FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2017

I am chronically nostalgic, and thus, I love writing wrap-ups. I love reflecting on all the books I have read in a year. It falls into the same category of my love for the new year; New Year’s Eve is my favourite holiday because I love to reflect, and then start fresh. To me, it feels like coming full circle. Traditionally, I have tried to compile a top ten list of books at the end of the year, but in reality, I’m very particular about calling a book a ‘favourite’ and don’t often love ten books out of the reading year enough for them to qualify as such. This year, I’m abandoning the number system and going with my gut: instead of forcing myself to pick ten book and filling most of the list with four star books, I’m just going to tell you what my favourite books of the year were. Goodbye top ten list, hello simple favourites list. Here are my favourite books of 2017, most of which, by coincidence, I read in one sitting.

6. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (2007)
I'm a sensible reader. I tire easily and go to bed early, so when a book keeps me up until 2am because I have an urgent need to finish it all in one go, you had best believe that book is good. I have an exclusive list of books that have changed my life. There are only about five books on it, and a story needs to make me feel a very specific way after reading to make the cut. (Blog post on that list coming sometime in 2018. Possibly.) A Thousand Splendid Suns, without a doubt, is at the very top of that list. This book stills you. It registers somewhere in your gut, like a hunger, an ache; I have never grieved over a book, and yet over this one, I grieved, deeply and personally. Hosseini is a master of his craft. I wanted to reach through the pages and rescue his gorgeously textured characters from their awful lives, but I couldn’t, so I tore through the pages at top speed instead. A Thousand Splendid Suns gave me a unique kind of history lesson. Seeing the conflict and terror through the eyes of two brave and battered women forced automatic empathy, and I have always been known for being endlessly empathetic, so you can only imagine the extent to which this book moved me. It haunted me. I was still thinking about it days afterward. This is the kind of book that leaves an impact, and I am always on the hunt for more books to give me scars. 

5. Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng (2014) [full review] I read this book in a single day for the BookTube-a-Thon, but probably would have read it in just as short a time frame if not trying to read seven books in one week. I stray away from thrillers for two reasons: I scare extremely easily and don’t like reading things that creep me out; and ‘thriller’ strikes me as a rather adult genre, and I don’t particularly enjoy reading adult books. Then I read the synopsis and the first five pages of Everything I Never Told You, and I discovered a whole new world.Young adult thrillers are a thing, and I am newly -- and deeply -- obsessed. This is another book that stayed with me for days after I finished reading. (I am only now realising that I could say the same thing about every book on this list.) I found this book beyond brilliant. I was stunned by the layers of complexity, the kinds of themes Ng probed and the intelligence with which she interrogated them -- this book was smart, sharp as a tack, and I devoured it like it was food and I was starving. I struggled to write my full review at the initial time of reading because this book was so intimidating to talk about; would anything I wanted to say be able to fully capture the depth of this book, the absolute genius of its themes and the incredibly compelling tragedy of the story? I think my review ended up doing it justice when I finally committed to it, because it felt like an injustice for me to not write about Everything I Never Told You. It was the kind of book that begged to be written about, and I adore that kind of novel -- the call to write is a call to which I will always respond.

4. Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero (2014)
I have a ludicrously short attention span, and yet I read this entire book, without stopping, in one sitting. No stopping to check my phone, no getting bored of reading and switching over to Netflix; for five uninterrupted hours, Gabi, a Girl in Pieces had my undivided attention. Quite simply, I loved it: it was cute and fun and well-written, Quintero’s rendition of the teenage voice was both heartfelt and refreshingly believable, and it went to some pretty dark places without becoming pessimistic and bleak. I loved that Gabi was a poet. I loved Gabi’s poetry, how straightforward it was while still being poetic and lovely to read. I loved that she met her love interest in poetry class, and that they bonded over their mutual love of expressing their personal grief through writing. I found Gabi’s voice and personality so authentic. She was so open and honest with the reader, but then again, the novel was written as excerpts from Gabi’s diary; we were prying into a safe space where she didn't have to save face or act a certain way. We were privilege to her most private thoughts and fears, and I really enjoyed that about the novel -- not because I enjoyed maliciously snooping through her diary, but because it created a more genuine reading experience. We were intimately close to the heart of Gabi’s story and her growth, which I found invaluable to my enjoyment of the book. 

3.With Malice by Eileen Cook (2016)
If Everything I Never Told You was the key that unlocked the door for my interest in thrillers, With Malice was the gust of wind that blew that door wide open. I didn't consume this story; this story consumed me. It was like Jumanji; I opened the book, and it swallowed me whole. I was so invested in this story. Stopping reading wasn't an option: I had to know what happened next. What I loved the most about this book was Cook’s genre choices. Cross-genre fiction is not unusual, but there is something about the ‘young adult/thriller’ combination that felt so perfect to me. They gelled together so nicely, the melodrama of young adult intensifying the suspense and creepiness by which thrillers are characterised. As a result, this book felt a touch hysterical to me, but not at all in a bad way: in fact, I felt that it added to the realism of the story. The main character, Jill Charron, is an eighteen-year-old amnesiac accused of first degree murder. She may face a life sentence for a crime that she can’t even remember whether or not she committed. Would such a conundrum not make one a little bit hysterical? I also really loved the confusion of memory and reality in this book. Some argue that giving Jill amnesia was too convenient, a cop-out way of creating mystery. I understand that, yet I disagree. Jill’s amnesia added mystery and suspense, sure, but it also made Jill a really unreliable narrator, especially at the conclusion of the novel. I wasn’t sure what to believe, about the plot or about Jill’s backstory or about her scattered memories; I wasn’t sure if I could trust Jill at all, and as opposed to finding that unsettling, I honestly found it really exciting. I was afraid that With Malice would be really scary and too creepy for me to enjoy, but I think the YA aspect helped mellow out the creepiness, so I was able to have a tense but stressful, but ultimately super fun, time reading this awesome book. 

2. Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff (2015)

I have a confession: I haven’t actually finished this book yet. As of writing, I’m on page 467/599, and I won’t be able to complete the last 132 pages before the year is up. Yet I am enjoying it so much that I just can’t wait until December 2018 to talk about it. It’s possible that I’m jumping the gun. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. I bought Illuminae at the start of 2016 because it was 70% off in the closing down sale at the Whitcoulls in Sylvia Park. I had barely thought about it since, and had come to regret the impulse buy. I even came close to Konmari-ing it off my TBR. I’m so glad that I didn’t. Illuminae is so fucking cool. Initially, it gave me strong Ready Player One vibes in its tone and pace, a sure sign that it was going to be excellent (Ready Player One is one of my favourite books of all time, to contextualise the praise). When I was animatedly explaining the plot of this book to my boyfriend Luke, he told me that what I was describing was stock-standard sci-fi content, but I have read relatively little sci-fi, so this was all so exciting to me. I can’t believe how action-packed this book is so far, and how tragic -- I’ve been reading it on my breaks at work, and keep getting odd looks from customers when I gasp out loud because another awful, explicitly violent death has occured to a character to whom I had only just gotten attached. The main characters, Kady and Ezra, are incredibly charismatic, and the dynamic between the two of them is hilarious, touching, and heartbreaking all at once. In particular, I adore Kady. I adore Kady because she is headstrong and kickass and awesome, but also vulnerable and scared and terrified of being alone. I adore Kady because the dichotomy between the mask she puts on and the face she actually wears is fascinating --she is a huge badass who loathes the idea of being emotionally vulnerable, because being open with people so often leads to getting hurt. (God, can I relate to her fear of vulnerability.) I adore Kady because she is so raw and realistic. Ezra is sweet and charming and loveable, a big ol’ goof with a heart of gold, but Kady is just something else. Her love for Ezra keeps her going, even when all hope is lost. She is such a hero. I haven’t even finished this book, and yet I couldn’t resist going out and buying the sequel, Gemina today -- and the third book in the trilogy, Obsidio, comes out in March 2018. I know where I’ll be spending my paycheck.

1. Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire (2016) [full review]
Every Heart a Doorway is one of those books I normally wouldn’t go anywhere near, as I generally don’t enjoy high fantasy, but there was something about this novella that drew me in… (It was the cover. Look at it! How gorgeous is that?) I’m currently halfway through writing my full review and it is very loving and impassioned, so I’ll keep it short. This book was everything I expected, and so much more. Seanan McGuire is an author of extraordinary talent, not only with prose but also with storytelling and world-building, and her writing style reminds me of a very specific song from the credits of an episode in the first season of Gravity Falls (listen to that lovely, spooky song here -- it’s track 21). I expected to read a fantasy novella about a murder at a school for wayward children; I was not expecting a beautifully written tale about belonging and acceptance, a story so strongly atmospheric from the inside out that its pages swirl with wonder and magic, but that’s what Every Heart a Doorway is. I only wish that this book had been longer. Clocking in at 169 pages, Every Heart a Doorway squeezes an astounding amount of story movement and character development between its end pages, but the world and its lore are so interesting that I almost wished George R. R. Martin had written it; I could really have done with an extra 900 pages of unpacking the world-building and fleshing out the stories of the other characters. Goodness, am I glad that this marvellous book is not a standalone. 

BONUS: JANUARY 2018 TBR

• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
• The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
• Find Me by Romily Bernard
• Remember Me by Romily Bernard
• Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

Happy New Year x

EVERY HEART A DOORWAY by Seanan McGuire (2016)

"Because for the first time in forever, she'd felt like she was going home, and that feeling had been enough to move her feet, slowly at first, and then faster, and faster, until she had been running through the clean night air, and nothing else had mattered, or would ever matter again--"

THIS REVIEW IS SPOILER FREE

I started reading Every Heart a Doorway on Christmas morning. I finished it two days later. Not to be dramatic, but I literally have not stopped thinking about it since. I am what the kids call ‘whipped’. When I first heard about this book a few weeks ago, I didn’t pay it any significant attention; right off the bat, I knew it was a fantasy, and I notoriously don’t love the fantasy genre, so I safely assumed it wouldn’t be for me. Yet something drew me to this book; something told me that I wouldn’t regret giving it a chance. So I gave it a chance. Lo and behold, I definitely do not regret it. With four days to go until my Favourite Books of 2017 post went live, Every Heart a Doorway shot straight to #1. I have so much to say about this book. I’m going to jump right into it.

I had never heard of Seanan McGuire, the author of Every Heart a Doorway, before I picked up her book, but it turns out that the woman is insanely prolific, having written 30+ books in the last eight years. Christ Almighty, I’d love to be that productive. Her talent was evident from the first line. The prose in this novella… I hope McGuire quit her day job when she started writing, because her capability to wield and weave words is unprecedented, and she should not waste her time doing anything else. As a writer myself, I found McGuire’s eloquence nothing short of awe-inspiring. There was something almost magical about it, and the feeling that magic was glittering between each word lent itself perfectly to the atmosphere of the story. The mood of this book is quiet, mystical. Maybe it’s because of the cover, but reading Every Heart a Doorway reminded me of standing alone in a still, silent forest clearing, sunlight filtering gently through the canopy of trees, whispering wind and the faint flutes of birds the only sounds to be heard. (I clearly had a very synesthetic reaction to this book.) McGuire’s style of writing suited this tone so well. Her words are so precisely chosen and arranged, yet they don’t feel stiff or unyielding; they feel special, and careful, and lovely. They sing in harmony with the atmosphere of the story. There’s being a talented writer, and then there’s being so talented that your writing becomes not simply the mode of storytelling, but a part of the ambience, and I’ve never read a book where the genre and the writing style are such a match made in heaven.

Every Heart a Doorway is a story about belonging, and I think the title of the book captures this idea perfectly. Reminiscent of The Chronicles of Narnia and the wardrobe to another world, the characters in Every Heart a Doorway have walked through magical portals called ‘doors’ and discovered marvellous worlds beyond them. Similar to Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, however, McGuire’s novella doesn’t take place in a fantasy land; it takes place in a real world, and follows characters who have been forced back through their doors, turfed out of their new homes, and who now need to readjust to their old, unfulfilling lives. I found the lore surrounding the doors especially intriguing. A door would not open for just anyone. One could not share their door with another person, could not invite their friends to visit their world or, indeed, visit anyone else’s; your door belonged to you and you alone, because your door understood you. Your door was tailored to you, knew you better than anyone else; the ‘real world’ was your de facto home, but your door led you to the world where you could finally discover and become the truest version of yourself. Every heart was a doorway, and every doorway was for only one heart. It sounds so isolating and lonely, yet also so uplifting and wistful. To belong so innately, so irrevocably… it only makes sense that the children in the story wanted more than anything else to find their doors again.

And, of course, the thing that made me gasp out loud and almost drop the book: the main character of Every Heart a Doorway is asexual. I don’t know how this detail escaped me when I was first sniffing out this book. I have no idea why nobody is talking about this, because they really should be. On the forty-second page of the novel, Nancy, our protagonist, comes out both to her roommate and to the reader as asexual. First of all, I have a natural bias towards any media that includes asexual representation, given my personal affinity with the subject matter. Obviously, my love for this book has been in-part inspired by its diversity (there is also a transgender side character, and an androgynous side character who takes on the leading role in the companion novel, Down Among the Sticks and Bones, which I cannot wait to read). Aside from my (perfectly reasonable) bias, what I really loved about McGuire’s depiction of asexuality was the fact that Nancy doesn’t spend the entire book wondering whether or not she might be asexual. From page 42, she just knows -- has known, in fact, for quite a while. She’s pretty used to explaining the whole thing by now, and on a personal level, I found that so relatable -- shows like BoJack Horseman make me happy because they represent who I used to be and how I used to feel about my sexuality, but books like Every Heart a Doorway make me happier because they represent who I am and what I feel now. Fiction that relates the journey of self-discovery is invaluable. It creates a safe space for readers to explore themselves and to find comfort in the shared experiences of people who understand what they are going through on a personal level -- but I think it’s also really important to have representative fiction where the characters aren’t still finding themselves. They’ve found themselves, and they are at peace with who they are. This kind of representation helps normalise minority sexualities, and it also inspires self-confidence and validation. It’s nice, for once, to have skipped the journey and to just start reading from the destination. It’s nice to read asexuality as something established and set in stone.

Every Heart a Doorway is about the closest thing I’ve ever found to a book version of Gravity Falls. I love Gravity Falls because of its blending of target audiences. The show is pitched at children and pre-teens and ran its two seasons on the Disney Channel, but it also appeals to older viewers because of its dry sense of humour, its complex world-building, and its (sometimes) mature tone. Every Heart a Doorway is just the same: it’s whimsical and magical, breathtakingly atmospheric, but it is definitely not a book for children. It has the big heart of a children’s story, but its complexity and maturity age it like a fine wine; one might even say that this book has an old soul. If not for its occasional references to the 21st century, this book would be timeless. It breathes; it has a heart that beats. It lives in you and with you long after you finish reading. Goodness, am I glad that this marvellous book is not a standalone.

EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU by Celeste Ng (2014)

“How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia’s mother and father, because of her mother’s and father’s mothers and fathers.” 

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

Everything I Never Told You is a story about family. The Lee family, to be precise: a Chinese-American family living in idyllic, suburban Ohio in the 1970s, the Lees are secretive, dysfunctional, antisocial and, as the book begins, shocked when the body of their teenaged daughter Lydia is found at the bottom of the local lake. The middle child of three, Lydia was the family favourite. Her mother, Marilyn, dreams of a life for her daughter different to the domesticity into which she herself fell. This desire, bred by disappointment and failure, is a metamorphosis of something both selfish and selfless: does Marilyn want the best for her daughter, or is she merely mutating her into a vision of the things she was never able to be?

Marilyn Lee aspired to become a doctor. In the 1950s, however, women didn’t become doctors; they became housewives and stay-at-home moms. To her credit, Marilyn fights back. She strives to overcome the stereotypes of her gender, even earning acceptance Harvard Medical School, but in her sophomore year, she falls into the exact trap her mother prophesied: she meets a nice Harvard boy, falls pregnant to him, and has to leave school to assume full-time motherhood. Seven years later, Marilyn has two young children and no qualifications, and she wonders where it all went wrong: how did her dedication to not being deterred lead her into the exact same lifestyle she was so determined to avoid? She attempts to get her goals back on track, but when, ironically, she is thwarted by the unexpected arrival of her third child, Marilyn accepts that her dreams are not meant to come true: her fate lay in the very things she had so desperately tried to escape. The same, she realises, does not have to be true for Lydia. Lydia, her sweetheart, her eldest daughter, her legacy -- Lydia can be whoever she wants to be, achieve whatever she wants to achieve. Lydia becomes Marilyn’s passion project. The opportunities that Marilyn wasn’t able to seize don’t have to be out of her daughter’s reach, and she begins, with relentless energy, to sculpt her young daughter into the educated, qualified woman she was unable to become.

Despite how wrong it all ends up going, Marilyn did set out with good intentions for her daughter. She was an early-level feminist, rebelling against the expectations of female domesticity that dominated the mid-20th century by excelling at her studies and successfully taking them to a tertiary level. Her acceptance into Harvard Medical School is an awesome feat -- even in the 1970s, Harvard’s acceptance ratio of males and females was still four-to-one (Radcliffe Magazine). Her mother, however, never supported her daughter’s bold aspirations. Always gently hinting that women were unfit for medicine and besides, that Marilyn didn’t have what it took, her mother believed that Marilyn was chasing a foolish dream and that her grand plans would, in due time, all fall to pieces. Much of Marilyn’s bitterness, and her galvanization to encourage Lydia, is driven by the fact that despite the antiquity of her worldview, Marilyn’s mother ended up being right. Marilyn did not have what it took to become a doctor. Her ambitions fell to pieces not once, but twice. She failed to prove her mother wrong. And so she became adamant: Lydia would not face that same discouragement and demoralization. Lydia would have a mother who inspired her to dream bigger than society expected of her, and Marilyn would sit at the helm, shaping her daughter into the brilliant scientist she was unable to become.

These good intentions are spiked through by Marilyn’s selfishness. When she looks at her two children, Marilyn is reminded of her failures. Her aspirations were ripped apart by her family, the husband who impregnated her and resulting the children for whom she had to drop everything. Her aforementioned attempt to get her goals back on track was not a simple trip to the bookstore for textbooks and an enrolment in a community college. She needs to start fresh, unburdened. In the middle of the night, without even leaving a note, Marilyn packs a bag and vanishes. Lydia, five years old at the time, blames herself. It must be my fault, she frets to herself. I must have done something wrong, something so bad that she couldn’t stand to be around me anymore. When Marilyn, plans ironically upended by her third pregnancy, returns to her family months later with her private resolve to never let Lydia know her same failures, Lydia has also made a secret decision: no matter what it involves, she will do everything possible to make her mother happy, so that she will never leave her again.

And so it begins. Marilyn stacks Lydia’s bookshelves high with textbooks, militarizes her homework routine, tests her and quizzes her and beams with delight every time her daughter brings home an A+ or fires back a correct answer. Lydia, in turn, throws herself into her studies, watching how her mother blossoms in response to her academic success. For a while, this works -- Lydia’s diligence delights Marilyn, and Marilyn’s engagement with her daughter’s life energises Lydia’s dedication to the ambitions her mother has passed down. Yet these aspirations were not inherited organically. Lydia’s ‘goals’ are not inspired by her mother; they are inspired by her fear that if she doesn’t make her mother happy, she will leave her again. Marilyn manipulates Lydia, holding over her daughter’s head the threat that she might abandon her again. Because Lydia has become so devoted (albeit out of fear of abandonment), Marilyn is able to live vicariously through her. She tells herself that she is pushing Lydia so hard because she wants Lydia to embrace the opportunities that she herself was unable to, but in reality, what she really wants is to use her daughter to recreate her own past, editing out all of her mistakes and transforming Lydia into the version of herself that she wishes she had been.

As the novel unfolds, we discover the true harm of Marilyn’s selfish behaviour. Lydia feels trapped. She depends on her adopted ambitions to make her mother happy, but she has realised that she doesn’t really want to become a doctor, that she wants to forge her own identity and future. Yet she is paralysed by the debilitating fear that if she voices her dissatisfaction, her mother will leave her. Marilyn’s failures have made her bitter and resentful, and she takes this out on Lydia -- which, as we learn, results in Lydia’s death. Haunting, chilling, and thought-provoking, Everything I Never Told You explores, in short, bad parenting; how an earnest mother projects her own failures onto her daughter, selfishly trying to start her own life anew in the willing mould her daughter’s life presents. After all, Lydia’s birth ruined Marilyn’s life. Surely, in return, she deserves to claim ownership of her daughter’s entire identity -- an eye for an eye, a life for a life.

WORKS CITED

• Harrison, Pat. “The Complicated History of Women at Harvard.” Radcliffe Magazine, Radcliffe Institute For Advanced Study Harvard University, 2012, www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news/radcliffe-magazine/complicated-history-women-harvard.