Memorable Books from 2014

I read a number of great books this past year, but as I reflect on my reading in 2014, these are the books that I find myself recommending over and over to others. All were published in either 2013 or 2014.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr  (2014)

“From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.” (annotation from the publisher)

A National Book Award Finalist

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant by Roz Chast  (2014)

Probably best known for her cartoons that appear regularly in the New Yorker, Roz Chast’s extremely candid autobiographical graphic memoir about caring for her aging parents should not be missed. With bluntness and humor Chast reveals the struggles of an only child doing her best to care for her parents at the end of their lives.

A National Book Award Finalist

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion  (2013)

Don Tillman, Australian professor of genetics, has never been on a second date. He is a man who can count all his friends on the fingers of one hand, whose lifelong difficulty with social rituals has convinced him that he is simply not wired for romance. So when an acquaintance informs him that he would make a "wonderful" husband, his first reaction is shock. Yet he must concede to the statistical probability that there is someone for everyone, and he embarks upon The Wife Project.

In the orderly, evidence-based manner with which he approaches all things, Don sets out to find the perfect partner. He sets up a project designed to find the perfect wife, starting with a questionnaire that has to be adjusted a bit as he goes along. Don's potential wife will be punctual and logical, most definitely not a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker, or a late-arriver. Then he meets Rosie Jarman, who is everything he's not looking for in a wife. She is also beguiling, fiery, intelligent, and on a quest of her own. She is looking for her biological father, a search that a certain DNA expert might be able to help her with. Don's Wife Project takes a back burner to the Father Project and an unlikely relationship blooms, forcing the scientifically-minded geneticist to confront the spontaneous whirlwind that is Rosie, and the realization that love is not always what looks good on paper. (annotation from World Cat)

The audiobook is nicely narrated by Dan O’Grady.

 The Rosie Effect, a follow-up novel, is due out this month.

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (2013)

This intriguing story alternates between two main characters. The reader gets to know 16-year-old Japanese teenager, Nao Yasutani, through the diary she writes...possibly her last words and thoughts. Nao, who is relentlessly bullied at school and also struggling to understand the severe depression of her father, is contemplating suicide. First, though, she intends to record the life story of her great-grandmother Jiko, a Zen Buddhist nun in her diary. But Nao also includes her own life story in the diary that eventually washes up on a shore in Vancouver Island, Canada.

Ruth, a middle-aged author (Ozeki gives this character her own name), discovers Nao's diary carefully wrapped in a plastic bag along with some old letters in French and a vintage watch. She begins to investigate how the bag traveled from Japan to her island, and why it contains what it does. Nao’s sincere teenage voice powerfully connects to Ruth as she reads slowly through the diary. Her desire to know what becomes of Nao is profound.

Time (don't waste it!), the meaning of life, spirituality, Buddhism, philosophy, and myth are among the themes examined in this unusual novel that begs to be discussed.

Ozeki masterfully narrates the audiobook version of this novel.

The Louise Penny Armand Gamache series

I am not an avid mystery reader, yet I have become completely captivated with the Inspector Armand Gamache mystery series by Louise Penny. A couple of years ago, I read the first book in Penny’s series, Still Life (2006). I liked it, but at the time I had not yet discovered the absolutely wonderful audiobook versions of this series narrated by Ralph Cosham. Over this past year I caught up with most of the remaining titles in the series by listening to them. If you are a fan of this series and have not yet sampled an audio version, I urge you to do so.

This leisurely-paced mystery series set in Canada revolves around Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, head of homicide of the Sûreté du Québec. The setting of many of the books is the small, charming village of Three Pines, outside of Montreal and not far from the Vermont border. As the Gamache series progresses, the reader comes to know the residents of Three Pines quite well—their positive traits, their flaws, their connections to one another. Each mystery in the series is intricate and unusual, yet it is the complex characters and their development throughout the series that keep drawing me back to these books.

This year Penny published the 10^th title in the series, The Long Way Home, the only title I have yet to read. 

Louse Penny has won 5 Agatha Awards and received many other accolades for her work.