The 5 Best Books I Read This Year
Another year of failing my Goodreads challenge has come and (almost) gone
Just once I’d like to know what happens when I read the amount of books I’ve set on my Goodreads goal. This year it was a goal of 48 books, roughly 4 a month. As of today, I’ve read 26. Meanwhile, I see some who have met their goals of 75 books read in 2023. Others have surpassed their goals, reading 68 books thus far when they set out to achieve 30.
I’m jealous of these people. It’s not as if my goal of 48 was impossible. It’s just that there are too many distractions. There are mindless games on my phone to play. There are mediocre shows on Netflix to binge. There are conversations with people. And perhaps the biggest distraction from me reading more books is, ironically, reading too many books. Or, more accurately, wanting to read too many books.
Ask my wife. The stacks of books around the house, the shelves overflowing with titles I’ve yet to read, it’s…a lot. I have a habit of buying books and adding them to my “to-be-read” list. I have a habit of taking my daughters to the local library and bringing home 3-4 books for myself when I’ve already checked out 3-4 books the previous week. And let’s not discuss my Libby app, which is where I borrow books free from the library to read on my phone. As of this moment, I have 9 books downloaded on it, two of them audiobooks.
It’s a problem. Call it ADD. Call it being over-eager. Call it vain ambition. All I know is if books were brownies, there would be crumbs all over the house and I’d have some serious health issues.
I suppose there are worse addictions to have than reading. I kick myself for not discovering my love of reading books until later in life. I had it as a child but lost it somewhere in my teen years when the forced reading of various novels dampened my view of books. Oddly enough, I’m about to go through The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with my homeschooled daughters. I don’t know that they’re as excited as I am.
The Top Five
My tastes are broad, though are largely settled in fiction. Which is odd, because I used to snub my nose at anything not based in reality. Fiction was for the dreamers, the lofty idealists who really believed they could escape the world through another world inside a book.
To those people, I apologize. I was wrong to doubt you. And as I spend time each day submitting my own work of fiction to various agents, I appreciate more the life of a fiction writer. Those who spend hours each day writing about people and places that only exist in their minds. It’s fascinating.
Anywho, here’s my top five. Note these are the best ones I read this year, not ones that came out this year.
#5: Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
“Sometimes I think high school is one long hazy activity: if you are tough enough to survive this, they'll let you become an adult. I hope it's worth it.”
As fun as having two teenagers honestly is at times, I’m also equally terrified. I know (only partly) that the things they’ll face as they grow into young women will be much more difficult than what I endured as a goofy teenage boy.
Speak is a story about sexual assault, but just as much about finding your voice. Finding the chance to speak up when you’re hurt, when injustices have occurred to your body, mind, and spirit.
I gave 5 stars out of 5 to this book. One day (soon) I’ll encourage my daughters to read it. As my review said on Goodreads, it needs to be required reading for every high school student. And I mean every student: the sweet innocent teenage girls and the teenage boys in hopes they won’t become wolves in sheep’s clothing.
#4: Stay True by Hua Hsu
“Friendship rests on the presumption of reciprocity, of drifting in and out of one another’s lives, with occasional moments of wild intensity.”
I wrote on my LinkedIn page back in July about Stay True. Some readers would label this book a tragedy, its climax coming when Hsu’s dear friend is brutally murdered. I’d prefer we label it a book on friendship, however, and only that.
Every friendship endures its tragic moments. It may (but hopefully doesn’t) involve murder, but certainly, the passing of time presents us with moments of reflection and even sadness on how our friendships have evolved. The loved ones we used to see with great frequency have transitioned to typed words on a screen that fits in our pockets. The miles separate us. Life pushes our boats into different streams and channels.
But real friendship doesn’t crumble beneath the heaviness of tragedy. The truth is even when our best friends perish, the very thought of time with them brings a smile to our faces. I’m thankful for a book like Stay True that reminds me of sweet friendships from my youth that still reside in my soul to this day.
#3: The People We Keep by Allison Larkin
“I say that it's amazing how much you can miss people you only got to be with for one tiny perfect bit of time; how a place where you barely got to live can be the closest thing you've ever had to home.”
Another book enveloped in the theme of friendship, The People We Keep follows April, a teenager with a less-than-ideal home life, on her trek to find what life has to offer beyond the hollowness of her hometown.
The theme of leaving is what stood out to me most, however. The abandoning of friendships, of lovers, of houses we’ve grown out of, these are the things that can haunt us. The book is set in the mid-90s, a time capsule of sorts, a time when saying goodbye was final. There was no long-distance texting. There wasn’t a chance to stalk an ex on social media.
Characters that aren’t always believable bother me, and I got a bit of that vibe here. Still, The People We Keep reminds me that even the most temporary of friendships, for better or worse, will stay with us forever.
#2: The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner
“If you're going to live, you might as well do painful, brave, and beautiful things.”
This year I spent nine months writing a 96,000-word young adult novel. I didn’t initially intend to write a book geared toward teen readers. But that’s the story that unfolded.
The YA space is weird. The vast majority of books are written by women, most of them having a romance twist or fantasy bend to them. There’s nothing wrong with those things, but as a man wanting to write beyond the puppy love of youth and not having any interest in Harry Potter and the like, I wanted something to model my work after.
The Serpent King is that book. It’s got everything a YA novel should have: romance, loss, friendship, humor, and emotional turns. Finding such a book written by a man NOT named John Green was a treat. (I’m a John Green fan, by the way, but he can’t be the only one out there.) Jeff Zentner’s work has pointed me to other terrific YA writers that I’ve learned from. And for that, I’m thankful.
#1: East of Eden by John Steinbeck
“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
There are books we read and wish we had discovered them years before. Perhaps in our schooling days, when teachers required us to read novels much thicker than the Sports Illustrated or Mad Magazine we preferred to read. East of Eden, for me, is not one of them.
Why? Because if I had been asked to read it, I would have thumbed through unread pages, found a Cliffs Notes version, and written a fluffy, mediocre summary of the greatest American novel in existence. My teenage mind wouldn’t have given it the attention it so deserves.
I haven’t read even half of the great classics from American literature. But I find it hard to believe one can hold up to the greatness of East of Eden. I’m already looking forward to another summer in the future when I flitter away the day on a back porch getting lost in the Trasks and Hamiltons. Their glories, their failures, their stories that mirror so many of our own. Glories and failures that add up to what our lives are. Incalculable loss, invigorating triumph, and many, many days balancing between the two. Like the book says, “Lord, how the day passes! It's like a life - so quickly when we don't watch it and so slowly when we do.”