Angel Catbird by Margaret Atwood, Illustrated by Johnnie Christmas and Tamara Bonvillain (2017) Dark Horse Comics

A three-issue set written by the imitable Ms. Margaret Atwood.  It serves two purposes; 1) a fun and sometimes silly story about a superhero (?) who is part human, part cat, and part bird vs. a man who is part human and part rat.  And 2) a plea for people to keep their cats indoors so they won't get killed and won't decimate the songbird population.  Ms. Atwood obviously enjoyed herself as the writing exposes her trademark wit.  Worth spending the afternoon reading.

Best Books I Read in 2022:

This year I read 89 books.  These are what I consider the best of the list (in the order I read the books).

1.      The House on the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune (2020) Tor Books

This was the first book I read in 2022 and it still hits my best of the year.  It's a book about how prejudice and hatemongering affect the most innocent of lives.  In a world where there are magical beings, a government branch is responsible for the orphanages where magical children are kept – ostensibly to keep them safe from the world and the world safe from them.  An inspector, who has closed some orphanages because they abused the children, is sent to the most secret of these on an island.  There, he encounters beings like he never has before.  These are considered the most dangerous of magical beings.  But they are all children and they’re just doing what children do; they dream of a better life.

2.      Britt-Marie was Here by Fredrik Backman (2016) Simon & Schuster

Two months went by before I found a book worthy enough of hitting this list.  It's about a woman who was cheated on and insists on making a new life elsewhere and finds it hard to change, and then finds herself changed anyway, by life, by people, by understanding more about herself.

Britt Marie has let life pass her by, watching her father, then her mother, give-up over time since the death of their other daughter, spending her time raising her husband’s children, and taking care of him  Then he had a heart attack and the other woman called her.  Britt-Marie saw that he was on the mend, then went home, packed a bag and left.  Now she’s in Borg, a small town that has been shutting down, working as the caretaker of the Recreation Center.  She’s inherited a soccer team, actually just a group of local kids.  She likes things to be neat and tidy.  So, she changes Borg, and it changes her.

3.      The Magician's Lie by Greer Macallister (2015) Sourcebooks Landmark

An interesting take on magic and illusion.  A woman who performs illusions runs from the scene where a man who is assumed to be her husband has been killed with the tools of sawing the man in half.  But is she a murderess, or the victim of domestic violence who has been pursued by a man who is not her husband?  This kept me on the edge of my seat throughout the book.

4.      A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (2016) Viking

Half-way through the year I found another gem, one I had avoided.  At first glance, this book seemed off-putting in that the subject appeared to be rather boring.  It is anything but boring.  We follow the life of a Russian Count after the Bolsheviks have come to power.  If not for a poem attributed to him, they would have summarily shot the aristocrat.  Instead, they exile him to the Metropol hotel for life.  Instead of going crazy in his confinement, he makes friends.  He dines with a man from the KGB.  He lets a little girl drag him all over the hotel.  She grows up and has a child, which he must raise after the mother follows her exiled husband to Siberia.  He waits tables in the hotel's restaurant.  All through the narrative, his observations, his wit, his charm is evident.  Mr. Towles has done such a superb job with characterization, that it takes but a sentence to know who is speaking or thinking.  Easily the best book I've read in the past year, this should have gone up for a Pulitzer.

5.      The Magician's Elephant by Kate DiCamillo (2009) Candlewick

Two more months went by before I read this book.  DiCamillo is a wonderful writer.  There is a distinct plot, there is a full cast of characters who are important to the story and who you come to care about, including the elephant, a dog, an orphan, a boy, a policeman and his wife, even an old soldier and a beggar, and of course, a magician.  Every promise in the book is fulfilled, even those you do not realize are promises until they are fulfilled.

6.      The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams (2022) Random House

There are few books that I label as important - this is one of them.  The story follows Esme, the daughter of a worker on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.  As a child, she sits below her father’s desk and looks at the word slips the fall from the tables.  At one point she is sent to a boarding school with disastrous effect on her life.  She notices over time that the words not included in the printed work are about women.  She becomes friends with a brother and sister in the suffrage movement.  With him, she bears a child, who is adopted by friends who move to Australia.  She starts collecting these lost words and eventually they become a book titled Women’s Words and their Meanings.  At the same time as this immense project takes place, the world changes.  War comes and with it is the loss of many of the workers on the dictionary, including a compositor with whom she fell in love.  You will laugh at parts, be angry at others, and cry tears.  But you will read a very well written book and find it a satisfying read.

7.      Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (2009) Ballentine Books

A marvelously intriguing book.  This is the story of a Chinese American boy in Seattle who befriended a Japanese American girl in 1942.  It follows the journey of the boy whose father is viciously anti-Japanese since they took over his native China.  Parallel to this is the same boy grown into a man who has lost his Chinese wife and discovers that the Panama Hotel has artifacts in its basement that were left by Japanese families when they were ‘evacuated’ during the war.  A jazz saxophone player provides a connecting role between the two time periods.  The writing is rich with poetic similes and observations of the human condition between generations and with young and old love.

8.      The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn (2022) William Morrow

Ms. Quinn becomes better with each book.  Her blend of accurate historical fact with fiction teaches us about lesser known, but important people in history and makes their stories memorable.  In this book we learn about a heroic woman who wanted to be a historian but would not let the invasion of her country go unanswered.  She responded by becoming one of World War II’s best snipers.  Read her story as she became Lady Death to the Nazi’s and did everything she could, even when not carrying a gun, to help defeat the worst megalomaniac in the twentieth century.

9.      Fairy Tale by Stephen King (2022) Scribner

Stephen King wrote a masterful tale, reminiscent of his collaboration with Peter Straub,  that involves a boy, a dog, other worlds, and something out of H.P. Lovecraft.  The hero is a seventeen-year-old boy who saves an old man’s life and finds his own life changed.  There are secrets and more dangerous secrets.  There are worlds of discovery, and more people who need the hero’s help.  A coming-of-age story that shapes a boy into a man.  This gripping tale kept me awake late into the night wanting to know what happens next through more than 600 pages.

10.   The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna (2022) Berkley

In the last month of the year I found this book and liked the title.  I liked the book even better. The witches only meet on the third Thursday of every third month.  And they never meet in the same place twice.  This is very inconvenient, but very safe, or so the leader, Primrose, tells them.  Witches should live alone and stay away from entanglements.  Which is all very good, except their youngest member, Mika Moon, has been asked to tutor a set of three young witches who have been hidden by a very powerful witch.  This can change everything, for the three girls, for Mika, for Primrose, and all the other witches.  A good read, it combines urban fantasy and romance.

 As you can see in this list, I read current books as well as books published in earlier years.  I don't finish a book I don't like, so winnowing the list down to the best requires extraordinary writing.  If I were to add a non-fiction book to the list, it would be the audio version of Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft - it includes after words by his sons and is a delight to hear.

My reading list will keep me busy for the next decade and will grow as good books become available.  

Best Books I Read in 2021:

This year I read 75 books.  These are what I consider the best of the list (in the order I read the books).

1.       The Left-Handed Booksellers by Garth Nix (2020) HarperCollins 

The first book I put on this list didn't come until the end of the first week of February.  I read good books, but none of them quite turned the key.

This book is an interesting twist on urban fantasy and mystery.  The story takes place in London where a young art student goes to visit her 'uncle' only to find herself thrust into a war of sorts where left-handed booksellers are authorized to kill fantastical creatures posing as humans.  Only it turns out that the young woman has some fantastical connections of her own.

2.       The Boy, The Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy (2019) HarperOne

This was a difficult choice only because I also read so many other good books in March.  But this one stands out. It's a Jonathon Livingston Seagull for this generation.  A simple feel-good book that could not have had better timing than to come out at the beginning of the pandemic.  It encourages self-worth, and a feeling that no matter what we face, we can go on.

3.       The Fifth Season by N K Jemisin (2015) Orbit 

I have read much less Science Fiction on the past few years and have missed out.  This is a fantastic, complicated book that deserved getting the Hugo and the Nebula.

On a planet, much like Earth, maybe it is Earth, where the continents have drifted back into one giant land, there are still changes that occur.  The people on this planet call the times that last after a change, anywhere from months to years, seasons.  Most settlements last only through one season.  The capital of the empire has lasted through four such seasons.  People with special abilities are shunned and recruited by the capital and trained to use their abilities to try to stave off earthquakes.  The main heroine is one such person.  We follow her in three different timelines: as a child, as a four-ring practitioner, and as a refugee.  In the middle timeline, she is paired with a ten-ring practitioner, almost unheard-of, as her mentor and is ordered to bear his child.  He is less than cooperative.  They are sent to a city on the coast to clear coral from a harbor.  She finds an artifact blocking the harbor.  Trying to move it, she raises it and doing so destroys the city.  She and her mentor find themselves transported to an island where life seems idyllic, and they can raise their child.  But the empire finds them.  In the third timeline, our heroine feels the start of another season and escapes as a refugee.  She is reunited with her mentor on his deathbed.  He has started the fifth season and wants her to finish what he started and destroy the empire.

4.       The Night Circus by Erin Morganstern (2011) Doubleday

This is an urban low fantasy.  There are no elves, no trolls, no orcs, no hobbits.  But there is magic and illusion.  Two very old magicians have an ongoing game they play with other people’s lives.  Each finds a special child with inherent abilities.  They adopt the child and train them.  Once the bet is placed, each child receives a ring, which burns itself into their finger.  Neither will be introduced to the other.  In this case, the venue becomes a circus which opens at night.  Those people who are involved with the circus find that they have become virtually frozen at the age they were when they first agreed to conceive and build the circus.  But they are not immortal.  One of the contestants enhances his own looks to make himself seem ordinary and serves as the assistant to the circus proprietor, who is not one of the magicians.  The other, a superb illusionist has her own act in one tent of the circus.  Each think that it is their work that sustains the circus.  Little by little they recognize that the other contestant is making changes and additions to the circus.  For years, this is how they compete.  Eventually they find each other and go beyond mere introduction to becoming lovers.  The problem is that there is only one way for a contestant to win.  The other must die.

5.       Tears of Amber by Sofia Segovia (2021) Amazon Crossing (english translation)

A group of people are thrown together during World War II in East Prussia, what is now the far-western Russian oblast of Kalingrad.  A Polish man and a Polish woman are sent as slaves to help on a German farm.  A second German family is torn apart by the enforced enlistment of the father.  The history of the war works out its tragedy amongst these innocent bystanders just trying to survive a terrible time in history.  But you will not forget it.

6.       Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (2021) Knopf (7/26)

Klara is an Artificial Friend who longs to be picked by a young girl.  She resides in a store where the manager tells her how to do her best to represent the store and other artificial friends.  She receives nourishment from the sun (she is solar powered) and while in a storefront window, watches a homeless man sit each day with his dog across the street.  One day, neither the homeless man nor his dog rise and Klara is afraid they are dead.  But when the sun comes out the next day, they  rise and seem to be better than before.  A machine is parked in front of the store that produces terrible pollution.  When  it is moved, Klara sees the homeless man become reunited with a woman as they embrace.

When Klara is picked, the girl who asked for her, Josie, is a 'lifted' youngster (genetically edited) who has trouble with her health.  From Josie's room, Klara observes the sun sets, goes to rest, on the far side of the field in a barn.  Josie has a  friend, Rick, who is not lifted, but is brilliant with drones.  They play and squabble.  But Josie's health gets worse.  Klara comes up with a plan to ask the sun to heal Josie with his special restorative nutrition.  So she travels to the barn with Rick's help.  She offers to destroy the pollution machine in exchange for Josie's improved health. 

The family, including Klara go into the city for Josie's 'portrait' where Klara discovers it is a replacement artificial friend body that upon Josie's death is to become a new body for Klara.  Klara is convinced that her bargain with the sun will result in a healthy Josie.  She finds the pollution machine and with the help of Josie's father, takes some of her own lubricant and pours it into the exhaust of the machine, disabling it.  Now Klara plans to watch the sun restore Josie.  But Josie does not get better.

While the family surround Josie, expecting her to die at any moment, odd weather comes through the area where the family lives.  Klara suddenly gets everyone to go into Josie's room and she open's the blinds so that the sun floods the room.  Josie sits up and says she is feeling better.  Klara's sacrifice has not been in vain.

Josie eventually gets well enough to go off to college.

The book ends with the manager finding Klara in a storage yard, discarded, but spending her time reminiscing her time with Josie.

This is a tour-de-force of writing.  Ishiguro has a simple style that flows very swiftly and makes the story amazing.  You won't forget Klara.

7.       My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman (2015) Atria Books (8/5)

Backman’s masterpiece – almost eight-year-old Elsa loves her grandmother, and her grandmother loves her back fiercely.  Her grandmother is an odd duck who tells fairy tales from the land of almost asleep and defends Elsa like no one else.  But her grandmother is sick and dies.  Elsa is given a quest to deliver letters, which she must find to the people who live in her building.  She finds out it really is her building because her grandmother owned it and left it to her.  

We meet people who were rescued by the grandmother when they were just children, except for one woman who was rescued after a tsunami killed her husband and two sons.  There is Wolfheart who is a warrior who doesn’t like to fight.  There is Britt-Marie, who took care of Elsa’s mother while her grandmother was off saving other people.  There is a set of brothers who were both in love with the same woman.  There is a family taking care of their grandson, hoping their son gets some help.  And there’s a wourse who is a hero.

A delightful read.

8.       Billy Summers by Stephen King (2021) Scribner 

King turns his storytelling talent to a thriller and does such a good job, it should get an Edgar.

Billy is a hitman - has been since he returned from Iraq.  He wants to retire, but there is one last job to do, it's to hit a hitman who got too visible and killed someone he shouldn't have.  The client wants Billy to follow a specific escape plan.  Billy does the job, but he does his own escape, which is a problem for the client.  While hiding in the same town as the hit, he sees a van stop and toss a body across the street.  He checks and it's a girl who has been drugged and raped.  He hauls her into his hideout and cleans her up.  When she comes to, she thinks at first that he hurt her.  But as her memory returns, she gets mad at her 'boyfriend' and his buddies.  When it's time to go on the run, she goes with Billy.  There is still one more job to do.  Billy was stiffed because they never intended to pay him, they intended to kill him.  So he hunts down the client to find out why.  That results in a couple of deaths and a brain-dead thug whose mother is outraged.  But the client gives-up the real money behind the hit, a billionaire who likes little girls.  And that angers Billy and his rescued girl.

9.       Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr (2021) Scribner 

I am in awe of Mr. Doerr's ability to weave a story.  The main theme is a simple story.

The novel covers six story lines based on character:

Diogenes original story that is only partially available that he sent to his sick daughter,

Zeno, the son of a Greek immigrant, whose father died in World War II, was raised by his almost step-mother, went to war in Korea and fell in love with a British soldier at a POW camp, who translated ancient Greek, and was separated from him when the Brit escaped, then went on to translate Diogenes’ story, and then help a group of fifth graders put it on as a play, and became a hero by running a bomb to a lake before it could kill anyone else,

Seymour, an autistic young man who was infuriated at the destruction of his Trusty Friend’s habitat and wanted to strike back at the developers who caused it and planted a bomb in the library where Zeno was watching a dress rehearsal of the play, he goes to prison for his crime and becomes a programmer for a company that is trying to present a view of the earth that is pristine.  He evaluates anomalies and marks them to be revised with something pleasant.  He eventually gets out of prison and goes to work for the company.  He begins putting easter eggs in the views that have an owl as a hint and if you click on them, you will see the original view before it was modified.  He finds that Zeno published a translation of Diogenes’ story and has them bound and gives a copy to the grown kids from the library play,

Anna, a young girl in Constantinople in 1483, when it fell to the Ottoman empire, who found a copy of Diogenes’ story and told it to her husband and sons,

Omeir, who was born with a cleft palette and whose grandfather refused to put the child to death, even though the child’s father died on the day of his birth, causing the family to have to move way out of their local town in order to survive – who raised two oxen and was pressed into the service of conquering Constantinople, but when the oxen died, he gave up and on his way home discovers Anna and takes her with him, marries her and raises two sons.  When she dies, he makes the journey to Italy with her poor copy of the story,

Konstance, who lives on a deep space ship with her parents and a group of people trying to find another home for humanity and finds the tale on a vast electronic library when a plague kills everyone else on the ship and her father stowed her in the computer room with enough nutrient powder to last her 5 years of a 567 year journey.

All these story lines do come together, but in unexpected ways.  It's a historical novel, it's science fiction and I found it very satisfying.

Best Books I Read in 2020:

This year I read 59 books.  These are what I consider the best of the list (in the order I read the books).

1.     Oddkins by Dean Koontz (1988) Grand Central Publishing
Disguised as a children’s tale about a magic toy maker's death and the quest of his magic toys to find the new toy maker who is across the town.  Their adversaries include some newly awakened toys made by the previous, evil, toy maker.  At the same time, the heir of the toy maker who thought his uncle was ridiculous and wants to sell the toy shop is pursued by a man who was just released from prison who wants to buy the shop to make more evil toys.  The turning point comes when the nephew sees the magic toys on their journey being pursued by the evil toys.

2.     Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds (2017) Atheneum
Written in verse, this tour-de-force follows a boy whose brother was just shot and killed.  As he takes the elevator down from his apartment, after having retrieved his brother’s gun, he is met at each floor by ghosts of others in his family who have also died by gunshot; his uncle, a girl he knew at a playground, his father, even the young man who killed his father, and his brother.  They all ask him why he thinks he needs a gun.  And it ends with that question still open.
This book won honors from Newbery, Coretta Scott King, Prinz, and won the Walter Dean Myers Award and The Edgar for Best Young Adult Fiction.

3.     A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness (2011) Candlewick Press
Frequently a book is simply better than the movie.  In this case it’s better written and so much darker.

Conor lives alone with his mother, who is dying from cancer.  She’s been getting treatments, but they’re failing to make her better.  His father lives in America with his ‘other family’.  Conor has been having nightmares every night.  In the churchyard across the field from their home is a yew tree.  One night, it comes to life and walks to Conor’s bedroom.  In the movie, it feels like an adventure.  In the book, it’s another nightmare.  Especially the fourth story, the one from Conor, the truth.

I could not read this without hearing Liam Neeson’s voice as the monster.

A note on authorship.  Mr. Ness has written a masterful work based on the idea of another writer, Siobhan Dowd, who died before she could write the book.  He could have taken all the credit, but he has made a point of citing her as originating the story.

4.     A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas (2016) Berkley
An interesting variation on the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Charlotte Holmes has an extraordinary mind.  She has no interest in becoming married to a man.  So after her father reneges on his promise to pay for the education that she might become independent, she intentionally loses her maidenhead to a married man.  That way he cannot be forced to marry her and her worth as a prospective bride is dashed in the eyes of any other man.  Then she ‘runs away from home’ determined to establish herself.  Unfortunately things do not go as planned.  A childhood friend, who is now a Lord, tries to watch out for her, but that only brings anger.  She ‘happens’ upon an ex-actress who is a widow, whose name turns out to be Mrs. Watson.  It is she who concocts the scheme of fronting a ‘sick’ Sherlock Holmes, whose sister, Charlotte, takes messages to him.  This book highlights three murders which happen to be inter-related.  In the end, a mysterious man seems to be behind it all.  His name is Moriarity.
Well written, mixing a pure mystery with the gothic romance flavor of the late 19^th century.

5.     Egg and Spoon by Gregory Maguire (2014) Candlewick Press
A masterpiece that creeps up on you.  Two young girls in Russia – one, a peasant, Elena, whose father died trying to save a bunch of girls from a flood, her mother is dying, her brothers have been ripped from their home and there’s no food, no medicine and almost no one left in her village.  The other, Ekaterina, comes in a train that stops for a bridge to be repaired.  This one is a near-princess, part of the nobility, who has a rich Aunt, a governess, and a butler trying to rein her in, though she is bored.  The two girls become somewhat friends.  Ekaterina shows Elena a gift, a Fabergé egg, they’re taking to the Tsar, who wants to show-off his godson, Anton.  The egg has three mythical scenes: Baba Yaga’s chicken house, the ice dragon, and the firebird.  But the train lurches into motion and Ekaterina falls out of the train with the egg, while Elena falls into the train.
While Elena girl finds herself forced to hide, she ends-up having to impersonate Ekaterina in order to try to keep the butler and the governess from getting in trouble.  Meanwhile, Ekaterina is cornered by a snow tiger and herded to a bridge.  On the other side, she finds Baba Yaga’s house, but instead of eating the offered, poisonous, soup, she gives the egg to Baba Yaga.  Meanwhile, Elena, at a stop of the train, tries to escape.  She sights the Firebird and reaches to take a tail feather so she could get a magical wish granted.  But a hen, chased by a fox enters from the other side just as the Firebird becomes aware of the peasant girl and turns on her.  The hen crashes into the Firebird, grabs a feather and the fox runs off.  An explosion occurs and there is an egg left behind.  Elena grabs the egg as a possible replacement of the Tsar’s gift.
The story is narrated by a monk, who had the favor of the Tsar, then lost it by helping the girls.  All three of the children go off on an adventure with Baba Yaga, meet the ice dragon, who is causing floods and an almost non-existent winter to happen.  His teeth are used to make a fence, they turn into an army, matryoshka dolls, extra large in size come along and marry the soldiers, everyone goes home happy.
Years later, under communism, the children have grown and take care of others in a kitchen.  The monk wanders the country, still observing and bringing the end of the story to a brilliant conclusion.

6.     The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (2008) Dial Press
Judith Ashton, a journalist and successful author of a series of comedic, light-hearted books on World War II written under a pseudonym, wants to write about something different and under her own name.  She receives a letter from Guernsey from a farmer who has acquired a book she once owned.  He tells how it led to the society on the island.  She is intrigued and writes back asking questions about the name of the society.  He writes back, telling her the story of how, on the spot, when confronted by German soldiers, a resident spun up the story, creating the society on the spot.  Back in London, Judith is pursued by a rich American publisher.  Her publisher and life-long friend, is both jealous and worried that the American will steal her away from his publishing company.
The book is written as a series of letters and tells the history of the German occupation of Guernsey without apology or lack of exposure of the tribulations of both sides.

7.     Absolute Power by David Baldacci (1996) Warner Books
This was Baldacci’s first novel.  It centers around corruption of the worst kind at the highest office in the land.  A rich old man, who was responsible for putting the president in office, goes on vacation to Jamaica.  At the last minute, his wife decides to stay behind.  Her real reason is to bed the president, who is all too willing to cooperate.
A thief, who knows a maid at the rich man’s house, enters, quiets the alarm system and proceeds to the master bedroom where behind a mirror, is a room sized safe filled with money, jewels and collections.  But before he can leave, the president and the rich man’s wife enter the bedroom.  The thief is trapped in the safe and discovers that the mirror is a one-way window and watches the scene develop.
Both the woman and the president are drunk.  When he slaps the woman too hard, she hits back, this enrages the president and he begins to beat the woman.  She grabs a letter opener and slices his arm.  He yells and his secret service men burst into the room in time to see her on top with the letter opener poised to plunge into the man.  The secret service men kill the woman.
The president’s chief of staff enters the scene, gets the secret service men and the president out of the room.  She finds the letter opener and bags it and puts it in the top of her purse.  When the secret service men come back, she has them sanitize the room, removing all evidence that the president had been there.  While doing that, they knock over the purse, and the letter opener falls behind a table to the floor.
When they leave, the thief leaves the safe, grabs the bagged letter opener for future insurance and climbs out the window.  The chief of staff realizes she left her purse behind and the secret service men go back for it.  Only once they’re in the room, they see the open window and the rope the thief used to climb down.
They give chase but fail to catch the thief before he gets away.
The local homicide detective called-in when the local patrol sees the open window, notices impossible aspects of the case.  No fingerprints anywhere, not even of the victim or her husband.  The floor has been vacuumed, the woman checked for having had sex, and a blood spatter pattern that shows something or someone was near when she was shot – and two bullet holes in her head from different directions, one still inside her head and the other already dug out of the wall.

8.     Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo, Illustrated by K.G. Campbell (2013) Candlewick Press
Flora Belle Buckman loves comics, especially The Great Incandesto.  She lives with her divorced mother, a writer of terrible romance novels, and sees herself as a natural born cynic (and defier of contracts).  She looks out her window and sees a run-away giant vacuum cleaner chasing a squirrel.
Ulysses is a squirrel who survives being sucked up in a very powerful vacuum cleaner.  Only when he is dumped out of the bag, he has become a squirrel with super powers.  He can fly, he can understand what people are saying, he’s super strong and he writes poetry.  Poorly spelt poetry and mostly non-rhyming poetry, but poetry done on a typewriter, never the less.
No one wants to believe Flora that Ulysses has super powers, even when they watch him do things a squirrel normally cannot do.  A boy across the street, pretending to be blind is even skeptical.  But Flora’s father believes her.  So does his neighbor, a very old woman from ‘the old country’, wherever that is.  So then Flora and Ulysses set out to do super-hero things and get lost.

9.     The Huntress by Kate Quinn (2019) William Morrow
A gripping thriller about the hunt for a woman, who as a Nazi killer hunted children.  The tale is told in two timelines; one about a Russian girl who wanted to fly airplanes and the other, after World War II where she and her ‘husband’ look for the Nazi killer.  The story exposes the bravery of Russian women who flew planes and bombed the enemy Germans to defend and then to drive back the invaders.  And the dangerous escape of one such woman after the government chose to imprison her over something her father said in a drunken brawl.  She then rescues an escaped British soldier, only for him to get killed by the huntress, who tried to kill them both.  But the Russian woman escaped and survived.  Later, the soldier’s brother, a journalist, finds her in a field hospital and to save her, he marries her in the field and has her sent to England.  A few years later, after the war is over, he has been chasing down Nazi criminals to bring them to justice and she appears to help him find the Huntress (who has gone to America)

10. The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson (2019) Sourcebooks Landmark
The hardscrabble folks of Troublesome Creek must scrap for everything—everything except books, that is.  Thanks to Roosevelt's Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, Troublesome's got its very own traveling librarian, Cussy Mary Carter.
Cussy's not only a book woman, however, she's also the last of her kind, her skin a shade of blue unlike most anyone else.  Not everyone is keen on Cussy's family or the Library Project, and a Blue is often blamed for any whiff of trouble.  If Cussy wants to bring the joy of books to the hill folks, she's going to have to confront prejudice as old as Appalachia and suspicion as deep as the holler.
Inspired by the true blue-skinned people of Kentucky and the brave and dedicated Kentucky Pack Horse library service of the 1930s, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is a story of raw courage, fierce strength, and one woman's belief that books can carry us anywhere—even back home.

11. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
The life of Cora, a runaway slave living in Georgia– who rails against the man who has become her ‘owner’ in the 1840s.  Her mother ran away and left her behind as a child (near the end of the book we learn that she was on her way back to get her child but was bitten by a cotton-mouth and died in the swamp).  This is a bitter memory for Cora, who took over her mother’s little plot of ground as a garden.  When a new slave, a big man, took over her cabin and ruined her garden to build a house for his dog, Cora busted-up the doghouse and hurt the dog and its owner.  This got her branded as crazy by the other slaves.  But a new man secretly plots with her to run away.  When they leave, they find their way to the underground railroad.  On the way slave hunters try to capture them.  Cora kills one, fighting for her life.  On the railroad, they get a choice to stop in South Carolina or go on.  This is a different kind of life where negros are educated and given health care.  Only it turns out to be insidious.  Because the doctors are studying eugenics and want to operate on the women, so they won’t have children.  One day, slave hunters come to town looking for Cora and her man.  Cora escapes back to the underground railway station.  Her man never arrives.  She catches the next train, run by a boy who was told the stations were closed.  He drops her off at the end of the line, it is blocked by a cave-in after that.  The station master does not expect her and things have gotten bad in his town.  He takes her home and hides her in the attic.  No one in the town is allowed to have slaves.  But this is not a town of tolerance.  On the way to the town, she saw a seemingly endless row of trees with former slaves hanging from the branches.  She lives in the attic for months.  Each week she watches as a runaway slave is brought to the town square, denounced, and sometimes the white family that harbored the slave is also put on a platform, ridiculed and then all hanged.  Cora has no escape.  One night the town constabulary knocks on the door and drags Cora, the station master and his wife out.  But Cora is not hanged.  The slave hunters came to town looking for her.  They have a commission in Tennessee to return a slave.  On the way, the hunter gets tired of hearing that slave sing, off-key, and kills him.  They switch direction toward Georgia to return Cora and are hijacked.  Cora is freed and runs with two new black men who tell her they are not slaves.  They take her to a farm in Indiana where the owner is black and quite a few runaway slaves.  Life on the farm is good.  Cora discovers the owner has a library and spends a good amount of her time there when she isn’t helping on the farm.  But life is not idyllic.  There are people on the farm who resent the runaways from sharing in what they have built.  One man contacts the slave hunters, thinking they will come and remove the runaways peacefully.  It results in a massacre.  Cora is captured, but the slave hunter wants to see where the underground station is so he can report it and have it destroyed.  But on the way down the ladder, he insists on holding on to Cora.  She falls, pulling him with her.  She lands on top and he dies.  She uses a handcart and pumps her way to another station.  Where she comes out seems to be in the middle of nowhere.  A small wagon train passes here and the last wagon is driven by an old black man who offers her a

 

 Best Books I Read in 2019:

This year I read 69 books.  These are what I consider the best of the list (in the order I read the books).

1.       Hello Universe by Erin Entrada Kelly (2017) Greenwillow Books

About a group of young people.  There is Virgil, referred to by his family as Turtle, which he hates, the Tanaka sisters; Kaori and Gen, Kaori working as a psychic with only two customers; Virgil and Valencia, who is deaf, but wears hearing aids.  Her family doesn’t get her either.  And then there is Bull, who is a bully and thinks he knows everything, and none of it is necessarily good.

Virgil is in a special education class with Valencia, whom he has a crush on, and Bull calls him retard and calls Valencia deafo.

School is out for the summer, but Virgil feels he has failed – at least at what he wanted to do before he wouldn’t see Valencia for the next three months.  So he sets an appointment with Kaori who tells him to bring five special stones and he sets out across the woods.

Valencia has seen Karoi’s card on the bulletin board at the store and calls and sets her own appointment.

While Virgil is crossing the woods, Bull comes upon him and steals his backpack and throws it down a well – the backpack contains Virgil’s pet guinea pig, Gulliver.  Virgil sees a ladder and tries to climb down to rescue Gulliver but falls from the last rung and cannot reach it to climb out.

Virgil’s lateness worries Kaori and when Valencia gets there, she and her sister figure out that Valencia is who Virgil was wanting to say hello to.  They all go in search of the missing Virgil.

Well written and deserving of the Newbery Medal.

2.       Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman - illustrated by Brett Helquist (2009) HarperCollins 

The story of a boy in the days of the Vikings whose father is away on a raid.  He tries to go to the woods with his father’s axe and cut down a tree.  But the axe is too big for him and when the tree is felled, he cannot get out of the way fast enough and his leg is shattered, rendering him not useful to his neighbors.  His mother is from Scotland and was taken by his father in a raid because she was so beautiful.  He did not even approach her about marriage until he taught her enough of his own language to ask her.  But he died on a later raid, saving a packhorse who had swept overboard.  When he returned, the cold and wet had gone into his lungs and he died.

His mother married another man who did not like his new stepson.  So one day, Odd took a salmon and set out to find his father’s wood cutting hut.  He has to use a staff as a crutch because of his leg, but he makes it to the hut, or just in front of it, where he sees a fox who clearly wants him to follow.  So he does and comes upon a scene with an eagle sitting on top of a tree and a bear stuck between two trees with it’s arm buried in a honeycomb.  Odd takes his axe and cuts down the tree behind the bear to free him, hoping the bear won’t eat him.  Instead, the bear, the fox and the eagle follow him home.

In the night he hears voices in a discussion and gets up and accuses the animals of talking.  They finally let him know that they are really Odin, Thor and Loki and have been banished from Asgard by a Frost Giant.  Odd agrees to go with them to get rid of the Giant.

3.       The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (2008) Macmillan

The story runs from the days of Henry the first to Henry the second and the martyrdom of Thomas Beckett.  It follows the life of two little boys, whose father and mother are killed by soldiers in front of them and rescued by an Abbot, who raises them.  Through their lives as a Prior of a Monastery and a Priest in the service of royalty (a little bit of John Jakes here).  A stone mason, who aspires to build a cathedral becomes the other force to move the story, demonstrating the lofty goals of people who wish the period after Henry I did not devolve into civil war between Stephen (Henry’s nephew) and the Empress Maud (Henry’s daughter) known as the Anarchy.  Follett does an excellent job on the history, getting the players and events correct.  The pivotal event for the story involves a plot to interrupt the succession in hopes for a weak king, the barons conspired to kill his son, William II, at sea.  However, there was a survivor, which they imprisoned to keep him quiet, in fear that he knew enough to bring them to justice.  In Follett’s story, this man is visited in his cell by a woman who lives in the nearby forest.  She is pregnant when they decide to kill him by hanging under a false charge.  A local knight’s son is a ruffian whose family successfully accuses the local Earl of being against King Stephen

4.       Warlight by Michael Ondaatje (2018) Knopf

A post World War II story, covering the life of an English boy whose parents went to other parts of the world and left their teenage children in the care of strangers.  Even the leave-taking was a lie, the father leaving for Singapore, the mother staying until the children’s year in boarding schools could start.  Almost at once, the Moth, whom she left in charge, starts caring for them more like a father than a renter who agreed to watch over them when home.  Then they discover their mother’s traveling trunk in the basement and know she did not leave to meet-up with their father.  The Moth has a lot of friends over to their house in London and they get to know them by playing hooky and running around with the Darter, one of the friends, and getting jobs to earn money.  The boy even has an affair with a coworker, Agnes, from the restaurant where he works.  Halfway through the book, they are kidnapped, and the Moth is killed and their mother suddenly appears with the friends and sweeps the children off to her own ancestral home.  But even boarding them in far-away places fails to solve any problems and the son returns to live with her, learning nothing about when she was away and the daughter insisting on a school too far away for visiting.  Once the boy graduates college, he is recruited to work for the government, going through files to make sure nothing is left that would be incriminating to England.  There, he discovers traces of his mother as a spy for the government with enemies searching for her or her children.  The Moth, the Darter, others were watching over the children to keep them safe from foreign vengeance.  Finally, he finds the address of the Darter and visits the man, to discover he has married and has a 13 year old daughter.  On his way out, he sees a family photo, with the Darter and Agnes and a small girl and realizes that his kidnapping happened just over 13 years ago.  But he leaves the Darter in peace.

5.       The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey (2014) Orbit

A post-apocalyptic science fiction story with a well-thought-out explanation of a cause for the zombie-like devastation of the world.  In Carey’s explanation, a spore spreads through the human race that started in the Amazon on the floor, attacking ants, who try to rub it off, but when infected will climb the nearest tree, attach themselves to a leaf and when the filaments of the maturing spore finish devouring their host, explode and spread their spores further along the floor of the rain forest.  In the humans, it travels the nervous system to the brain, replacing the intelligence of the host but controlling the motor functions.  A bite will infect their target.  But what the scientists discovered is that there appear to be children running around without being attacked but are obviously infected.  They capture some of these, take them to an airbase and then educate them. 

This is the story of how one of the little girls, Melanie, learns how the human race will continue.

Every child in the captured group, lives in a cell by themselves.  An alarm rings in the morning and they get dressed and sit in a wheelchair.  The door opens and two soldiers enter, one with a gun aimed at the child.  The other soldier ties the child into the chair and then wheels them into a classroom.  There, the teachers rotate each day, teaching different subjects.  One day, the base is attacked by Hungries (the zombies) herded by the Junkers (people who are not infected but did not evacuate to the uninfected areas) and the base falls.  Melanie, her favorite teacher, a scientist who was about to extract Melanie’s brain to inspect under the microscope, the Sergeant in charge of the military at the base, and a private escape.  But their way from there is not easy. 

The Junkers pursue them.  They try to hide but find themselves surrounded by the Hungries.  Melanie finds the Hungries do not see her.  They discover an abandoned mobile research vehicle and make their way inside, but it is inoperable.  The Sergeant works on restoring power and Melanie does recon, where she discovers a group of children, but they are operating as a savage tribe looking for protein (people) to eat.  The private becomes their first victim.  The scientist traps one of the kids and starts examining their brain tissue under the electron microscope and leaves the others behind who were looking for the private.  When she comes across a wall of the fungus, she stops and finalizes notes about the difference in the second generation of infected hungries, the kids, and realizes that all is lost.  Melanie tricks her into opening the door and then listens to her as the scientist, knowing she is infected and dying, explains what she has found in the kids.

6.       Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson (2018) Nancy Paulson Books

Part of a school year of six students passes in a special class in the fifth grade in a school in Brooklyn.  These students know they have been put into the class because they have learning difficulties.  But it’s not a problem with their intelligence, it’s because they’re all trying to deal with different events in their lives because of a kind of PTSD due to things that happened to members of their family.

The story is narrated by a red-headed, girl whose mother was black and the father is Irish.  They were in a car accident that killed her mother and when the man went to get help, he returned to find the police already there and has been imprisoned because he left the scene.  Another is hyper-active because she lost her father.  Another is depressed because his father, from the Dominican Republic, has been taken by the INS.

The teacher has given them an hour each week in a room by themselves to talk.  This is the story of what they talk about and how that changes their lives.

7.       Between Shades of Grey by Ruta Sepetys (2011) Philomel Books

The story of Lithuanians who, like other people from Estonia, Latvia and Finland, were displaced by Stalin because they were educated, writers, or teachers, and sent to Siberia in hopes they would provide slave labor and die.  It is a heartbreaking account from one girl’s perspective of how she lost her mother and father.  Her father was a professor and died in prison for the crime of having an opinion that was counter to the invading Soviets.  Her mother died trying to keep her children safe.  The enduring strength of those who survived was met when they finally were able to return home thirty years later only to find their property and even their names stolen by strangers who threatened to turn them back to the Soviets for further punishment on the charge of seeking the truth.  These stories are only coming to light in the last twenty years as time capsules are found in construction sites.

8.       Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (2018) G.P. Putnam’s Sons (7/24)

Southern Fiction at its best.  This is the story of a little girl living in the Marsh of the North Carolina coast.  Her mother, then her siblings and finally, her Father leave here to grow-up on her own.  She attends school for a day but runs away back to her home in the marsh, where she can avoid the truant officers. 

She finally makes a friend with a boy who teaches her how to read.  He provides only textbooks about biology and science.  She also reads the book of poetry that her mother left behind.  He leaves her too, goes away to college and does not return to her.  While he’s gone, the local jock woos her and promises marriage and a new life.  She gives him a shell necklace that she made, and he promises to wear it for the rest of his life.  But she finds he is engaged to marry another girl from the town.  So, she rejects him.  

The college boy comes back and even though she will not trust him, he sees her collections of shells and feathers from the marsh and convinces her to write a book on the subject.  She does and it gets published.  With this money, she pays back taxes on her 300+ acre property inherited from her father.  

The local jock, drunk, reminiscent of her father, traps her in a local lagoon and tries to rape her.  She fights back and escapes but is noticed by some local fishermen.  

She’s invited to go see her publisher at a writer’s conference in Greensboro and takes the bus.  Everyone notices her, because she was dressed a little differently for the time.  While she’s gone, the jock dies, falling off a tower they’ve both been to before.  The mother, retrieving his personal effects, notices the shell necklace is missing.  

The marsh girl is accused of murdering the boy and goes to trial.  But in the end, the jury does not believe there is enough evidence to convict and she is let free.  She never returns to the town where she was shunned and accused of murder.  She does connect with the college boy and they live a life of research and love.  That is not the end of the story.  

9.       The Good Lord Bird by James McBride (2013) Riverhead Books

The telling of John Browns last few years from the point of view of a young negro boy rescued/kidnapped and mistaken for a girl because of his size.  It details the lives of John Browns’ sons and their faith-free following of the man who considered himself following God’s will.  A feather from the Good Lord Bird (an extra-large ivory billed woodpecker) is considered good luck, but the bird does not save Fredrick Brown, who is a little slow, and ends-up dead from another preacher.

10.   Montparnasse by Thierry Sagnier (2019) Apprentice House (11/8)

Life for the artists and expatriates at the end of The Great War, living and loving in Paris.  The next time I visit Paris, I must go to Montparnasse and see if I can drink up half as much atmosphere as abounds in Thierry’s masterful rendition. 

He paints a vivid portrait of how amazing and complex a time it was to be in Paris.  It was a new beginning for the country after the war was over. And it was a terribly sad time, so many people faced terrible losses of life and limb. 

We see this through the eyes of American’s who have chosen to stay; a strong woman who cajoles her husband into staying, resulting in his becoming rich and possibly in each of them finding their own way to live and love, and through the eyes of a serial killer, who lures war widows for their money.  And through the landscape of the artists who lived in Montparnasse at the time.

This novel affects me both as a reader, drinking up the beautiful language and story, and as a writer.  I’m encouraged to follow Thierry’s/M. Renoir’s advice and write every day, even if it to describe a lemon, in its myriad aspects.

Best Books I Read in 2018:

This year I read 80 books.  These are what I consider the best of the list (in the order I read the books).

1. Maus I a Survivor's Tale - My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman (1991) Pantheon Books

The Special Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel about his father and his experiences in World War II going from a successful garment salesman, then evading capture and then into Aushwitz

Maus II a Survivor's Tale - And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman  (1991) Pantheon Books

A continuation of the earlier work that tells of his father's life in the camps until he is reunited with his wife after the war.

2. Mr. Majestyk by Elmore Leonard (2002) Mariner Books

All he wants to do is get his melon crop harvested and to market.  But he let his temper get away from him when a local hoodlum tries to drive off his workers and replace them with drunks.  He ends up on a bus with a killer whose crew tries to break him out and now he has to deal with that man.

3. The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill (2016) Algonquin

Each year, in the Protectorate, a child must be sacrificed to the Witch.  But one year, the witch, who feeds each child starlight and takes them to a better place and finds good parents, accidentally feeds one child from the moon and keeps her because her magic will be too wild for most people to control.

4. Artemis by Andy Weir (2017) Ballantine Books

Mr. Weir is back, this time using the actual name of a NASA project to establish a colony on the moon.  A girl living on the moon in the Artemis colony, saves her city by breaking all the rules 

5. The Neon Rain by James Lee Burke (1987) Henry Holt & Co.

Dave Robicheaux, a Lieutenant in the New Orleans Police department struggles with the death of a young woman in another Parrish that is written-off as a drowning death.  He is sure it was a murder and checking into the case causes a lot of bad guys to come out of the woodwork - even his partner.  When his brother gets shot, he goes after the mobster who was supposed to be his friend.

6. Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews (2013) Scribner

A ballerina is intentionally injured by a competitor and wreaks her revenge.  Then she is offered a way to keep her mother in their apartment by becoming a spy. She is sent to Sparrow school, where she is trained to seduce foreign diplomats so they can be blackmailed to give up state secrets.

7. Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King (2014) Scribner

Bill Hodges, a retired detective is contacted by the mass murderer about his last case.  Only now, the killer plans on something much more elaborate and deadly.

8. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (2013) William Morrow

An old man returns to his childhood neighbor's home and remembers that the pond in the back was called the ocean.

Excellent writing from a master storyteller - it includes the mythic triple goddess of the maiden, the mother and the crone.  Gaiman has mixed mythology, fantasy and reflection of the fears of our childhood and the cost of the mistakes in our lives.  It starts with a wonderful epigraph: "I remember my own childhood vividly . . . I knew terrible things.  But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew.  It would scare them."  -Maurice Sendak

9. The Women in the Castle by Jessica Shattuck (2017) William Morrow

Three very different women live through World War II in a castle in Germany.

10. The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith aka J K Rowling (2013) Mulholland Books

Cormorant Strike, a disabled British veteran MP is now a private detective with a ruined love life, enough bills to sink his business and a new temp receptionist.  He’s also the son of a rock star.  A client wants him to find the murderer of their famous model sister, whom has been ruled a suicide.