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.