Find below the favorite books I read in 2011, in no
particular order.
I read more than new
releases so some of these books were published before 2011.
These are books that I continually
recommended to my friends and family this year.
1. The Warmth of Other Suns:
The Epic Story of the America’s Great Migration by Isabel
Wilkerson
Wilkerson tells the story of the Great Migration by focusing
on the stories of three different people who migrated to New York, Chicago, and
Los Angeles. It’s fascinating
stuff. It covers both life in the Jim
Crow South and life in the north in the last half of the twentieth century.
I recommend this highly because the stories are so
involving. I live in the industrial North (metro Detroit), and I learned a lot
not just about migration and race relations, but also about how cities
developed in the twentieth century. For
a much more complicated take on race relations than you can find in The Help,
check out this book.
2. The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman
This is the story of two sisters in 1999: one a dot-com executive, and the other a
philosophy grad student at Berkeley.
It’s been compared to Sense and Sensibility, which I can see (two
different sisters and their love lives), but I think this stands on its own as
well. It definitely felt like a big
19th century novel with a large cast of characters and a rollicking plot. It follows one sister working in the world of
Internet startups and the other sister working in a used bookshop and living in
an environmentalist group house in Berkeley while in grad school.
I listened to the audio version for the first half, and then
I read the last half because I was anxious to find out what happened to the
characters. That’s saying a lot because
not all of the characters were likeable, but they were all complex people. I’m a fan of the
getting-your-life-together-in-your-twenties books.
3. An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by
Elizabeth McCracken
This is a very heartbreaking memoir about McCracken and her
husband coping with the stillbirth of their first child. It speaks so well about grief, hope,
friendship, and love. Sometimes I like
to read books or watch movies for a good cry, and this fits the bill. I like this book as a portrait of grief more
than I liked The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.
4. Mystery Writers Whose Stuff I Love: Laura Lippman, Deborah Crombie, and Louise
Penny
Laura Lippman writes the Tess Monaghan, P.I. series of
novels as well as stand-alone novels. Feisty, independent heroines are a thing for me in crime fiction,
and Tess fits the bill. The stand-alone
books I’ve read are very involving and sad:
they feel a bit like sociology.
My favorite Lippman book I read this year was The Last Place,
part of the Tess Monaghan series.
Deborah Crombie writes the Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James
series: they are detectives in London,
but the series takes place in other towns as well. Her books are very atmospheric.
Some are a bit more like a cozy since some take place in small towns/
villages, but they are not novice detectives.
Each character has emotional drama too, but it doesn’t feel melodramatic
for the sake of being melodramatic. My
favorite Crombie book I read this year was Water Like a Stone, which
takes place in the world of canal boats.
And, finally, my cozy recommendation in this roundup is for
Louise Penny, who writes the Inspector Gamache series of mysteries that take
place in the village of Three Pines, near Montreal. All of her characters are deep, involving characters, which is
refreshing after reading more hard-boiled detective fiction. I’ve only read two books in the series so
far, but they have both been wonderful. Start with Still Life.
