The old saying holds that love springs eternal. True enough, but when you’re thinking about a life-long pursuit, and life-long pleasure, there’s nothing like a book.
Books sustain us in good times, and bad, and they entertain and educate. So although the buzz is that 2016 was one of the worst years in recent memory, this doesn’t hold true of the books that were released this year in hardback or paper.
To get a sense of what books have excited readers’ interest this year, I called some area book stores to see what’s been flying off the shelves, and what book store owners and managers are recommending to readers.
The Yankee Bookshop, Woodstock.
Assistant manager Will Flynn compiled a list of customer favorites this fall: two novels set in the American West, one novel set in Vietnam, and two non-fiction books.
The Last Bus to Wisdom was the last novel written by the late Ivan Doig, one of the deans of writing set in and from the West. The novel, set in the 1950s, tells the story of young Donal Cameron who is shipped from his grandmother’s house in Montana to a great-aunt’s house in Wisconsin when his beloved grandmother becomes ill. The problem is that the great-aunt has a sour temperament and she’s less than enthusiastic about Donal’s arrival. When she decides to return Donal to sender, her disillusioned husband Herman the German lights out with Donal on a peripatetic bus trip across the West.
News of the World by Paulette Jiles was a National Book Award finalist. Jiles, a Texan, has written a number of historical novels, and her first novel, Enemy Women, published in 2007, attracted a fair amount of attention. News of the World, set in 1870s Texas, concerns Capt. Jefferson Kid, a Texan in his early 70s who is paid to deliver a young girl, who’d been held captive by the Kiowa and then released, to relatives in San Antonio. The complication is that Johanna views the Kiowa as her family and does not want to be separated from them. The pair forge a bond as they confront perils of both the natural and human kind.
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and nearly every other literary prize you can think of. The protagonist and narrator, a South Vietnamese captain, escapes to the U.S. after the fall of Saigon in 1975. He makes his way to Southern California, but it is then revealed that he is a double agent who is reporting back to the Communist regime on Vietnamese refugees. Nguyen’s writing has been compared to that of Graham Greene and Saul Bellow.
The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf also made it on to nearly every Best Books list this year, as well as winning numerous awards for writing about natural history. Wulf has written a book that is a biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 18th- and early 19th-century German scientist who befriended Thomas Jefferson and was a huge influence on Darwin. The book also examines how Humboldt’s ideas about the interrelation of natural systems resonate two centuries later.
Why You Love Music: From Mozart to Metallica — The Emotional Power of Beautiful Sounds by John Powell, a scientist and musician, explains why we respond to music the way we do, and how music underpins our psychological response to so many experiences in our life. It answers the questions: Why do we like certain sounds, but not others? Why is music such an effective sales tool? And why do certain songs stay in our heads for decades?
Norwich Bookstore. Owner and manager Liza Bernard has a wide-ranging list of books that garnered special interest this year.
The novel The Nix, by Nathan Hill, a satire about American life from the 1940s through the present, brought a flurry of attention to Hill when it came out. Samuel Anderson, a college professor, tries to learn why his mother abandoned him when he was little. The plot turns on the arrest of his mother for crimes she committed as a radical in the 1960s, but as far as Anderson knew, she was just an everyday young woman who married her high school sweetheart. “It’s a pretty amazing book,” Bernard said.
In A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, which is set in 1922, a Russian aristocrat is sentenced to house arrest in the Hotel Metropol. Think of this as a modern-day spin on the old chestnut Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum, in which spies, celebrities, thieves and beautiful young girls hobnob in a place of extraordinary privilege and byzantine politics.
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is one of the most highly praised books of the year. Born in Ghana and raised in the U.S., Gyasi has written a sweeping, intergenerational novel about the cost of the slave trade and who profited from it. The novel begins with the story of two sisters in 18th century Ghana, born to the same mother but different fathers. Esi is sold into slavery while Effia is married to an English slaver. The novel follows the descendents of Esi and Effia through three centuries, from Africa to Europe to the U.S.
Stefan Hertmans War and Turpentine is part memoir, part novel. Hertmans is a Belgian of Flemish ancestry who discovered a box of journals that his grandfather had written during World War I. In an act of imaginative rediscovery, Hertmans turned his grandfather’s journals into a novel that looks at past and present. In the process Hertmans investigates his own life and history. It’s been compared with the works of W.G. Sebald, which is high praise indeed.
News of the World by Paulette Jiles also made Bernard’s list.
On the non-fiction side, there’s Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography. Do I even have to explain? Nuff said.
Being A Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide by Charles Foster has a most unusual premise. Foster, a British naturalist who teaches at Oxford, decides he can’t really understand the animals he studies until he tries to live like them. So Foster lived alongside badgers, foxes, otters, deer and swifts, settling into a badger den in a hillside, rooting through garbage in London like an urban fox, and catching fish with his teeth as an otter would. There’ll always be an England.
Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton takes you to the world’s most unknown, eccentric and intriguing places, including ossuaries in Italy, glowworm caves in New Zealand, a baobab tree in South Africa so large that its interior can accommodate 15 people, the Nazca Lines of Peru, and a weather-forecasting invention powered by leeches in Devon, England.
The Book of Birds by Angus Hyland is a small, 5-by-7-inch paperback, Bernard said. It collects depictions of birds in art through the ages.
A lot of cookbooks boast that their recipes are easy and fast to make but that doesn’t always pan out. But Simple by British food writer Diana Henry actually does live up to its claims. Henry looks for innovative ways to pair spices, herbs and foods in recipes that don’t take hours to assemble and cook. Bernard said that her husband, who is the family cook, flagged at least 40 recipes he’d like to try. And speaking personally, I applaud any cookbook that devotes an entire section to toast.
For children and teens, Bernard recommends Some Writer! The Story of E.B. White by Caldecott Medal winner Melissa Sweet. Sweet draws on the White family’s archive of photos, personal letters and other mementoes to tell the story of the New Yorker writer who produced some of the most beloved books for children.
Everyone’s heard the admonishing phrase, “Kids, Don’t Try this at Home.” Well, in his book Maker Lab: 28 Super Cool Projects: Build* Invent* Create* Discover*, Jack Challoner asks kids to do exactly that. It spurs kids ages 8 through 12 to try science experiments at home, using materials found at home. Children can build their own solar system, make a lemon battery and, yes, build an exploding volcano! Look away, parents. Just look away.
Secret Keepers by Trenton Lee Stewart, the author of the popular Mysterious Benedict Society series, takes a normal kid, Reuben, who finds a mysterious antique watch with hidden powers. Sounds great, yes? Be careful what you wish for. Reuben and his friends must take on the super villain The Smoke to save their city New Umbra from a terrible fate.
Left Bank Books, Hanover.
Owner Nancy Cressman sells second-hand and specialty books. Many of her customers, she said, “are looking to discover something that they didn’t necessarily know existed.”
Poetry is one of the store’s most popular and strong sections, particularly because the store carries such local poets as Jim Schley of Strafford and Laura Foley of Pomfret, as well as poetry books published by the White River Junction-based Harbor Mountain Press, the brainchild of Brownsville poet Peter Money.
Also well represented are such other New England poets as Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, E.E. Cummings and Mary Oliver, the Ohio-born poet who adopted New England as her home for decades.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.