My Top Ten List, with Contest Winners

Thanks to everyone who played along with my Top  Ten Books contest! Here’s the real list of my favourite books of 2011:

10. Caleb’s Crossing, by Geraldine Brooks.

9. Far to Go, by Alison Pick.

8. Rin Tin Tin, by Susan Orlean.

7. When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead.

6. Maus, by Art Spiegelman.

5. Between Mothers and Sons, edited by Patricia Stevens.

4. The Ghost Brush, by Katherine Govier

3. Bossypants, by Tina Fey.

2. Planting Dandelions, by Kyran Pittman

1. 11/22/63, by Stephen King.

I said I would pick four winners, but due to some behind-the-scenes factors as I analyzed the responses (basically that I got five people with the correct list who replied within a very short time of each other), I decided to go with five winners instead. And they are …

Inkslinger, who gets a copy of my Biblical Fiction Prize Pack (Esther; Deborah &  Barak; Lydia; James)

Ruth and Cindy, who each get a copy of my Historical Fiction Prize Pack (The Violent Friendship of Esther Johnson; By the Rivers of Brooklyn; That Forgetful Shore)

Lesley, who gets a copy of The Chronicles of Uncle Mose by Ted Russell (not on the Top Ten list, but one of the books I reviewed this year)

Kristin, who wins a copy of Far to Go by Alison  Pick.

Thanks for playing, and happy reading in 2012! I’ll be back with some more reviews in a week or so.

2011: The Reading Year in Review (and Yes, There’s a Contest)

On the first day of the new year, it’s time as always to take a look back at books I read in 2011. I don’t feel 2011 was a particularly great reading year for me, unlike 2010 where I read so many absolutely wonderful books that I had a really hard time narrowing it down to a Top 10 list. In 2011, for one thing, I only read 68 new books – significantly fewer than the 80-100 I normally read in a year. There were a couple of contributing factors: a period during the winter when I was deep in researching and writing That Forgetful Shore, and reading only books that were relevant to that research; the entire month of June sacrificed to the Game of Thrones series, which I did like a lot, but not enough to take my breath away; also the fact that my e-reader died in May and I was getting by until November with borrowing either Jason’s or Emma’s Kobos, reading on my phone, and checking out the odd paper book from the library. It was a patchwork solution that didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, especially during our three-week vacation, and I didn’t feel I was really back on track, book-wise, till I got my Blackberry Playbook in November.

Despite that, there were some very good books in this year’s list. I read 45 fiction and 23 non-fiction books; 26 books were written by men and 42 by women. In both those cases the proportions are about what they usually are.

So, what are my ten favourite books of the year? I narrowed it down fairly quickly to eleven, and then debated all day over which one to knock off to make it an even ten. It’s always pretty arbitrary.

As per usual for the last few years, I’m not going to just give you the list. No, I’m going to give you clues to the list, and you can search here through my archived reviews for the year, or anywhere else on the web (or dip into your own vast well of book-knowledge) to figure out which ten books made the list. If you think you have the list figured out, email me at trudyj65@hotmail.com (I’ve disabled comments on this post so you can’t accidentally post the list here and spoil it for other people).

This year I will pick four winners (probably the first four correct lists, unless I get a vast amount of entries in which case I might just draw four at random) and I will be giving four prizes.  Two of the winners will get to pick their own favourite book from my Top Ten list (you have to actually pick one; just saying “Pick one you think I’ll like!” has not always given good results in the past). The other two lucky winners will get prize packs of my books (you can visit my writing page if you want to know more about them). The Historical Fiction Prize Pack consists of three books by me: That Forgetful Shore, By the Rivers of Brooklyn, and The Violent Friendship of Esther Johnson. The Biblical Fiction Prize Pack includes four books: Esther: A Story of Courage; Deborah & Barak; Lydia: A Story of Philippi, and James: the Brother of Jesus.

When you send in your entry, be sure to let me know which prize you’d like if you win!

Without further ado, here are the clues to my top ten books of the year:

10. Educational opportunities for Native Americans in colonial New England? I didn’t think I was interested, but … the right writer can draw me right in.

9. Just another Holocaust novel — but its intense personal focus makes it so much more.

8. Here’s another, “Didn’t think I was interested, but ….” This time, it was a non-fiction writer who made me fall in love with a long-dead German shepherd.

7. Supposed to be a young-adult novel, but this time-travel story fascinated me more than it did my eleven-year-old daughter.

6. I’m not normally hooked by graphic novels, but this one — yes. And it’s also “just another Holocaust story” … but so much more.

5. A collection of essays? Not my usual reading choice, but these witty, thoughtful women writers caused me to race through the book in a day.

4. Beautiful historical fiction, again about a subject I didn’t think I was fascinated by. Japanese painting? Oh yes!

3. I love her on TV so what’s not to love about her book?

2. Breezy, funny, wonderful memoir by an ex-patriate Newfoundlander.

1. I like this author’s writing, but I usually dislike his subject matter. This time I loved it all, making this weighty tome my favourite book of the year.

Remember, if you think you’ve figured out all the books, email me your list along with a note about which prize you’d like to receive, and if you’re one of the lucky four I’ll be sending you a book or maybe even a whole package of books! Contest closes 12:00 midnight, Newfoundland Standard Time, Friday January 6, 2012.

Rin Tin Tin, by Susan Orlean

For me, one of the marks of a truly great writer, fiction or non-fiction, is their ability to make me care passionately about a subject I didn’t think I cared about at all before picking up the book. Susan Orlean’s Rin Tin Tin illustrates this more vividly than any book I’ve read this year.

Yes, I’m a dog person, but I’ve never been interested in German shepherds, or famous movie/TV dogs (if I were, I probably would have opted to read a book about Lassie, because at least I like collies), or the era of silent film. In fact, I had only the vaguest sense that Rin Tin Tin was  a German shepherd who appeared in movies and TV — unlike Susan Orlean, I didn’t grow up watching Rin Tin Tin on TV. Until this book coincided time-wise with the release of the movie Tintin, I used to get Tintin and Rin Tin Tin mixed up in my head, knowing that one was a dog and one wasn’t, but not really being more aware than that.

I did know, however, that Susan Orlean is the kind of writer who can make you fascinated with her subjects, and picking up the book to glance through it convinced me I had to give it a try. As a result, I had a fantastic time learning about the life story of the original Rin Tin Tin, a German shepherd dog found on a World War One battlefield and brought back to the US by a soldier named Lee Duncan. Rinty (as he was often called), trained by Duncan, went on to become a star of silent movies. Later, after his death, Rin Tin Tin’s name and iconic image continued in a series of other dogs, some directly descended from him. Rin Tin Tin reached his widest audience in the 1950s with the children’s television show bearing his name.

There’s so much more to this story than that thumbnail sketch can capture – information about silent movies, early television, dog breeding, the use of dogs in wartime, the changing role of dogs in American life over the twentieth century, the passionate obsessions of people like Lee Duncan, who was determined to make his dog famous, and Bert Leonard, who was determined to keep Rin Tin Tin on television and film. Along the way Orlean admits that by researching and writing about people who were obsessed with Rin Tin Tin, she has in fact become one of those people herself. Since she is a dog owner and dog lover, I was very surprised that the book didn’t with her getting a German Shepherd pup from the Rin Tin Tin line for herself. But perhaps she’ll further her contribution to the Rinty legacy in another way: a recurring theme throughout the book is how badly both Duncan and Leonard wanted to see a feature film made about the real Rin Tin Tin and his story. That movie never got made despite numerous attempts, but now that Orlean, who’s already had one nonfiction book turned into a sucessful movie (The Orchid Thief/Adaptation) has written a best-seller about him … who knows?

No question, if there was a movie, I’d go see it. Because Susan Orlean has now made me fascinated with Rin Tin Tin. And that, boys and girls, is what good writing does.

The Virgin Cure, by Ami McKay

The Virgin Cure is another gripping, well-researched glimpse into the past lives of women by the author of The Birth House. This time McKay’s subject matter is the lives of street children, particularly young girls forced into prostitution, in late nineteenth-century New York. The story centres around Moth, a twelve-year old girl who leaves her tenement-dwelling, indigent mother to go into service, but eventually finds herself homeless and penniless. Prostitution appears to be her only option, but Moth is “lucky” enough to fall in with a brothel owner who specializes in training young girls to lose their virginity to well-heeled, carefully selected gentlemen.

Even in this supposedly sheltered environment, though, Moth is not beyond the reach of cruelty. The one person who truly wants to help her is Dr. Sadie, a young female physician who specializes in treating women and girls who have fallen through the cracks of society. Based on interviews I’ve read, it seems Ami McKay’s interest in the story was originally piqued by finding out about one of her ancestors who was a medical doctor in that very time and place — an unusual career path for a woman of that time. Though she originally thought of writing the story from Dr. Sadie’s point of view, it was Moth’s voice that came to the forefront as she tried to write the novel. I was interested to find out this background, because I actually found the young doctor the more interesting character, and wanted to know more about her — perhaps because hers was a perspective I’d never read about before.

That was one criticism I had of this novel; the other was that it seemed to end too quickly, and more happily for Moth than I thought was strictly believable. Even so, it was an engrossing read and a very well-done portrait of life in a particular place and time. It transported me, which is exactly what the best historical fiction ought to do.

11/22/63, by Stephen King

As I’ve explained over on my blog, I like Stephen King’s writing but dislike a lot of his subject matter (particularly the horror), so I haven’t really read a lot of his books. But when I realized his latest novel was about time-travel — a story about an average guy in today’s world who discovers a portal to the year 1958, and decides to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy — well, I couldn’t wait to read it. I love time-travel, and this novel is, hands-down, the best thing about time-travel I’ve ever read.

The time travel device here is never explained, and who really cares? But the way it works is pretty straightforward — the portal always takes you to a particular day in September 1958, and every time you go through the portal, every change to history that you made on your last visit is erased and history goes back to the way it was. Jake, the main character, takes up a dying friend’s challenge to go back and prevent an event that many Americans see as a watershed moment without which their history might have been much better — the Kennedy assassination of 1963. Before doing that, Jake has another challenge — he wants to prevent another, more private act of violence, and positively affect the life of one of his former students.

He has to do this twice, because after the first time, of course, he has to pop back to 2011 and see if it worked. And it did — sort of. Things didn’t turn out exactly as Jake hoped, but he figures he can fix that on his next trip to the past, when he goes back for a much longer visit. Five years, in fact — long enough to prevent the assassination. Also long enough to get used to living in the late 50s and early 60s — for the most part. He finds many things that he loves about the past — the cars, the music, the prices — but even after several years there is still jarred by the casual racism and sexism (and still misses his cellphone at crucial moments).

Pirate King, by Laurie R. King

This latest adventure of the aging (but still brilliant and surprisingly agile) Sherlock Holmes and his young wife Mary Russell finds Russell on an undercover assignment aboard a pirate ship. Well, it’s actually a ship owned by an eccentric film crew, in the process of making a silent movie based ever so loosely on The Pirates of Penzance. Russell is supposed to be investigating suspicious criminal activity that seems to follow this film company around, but when the director’s relentlessly quest for authenticity leads him to accidentally hire real pirates as actors, the original mystery takes a backseat to adventure. Holmes shows up, of course, and he and Russell combine their skills to solve the problem — solving the original mystery almost as an afterthought.

The plot’s a little flimsy here but that doesn’t really matter — this story is all about setting, with wonderful details about the silent-film era, and about character, as are all the Holmes/Russell novels. As I found the last two novels in this series (The Language of Bees and God of the Hive) a little dark, it was nice to have what was essentially a fun romp with lots of humour, and an adventure that never once left me doubting our hero and heroine would come through successfully.

Lionheart, by Sharon Kay Penman

Lionheart is the latest of Penman’s sagas about the Angevin kings of England, following her two volumes about Henry I and Eleanor of Aquintaine, Time and Chance and The Devil’s Brood. This book, as you might guess from the title, tells the story of Henry and Eleanor’s most famous son, Richard I of England, also known as Richard the Lionheart.

Richard I is a king with a larger-than-life legacy, loved by some and hated by others. This novel follows his career just for two years, during the Crusades and his unsuccessful attempt to capture Jerusalem. The cast of characters is large — large enough that I kept getting minor characters confused. The two most important characters, other than Richard himself, are his widowed sister Joanna and his young bride Berengaria.

Like all Penman’s books, this one is meticulously researched, well-written and sweeping in its scope. However, I do have to say with some disappointment, as I did with my review of The Devil’s Brood, that it lacks the emotional punch of her earlier works, The Sunne in Splendour and the Welsh trilogy. The Sunne in Splendour was a maginificent book about another controversial Richard, Richard III, and the main character of that novel has lingered in my memory for years as a haunting and completely believable human being. While Penman does a better job with Richard I than many other writers would have done, he doesn’t carry that same emotional resonance for me at all. There were times, in reading the book, that I felt bogged down in military and political detail, rather than carried along by the characters and their interactions with one another. I will certainly read her follow-up book, A King’s Ransom, when it comes out, but I really hope Penman can recapture some of the magic of her earlier books, because I miss that.

Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me, by Ian Morgan Cron

This is a great, fast-moving and insightful memoir by a guy who was drawn to faith at an early age — Cron gives a moving description of his first Holy Communion acting like a tether, holding onto him even when he let go of God. Cron subsequently loses his faith and finds it again, but there’s nothing easy or predictable about this journey. He vividly depicts the reality of growing up in a wildly dysfunctional family with an alcoholic parent, of struggling to define his own identity, of rediscovering God as a young adult but learning that faith doesn’t magically make all the pain and problems go away.

I found Cron’s writing absolutely engaging, often funny, and always thought-provoking. If I had one quibble with the book it was the part about the CIA. Among his many other oddities, Cron’s father worked part-time for the CIA. That’s an interesting little detail, but (to me) it was in no way essential to the plot of the story, and if it had been left out the book would have been just as thought-provoking and poignant and intriguing. The fact that the CIA is given such prominence in the title to me feels like one of those annoying marketing “hooks” used to convince the reader that there’s something quirky and original about this book that makes it unlike any other. Sure, you’ve read spiritual memoirs, but have you read one with the CIA in it? Thought not!

The thing is, there’s not really much about the CIA in this book, and what there is is mildly interesting – I certainly don’t mind it being there if it’s genuinely a part of Cron’s childhood experience – but the book doesn’t need that. It could be titled Jesus, My Father and Me much more accurately, because that’s really all about — a guy muddling through his messed-up relationship with his messed-up dad, to find a solid grounding in the love of his Heavenly Father. So if the CIA thing lures you in, that’s OK, but don’t be disappointed that there’s not more of it in the book, because that’s really not what the book’s about. It’s about a journey of faith and grace, through the mess we all slog through, and like all such stories when they’re honest (which is not the same as being strictly factually accurate) and well-told, it’s beautiful.

I’m looking forward to picking up Cron’s other book, a novel about St. Francis, because I love both his writing and the way he views God and the life of faith. Watch for another review coming … whenever I can get my virtual hands on the book.

Mercy of St. Jude, by Wilhelmina Fitzpatrick

I might not have heard of Wilhelmina Fitzpatrick’s second novel if I hadn’t had the good fortune to share a book launch with her. Mercy of St. Jude was launched at the same time as my book That Forgetful Shore, and of course “Willie” (as she introduces herself) and I did the polite author thing and bought each other’s books and got them signed. However, no politeness is required for me to give this book a good review — I genuinely enjoyed it, and found it gave a very believable glimpse into a particular slice of Newfoundland life.

The book is set in the late 1990s, at the wake of a not-very-well-loved woman named Mercedes Hann. Mercedes has been an unflinching model of moral rectitude to an extent that’s made her niece Annie Byrne and other family members resent her, though she’s shown unexpected warmth and kindess to Annie’s one-time boyfriend, Gerry. Told from several points of view, the story peels back the layers of Mercedes’ complicated life to reveal what made her the woman she was. Along the way, many secrets are revealed, some of them shattering. There’s a lot of humour in this book, but also a lot of darkness. You know how in some books there’s a deep, dark secret everyone’s hiding, and when you finally find out what it is, you wonder why it was such a big deal? This book is NOT LIKE THAT. When you find out the dark secret at the core of Mercedes Hann’s past, you can understand perfectly well why she and the handful of other people who knew, wanted to keep it a secret.

An Unquenchable Thirst: Following Mother Teresa in Search of Love, Service and an Authentic Life, by Mary Johnson

Mary Johnson joined the Missionaries of Charity as a teenager, in the late 1970s when becoming a nun was hardly a mainstream or popular choice for a young girl. Even her devoutly Catholic family didn’t entirely understand or support her choice, but Mary had no doubts: she was called to a life of service.

An Unquenchable Thirst is the story of her twenty years in the order and why she finally left — not just that religious order, but ultimately the church and Christianity as well. It’s a well-told, compelling story, though there are no shocking exposes of Mother Teresa or the Missionaries of Charity as some readers might be expecting.

Essentially, Johnson’s (or Sister Donata’s, as she was during her years in the order) vocation faltered on two of the three religious vows: poverty wasn’t a problem, but chastity and obedience were. She joined as a teenage virgin, never having had a dating relationship at all, thinking herself, as many teenage girls do, unattractive and unsexy, and assuming that giving up something she’d never had would be no problem. Of course, it turned out to be more complicated and that, and given her cloistered life it may not be surprising that her sexual awakening came at the hands of other nuns. Eventually, though, it was a relationship with a man — a priest — that made her realize she was cutting out a vital part of her life; not just sex but the ability to intimately love one other human being.