Another year, another stack of great books to read. Jeffrey Brown talked with Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, and author Ann Patchett about their top picks this year.
Fiction
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
“It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is a sweeping epic about two young people who are both from the same small town in India. They are living in the States. And when they’re in the States, they feel too Indian. And when they go home to India, they feel too American. And this is the story of how they slowly wind their way to one another and maybe cure their loneliness. Kiran Desai is a brilliant, all encompassing writer, and I love this book.”
– Ann Patchett
The Antidote by Karen Russel
“Nobody does the old weird America better than Karen Russell. This novel is bookended by two real events, an epic dust bowl storm and an epic flood in 1935 in Nebraska. And in the middle is our main character, a prairie witch called The Antidote, who holds people’s memories that they otherwise can’t contain.”
-Maureen Corrigan
Heart the Lover by Lily King
“It’s a follow-up to ‘Writers & Lovers,’ but Lily King is such a brilliant designer of narrative that you don’t have to have read the first novel to really fall in love with this one. It’s about a love triangle at a college campus in the nineteen eighties, and it follows our main character, a woman nicknamed Jordan, as she tries to pull her life together in the decades afterwards.”
-Maureen Corrigan
Non-fiction
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
“Arundhati Roy burst into the literary scene in 1996 with her international best-selling booker prize winning ‘The God of Small Things,’ which sold over six million copies. This is the story about her relationship with her brilliant and difficult mother, Mary Roy, but that’s really only about 15% of the book. The rest of it is about Arundhati Roy’s life. She was an architect, she was an actress, she was a screenwriter, but more than anything, she was a political activist. This is an amazing book. And do yourself the biggest favor when you’ve finished reading it, go back and reread ‘The God of Small Things.’ And you can just see what stories you can tell in nonfiction and in fiction and how they overlap.”
– Ann Patchett
A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction by Elizabeth McCracken
“There are so many people on your holiday list who want to be writers. And this book is wonderfully different. It’s a lot edgier than most books about how to write. It’s very truthful. And I find that almost any time there is a terrific debut author, a novel that I really love, Elizabeth McCracken has been that person’s teacher. And she has wonderful, wonderful tough love, direct, and very funny advice on how to be the writer you want to be.”
– Ann Patchett
Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families by Judith Ann Giesberg
“Judith Giesberg is a historian. In 2017, with a lot of her research grad students, she constructed a website, the Last Seen website, that gathered together every ad they could find, placed by formerly enslaved people looking for their family members who were sold away. This book focuses on 10 of those ads. It really deepens our understanding of the lived experience of slavery.”
–Maureen Corrigan
Bread of Angels by Patti Smith
“Patti Smith’s latest memoir celebrates the 50th anniversary of her landmark album, ‘Horses.’ Patti Smith is such an American original, and this book really focuses more, goes back to her childhood, but also on her marriage to Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, another musician. Her prose is both filled with poetry, but also this rough authenticity, and I love her.”
-Maureen Corrigan
Children’s Books
If We Were Dogs by Sophie Blackall
“This is about two people who are having a conversation. ‘Hey, what would we be like if we were dogs? What would our relationship be like?’ This is the answer. It turns out one of the people doesn’t want to be a dog. We cannot keep this book in the store. And not only do parents love reading it to children, the children are going crazy for this book.”
– Ann Patchett
The Norendy Tales Trilogy by Kate DiCamillo
“These are three very tiny little books by Kate DiCamillo, three very short novels put together in a boxed set. They are a little bit fairy tale, very imaginative, very beautiful. They all have a full arc. You could read them to a young child. I think children up to 14 would read them to themselves and really enjoy them. But here’s the thing. I just gave this to a friend of mine who is a 93-year-old Catholic nun. She said it was the best book, set of books she’d ever had. She loved them. So don’t think that these are just children’s books for children. They are for everyone.”
– Ann Patchett
Hidden Gem
Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade
“I didn’t think there was a lot left to learn about Gertrude Stein. A new biography. Somehow Gertrude Stein inspires, I think, almost an obsessive investigatory zeal in her biographers. And I read this at night before I went to sleep, like a detective novel. It goes deep into Stein’s life in Paris and of course her relationship with Alice B. Toklas, but also the afterlife, how her reputation has been constructed, reconstructed. It’s fascinating.”
-Maureen Corrigan
Best Book to Give as a Gift
Christmas on Jane Street by Billy Romp and Wanda Urbanska
“I came across this book in an independent bookstore in Greenwich Village last year called Three Lives. Yay for independent bookstores! It was on prominent display. It was first published in the 1990s. It’s a memoir by Billy Romp writing about the nearly 20 years that he and his family would drive down from Vermont the day after Thanksgiving and sell Christmas trees in Greenwich Village up until Christmas Eve. It’s a lovely book about the communities that exist in big cities that oftentimes we are so unaware of.”
-Maureen Corrigan
Dog Show by Billy Collins
“A collection of Billy’s dog poems throughout his career, beautifully illustrated. If you love poetry, if you would like to love poetry, if you’ve ever loved a dog, this would be such a terrific book.”
– Ann Patchett
Book You Could Not Live Without
Buckeye by Patrick Ryan
“This is just such a terrific novel. It goes from the First World War through Vietnam showing the effects of war and love, war and peace, shall we say, on a small Ohio town. This is a book that women will love, that men will love, that you know, if you have someone on your list who says, ‘Oh, I only read nonfiction,’ they still will love this book. It really meets everyone’s needs.”
– Ann Patchett
Who Is Government? by Michael Lewis
“It explains what people in our government are doing. And it tells such terrific stories of public service, and this is what we need.”
– Ann Patchett
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