The Best of 2014

In 2014, I cracked the cover of 66 books, making it to the last page of all but five. Using the same 15% rule that I've used in the past (2013, 2012, and 2011),  I should select the 9.9 best books. What follows is the best of my 2014 reading list - 5 fiction and 5 non-fiction - with two honorable mentions tacked on. Happy reading!

Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health
(reviewed January 20, 2014)
Jeanne E. Abrams reveals the extent to which elite, early Americans (George and Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, for example) were marked at every stage of life by death and disease. There is not one who hasn't lost a child or spouse to what we look upon today as a highly treatable disease. The denizens of Washington, DC, are laid low by malaria with alarming regularity in Washington's time; today, such a diagnosis in the city would be regarded as singularly peculiar - and alarming. Revolutionary Medicine also serves as portrait of how medicine has changed. In the time of days of the Founding Fathers, an educated person knew as much of medicine as, perhaps, their physician - who may or may not have ever studied medicine...

Twenties Girl
(reviewed January 24, 2014)
Sophie Kinsella has created a lighthearted masterpiece here. Lara Lington's life is a wreck, and that's before her great aunt Sadie begins haunting her, harassing her about finding a missing necklace, without which she cannot go to her eternal rest. Did I mention that Lara never met Aunt Sadie while the woman lived? Or that Sadie is also determined that, in addition to finding the necklace, Lara will also learn the Charleston? Twenties Girl is completely and utterly over-the-top. It is ridiculous in the best sense of the word and it is hilarious pretty much from start to finish.

A Walk in the Woods
(reviewed April 17, 2014)
Bill Bryson wins the prize for best travel writing in 2014. Bryson, you see, has decided to hike the Appalachian Trail. Rather than hike alone, he has persuaded an old high school buddy to hike with him. Never mind that they've not seen each other for some 15 or 20 years. No, it's until the buddy, Stephen, shows up on the eve of the hike seriously overweight and badly out of shape that Bryson begins to doubt his plan. What ensues is general hilarity. From nutty fellow hikers to those who pick up hitchhikers to innkeepers and cab drivers, Bryson brings color - and humor - to each day's long, hard slog.

Cutting for Stone
(reviewed June 15, 2014)
Abraham Verghese made me cry. Not little sniffles, either. He is by far the only author about whom I can say that this year. (In fact, no book has come close to imparting the emotional trauma of Cutting for Stone since Leila Meacham's Roses, which I read in 2010.) This is an epic, sweeping novel that travels from early-twentieth century India to mid-century Ethiopia and onward to twenty-first century America. It is the story of Marion and Shiva Praise Stone, but more than that it is a story of man's unparalleled ability to make terrible, terrible decisions, most often when blinded by love. The prose is lovely and wisdom - "We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot." - is more than page deep.

Elizabeth is Missing
(reviewed July 16, 2014)
Emma Healey's Elizabeth is Missing is not only well-written and well-constructed (often a challenge for books with parallel narratives), but it is also a stunning, poignant look at aging and dementia. Maud's friend, Elizabeth, is missing. Or maybe not: Maud can't really remember. But as she tries to make sense of Elizabeth's disappearance, memories flood back of another disappearance, this of her older sister Sukey who simply vanished in 1946. The reader can feel the losses and confusion mount around Maud and her daughter Helen, whom Maud is often unable to recognize. Healey creates a genuine portrait of a woman falling away from the world, which is terrifying in its realness.

The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street
(reviewed August 26, 2014)
Susan Jane Gilman's novel begins when five-year-old Malka Treynovsky arrives in New York in 1913. Three months later she's crippled in an accident and abandoned. Taken in by an Italian family, Malka becomes Lillian, and ultimately marries the handsome but illiterate Albert Dunkle, with whom she builds an empire of ice cream shops starting with a single truck. Soon, Lillian is the head of an ice cream empire and a celebrity in her own right, which is wonderful for her right up until it isn't: when she finds herself on trial for both tax evasion and assault. In the midst of this double ordeal, Lillian has decided to share her ordeal with us, darlings, and her voice is what makes Ice Cream Queen the masterpiece that it is.

The Great Match Race: When North Met South in America's First Sports Spectacle
(reviewed October 17, 2014) 
John Eisenberg has taken a single event - and a horse race, at that - that happened nearly 200 years ago and imbues it with a level of suspense and outsize importance such that the reader feels the outcome truly matters. In 1823, a southern horse and a northern horse squared off in the first mass sporting event in American history. That summer, the race to be the fastest horse was merely a stand-in in the decades-long superiority contest between North and South that would culminate in the Civil War four decades later.

The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War
(reviewed November 5, 2014)
David Laskin has painstakingly reconstructed the histories of a dozen young, fresh immigrants to the United States, all of whom - by choice or by chance - return to the "Old Country" as soldiers in their adopted country's army to face the horrors of World War I. In Europe, some men barely see war, while others become heroes. As with the Doughboys write large, most of Laskin's subjects make it home after the Armistice, but some do not. As much about the immigrant experience as the soldier's, The Long Way Home is illuminating on both fronts.

Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932
(reviewed November 29, 2014)
Francine Prose has crafted the most amazingly constructed novel I have ever read. At its heart, this is the biography of Lou Villars, a cross-dressing, javelin-thrower-turned-race-car-driver, Hitler revering, collaboratrice extraordinaire. What makes Lovers so remarkable is that Prose has written, essentially, the biography of a woman who never existed (Lou Villars) written by an author who never existed, the chapters of which are interspersed with chapters from the memoir of a heroine of the Resistance, the unpublished diary of another Resistance hero, famous works of an American writer and Hemingway contemporary, and letters to his parents penned by a Hungarian photographer. There are also chapters devoted to the memories of the owner of the Chameleon Club. And none of these people ever existed: this is not historical fiction based on actual people; it is fiction transported to another time. This book is a fabulous, dizzying ride at the end of which the reader can't help but wish to have been there, Paris's lover, if only for a moment.

A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana
(reviewed December 24, 2014) 
Haven Kimmel's memoir is written in a lighthearted and self-deprecating tone, and the many quirky characters of Mooreland, Indiana, (population: 300) come to life in the pages of Zippy. Unlike many other memoirs, this is a small story of a small life, but there is a touching sweetness to it, and a humor to which anyone familiar with small, Midwestern towns can connect. Fittingly, Growing Up Small is a small book, and a quick and happy read.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Villa Triste
(reviewed July 23, 2014)
Lucretia Grindle has actually written two books here, one historical fiction and one modern-day mystery, and woven them together rather ingeniously. Caterina Cammaccio is a nurse by day and a reluctant partisan (or Italian resistance fighter) by night in wartime Florence, which is simultaneously occupied by Nazis and overrun with fascists. Flashing to the present day, Giovanni Trantemento, an elderly and decorated former partisan, has been brutally murdered in his own home. As Florence's top cop, it's up to Alessandro Palliotti to solve the crime, but when another former partisan is similarly murdered elsewhere in Italy, it's clear to him that Trantemento's murder wasn't a mere crime of opportunity. I won't spoil the mystery - or how they connect - but I will say that Grindle has pulled off both parts of her novel beautifully, while creating an array of remarkable characters.

The Moor's Account
(reviewed December 27, 2014) 
Laila Lalami's novel is grounded in actual events: In 1527 the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition set off for the New World only to be beset by every trouble that could plague a sixteenth centruy explorer. Narváez, in fact, was carried out to sea on a raft and never seen or heard of again. Four men (of the six hundred or so who set off for the new world) did survive: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, and his Moroccan slave, Estebanico. Cabeza de Vaca returned to Spain achieved great fame with his account of their journey. The Moor's Account is Lalami's telling of this same story, but from the perspective of Estebanico. It is a beautifully written and captivating tale.