The Best of 2017

Looking over my reading for the past year, I am struck by how much of what I've read is utterly forgettable. Even books that, by title, I recognize as having liked are now, months later, reduced to a hazy memory.

There are, of course, exceptions. Shogun is far and way the best book I read this year - and as I said when I reviewed it initially, possibly ever. The details of James Clavell's masterpiece, the central part of which is the Anjin-san's adaption to and ascent within sixteenth century samurai culture, are still fresh.

Two other works of fiction also number among the best books I've read this year: A Man Called Ove and The Housekeeper and the Professor. A Man Called Ove made me laugh out loud more times than I can count, and reminded me of Owen Meany in all the best ways. The Housekeeper and the Professor is a totally different animal, and so very Japanese (yes, I acknowledge possible bias), but the contours of the sweet story of an amnesiac professor and the housekeeper who befriends him are still fresh.

As always, I read a great deal of non-fiction and here I had a harder time separating the very best from the merely very good. In the end, The Mushroom Hunters, Hidden Figures, and The Radium Girls take the prize. I loved the latter two for shedding light on historical episodes that were previously only shadows in my mind - and for acknowledging the contributions of the women who were central to the events. And Mushroom Hunters...well, who knew that one of my favorite foods could have such a complex and colorful supply chain?

I also want to acknowledge the excellent biographies and memoirs I discovered this year. Chicken Every Sunday, which warms my soul to remember, and The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind are memoirs of the first order. They could not be more different - the former offers nostalgic reminisces on life in small town America in the early twentieth century, and specifically of the author's childhood growing up in the boarding house her parents ran, while the latter is the hard scrabble story of survival amidst the famines and deprivation of modern-day, rural Malawi. Both, however, are simply wonderful. I would be remiss not to include Eve of a Hundred Midnights among my "best of" picks, as well. Written in the style of a non-fiction novel, Eve is essentially a biography of Melville Jacoby and, more to the point, the story of his flight across Asia and the South Pacific when the Philippines fell.

Lastly, I have to award and honorable mention to Celia Garth, if for no other reason that her pluck and spirit made her my favorite character that I encountered this year.

 And so, while much of what I read may have been (and may continue to be) rather forgettable, so much isn't, and that what keeps me turning the pages. Here's to another year of reading - may your New Year also include many happy hours of reading pleasure.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a weird book. It's not a bad book, per se, but it does require that the reader suspend rational thought a bit and simply embrace the story.

So: Jacob de Zoet signs on with the Dutch East India Company to earn his fortune and, he hopes, the hand of his beloved Anna back in the Netherlands. He arrives in the strange world that is Dejima in 1799 for what he anticipates will be a relatively short stint; through the corrupt dealings of the highest ranking officers, Jacob ends up more or less marooned on the tiny island that is the foreign trading post adjacent to Nagasaki (they are in fact connected by a closely-guarded and tightly-controlled land bridge).

On Dejima, Jacob's path will intersect with any number of characters, both Dutch and Japanese, from the wily cook and gruff doctor, to interpreters who may also be spies and the mysterious, badly disfigured midwife who captures Jacob's imagination almost immediately. Ultimately, he uncovers a dangerous secret implicating one of the most powerful - and dangerous - men in Nagasaki.

As I said, not bad, just improbable. Like, really, really improbable. (But perhaps no more improbable than the ship-wrecked Blackthorne/Anjin-san becoming a daimyo. Nevertheless, there was just too much here that was too improbable for me to really love this book. From the scene that allows Jacob (who is a sympathetic character, by the way, and one who's easy to like) to earn the trust of the magistrate to the secret shrine to the final resolution...well, bizarre might just be the best word for it.

Three-and-a-half stars.

The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power, and Intrigue in an English Stately Home

In The Mistresses of Cliveden, author Natalie Livingstone has re-assembled the history of Cliveden and the story of its châtelaines. The finished product alternates between the high born behaving badly and an architectural primer. This is neither wonderful nor terrible. The chapters on Augusta (mother of 13-colonies'-tyrant George III) and Harriet (BFF to none other than Queen Victoria herself) were the most interesting on a personal level.

As for the house, I wish Livingstone had devoted more ink to its use as a Canadian hospital during World War I, particularly as the hospital at Cliveden was not located within the house, as it was at Highclere Castle, but was actually a brand-new, specially-constructed facility located on the grounds. Unfortunately, the treatment of house-as-hospital is consistent with much of the book. Livingstone spends minimal time describing the routines of the hospital, the ways in which various family members interacted with it, or what the men themselves thought. In other words, surface deep.

This is frustrating because there are stories here, no question, but in focusing so squarely (narrowly?) on the house's mistresses, Livingstone's approach to many of them feels too oblique. Beyond the hospital example, above, I'd over the treatment of Nancy Astor's string of butlers and maids. Surely there's more to tell than what is written here, and I'd bet dollars to donuts it would add a little more color to tell it, but instead the reader gets only a handful of lines and the merest outlines of the story.

Final verdict: An ambivalent two-and-three-quarters stars. I've already said the book is not terrible, so fewer seems mean spirited, but there is too much could-have-been for it to merit more.

Circling the Sun

I likely would have read this sooner, had I not just finished West with the Night - Beryl Markham's memoirs - when Circling the Sun - Paula McLain's fictional account of Markham - appeared on my radar.

A bit of background first. McLain's The Paris Wife was one of the best books I read in 2011. I loved McLain's writing in general and her treatment of Hadley Richardson in particular. I may have had a similar reaction to McLain's treatment of Markham, too, had I not already read the latter's own memoir.

The writing is certainly there. McLain writes beautiful prose and, as with The Paris Wife, I found myself often stopping to admire her way with words. "I have fought for independence here, and freedom, too. More and more I find they're not at all the same thing," McLain has Markham say at one juncture. Simultaneously obvious and subtle, this sentiment stopped me in my reading tracks to ruminate how concisely McLain captured this thought.

Likewise, when I read in the narrative, "The beautiful rich who hoisted themselves up on vast parcels of land...They had their own rules, or none at all - which could happen when you had too much money and too much time." I again felt compelled to read and re-read and re-read again McLain's lovely prose. (And also to recall the multiple books featuring the well born behaving behaving badly. See White Mischief or My Life as a Mountbatten or Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey should you need any convincing.)

Ultimately, though, I felt that McLain gave Markham short shrift. Markham's life was one of firsts for women, from horse trainer to bush pilot, yet McLain chose to focus on Markham's personal life - failed marriages and extramarital scandals not least of all - which left me with a diminished sense of who Markham was and what she accomplished. And so, even though I don't find particular faults with the book itself, and enjoy and admire McLain's writing, I came away disappointed, feeling that I had read but a very partial account of Markham's life and times.

Two-and-a-half stars. (Caveat: see above. Anyone who hasn't read West with the Night will most likely - and fairly - find this rating overly harsh.)

Dimestore: A Writer's Life

I encountered Lee Smith's Dimestore on Bookbub and from the description understood it was a memoir of growing up in the hills of Appalachia. As such, I was expecting something of a cross between The Truth According to Us (fiction set in Appalachia) and A Girl Named Zippy (memoir of growing up in small town America mid-twentieth century). Initially, my expectations seemed in line with what I was reading: the early chapters of Dimestore are, in fact, devoted to Smith's formative years in Grundy, Virginia.

By degrees, though, Smith turns away from these early years - perhaps she felt she had already mined them extensively for her other works, primarily fiction - and the chapters become essays and the story becomes disparate episodes in Smith's adult life. I was far less drawn to these later essays, particularly the ones dealing with Smith's divorce, her subsequent remarriage, and the mental health battles of her grown son, than I was the chapters devoted to her girlhood.

I use the words "chapters" and "essays" purposefully here, for the first half of Dimestore reads like a story, and a very good one, while the latter half is disjointed and less engaging. For that reason, I came away with only a lukewarm liking of the book. I wasn't familiar with Smith's work prior to reading Dimestore, and having finished it, I'm not likely to seek out her other works intentionally, though I wouldn't go so far as to say I'd avoid her, either.

Devotees of Americana and Appalachian would likely delight in the early chapters in which the reader meets the spirited Lee with her "kindly nervous" parents and unique perspective on life in the mountains. The images of small town gossip, the general store, and the mountain stream running black with coal are acutely done, and early on wrote a check that the rest of the book just couldn't cash.

Two stars.

Murder for Christmas

Mordecai Tremaine accepts the invitation to spend Christmas in Sherbroome out of curiosity more than anything else. Almost immediately, he discovers that nothing is as it seems, and that more than a few of his fellow guests are cagey - if not openly hostile. There's no surfeit of Christmas spirit, that's for sure; what little there might have been disappears promptly upon the discovery of a body, clad as Father Christmas no less, at the foot of the Christmas tree.

I haven't curled up with an Agatha Christie-style mystery in some time and when Francis Duncan's Murder for Christmas showed up on BookBub, I couldn't resist. What better to read in the run-up to that most festive of days? And if Duncan's conclusion wasn't quite as surprising as Dame Christie's, there's no mistaking the genre. Similarly, the setting: not for a minute can the reader forget that this is England, in the years of sleepy villages, great houses, and roaring fires.

Readers who love a classic murder, and especially a classic English murder, will spend happy hours with Murder for Christmas.

The Married Girls

It's difficult to remember a more disappointing read. For most of The Married Girls, I debated whether to keep reading or call it quits. The story itself was rather meh for much of the book, plodding along, not so terrible or offensive that I felt compelled to give up, but barely holding my interest. Finally, some three-quarters of the way through, I was rewarded for my persistence: we had a truly interesting story! Only for Diney Costeloe to deliver one of the most frustrating, irritating endings I can think of. I nearly threw my Nook.

The set-up is this: Britain is finally emerging from the long shadows of World War II, with the war over, the blackouts done, rationing on its way out. Against this backdrop we meet Charlotte and Daphne, married respectively to Billy and Felix, and building new lives post-war.

Charlotte is a German Jew who arrived as a refugee on the Kindertransport and whose past threatens to overtake her in the form of Harry, who - somewhat confusingly - has an outsize presence in the first half of the book as the mouthpiece of an ailing mob boss, before Costeloe seemingly tires of him and sends him packing, quite literally. Although the set-up is that this is all hush-hush, none of this seems to be a secret from Charlotte's husband. Her story takes a turn for the dramatic, which improves the entire book...until the end. More on that in a minute.

Daphne, on the other hand, is a piece of work, with more secrets than I can count, but one big one that, if revealed, will clearly cause he neatly constructed life as the Squire's wife to unravel. For in Felix Bellinger, she has found a man with a title who can take her away from her beginnings in the East End, both literally and figuratively. Very early it's clear that Daphne has no affection, let alone love, for her husband, and it's this, as much as her secrets that threatens to overwhelm her at every turn.

Once events really begin to unfold, the story improves and does so until the final chapter which, instead of allowing the story to progress winds it up quickly, unsatisfactorily, and perhaps with an eye to a sequel. And although I liked Charlotte and don't mind the idea of knowing how her story concludes, it's not a sequel I'll be reading.

Two-and-a-half stars.