My Favorite Books of the Year: Part II

Thanks, Obama, but I'll take it from here.

Last week we counted down 10-6. This week I reveal my top 5. Only one more Thursday left in this year. See you then!

5. Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

This is the story of three women (two transgender and one cisgender) thrown together in an unplanned effort to raise a baby. Ames and Reese are exes who always planned to start a family, and Katrina is the mother-to-be of the child Ames accidentally sired after detransitioning back to a man.

When Ames reconnects with Reese in an effort to find out if three unprepared co-parents are better than two, personal baggage and self-sabotage fly from every corner. It’s a fun story and the first I’ve read with multiple trans characters, a necessary point of view that we need more of from all publishing houses.

4. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

O’Farrell wrote the pants off this interpretation of Shakespeare’s early life and her theory on how he might have navigated the grief of losing his young son. The playwright, though a main character, is never actually named, and it’s through his wife (my nominee for character of the year) and children’s eyes that we see him grow up, withdraw from their lives, and return a few years later with a hit play that might be the key to his altered interior life.

3. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

Despite the title, the novel often feels like it’s the story of Agnes Bain. Or perhaps the Agnes Bain Show might best describe her outsized rages against the men in her life when she’s spent the morning (and afternoon and evening) drinking Carlsberg Special Brew.

No one is more transfixed by this show than her youngest child, Shuggie, left to hide their benefits book and care for his mother by age ten after multiple father figures and two older siblings leave her to drink herself nearer death.

In truth, the story’s about both of them, and we need glimpses into Agnes’s past to make guesses at what might be in Shuggie’s future. It’s the bond between mother and son stretched to its limit but never broken, two people who desperately need each other, helpless to save one another.

Read my full review here.

2. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Doerr weaves three eras and five points of view into a big beautiful book. Anna and Omeir meet during the fall of Constantinople, Seymour and Zeno meet in present day, and Konstance is on a mission hundreds of years in the future.

While it can take time to find a rhythm with so much ground to cover, the payoff of the fully revealed intertwining of all these characters is worth it.

1. The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich is a Pulitzer Prize (finally, for this book!) and National Book Award-winning treasure. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, and though she writes primarily about indigenous people, her stories of love, tradition, and culture are universal.

The Night Watchman tells a tale similar to the one of Erdrich’s grandfather who worked all night as the watchman at a jewel bearing plant and all day to stave off the threat of termination of longstanding treaties with the United States.

As he fights to preserve his community’s way of life, Pixie Paranteau, a recent high school valedictorian who makes jewel bearings at the same plant, offers a view into the future of the tribe and its members as she straddles the Chippewa language she shares with her elders and the call of bigger cities and economic prospects.

Erdrich is a poetic master of prose, and her work commands your attention for its skillful plotting, vivid language, and utter readability.