Top Ten New-To-Me Authors I read in 2014

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week's list is easy because I read a number of authors for the first time who I really liked a lot. Links go to my posts about their books.

1. Andrew Smith is easily number on my list. I read three of his books this year and really liked them all.
2. Holly Black. I loved The Coldest Girl in Coldtown and I should really probably read something else of hers. Any suggestions?
3. Hugh Howey. I really don't know if I'll read more in the Silo series, because can they possibly be nearly as good as Wool?
4. Cammie McGovern. I love finding new great YA authors!
5. Jessie Burton. The Miniaturist was her debut, and I will be keeping an eye out for more from her.
6. Kate Manning. My Notorious Life featured one of my very favorite protagonists of the year.
7. Caitlin Moran is funny and clever and brilliant.
8. Karen Joy Fowler managed to pack a pretty big story into a rather little book, which is something I always appreciate.
9. Dan Chaon wrote some really great short stories and I've heard positive reviews of his other books also.
10. Nick Lake wrote one of the most amazing and unusual YA books I read this year.

What about you? Did you discover any great new authors this year?

Glory O'Brien's History of the Future

Glory O'Brien's History of the Future by A.S. King (2014)

When Glory was only 4 years old, her mother committed suicide by putting her head in an oven. Now Glory and her father microwave all their meals. Across the street is a commune run by a woman named Jasmine Blue Heffner, a friend of Glory's mother, and her daughter Ellie is Glory's best friend. She's actually Glory's only friend and Glory is honestly getting tired of her. Ellie is very self-centered and primarily uses Glory as transportation and as a purchaser of lice medication. Soon after the story opens Glory and Ellie drink a petrified bat, and it gives them the power to see everyone's past and future. Glory begins documenting the future she sees, hoping that it won't actually come true.

That is kind of a weird premise, right? A.S. King generally interjects some sort of weirdness into her books (kind of like Andrew Smith) and it always works (also like Andrew Smith). Many of King's books read light and funny even if they're about serious subjects, but this isn't one of them. This one is fairly dark and reminds me more of Everybody Sees the Ants than any of her others. But although it's not humorous, it's still clever.

What I love most about Glory is that she's so matter-of-fact and she doesn't kid herself, but she is also a very considerate person. She knows she doesn't want to be friends with Ellie anymore, but she will do things like give her a hug because she needs a hug. Her strong sense of self comes through especially well in her conversations with Ellie. At one point when Ellie doesn't want to appear emotional because boys don't like emotional girls, Glory asks "Anyway, who cares what guys like? They don't do stuff because of what we like, right?" That is exactly the attitude that I love, and Glory displays it throughout the novel.

Aside from Glory herself, there are some very cool elements to this story. First, though much of it is centered around her mother's suicide, it isn't an issue novel. Glory's feelings about her mother's death and fear for her own future feel genuine in their complexity. Like her mother, Glory is really into photography, and I really liked how she used photographic principles to relate to other areas in her life.

The future story told through Glory's visions is probably the coolest/scariest part of all. Without giving away too much, it is dystopic in a way that is similar to certain elements of The Handmaid's Tale, and has the same sort of scary believability. I actually kind of want it to be a real book. (Note to A.S. King: please write this.)

As I was reading, I thought this book was pretty dark, but ultimately it left me feeling hopeful for Glory and her future. A.S. King manages to make all her books very different from each other, but equally sophisticated and surprising and awesome. Another winner from one of my favorite young adult authors!

Revival

Revival by Stephen King (2014)

When Jamie Morton was just a kid in the 1960s, he was playing with toy soldiers in the driveway one day when a shadow fell over him. He looked up and saw the man he came to know as Pastor Charlie Jacobs, a man whose shadow would remain over Jamie even decades later.

Jamie grew up to become a musician and a drug addict, and he went through rough times and lost people close to him. Charlie also experienced loss and difficult times, but he always retained a fascination with electricity, and every time Jamie saw him he was using his strange electrical power in different ways. Whether he was using it for cheap tricks or to heal members of his new congregation he was obviously working towards something bigger, and the more Jamie learned the more fearful he became.

The way Stephen King describes his characters and their lives always brings me back to my childhood and, in fact, I read this while in Maine at my sister's house over Thanksgiving. (My family is just as rural and redneck as King's characters. We went skeet shooting after Thanksgiving dinner. No lie.) If you aren't from Maine, or somewhere similarly rural, you might not appreciate just how true to life his writing is. But he really gets it. I know Stephen King has lived his entire life in Maine, but he's more educated and far more wealthy than the people he's writing about, yet I don't think he's let his fame change him.

Science and religion are woven together through Charlie's evolving worldview. Early on, he explains religion as an extension of science because "science is finite." Later, after he has lost his faith, he uses religion as a cover because people will buy into it more than his weird science. It's sadly true, actually - people aren't willing to accept science they don't understand, yet they are willing to accept religious ideas that are much more far-fetched because of their faith. It's really kind of bizarre when you think about it.

I also liked the the concept of a "fifth business," someone who just keeps popping up at random times over the years, which is what Charlie Jacobs was to Jamie Morton. The very idea is somehow ominous, and here it was more so because Jamie knew that Charlie was up to something strange. I could kind of see where the story was going before it got there, but much about it was quite different than I expected. Through a lot of the book I kept thinking that it wasn't exactly a horror novel, but it is. It definitely is. Things happened near the end that made my blood run cold.

And I will leave you with that. It's Stephen King, and it's good Stephen King.

Top Ten Books for 2015

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted at the Broke and the Bookish. This week's list is Top Ten Books I'm Looking Forward to in 2015. I'm a bit behind because I'm still working on the books that came out in 2014. (You can see the list of top books I've been looking forward to in this post. I've read some of those already, but still have several to go.) But I do have 5 books that come out in 2015 that I'm already looking forward to.

1. West of Sunset by Stuart O'Nan (January)
2. Funny Girl by Nick Hornby (Now I'm getting conflicting reports on whether this comes out in 2015 or late 2014. Huh.)
3. The Alex Crow by Andrew Smith (March)
4. Love May Fail by Matthew Quick (June)
5. Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson (March) Again, I don't read a ton of nonfiction, but I loved The Devil in the White City. I haven't read anything else by Larson since then, but this one looks really good!

The rest of my list is made up of 2014 books I still haven't gotten to:

6. I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson
7. The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters
8. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlyn Doughty
9. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
10. It Will End With Us by Sam Savage - I only just realized this existed. Why am I not alerted when Sam Savage publishes a new book?

(I am also suddenly weirdly interested in the romance novel Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover by Sarah MacLean. I think this may be a side effect of reading War and Peace.)

Do you know what's crazy? I started to list Milbourn Falls by Jessica Spotswood, and then I was reminded that it's not out until 2016! I can't believe I already have a 2016 book on my list!

It actually stresses me out to look ahead to books being published even in 2015, considering there are books published long before I was born that I still haven't read. My TBR list is getting more and more out of control, and I really wish authors would just stop publishing for a while so I can catch up because that's the only way it's going to happen.

I can't believe I'm having such anxiety over this. I'm going to pretend we never had this conversation.

Men Explain Things to Me

Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit (2014)

One day I was killing time in a bookstore when I came across - and could not resist opening - a book entitled Men Explain Things to Me. The title essay describes, in hilarious detail, the author's encounter at a party with a smug man who doesn't want to believe she has written a well-respected book on a serious topic. He asks, "And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?" As if there were two books on the very same niche topic published at almost the same time.

And so begins Solnit's short book of essays about women, gender, power, and communication. I later got a library copy to read in its entirety. Solnit writes about domestic abuse, sexual assault - and specifically about the IMF head who raped a hotel maid - marriage equality, the disappearance of women in (and from) history, Virginia Woolf, and the trajectory of the women's movement. A lot is covered, so I'm just going to relate a few bits that stood out to me.

In "The Longest War" she writes about rape and abuse, and includes some pretty eye-opening statistics. One in five women will be raped in her lifetime, which I knew already, but I didn't know that for Native Americans that number is one in three. Another point she makes about rape is that the emphasis is always on how women can protect themselves. Obviously this is important and the only part of it that we, as individuals can control, but what about focusing some attention on teaching men not to rape? She urges us to consider these not as separate crimes existing in a vacuum, but part of an overall huge problem. When she lays out all of these statistics, it really does seem like an epidemic that should be earning far more of our attention. Another infuriating fact? In 31 states, rapists who impregnate their victims have parental rights. Let that sink in for a minute.

When analyzing violent crimes in general, we talk a lot about things like race and guns and mental illness, but ignore gender. The fact is that almost all violent crime is committed by men. Of the 62 mass shootings in the last thirty years, only one was by a woman. One statistic that stood out to me was this: "Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined."

Another excellent essay is called "In Praise of the Threat" and gracefully articulates what I've been trying to say for years. Opponents of same-sex marriage frequently decry it as a threat to traditional marriage, and Solnit asks why that's a bad thing. Traditionally, marriage has meant the subjugation of women and loss of their rights, so why would we want to preserve that? She feels that "marriage equality" is an apt phrase as it describes not just same-sex marriage, but equality in all marriages, something she says has been increasingly brought about by the legitimization of marriages between people of the same genders.

Although I got a bit bogged down in the Virginia Woolf essay, in general I found this collection eye-opening and it really got my blood boiling in the very best way. (I do enjoy a good feminist rant! Just ask my coworker Jenny.) The only complaint I had while reading is that Solnit presented quite a few statistics and facts without citations. It turns out that in the acknowledgement she says the citations are available in the online versions of the essays. She didn't include them here because it tends to interrupt the flow of writing, which is understandable. But I would have appreciated that note at the beginning of the book, not the end.

I probably will check some of the citations online, not because I don't believe her but because I want to read more about these issues. For instance, she mentions a huge backlog of untested rape kits and I'm very curious, and somewhat horrified, about why that has happened.

There aren't enough books about women in society that are written in such an accessible, and even humorous, way. I'd love to get my hands on more books like this. I'm considering trying Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, another recent one. Other books I've read in this vein in the last few years include Bossypants, Lean In, and How To Be a Woman. Do you have any recommendations for non-scholarly writings on feminist topics? Post them in the comments!

100 Sideways Miles

100 Sideways Miles by Andrew Smith (2014)

Among the characteristics that make Finn Easton special are his heterochromatic eyes, his epilepsy, and his penchant for expressing time in miles rather than minutes. Eternally frustrating is the feeling that he is not himself, but a character from his father's cult book The Lazarus Door. But along with his crazy best friend Cade Hernandez and his first girlfriend, Julia Bishop, Finn begins to really find out who he is for real.

As with Andrew Smith's other books, the summary can't do it justice because what makes his books special are the way he tells the stories. On the weirdness scale, this one is between Winger and Grasshopper Jungle. There's nothing otherworldly or science fiction-y, but it's full of quirk. I mean, the most defining event from Finn's childhood is when a dead horse fell on him.

Finn is just as sympathetic a protagonist as I would expect from Smith, and while his constant mile-counting got maybe a tad tiresome, I found it authentically adolescent. Finn's friend Cade was kind of a jerk but having a friend like that added both realism and entertainment value. I didn't get to know Julie as much as I would have liked to, but I thought she was really cool. I mean, the first time she really met Finn, he was in his underwear having a seizure and pissed himself. Not only did she help him clean up, but she started dating him. And I loved her birthday present for him so much!

I loved the whole plot about Finn's dad's book The Lazarus Door. I kind of love books about fictional books, like Amazing Amy from Gone Girl or An Imperial Affliction from The Fault in Our Stars. It's especially great when, like here, they achieve pop culture fame. In The Lazarus Door, visitors from outer space arrive on Earth through the simultaneous opening of microscopic doors all over the place, and these visitors have wings like angels and heterochromatic eyes. Finn is always running into people who are intimately familiar with the book, and who suspiciously eye the scars on his back and his two different colored eyes, putting two and two together to conclude that he is not of this world. Until he self-consciously explains that his father wrote that book. (By the way, I wish this book existed. It sounds creepy and weird and Andrew Smith could totally pull it off.)

As an extra bonus, there's a road trip. I always love a good road trip. You just know something significant will happen and they won't make it to their destination and it won't even matter.

I thought Finn was a bit too level-headed at times, especially in his relationship with Julia. Teenagers are extremely passionate and dramatic and they feel all the feelings intensely, and though at first I thought "Way to be mature, Finn!" I wondered later how realistic it was. It really didn't detract from the experience, it's just something I thought about. It's entirely possible that some teenagers are just more sensible than I was.

Overall, I really liked 100 Sideways Miles. When I initially read the description on Goodreads it didn't sound super-compelling, but having read two books by Andrew Smith already I knew that didn't mean anything. For many books, it's not the plot that's important, it's the other stuff - the stuff that's hard to summarize in a nutshell - and this is one of those books. Luckily, we won't have to wait long for another. According to Edelweiss, Andrew Smith has another weird one coming out in March. Hooray!

Sharp Objects

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (2006), narrated by Ann Marie Lee

When a pre-teen girl is murdered in her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri, journalist Camille Preaker heads out from Chicago to investigate. A similar murder occurred the previous year, and though the town is reluctant to receive the sort of notoriety serial murders will bring, Camille is determined to get her story. But returning to Wind Gap dredges up ghosts in her own past, particularly that of her sister Marion who died at around the same age as these girls.

That's enough to put anyone on an emotional roller-coaster, but Camille is also battling her own self-destructive impulses. Ever since her sister died so many years ago, she has cut words into her body, now a veritable tapestry of scars. Since her stay in a psychiatric hospital, Camille has stopped cutting but it's a tenuous recovery, and she seems to have replaced that behavior with heavy drinking. It doesn't help that during her investigation she has to stay with her mother, step-father, and 13-year-old younger half-sister Amma, who she barely knows. All of this is a recipe for a story rife with dysfunction and dark, dark secrets.

Gillian Flynn's earlier novels, Sharp Objects and Dark Places, are more gritty than the more well-known Gone Girl. Everything is unpleasant. Characters are not likable, houses are rundown and dirty, the weather is oppressive, the town's main business is an industrial pig farm. Illness is described in nauseating detail, and when Camille is injured her mother pokes at the wound. Everything bad is just aggravated and made worse until everyone feels horrible, both physically and emotionally. Camille, much like Libby from Dark Places, is a troubled young woman with a dark past who is emotionally distant and has few, if any, friends. Camille is more functional than Libby since she actually has a career, but it seems she's barely holding onto it. It's been a while since I read Gone Girl so it's a bit difficult to compare them but although they are all pretty screwed up, I think these older novels have a more pervasive darkness.

Because I so enjoyed the audiobook of Dark Places, I listened to the audio for this one as well. I would have done so much earlier had it also been narrated by Rebecca Lowman, who I sincerely believe should be hired to read all the books. All of them. Ann Marie Lee isn't bad, but I was a bit put off at the very beginning when she mispronounced both "Gillian" and "Pulitzer." Some of her voices were a little overdone, such as younger sister Amma's high-pitched, wheedling tone that set her up as more of a bad character than necessary right at the start. Otherwise it was a good listening experience and I wish Flynn had more material, because something about her books works very well on audio for me.

I have a lot to say about this novel and its characters, but I don't want to recount too much for those of you who haven't read it. Flynn's books really probably aren't for everyone, but I just think they're all brilliant and I somehow enjoy wallowing in the bleakness. Nobody writes quite like she does.