It’s only May, but I have already read enough stellar books to compile my annual Half List. When it comes to naming the best books of the year, I tend to have a short memory. A list drawn together at the end of the year would inevitably favor recent reads. In the interest of fairness, I have begun splitting the job in two.
Here are the five best books I have read so far this year.
5.
Telling stories nonlinearly is nothing new. Charles Baxter’s First Light is told backwards, The Time Traveler’s Wife jumps around over the duration of a relationship, and The Wife Between Us uses a time jump to pull off a surprise.
Every year on her birthday, Oona wakes up to a different stage of her life with no memory of what has come before. (Or sometimes what happens after. She can be twenty one year, but fifty the next.) The reader is as confused as she is. What happened to her boyfriend? Is her mother still alive? Where is her assistant this round?
What impressed me about this book is the execution. By only getting snippets of the heroine, we slowly put together her life. It is a clever puzzle, and a poignant one.
4.
Riley and Jen grow up together in a working class Philadelphia neighborhood. Jen’s mother is neglectful and Jen leans on Riley for support. Years later, her friend pays for Jen and her husband, Kevin, to achieve their dream of having a child through IVF.
When Kevin, a cop, shoots an unarmed Black teenager, Riley is in an awkward position. A reporter for a local TV station, she finds it difficult to support Jen and her husband as the story gains national attention.
The twist here is that the book is written by two women, one Black and one white. By embodying two sides of a mixed-race friendship, we see different lenses on the current debate over racism and policing.
I wasn’t crazy about the ending, which turns one character into a martyr, but I was so engrossed up to that point that this remains one of my favorite reads of the year.
3.
Combine the tact of Sheldon Cooper, the cluelessness of Adrian Mole, and the romantic delusions of Evie Decker and you get pretty close to Eleanor Oliphant, the earnest heroine of this page-turner. An abused child with a dreary office job in Glasgow, Eleanor endures office bullying and weekly phone calls with her incarcerated mother while dreaming of romance with a local musician she has never met.
I was easily drawn into the engaging narrative voice and seemingly insurmountable challenges of the heroine. This is a fun, slightly dark story that reminded me at times of Mike Leigh’s early films. There is an unnecessary twist at the end, but even an occasional misstep doesn’t keep this from being of the year’s best reads.
2.
My first ever horror read, this well-crafted novel is made up of different pieces that don’t seem to fit until they do, walloping the reader with a chilling bit of social commentary that would make Hitchcock proud.
Eleven years before, a young girl went missing in a Washington town. In the present, a loner lives with his cat on Needless Street, visiting a therapist for meds and hosting occasional visits from his teenage daughter. The sister of the victim moves into a vacant house next door, bent on solving the case.
This is a book I couldn’t put down, except at night when I was too afraid to read it. My first book of the year, it has stuck with me even months later.
1.
It’s hard to believe I will find a better book this year, but I am up to the challenge. I hadn’t read Erdrich in over a decade and had forgotten what a master stylist she is. Her writing is pure poetry, worth the cost of admission alone. But it’s her characterization that blew me away reading this.
Tookie is an Indigenous woman who doesn’t even know her legal name. Crushing on an acquaintance, she is compelled to commit a bizarre crime that lands her in prison for sixty years. Paroled after a good lawyer finds a loophole, she takes a job at Birchbark Books in Minneapolis. When COVID hits, she is haunted by a ghost of a former client.
This is a book about Indigenous people, bookstores, the criminal justice system, and chosen communities. More than anything, it’s about how books can save a person’s life. One of the best books I have ever read.
Books Smitten 