Best Books I read in 2016:

I read 74 books this year.  These are the best from the list (in the order I read the books).

1. The Martian by Andy Weir (2011) Crown 
   All the ways Mars wants to kill you - Themes: fate (Mars is trying to kill him through no fault of it's own), hope (the indomitable human spirit) and humanity (people want him to live and go to extraordinary lengths to help him survive)
   
   
2. The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd (2014) Viking
   Sarah Grimke, living in pre-Civil War Charleston, is given Handful, a slave, to be her handmaiden.  Sarah doesn’t want a slave, but she is given no choice.  Over the next thirty-five years as the girls get closer and Handful looks for a way to freedom, Sarah and her younger sister, Angelina, go north to help with abolition and women’s rights.
   
   
3. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (2012) Ballentine Books 
   The book was so good, I hated it.  Ms. Flynn can pull your emotions every which way.  On Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary, with the celebration planned and ready to get underway, Amy disappears.  The police jump to the regular conclusion that the husband killed the wife.  And Nick does himself no favors, caught in lie after lie.  The ending will make you jump.
   
   
4. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (1998) Harper
   Nathaniel Price, an evangelical Baptist, takes his family to the Congo on a mission.  Everything they planned is turned on its head.  Their garden refuses to grown, their attempt to convert the local populous only works to enrage their enemies.  Told over three decades from the point of view of one of the daughters, the family is torn apart and reconstructed.
   
   
5. The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks (2005) Doubleday 
   There are people who want to control the world by forcing it to follow orders.  There are Travelers who bring change to the world.  The Tabula see Travelers as dangerous to world order.  And there are Harlequins who protect Travelers.  This is a story of a Harlequin who is called to serve and protect a set of brothers who may be Travelers against the Tabula agents sent to kill them.
   
   
6. Mrs. Peregrine's Peculiar Children - Ransom Riggs (2011) Quirk Books
   Teenage Jacob goes to an island off the coast of Wales with his birding father who is immersed in writing a new book.  Jacob, bored and wandering the island, finds the ruins of an abandoned house.  Only it’s not exactly abandoned, it’s trapped in a time loop from World War II.  And its occupants are peculiar indeed.
   A wonderful and well thought out adventure.  You'll fall in love with the children.
   
   
7. The Nightingale - Kristin Hannah (2015) St. Martin’s Press 
   Two sisters in German occupied France during World War II find their separate ways of surviving and finding a way to resist Nazism.  One joins the resistance, the other leads children and wounded fighters over the Pyrenees into Spain and freedom. 
   
   
8. Raven Girl - Audrey Niffenegger (2013) Harry N. Abrams 
   A raven and a postman have a daughter who wants nothing but to be able to fly.  Like her mother, she is a raven, but she has a human body like her father.
   
   
9. The Golem and the Jinni - Helene Wecker (2013) Harper 
   A man who loses his business desires to go to America, but with a wife.  When no woman will have him, he purchases the ability of a local Jewish Kabbalist to create a Golem for him. On the way across the ocean, his utters the words to wake her and then dies.  In New York, a Syrian woman takes an old oil flask of her mothers and asks a local tinsmith if he can repair it.  But when the tinsmith removes some of the scroll work, out comes a Jinni in the form of a man, but with an iron band on his wrist.  Thus starts a winding story that brings everyone's lives together with an unexpected and well-deserved twist.
   
   
10. And Sometimes I Wonder About You - Walter Mosley (2015) Little Brown 
    Leonid McGill is still trying to find a way to care for his wife, Katrina, love his girlfriend Aura and escape the magnetism of a new woman, Marilla, while keeping himself, his secretary, his children and acquaintances from being killed by people who think they want more than is possible.  This is the best craftsmanship to be found in writing.  

The Spy Who Loved Me - Ian Fleming (1962) Jonathan Cape 

A very different James Bond story, this time from the woman's point of view.  She's independent, had her heart broken, twice, does not trust men as a result, but she's off on an adventure, riding her Vesta from Canada down to Florida.  Caught a little low on cash, she stops at a motel in the Adirondacks and is offered a job as a receptionist.  The couple running the summer business for an absentee owner, ask her to stay an extra day after they leave for the owner to arrive for the winter shutdown.  Only the two guys who show up have less than honorable intentions.  Bond shows up during a storm with a flat and stays the night, rescuing her from her fears about the men she thought were going to rape her.  Only their intentions were much worse.

The Black Echo - Michael Connelly (1992) Little Brown 

Twists upon twists in the first Bosch novel.  Bosch is a celebrated and demoted detective in the LAPD.  A dead vet is found in a pipe at the reservoir in Hollywood Hills.  Bosch is able to identify the body as someone he served with in Viet Nam. Bosch sees what others don't and realizes it is not an OD, but a murder - he goes to the man's apartment and finds it has been ransacked, but he comes across a pawn ticket for a piece of jewelry.  He visits the pawnshop and discovers it was robbed the night before, taking the item from the ticket, but there is a picture of the item.  It turns out that both the dead guy and Bosch were looked at by the FBI for a bank robbery that happened while Bosch was on a forced vacation.  The IAD want Bosch so bad they can barely restrain themselves.  This looks to them like a tie-in that they can use against Bosch.  When he braces the FBI for info on the robbery, they call his boss and get him taken off the case, then call back and ask to have him put back on as a liaison to them.  He figures-out that there was a high-up Vietnamese police chief that had a box with no declared value in the first robbery, but as he digs further, there is reason to believe that the man had a fortune in diamonds in his box.  There is another Vietnamese who had diamonds in different bank and he suspects the other man is a target.  

Charcoal Joe - Walter Mosley (2016) Little Brown 

Mouse brings a job to Easy Rawlins; Joe needs his son, who has been framed by the cops, cleared of murder charges.  Easy is planning on proposing to his love, but that turns out to not be possible.  The boy in question turns out to be a Phd in Physics and likely an innocent bystander in un-innocent murder, theft and triple-crosses.  Fearless Jones covers Easy's rear. Lots of bad guys get their final ticket punched, and one gets a angelic gift when Easy returns her unconscious body to her home.  

And Sometimes I Wonder About You - Walter Mosley (2015) Little Brown 

Leonid McGill is still trying to find a way to care for his wife, Katrina, love his girlfriend Aura and escape the magnetism of a new woman, Marilla, while keeping himself, his secretary, his children and acquaintances from being killed by people who think they want more than is possible.  This is the best craftsmanship to be found in writing.  

The Golem and the Jinni - Helene Wecker (2013) Harper

A man who loses his business desires to go to America, but with a wife.  When no woman will have him, he purchases the ability of a local Jewish Kabbalist to create a Golem for him. On the way across the ocean, his utters the words to wake her and then dies.  In New York, a Syrian woman takes an old oil flask of her mothers and asks a local tinsmith if he can repair it.  But when the tinsmith removes some of the scroll work, out comes a Jinni in the form of a man, but with an iron band on his wrist.  Thus starts a winding story that brings everyone's lives together with an unexpected and well-deserved twist.

The Space Between - Brenna Yovanoff (2011) Razorbill 

Lilith's daughter searches for her brother on Earth, seeking the help of a boy who attempted suicide, but was sent back.  He's the only courage she finds to start her search.  To her, Earth is terribly cold, but it has unexpected discoveries, like humanity and love.