A Year of Good Reads:
Nothing beats sitting by the fire on a winter’s afternoon with a riveting read or sharing a tale of adventure with your children or, even better, your grandchildren.
Nothing beats sitting by the fire on a winter’s afternoon with a riveting read or sharing a tale of adventure with your children or, even better, your grandchildren.
Several visits to Arcade Books resulted in a trunkful of books for family, and friends, and a few just for ourselves.
For the youngest of readers, we fell under the spell of “Little Elliot, Big City” by Mike Curato, in which a young elephant, who leads a quiet life, takes Manhattan. For delightful learning, Oliver Jeffers brings the alphabet to life in “Once Upon an Alphabet: Short Stories for All the Letters”.
In the young adult category, there is “I’ll Give You the Sun”, a coming-of-age novel by Jandy Nelson. Laura Hillenbrand has adapted her bestselling “Unbroken: An Olympian’s Journey from Airman to Castaway to Captive” for teens.
While this is the season of Yule logs, gingerbread houses, and Barefoot Contessa heart-stopping delectations (and yes Ina Garten has a new cookbook out, “Make It Ahead”), “Plenty More: Vibrant Vegetable Cooking from London’s Ottolenghi” is the collection we bought for several on our list, because it’s filled with exciting and tempting grains, legumes, and even desserts.
Peace is what the world hopes for, but books on war proliferate. In “Redeployment”, this year’s National Book Award for Fiction, Phil Klay, a former Marine, takes readers behind the scenes in Iraq and Afghanistan. His stories are searing.
If you’re looking for an excellent one-volume history of Napoleon, look no further than the immensely readable biography by Andrew Roberts. He sheds new light on the emperor who set out not just to conquer the world, but to redesign the world in his image.
Another tale of blind ambition — this one fictional — is Doug Brunt’s “The Means.” This page-turner makes for great dinner table conversation about the kind of people who run for political office and their handlers. Brunt, who divides his time between Rye and Manhattan, writes with an assurance well beyond his years. A former financier, Brunt has met with wild success in his new career as a novelist.
The best thriller of the year was “I Am Pilgrim” by Terry Hayes. A former screenwriter and journalist, Hayes knows how to plot a gripping story and his portrait of terrorism is both chilling and prescient.
In honor of British mystery great P.D. James, who died this year, catch up on any of hers that you haven’t read. All of them are eminently re-readable, other than, sadly, her last, “Death Comes to Pemberley”.
For many years, author James Magnuson has been the Director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. In his latest work of fiction, “Famous Writers I Have Known,” Magnuson has a field day with some of the writers he has known. The novel is deliciously satirical. Both the Wall Street Journal and NPR lauded it as one of the best books of the year.
— Robin Jovanovich
