"Why Is This at All Important?"

My local library is running an informal Best Books of 2018 contest. Customers can vote on social media or drop their vote in a "ballot box" (i.e., a shoe box wrapped in craft paper). One anonymous commenter decided not to vote. Instead, he or she left a note asking, "Why is this at all important?"

The answer, of course, is that it's not one bit important! It's fun! 

I adore this time of year, when every media outlet with even the slightest literary pretension produces a list of the best five or ten or hundred books published in 2018. 

Thus I present for you a list of my favorite lists of the best books of 2018. Yes, a listicle of listicles. It's so meta, I can hardly stand myself. 

1. The granddaddy of them all is NPR's "Book Concierge," a 318-item list of books sortable into the standard genres, but also book club reads, short books, long books, "eye-opening reads," and some other unusual categories that make the list a fun way to wile away a half-hour--when you're not actually reading, of course.

2. The New York Public Library's list was curated by its staff (and was the inspiration for my local library's informal contest).

3. The Times Book Review chimes in every year with a great list. (That one might be behind a paywall if you've already used up your free views for the month.)

4. In a completely different list the New York Times book critics also pronounced on their favorites. (Also potentially behind a paywall.)

5. Slate, of course, has an opinion.

6. Slate also has an opinion about audiobooks.

7. PopSugar has the lighter fare covered. 

8. Once you get past the offers to join their recipe email list, Southern Living has a great list of choices curated from independent bookstores.

9. LitHub is probably my favorite literary website, and their mostly unique list is probably my favorite, as well. 

That's a lot of lists to sort through. If you're not in the mood, here are a few books that show up on at least three lists. 

Calypso, by David Sedaris

Circe, by Madeline Miller

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David W. Blight (nonfiction)

I'll Be Gone in the Dark, by Michelle McNamara (nonfiction)
The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner

Milkman, by Anna Burns (just won the 2018 Man Booker Prize)

There, There, by Tommy Orange

Transcription, by Kate Atkinson

Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan

After combing through all these lists, I'm most excited to read My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite. And I guess probably There, There, just because it showed up on almost every list and I want to decide for myself if it's worth the fuss.

Et tu? Have you added anything to your TBR pile because it showed up on a Best-Of list? 

#readICT Category 11: Published the Year You Were Born

I've been chugging along on the #readICT reading challenge, but I had a hell of a time with category 11, a book "published the year you were born." The year 1976 was all about giant mustaches and bell bottoms and some of the books were pretty tacky, too.

The first book I picked up was Mary Stewart's Touch Not the Cat, a supernatural romance--a precursor to vampire romances, I suppose. I thought it would be unintentionally funny and fast. But, you guys, I just couldn't. Back then, ESP was all the rage, and the main character kept talking about communicating with her lover telepathically--except she'd never met him and had certainly never boinked him. But she called him her "lover." Repeatedly. "My lover" this, "my lover" that. Eww. This struck me as the telepathic version of the sweaty Internet troll hiding in his mom's basement. Thirty pages in, I had had enough. I never did find out why she wasn't supposed to pet the cat.

Next I tried Interview with a Vampire. Here we go, I thought, a classic! This is hugely popular, it's been a movie, reading it will put me more in touch with our cultural zeitgeist. Really all it did was confirm that for me the only vampire story worth reading is the original modern version (thank you, Bram Stoker). I just don't care about sexy vampires. And in Interview in particular, I wasn't prepared for the implications of pedophilia. Was that even in the movie, or was I too naive to catch it? I'm sure in the seventies that was very taboo and titillating, but we know better now and I just found it distasteful, if not actually offensive. Thanks for playing, Interview, but you've been eliminated.

So I was feeling desperate. The day before the library closed for our big move, the last day the collection would be easily available, I did one last maniacal search for books published in 1976--and found Ursula Le Guin, bless her. Le Guin is known for sci fi and fantasy, but Orsinian Tales is beautifully ordinary. The book is a series of eleven short stories set in an imaginary eastern European country called Orsinia. Only two of the stories relate to each other, and each addresses a different aspect of world history, from rural life in the middle ages to Communism in the 1960s. The stories, which are not presented in chronological order, are about people struggling to live their ordinary lives under the weight of immutable world events.

Orsinian Tales is everything I love in a book. It is both quiet and lyrical. It is simple and profound. I'm so enchanted with this book that, when I thought I'd lost the library copy, I immediately ordered a replacement because I believe we need to keep this in the collection. When the library copy turned up again, I gave the new copy to a friend rather than return it. I'm terrible at evangelizing my faith, but this book? I will sing hymns to Le Guin and to Orsinia for the rest of my life.

Immediately after retrieving the library copy
from the pharmacy's lost and found. 

#ReadICT Are Words that Mean a Thing

A few years ago I was messaging a friend from out of town and I absent-mindedly referred to "ICT." "What's that?" she wanted to know. It's the code for the Wichita airport, which has somehow become local shorthand for the city itself. Do people in Kansas City refer to their town as "KCI"? Do Los Angelenos talk about the city as "LAX"? I kind of doubt it. It's weird. But it's everywhere, including in the name of this year's reading challenge put together by Suzanne Tobias of the Wichita Eagle and supported by the Wichita Public Library.

The challenge requires 12 books from 12 categories to be read any time during 2018. I, of course, am enthusiastically participating--so enthusiastically, in fact, that I locked a co-worker in a supply closet so I could take her spot in the library's online book club, which you can watch here if you haven't already deleted your Facebook account. (She wasn't really locked in a closet. She was stuck in the Chicago airport during a snowstorm. That's almost the same thing, though.) 

I'm three books into the challenge and so far there hasn't been a dud in the bunch:

Murder and Other Acts of Literature is filling slot 8 for an essay or short story collection. The variety in this collection was entertaining and writers who normally don't tickle my toes made me sit up. Virginia Woolf made me laugh! I mean really. Should I reassess Mrs. Dalloway? No, of course not, don't be silly. But the short stories in this collection were a fun read.

Leopard at the Door is my category 4, "a book set somewhere you've never been." Set in Kenya, Leopard is narrated by the adult daughter of an British colonial planter during what the British referred to as the "Mau Mau uprising" and Kenyans referred to as the "Mau Mau rebellion." These words matter. Americans may not be familiar with the history described here, which complicates the pastoral images we have of colonialism that we get from works like Out of Africa. I'm looking forward to following this one up with A Grain of Wheat, by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, a Kenyan writer who fictionalizes events from the same era.

And of course, Magpie Murders is filling category 2 for a detective novel or true crime book. If you watched the video linked above, you already know how I feel about this book, which is a detailed homage to the British murder mystery beginning with the genre's progenitor, Sherlock Holmes, through the present-day craze for police procedurals, with particular emphasis on Agatha Christie's country house murders. 

Twelve books in twelve months? You can do it! I can do it! Find the categories and sign up on http://wichitalibrary.org/readict.