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[booksong]

Top 10 Books Read In 2016

Bringing this back again this year (and yes I realize March is now almost over, I’m a little late oops), because I really enjoyed putting together a list last year, and one thing I always love in a new year is looking back on the great experiences I’ve had with reading, and hopefully lining up some new recommendations from others to look forward to in the rest of 2017!  

2016 was a rough year, but as with so much of my life, books were there to provide comfort, knowledge, escape, and new friends and perspectives.  Here are my 10 best titles of them, in no particular order (long post warning as always because it’s me talking about books):

1. Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks

The experience of sensing things that aren’t really there has long been considered a hallmark of the crazy and overemotional.  And yet hallucinations have been startlingly well documented in all types of people, and neurologist Oliver Sacks has compiled a wide range of anecdotes, personal accounts and sources, and scientific studies of the various forms they can take.  Vivid, complex visual and auditory hallucinations by the deaf and the blind, near-death and out-of-body experiences, phantom limbs, unseen 'presences', supernatural-esque encounters, sleep paralysis, and hallucinations induced by surgery, sensory deprivation, sleep disorders, drugs, seizures, migraines, and brain lesions--Sacks takes all these bizarre (and occasionally terrifying) case studies and conditions and approaches them with an attitude of fascination, curiosity, and clinical appreciation. 

I came into this book expecting to hear mostly about things like LSD trips and schizophrenia, which honestly are probably most people's touchstones for the concept of hallucinations. And while there is a single chapter devoted to drug-induced hallucination (with compelling and pretty eerie first hand accounts from the author himself), Sacks barely touches on schizophrenia, setting it aside right away in his introduction in order to focus on other altered brain states I'd barely heard of but found deeply engrossing. One of the things I found most personally fun about this book was that you get tons of potential scientific explanations for a lot of strange phenomena that have puzzled and frightened humans for centuries. Why might so many different cultures have similar folklore about demons and monsters that assault or suffocate people in their beds at night? You find out in the chapter about hypnogogic hallucinations and sleep paralysis. What about things like guardian spirits, demonic presences, the 'light at the end of the tunnel', or historical figures hearing voices from God(s)? There are case studies about them not just in history and theology, but medical science too. Instances of people seeing ghosts, faeries, balls of light, moving shadows in the edges of their vision, or even doppelgangers of themselves? All touched on in this book as part of various differences, injuries, and misfires in people's brains, brain chemistry, and neural makeup. It's really, really cool stuff.

2. Captive Prince trilogy by C.S. Pacat

Prince Damianos of Akielos has everything.  He’s a celebrated war hero, a master sportsman, and the heir to the throne, utterly primed to become king.  And every bit of is stripped away from him in a single night when his half-brother Kastor stages a coup and ships him off in chains under cover of night.  Just like that, Damianos becomes merely Damen, robbed of his power, freedom, and identity—the newest slave in the household of Prince Laurent of Vere.  Trapped in an enemy country that shares a bloody history with his own, surrounded by people and customs that confuse, disturb, and disgust him, and under the total control of the icy, calculating and seemingly unfathomable Laurent, Damen has no way of knowing that the only way to return to his rightful throne and homeland will be through strange alliances, brutal battles and betrayals, chess-like political maneuvering and negotiation, and the fragile, complicated, impossible bond he will come to forge with the man he despises the most.

I knocked out this entire trilogy in about two weeks, and it would have been much, much shorter than that if I’d been able to borrow the last book from my friend any sooner (thanks again @oftherose95!!). The second book, Prince’s Gambit, even traveled across the Atlantic and around a good portion of Ireland with me in a black drawstring backpack, and was mostly read in Irish B&Bs each night before bed.  The series was the best of what I love in good fanfiction brought onto solid, published paper (and I mean that as the greatest compliment to both fanfic and this series); it had unique, complicated relationship dynamics, broad and interesting worldbuilding, angst and cathartic triumph in turns.  It’s a political and military drama, a coming-of-age and character story for two incredibly different young men, and yes, it’s an intensely slow burn enemies-to-friends-to-lovers romance full of betrayal, culture shock, negotiation, vulnerability, power plays, tropes-done-right, and some of the most memorable and delightful banter imaginable, and it will drag your heart all over the damn place because of how fantastically easily you will get invested.  Yes, be aware that there are definitely some uncomfortable scenes and potential triggers, especially in the first book (and I promise to answer honestly anyone who’s interested and would like to ask me those types of questions in advance) but in my personal experience the power of the story and the glorious punch of the (ultimately respectful, nuanced, and well-written) relationship dynamics far outweighed any momentary discomfort I had.  A huge favorite, not just of this year but in a long while.

3. Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

After her beloved father dies unexpectedly, the author returns to the Buddhist temple run by the Japanese side of her family, not far from where the Fukushima nuclear disaster claimed the lives of many and made the very air and soil unsafe.  She initially goes for two reasons: to help inter and pay respects to her Japanese grandfather’s bones during the Obon holiday, and to find some kind of outlet and solace for her grief.  But during her travels she finds more than she ever expected to about Japan, its belief systems, its values, its rituals of death and memory, and the human process of loss.

There are actually two non-fiction books about Japan on my list this year, and they’re both about death, grief, growth, and remembering.  It’s a coincidence, but seems oddly fitting now looking back on 2016.  Part memoir and part exploration of Japanese cultural and religious traditions surrounding death and its aftermath, I was fascinated by the line this book walked through the interweaving of religion and myth, respect and emotional reservation, and most of all the realization that there is no one single accepted way to mourn and to believe, even within a society as communal as Japan’s.  It’s something I find constantly and absolutely fascinating about Japan, the meeting and often the integration of old and new traditions, and of outside influences. Probably one of the most thoughtful and uplifting books about death I’ve ever read, and a great one about Japanese culture too.

4. Nevernight by Jay Kristoff

When Mia Corvere was a child, her father led a failed rebellion against the very leaders he was charged with protecting. Mia watched his public execution with her own eyes, the same way she watched her mother and brother torn from their beds and thrown into Godsgrave’s brutal prison tower.  Narrowly escaping her own death, completely alone and a wanted fugitive, Mia now has only two things left—an ability to commune with shadows that has given her a powerful and eerie companion shaped vaguely like a cat whom she calls Mr. Kindly, and a desire to join the only people who can help her take revenge: the mythical and merciless guild of assassins called the Red Church.  But even finding the Church and being accepted can be life-threatening—graduating from their ranks will mean more sacrifice, suffering, revelation, and power than even sharp-witted and viciously determined Mia could ever imagine.

Let me preface this by saying this book is probably not for everyone.  Both its premise and execution are undeniably dark and graphic: the cast is necessarily full of antiheroes with unapologetically bloodthirsty aims and a range of moral standards and behaviors tending heavily toward the ‘uglier’ end of the spectrum.  The violence and deaths can be brutal, emotionally and physically, and despite their pervasiveness they never seem to pack any less of a punch.  But I’ve always looked to books as my safe guides and windows into exploring that kind of darkness every so often, and this book did so extremely well. Kristoff has a way of writing that makes Nevernight’s incredibly intricate and lovingly crafted fantasy universe feel rich and seductive even with the horrors that occur in it (the dry, black-comedy footnote asides from the nameless chronicler/narrator are a good start, for example).  On one hand, you don’t feel like you want to visit for obvious reasons, but the worldbuilding—with its constant moons and blood magicks and fickle goddesses—was so fluid and inviting it caught my imagination like few other books did this year. I absolutely got attached to many of the characters (especially our ‘heroine’ Mia), both despite and because of their flawed, ruthless, vulnerable, hungry personalities, and I found myself fascinated by even the ones I didn’t like.  This was one of the books this year I could literally barely put down, and I can’t wait for its sequel.

5. Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War by Susan Southard

Ever since the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and ended WWII, the name of the city Hiroshima has become synonymous with the tragedy.  Nagasaki is almost always mentioned second if at all, almost as an afterthought, the city bombed three days later that was a second choice target.  But 74,000 people still died there, and 75,000 more were wounded or irreparably affected.  In this book, author Susan Southard tells the story of not just the day of the Nagasaki bombing, but the months and years that came afterward: of suffering and healing, protest and denial, terror and hope, interwoven at each stage with the painfully intimate and powerfully humanizing interviews and life accounts of five hibakusha survivors.  

This was definitely one of the heaviest books I read this year (in length and content), but it also felt absolutely necessary and was luckily very readable, thoroughly researched, and respectfully told.  You can tell just through the writing how much the author came to like and respect her subjects as people and not just mouthpieces for their stories, and dear gods the stories they have.  Nagasaki is definitely graphic, and horrifying, and achingly sad, as you would expect any book that details one of the worst tragedies in human history to be. But ultimately the stories of the hibakusha and Nagasaki’s slow but constant recovery are ones of hope and survival, and much as when you read memoirs from Holocaust survivors that urge you to remember, and learn, and walk armed with that new knowledge into the future, this book also makes you feel kind of empowered.  It’s been seventy years since the bombing happened, many of the survivors are passing on, and nuclear weapons are now sadly looming large on the political landscape again, so while it’s not an easy book, it was without a doubt one of the most important I’ve read in recent memory.

6. Front Lines by Michael Grant

The year is 1942.  World War II is raging.  The United States has finally decided to join the struggle against Hitler and the Nazis. And a landmark Supreme Court decision has just been made: for the first time, women are to be subject to the draft and eligible for full military service. Into this reimagined version of the largest war in human history come three girls: Rio Richelin, a middle-class California girl whose older sister was already KIA in the Pacific theater, Frangie Marr, whose struggling Tulsa family needs an extra source of income, and Rainy Schulterman, with a brother in the service and a very personal stake in the genocide being committed overseas.  But while women and girls are allowed to fight, sexism, racism, prejudice, and the brutality of war are still in full effect, and the three girls will have to fight their battles on multiple fronts if they’re going to survive to the end of the war.

I think this is probably one of the first non-fantasy historical revisionist series I’ve ever read that worked so incredibly well.  There are probably a million places author Michael Grant could have easily screwed up executing this concept, but I was extremely and pleasantly surprised to find my fears were pretty unfounded.  Grant (husband of similarly clear-eyed Animorphs author KA Applegate) has always been a writer who doesn’t shrink from including and even focusing on uncomfortable-but-realistic language, violence, sexuality, and real-world issues of prejudice, and he brings all these themes into Front Lines and places three teenage girls (one of whom is a WOC and another who’s a persecuted minority) front and center without letting the book feel preachy, stilted, or tone-deaf toward the girls’ feelings, motives, voices, and flaws as individuals.  It’s also obviously well-researched, and there’s a whole segment in the back where Grant shares his sources and the similarities and liberties he took with historical events in order to tell the story.  Especially in today’s political climate, it’s a powerful and engrossing read. And what’s more the sequel just came out not long ago.

7. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

In the year 2044, a single massive virtual reality interface called the OASIS has got most of the declining Earth’s population hooked into it, living out all kinds of video game and sci-fi fantasies.  But some of the more hardcore players, like Wade Watts, are exploring the OASIS on another level—hunting for the easter egg clues to a massive fortune its eccentric developer left behind after his death.  But no one’s been able to find even the first clue, let alone begin solving the weird and difficult puzzles and challenges that might follow…until one day, Wade does, and draws the dangerous attention and greed of everyone inside and outside the virtual world to himself in the process.

I’m honestly not that big of a gamer, or even someone particularly attached to or affected by pop culture nostalgia. Everything I know about most of the references throughout Ready Player One was picked up through cultural osmosis, and some I’d never even heard of—and I still thought this book was a blast, so take note if that’s what holding you back from picking it up.  The book has a lot of the raw thrill anyone who loves fictional worlds (video game or otherwise) would feel upon having a complete virtual universe full of every world, character, and feature of fantasy and sci-fi fiction you could ever dream of at their fingertips.  But it also explores, sometimes quite bluntly, a lot of the fears and flaws inherent in the whole ‘leave/ignore reality in favor of total VR immersion’ scenario, and in the type of people who would most likely be tempted to do it.  All the different bits and genre overlaps of the novel really come together very seamlessly too—it’s a little bit mystery, a little bit cutthroat competition, a little bit battle royale, a little bit virtual reality road-trip, a little bit (nerdy) coming-of-age.  And despite how much world-building is necessary to set up everything, the book rarely feels like it’s info-dumping on you (or maybe I just loved the concept of the OASIS so much I didn’t care).  Probably the most unashamedly fun novel I read this whole year.

8. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

In the 1980’s in Northern California, a little Hmong girl named Lia Lee began showing symptoms of a severe and complicated form of epilepsy.  The hospital the Lees took her to immediately began issuing their standard observations, treatments, and medications.  But her parents, first generation immigrants with their own complex cultural methods of interpreting and caring for medical conditions, didn’t necessarily think of epilepsy as an illness—for the Hmong it’s often a sign of great spiritual strength--and were wary of the parade of ever more complicated tests and drugs their daughter was subjected to.  Lia’s American doctors, confused and then angered by what they saw as dangerous disobedience and superstitious nonsense, begged to differ.  What followed was a years-long series of cultural clashes and misunderstandings between Western medical science and the rituals and beliefs of a proud cultural heritage, and the people who tried with the best intentions (but not always results) to bridge that gap.

I had never read anything you could classify as ‘medical anthropology’ before this book, and I’m kind of mad I didn’t because it was fascinating. Using her firsthand interviews and observations Fadiman creates an entire case study portrait of the Lee family experience, from their life in America and struggle with Lia’s condition and American doctors to the history of the Hmong people’s flight from Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos and their experiences as immigrants.  And as the best anthropological works should be, there’s also a very compassionate and analytic line walked that criticizes, explores, and accepts both cultural sides of the issue without assigning blame or coming out in favor of one over the other.  By the end of it, I think my strongest emotion was hope that we might embrace a new type of medicine in the decades to come (even though it might look grim right now); something holistic that can find a way to mediate between culture and science, doctor and family and patient, so that maybe everyone ends up learning something new.

9. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett

Crowley has a pretty good life for a high-ranking demon living on Earth.  He can cruise around in his monstrous Bentley, and do assorted evil deeds here and there to keep from getting bored.  He even has a pleasant frenemy in the fussy, bookshop-owning Aziraphale, the angel who used to guard the flaming sword at the gates of Eden a very, very long time ago.  But then the various denizens of Heaven and Hell get the word from their higher-ups that it’s time for the Antichrist to come to Earth and the End Times to begin.  The extremely unfortunate baby mix-up that ensues is only the first step in a very unusual lead-up to the end of the world, which will include the greatest hits of Queen, duck-feeding, the Four (Motorcycle) Riders of the Apocalypse, a friendly neighborhood hellhound, modern witch hunters, and a certain historical witch’s (very accurate) prophecies.

Reading this book was long overdue for me—I’ve read and enjoyed works from both these authors before, and had heard a ton about this one, basically all of it good.  But I only finally picked it up as part of a ‘book rec exchange’ between me and @whynotwrybread and I’m so glad I got the extra push.  Good Omens has a dark, dry, incredibly witty humor and writing style that clearly takes its cue from both Gaiman and Pratchett; it was really fun picking out their trademark touches throughout the novel.  Couple that with a storyline that’s tailor-made to be a good-humored satire of religion, religious texts, and rigid morality and dogma in general, and you’ve got a pretty winning mix for me as a reader. It’s endlessly quotable, the characters are extremely memorable (and very often relatable), and despite the plot using a lot of well-known religious ‘storylines’, there are enough twists on them that it keeps you guessing as to how things will eventually turn out right up until the end.

10. Scythe by Neal Shusterman

At long last, humankind has conquered death. Massive advancements in disease eradication, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence means that not only can people age (and reset their age) indefinitely, but they can be revived from even fatal injuries.  And a benign AI with access to all human knowledge makes sure everything is run peacefully, fairly, and efficiently.  In order to deal with the single remaining issue of population control, a handful of those from each generation are chosen to be trained as Scythes, who selectively mete out permanent death to enough people each year to keep humanity stable.  And when Rowan and Citra are selected by the cool but kindly Scythe Faraday as his apprentices, neither are exactly willing, nor are they at all prepared for what the life of a Scythe will come to ask of them.

Neal Shusterman always seems to be able to come up with the coolest concepts for his novels (previous examples include getting inside the mind of a schizophrenic, two kids trapped in a very unique version of purgatory, and the Unwind series with its chilling legal retroactive abortion/organ donation of teens), and not only that but also execute them interestingly and well. They always end up making you really think about what you’d do in this version of reality, and Scythe is no different.  Would you be one of the Scythes who gives each person gentle closure before their death? Glean them before they even know what’s happening?  Divorce yourself emotionally from the process altogether so it doesn’t drive you mad?  Embrace your role and even come to take pleasure in it? You meet characters with all these opinions and more.  It doesn’t lean quite as heavily on the character depth as some of the author’s previous books, which gave me some hesitation at first, but the world was just too good not to get into.  And the fact that it’s going to be a series means this could very well just be the setup novel for much more.

 Honorable Mention Sequels/Series Installments

 -Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo (‘No mourners, no funerals’—as perfect a companion/conclusion to the already-amazing Six of Crows from last year’s top ten list as I could have ever hoped for)

-The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater (one of the most unique and magical series I’ve ever read comes to a powerful and satisfying close)

-Morning Star by Pierce Brown (a glorious and breathtaking battle across the vastness of space starring an incredible and beloved cast kept me pinned to the page until the very last word—this was a brutally realistic and totally fantastic political/action sci-fi trilogy)

-Gemina by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff (I rec’d the epistolary sci-fi novel Illuminae last year and this was an equally gripping sequel to it—can’t wait for the third book out this year!)

-Bakemonogatari, Part 1 by NisiOisin (the translated light novels for one of my all-time favorite anime series continue to be amazing!)

If you made it this far, THANK YOU and I wish you an awesome year of reading in 2017!  And I want to remind everyone that my blog and inbox are always, ALWAYS open for book recommendations (whether giving or requesting them) and talking/screaming/theorizing/crying about books in general.  Or write up your own ‘top 10 books from last year’ post and tag me!