Fiction faves published in 2021

I'll start at the top with the Nancy Award winner, The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles. And not just because I'm from Nebraska! I'll be reading it again after the demand calms down a bit at the library.

More focused, intense, and beautiful than Overstory, Bewilderment weaves a warning about our endangered planet through beautiful observations of nature and a powerful father and son portrait.

Hell of a Book has a hell of a structure telling a powerful story in a fascinating way. Is this the layer of the onion, or the memory of the onion, or a dream of an onion?

In the undiscovered gem category, I am pleased to present one of the most enjoyable books of the year, Raft of Stars. It's perfect for fans of Where the Crawdads Sing. Two ten-year old boys think they’ve committed a horrific crime, and light off into the Northwoods of Wisconsin. Four adults track them in the forest and down a river, including a sheriff recently arrived from Texas and doubting his future in law enforcement.  The wonder, the ferocity, and the healing power of nature make this a great adventure in reading. A terrific story well told, with characters worth caring about.

In the mystery and suspense category I recommend Bullet Train and Velvet Was the Night. Yes, Barack, I liked Harlem Shuffle, too. 

Should you happened to be annoyed with the governor of the Lone Star State and his disingenuous  nonresponse to the FEBRUARY WEATHER EVENT and POWER GRID FIASCO, I suggest Melanie Benjamin's The Children's Blizzard. Benjamin does a great job describing northeast Nebraska in 1888. While this blizzard is the stuff of lore where I grew up, it is not as famous in other places. The novel is an appropriate read when you are wrapped in quilts with just a flashlight for illumination.

 
Honorable mentions:

David Eggers has an idea where to stick those algorithms.

It's weird calling a novel historical fiction when it's set during my lifetime. It's like hearing David Bowie in the grocery store...or Opal and Nev.

Even if you don't need to read children's book for work, I recommend The Beatryce Prophecy to brighten your life. Definitely the best literary goat of the year, and way more fun than Lauren Groff's Matrix. Keep your library card right next to your vaccination record, kids!

 © 2013-2021 Nancy L. Ruder

Ask your doctor if nonfiction might be right for you.

Let's think about advertising. There are many horrifying parts to the Sackler history revealed in Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain. As a person old enough to remember television before direct to consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals, I blame the Sackler family for all those awful ads with side-by-side bathtubs.

Sifton's cookbook is inspiring, and also a fun cover-to-cover read.

Tasked with writing about a golf book for work, I was surprised to enjoy this audiobook.  While Coyne travels in search of “the Great American Golf Course,” he also ruminates about the future of golf, what makes a great course or hole, the ties across generations created by the game, as well as the changes in America since his newlywed parents first drove across the country during the Korean War.  He meets and golfs with an assortment of interesting characters along the way. Fun listening, but it made me miss my golfing father and championship golf enthusiast mom.

The late author's autobiography, allegedly for middle grade readers, is a fascinating, detailed story of a horrifyingly neglected childhood during and just after World War II. I recommend it to adult biography readers.

Spending time with Saunders exploring Russian short stories made me a better reader without that old English class feeling of having the story "spoiled."

Or, how to get the Texas lieutenant governor's undies in a bunch. 

© 2013-2021 Nancy L. Ruder

Roll out the red carpet for the 2020 Coveted Nancy Award Winner!

As soon as I finished Interior Chinatown I had to start over and read straight through again. That still might not be enough. While the tv cop show screenplay format makes the book fun, the explorations of racism, marginalization, aging parents, and self-limiting interior monologues are heart-breaking and revealing. 

Mostly, I've been more aware of the way I flatten my experiences and limit my options by my own interior monologue. Now I am wondering whether all women my age become invisible, or if we allow ourselves to become Generic Gray-haired Female in the background.

Highly, highly rec! Of course. being the National Book Award winner for fiction might be almost as good as  winning a Nancy Award

Favorite childhood picture book...

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder

Living in Non-fiction 2020

When the whole year was a bad case of non-fiction, my reading choices veered to fiction. I do recommend three books, only one a new release.
Annoyed with the lack of historical basis in the satirical series, "The Great," I am currently devouring the lively, well-written, thoroughly researched Catherine the Great : Portrait of a Woman by Pulitzer prize-winning historian Robert K. Massie. I plan to read more about Russia and by Massie in 2021. 

The long anticipated Churchill book by Erik Larson was definitely worth the wait. Reading The Splendid and the Vile in midsummer gave me perspective on real sacrifices and deprivations compared to the minor inconvenience of wearing a mask in the Covid era. We are such a bunch of whining weenies!

Hampton Sides's 2011 book, Hellhound On His Trail, reads like a novel, but the research into James Earl Ray's assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is impressive. Planning to read James Patterson and friends' Last Days of John Lennon to compare the approach.

 

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder

A tree skirt of books and a train running round and round

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder

In the giant hamster ball

Three Coronavirus novels for your consideration.

Early in the pandemic when I could still concentrate I read Lawrence Wright's The End of October about a global pandemic as told by an epidemiologist. The fictional doctor's explanations and musings helped me get a grip on the terminology and the workings of our nonfiction virus. Over half a year later, I mainly remember the description of the U.S. vice president placed in a giant hamster ball to keep him safe from the virus, and to protect the succession of power. 

There are many persons of power and influence I've wanted to put in giant hamster balls this year, more for my protection than theirs.

Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks, considers the social aspects of a 1666 pandemic. How could a small village stop the spread of Bubonic plague to the rest of the country? How could the residents not destroy each other in the process? Told by a young widow who becomes a midwife and later n a healer, this is satisfying historical fiction with cautionary tales for our time. Rather than become a superspreader, the village self-quarantines at the urging of a popular pastor, but the experience brings out the worst in the residents' natures. The need to blame, to spread fake news, to hunt witches, and the struggles between religion, superstition, and science resonate in 2020.

The Silence, by Don DeLillo, is a very short, spare novel about a different cataclysm, a different type of disease, an existential epidemic that could happen any day now.

On Super Bowl Sunday 2022 an unexplained event makes screens go dark, and airplanes fall from the sky with no flight control, no technology. No media can bring an instant 24/7 news blitz about the cause, because there's no media. The novel is the best dark DeLillo distilled down almost to poetry. 

To paraphrase artist Paul Klee, science explains the visible, but fiction makes visible.

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder

Nominees in the Exploding Reptiles Fiction category

No year in my memory, at least not since I escaped Millard Lefler Junior High, has needed ravenous, swamp dwelling fictional reptiles like this one, 2020. 

Snakes, dragons, and alligators remind this reader that irreverent humor and satire are essential to good mental health in this messed up moment. Still, keep wearing your mask and using vodka hand sanitizer. And remember, next to bleach injections, laughter  is the best medicine.

Squeeze Me, by Carl Hiaasen:  Skink, the former governor of Florida, hides out from the world in the Florida swamp just a bit down the road from the POTUS golf course. Enter a female wildlife relocation expert and very hungry pythons.

Highfire, by Eoin Colfer:  Vern, the last-of-his-kind fairy tale dragon hides out from the world in the  Louisiana bayou bingeing on Netflix. Enter a crooked sheriff, and let the airboats explode.

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder

Nancy Book Awards

Don't know if my choices were not memorable, or if I have memory loss, but 2019 was not a stellar year for books. You might give these a shot.

Audiobooks

 
  

Fiction

    

Nonfiction



Previous years:
2018
2013

That's all folks! Better luck in 2020.



© 2013-2019 Nancy L. Ruder

Faulty memories

Uncovered the ugly truth of my childhood today. No, not Granddad, although he was a scary character. Not Grandmother's lavender hair. I am talking about those dining room drapes!

This is not the dining room of my memory. Geez! The curtains in this Christmas 1964 photo were sort of yellow-green and a euphemistic "ochre," with black brush strokes on textured off-white. The bamboo blinds above were faded orange-brown with an ever-present dust coating. The glass shelf above the curtains was a head-bump waiting to happen. What color were the walls? For sure the linoleum tile was the black-speckled crumb-concealer, as we had that for a long, long time!

Repressed memories on those self-help cassettes I listened to in the nineties were usually sexual and physical abuse. Melody Beattie and Gerald Jampolsky were healing bigger stuff than bad drapes. But I definitely repressed this aesthetic affront.

© 2013-2019 Nancy L. Ruder

Social media posts as picture postcards, just faster

Summer reading of the best kind--I got a postcard from my grandson in the mail from Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo. How awesome is that? Personal hand-printed mail that traveled across geographic space over ticking hours and minutes and days to land in my physical mailbox. Woo-hoo! Sting rays and bats and tigers, oh my!

I'm struggling with my lunch break reading of Gretchen McCulloch's consideration of social media linguistics, Because Internet.  I'm intrigued by our turbo-changing informal writing culture. My problem is keeping track of McCulloch's cohorts of internet and social media adopters: Old Internet People, Full Internet People, Semi Internet People, Post Internet People and Pre Internet People. Really, they just need catchier names. The important idea is that we are in an era of unprecedented informal written communication  activity. People who would never have picked up a pen or typed out a memo are communicating by text, tweet, and post. They are creating new ways to add intonation, layers of meaning, emphasis, breath pauses, and speech-mimicking spellings.

McCulloch compares Beatle George Harrison's postcards with brief messages and doodles mailed in the '70s with use of emoticons and emojis today. Brief informal written communication isn't new, but the number of people participating is vastly different. Doodles and tiny faces are just attempts to indicate mood in a tiny box for a message.

Across cohorts and generations we still have some gaps of interpretation and understanding. My "NEW fiction" may just indicate a special library shelving location, while my coworker takes it as a shouted criticism of her shelving efforts.

We may need to identify and acknowledge those internal critics, editors, and even mentors perched on our shoulders with red pens and twinkly star stickers. Who is grading us for spelling, punctuation, legibility, and turning in our work on time? How do we feel about what goes into our Permanent Record? On my shoulders sit toga-clad judges who happen to be my great-aunt Emma and Miss Helen Madsen from seventh grade English class.

I am often guilty of being too flip, too blunt, too esoteric in speech and writing. Social media is a complex Venn diagram of audiences -- those we have in mind when we post, those with access to the post now, those viewing the post in the unknown future, those lacking the Rosetta stone to unlock the meaning.

What about the sensory experience of texting or posting? I don't get the joy of twirling the display rack of color postcards  (5 for $1.00) in the corner of the souvenir shop. Across the generations I DO get the XOXOX hugs and kisses I received from my grandmothers via the U.S. mail.

© 2013-2019 Nancy L. Ruder

Big black cauldron

There's a new employee noon hour book club starting up. Employees bring a potluck dish using a recipe from a book, fiction or nonfiction. Of course, they are literary lunching on their own time, just want to make that clear.

Thought about participating. I really did. It was a long day, though, and the only two books with recipes at my skill level were from the children's room.

I can throw a rock in a crockpot. Stone Soup remains a classic story of sharing even in this ugly time of the president we do not mention by name.

The first chapter book I ever read that had a recipe at the back was Ian Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Since it is recorded on the library summer reading program log of 1966--which I still have, of course--I know when I read it. My mom wasn't supporting my desire to make Monsieur Bon-Bon's secret fudge, so I flopped on the living room carpet to read about the lost colony of Roanoke.

© 2013-2019 Nancy L. Ruder

Long-listed for [the coveted] Nancy Awards

In this year when I could not find a creative project to propel me, and felt the lack all year. I tried to fill the hole with books. Fortunately, there were some great reads crossing my desk. These are ones that have stayed with me long after the last page. Thank heaven for these books, fiction and non. In this dark year I am so grateful for sagas and modulated voices and atmosphere, for science and reason and introspection, for fresh viewpoints and researched history, for ambiguity, poetry, and scenic vistas, for close observation, moral dilemmas, context and humor, and especially for breathing room. The world is so much bigger and more beautiful than the shouting and harassing, the propaganda, the rats and the overalls.