you want something for the whole fam to watch comfortably, we adore Brooklyn 99. It's a very funny, very nice cop comedy.

Bookwise, I am so excited that Best of 2014 lists are coming out now. I love "best of" lists; it's so wonderful to browse through total excellence and pick the most excellent of all lovely things. I feel fairly certain that for 2014 novels, The Bone Clocks and The Paying Guests will make my own best-of list, and both books are on many, many other lists as well. They are both British, and both incredibly-written literary page-turners, but that's about all they have in common.

Whew! That's a lot of recommendations. I haven't even got to my best-of-music list yet ... I'll save that for next week. In the meantime—happy weekend, everyone!

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: The Bone Clocks

It's the end of the month, and time for our roundup of the best books of the past few weeks. To see the other Cephalopod reviews, click here.

I read two really excellent books this month, both of which I gave five stars to on Goodreads: David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks, and Laline Paul's The Bees. Readers may know Mitchell from Cloud Atlas, another great book which has been turned into an apparently terrible movie. (I haven't seen it.) Mitchell is hard to categorize. His writing is literary and often solidly realistic, but he always seems to wander off into the strange and speculative. In his writing I see shades of Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, and Stephen King. But those just give you hints: he has his own totally unique style. He must be synesthetic because his metaphors and verbs sparkle with a mixture of senses that are rarely or never combined. You can practically chew on his language: "icicles drip drops of bright in steep-sloped streets from storybooks whose passersby have mountain souls" is a not-untypical example. (From The Bone Clocks.) But if that sounds distractingly ornate, don't worry: he is a nimble stylist and enjoys playing with every kind of mood and form. He's funny, he's dark, he's just-the-facts, he's show-offy, he's dry, he's wet. In Cloud Atlas he toys with channeling completely different genres in each section. In The Bone Clocks he sticks pretty much to one tone—though, echoing Cloud Atlas, he does have a number of narrators who each bring a slightly different style to the prose. I'm in love with his writing enough now that I'm simply going to commit myself to reading his entire body of work. (Not a difficult job: he only has a half-dozen novels or so.) Right now I'm reading Black Swan Green, an earlier work. It's got one narrator, a teenage boy, and is stylistically very unified. So far.

OK, OK. I hear you. "Stop whittering on about the style, woman! Tell us the plot!" Well. In The Bone Clocks there's this girl, Holly Sykes. And she's a normal English teenage girl, except she's telepathic, and some psychic vampires discover her and she gets caught up in a temporal war between good immortals and bad immortals. I feel like it's rude to say I was reminded quite a bit of the HBO show True Blood, but I was ... at least in the "battle of immortals + psychic mortal" aspect.

"I'm just a waitress!"

Hello? I lost you, didn't I? You were with me until I started talking about telepathy and immortals. Well, trust me on this: Mitchell is far more comparable to Dickens or Du Maurier than he is to Stephenie Meyer. He is a lovely, accomplished writer, and he is fully aware of the eye-rolling genre writers deal with. "A book can't be half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half-pregnant!" a literary agent splutters at a character in the novel who is himself a writer of half-fantasy novels. Yeah. This is just one of the many winky metafictional twists in this novel. David Mitchell hears your scorn of fantasy, and he is not going to let you get away with it.

No judgy-judgy!

OK. Moving swiftly onward. The Bees is another experimental novel that totally hit its mark, at least for me. We follow the adventures of Flora 717, a worker-bee who is destined to help her hive weather the kind of crises that real bees are coping with: early frosts, cell-phone towers, wasps, spiders, mice, and pesticides. Flora is one of the most engaging protagonists (human or non) I've come across, and I highly recommend this unusual book. I think it's especially appropriate on a high-school reading list. I mean this in the best possible way: it's entertaining, accessible, smart, and has a not-overbearing ecological message.

Since the last Coffeehouse I have also read, for the record, Sarah Bird's The Yokota Officer's Club, a lightly fictionalized memoir of her stint as a military brat on an Air Force base in Japan; Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West, about a disillusioned and dissolute young journalist during the Great Depression; and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, about a pizza deliverer who quickly morphs into sword-wielding computer-hacking badass. But actually it's about viruses. But actually it's about memes and language. But actually it's about a libertarian dream-nightmare of a corporate-owned America ... oh hell, that one you just have to read for yourself to sort out. All of these were fascinating books in their own right.

Happy reading, everyone! Off to see what everyone else read/loved this past month.