Open thread: best books of 2016

I realise that I didn’t really read very much this year.

I can’t imagine many fans didn’t read the latest Laundry Files (Charlie Stross), but if you haven’t it’s worth getting.

Ian Dunt’s Brexit book is a good attempt at a realistic look at the mess we’re in. (Most of the other books so far seem to have been written about the Tory party first, Britain second.)

Harry Parker, Anatomy of a Soldier, published earlier this year. He was in the British army and this novel is based on his experience in Afghanistan and the experience of being severely wounded and recovering. His technique is to give different inanimate objects the first-person narrative voices in each chapter, which gets a little wearing but it’s not as weird or contrived as it sounds. The novel is somewhat uneven, but the best chapters, such as the ones in which he in effect imagines what the surgical procedures he went through were like and how the doctors performed them in minute-to-minute detail, are gripping. Most of the time the book is direct, unsentimental, closely observed, and able to see things from different points of view (including those of the Taliban or associated forces that he was fighting). Not perfect, but I found most of it to be reasonably absorbing.

Not positive about dates, and not best but what I’ve read and liked, I come up with:

Jodi Dean – Crowds and Party
Anwar Sheikh – Capital
Joshua Clover – Riot Strike Riot (Prime)
Thomas Frank – Listen Liberal
Routledge Handbook of Neoliberalism
Peter Frase – Four Futures
John Smith – Imperialism in the 21st Century

I’m finally back to regular reading (beyond academic articles about my precise scientific specialty), though still ramping up again. I missed it.

In non-fiction I’ll throw in another vote for Cathy O’Neill’s “Weapons of Math Destruction”. I’ve also read parts of J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy”, and those parts were worth reading though the book becomes a little repetitive. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between The World and Me” (apparently the book white people in America read about race, and looks like I’m one) came out in Dec 2015 but I read it in January I think. On my list on that topic is Carol Anderson’s “White Rage”. On a lighter though thoughtful note, there’s a lot to like in Kameron Hurley’s collection of essays “The Geek Feminist Revolution”.

In fiction, I waited for, bought and enjoyed Tana French’s “The Tresspasser”. N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy has part 1 (“The Fifth Season”, 2015) and part 2 (“The Obelisk Gate”, 2016) out, and I’m waiting for the conclusion next year: geology-based science-fantasy, which is great, and her writing is excellent. And then I’ll put in a word for Volker Kutscher’s police procedurals set in late 1920s to 1930s Berlin. Really well done, and a time that one should read novels about these days. The first one “Der nasse Fisch” was out in 2007 already, but it’s an ongoing series, and only this first one is available in English for the time being (“Babylon Berlin” — the German title is not literally translatable because it’s metaphor wrapped around police jargon, and gets explained in the text).

I’m just finishing Marceline Loridan-Ivens’ You did not come back’, a short memoir/stroke letter to her father who died at Auschwitz-Birkenau. (I’m planning to read Scholastique Mukasonga’s Cockroaches (about the Rwandan Genocide) and Hisham Matar’s The Return, over Christmas, which might be of interest to others)

On the current topic of the day, the decline of dominant ethnic groups and their political reaction. I liked- The white working class by Justin Geist (an ethnography of WWC decline in East London and Ohio)
Descendancy by David Fitzpatrick (a collection of essays about Protestant decline in
Ireland)
The Sunni Tragedy in the Middle East: Northern Lebanon from al-Qaeda to ISIS by Bernard Rougier (The title gives the gist)

I’m not sure about best, but they’re the ones that stuck with me. (Novel wise I enjoyed Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish)

Seconding LFC and Anatomy of a Soldier. I read it twice. The author’s from the same regiment as my husband, and I used to know his father very slightly from parade ground/funeral/mess. There’s a scene in the book that involves shaving and it’s a heart-breaker.

Maria:
interesting — I thought/guessed you would have read it.

Excellent OP. Thanks for this, Chris.

We all need to learn more about the world we share. New books are part of the process. Making a new friend from the other side of our divides is another.

I’ll mention 2, one fiction and one non-fiction.

Walter Satterthwait’s New York Nocturne: The Return of Miss Lizzie (2016; it’s a sequel to his 1989 Miss Lizzie). A brilliant evocation of New York City in the 1920s, narrated by a young girl (who has a history with Miss Lizzie). And the mystery aspect of the book is very nicely done. (And, yes, that’s Miss Elizabeth Borden.)

Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth (2016) continues his long engagement with the causes and consequences o the industrial revolutions(s). Even if you ultimately don’t agree with him (I mostly do, but with some reservations), you will probably learn a lot both from this book, but from what he points us to.

I haven’t read many books this year, but I’m currently reading Between The World And Me, and also Dancing With Strangers by Inga Clendinnen who passed away this year.

I read a great many SFF novels, mystery novels, and Victorian triple-deckers. I cannot say that any of these were great, or would be great for anyone who did not have my tastes.

BUT I found Jerry Thompson’s Cascadia’s Fault absorbing and timely. I sure hope that the big Northwest Coast (US and Canada) subduction quake holds off for a few more centuries, until we can do better on mitigation and possibly, prediction.

The book that grew and grew on me–while reading, rereading, and thinking about it in the context of the rest of the books I’ve read since–is Tim Murphy’s novel Christodora. (Grove, 2016. https://www.amazon.com/Christodora-Novel-Tim-Murphy/dp/080212528X) Christodora covers a history I thought I knew—the last thirty years of the East Village—and speculates about a familiar future but . . . it rewrote the history of NYC that I used to carry around in my head into a more logical, more complex, history. The only book that I can think of that so immediately changed my view of the sidewalks I walk every day is All That is Solid Melts Into Air.

The best book I read at work this year (insert conflict of interest warning here) was Kia Corthron’s The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter (Seven Stories, 2016. https://www.amazon.com/Castle-Cross-Magnet-Carter-Novel/dp/1609806573) which just won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Like Christodora, Castle Cross largely takes place in a history I thought I knew—post-WWII Deep South. Turns out there was a parallel world all around me. (Some parts of Castle Cross were like The Wire—which Corthron wrote an episode of—set in my elementary school.)

I can’t think of a recent year in which my favorite books were novels. Usually, there’s a novel or two in my top ten but there are always a half-dozen non-fiction books that I find far more engrossing/insightful. Maybe it’s just a 2016 thing? Maybe parallel histories that hit close to home are the best escapism around?

You’re lucky Chris, I recommend you avoid it!

I liked the whole series, not just The Three Body Problem, but I can understand how it may rub somebody the wrong way. It is, basically, like reading some SF for the 50, but looking at things from a Chinese point of view. That I found fascinating, but there are long parts of the books that feel exactly like all the defects from the old SF amped to 11. Long expositions, civilization changing in ways that are more author fiat that actually showing you anything, if you care about female agency the last book has a female “protagonist” that merits the quotes because she never does anything at all…

Funny enough, what I got is a bad reaction to Too Like The Lightning. I read it, I just couldnt put it down, I want to see the second book, so it really does something well, but I just spent the same amount of time angry at it, confused, and thinking it doesnt make much sense at all. Dont know, maybe is because I’m an anti-monarchist Spaniard

Really great for me that you are having this thread, as I’m normally up to date with what is going on in science fiction and fantasy, but I need to read some economics or philosophy or history or anything real every now and then, and a lot of those recommendations sound very interesting.

The best things I read this year were blogs, not books: none of the books I read were as enlightening as the two best blogs/blog posts.

Best single post: Anne Amnesia, Unnecessariat, on the blog “More Crows than Eagles.” Go and read the whole thing, and the linked story right below the pictures.

Most thought-provoking blog: The Archdruid Report (John Michael Greer); I discovered it this year, so only one of the posts I’m noting is from this year. Three good starting points are this post from January on (class structure and resentment, this one from last year on progress (echoes of Economics in Two Lessons). One of the key ideas is catabolic collapse–I had only known that as a biological term previously–and here are three good posts on it: 1 (introduction), 2 (in empires), 3 (the first in the Dark Age America series, which is worth reading in full).

Here is a sample of what of I have read:
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
Frank Lloyd Wright and Mason City: Architectural Heart of the Prairie
Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust
The Perfect Horse The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis
The Life of Louis XVI by Louis Hardman

Read a number of really good books this year.

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins-

If you enjoyed Neil Gaiman’s American Gods then I would think this would be right up your alley. It has a similar feel of exploring a magical world just a half step to the left of our own. Mythical beings, Powers and Dominations playing their games and regular folks caught in the crossfire. If anything I think it is better realized then Gaiman’s work and certainly more quickly paced. I kind of fell in love with the mythology created in the novel and was disappointed to learn that Author is not planning on writing a sequel.

https://www.amazon.ca/Library-at-Mount-Char/dp/0553418602

The Gentleman by Forrest Leo
I am only about 2/3 of the way through this one but so far it has been an absolute delight. The basic plot is a unsuccessful poet accidentally gives his wife to the devil and then has to go into to hell and get here back. Written in the style of a 19th century comedic novel that has been spend up 50% the prose is just a delight. Everything is witty and it has a lot of the kind of lines that stick in your memory. Plus, in the style of Flashman or Pratchett, the author makes great use of footnotes to ad background and comedy. Highly recommended.

Thanks Sam — it was in spam, must have been auto-rejected because of the links??

I bought Too Like the Lightning with no prior knowledge of Ada Palmer based on an endorsement here, and I provisionally love it. “Provisionally” because the first book has lofted everything into the air, and in subsequent books she may make it all fly (I hope!) or it could come thudding back down. I’d be delighted if she managed to explain Bridger without magic*, content if she left his Mystery unexplained, disappointed if she tried to write a cause too mundane for its effects (“midichlorians”).

Like faustusnotes I thought that The Three-Body Problem was a stinker. I wanted to like it since some more non-Anglosphere voices in SFF would be great, and it came recommended by a lot of people whose opinions I normally expect. It suffered from the kind of world building problems that sometimes grate in the Star Trek and Harry Potter** settings: amazing capabilities that seem plot-destined to be used in specific narrow ways without in-world justification for the limits. Like how time travel is apparently easy in Star Trek if you need specimens of extinct whales but doesn’t even come up in discussion most times Star Fleet encounters some species-threatening menace. Or the thousand and one capabilities of transporters, nonetheless treated as simple people-and-cargo movers. Or the Time Turners in Harry Potter.

*Though I could accept outright magic. I adored the Thessaly trilogy even though it had ample magic to go with the philosophy and robots.

**Plenty of people find pure delight in ST and HP, so I recognize that this is a matter of taste. And I like HP just fine, only sometimes distracted by problems like this.

“It is, basically, like reading some SF for the 50, but looking at things from a Chinese point of view.”

This is nearly right. The Three-Body Problem reads as if no science fiction was written between it and Kornbluth’s “A Martian Odyssey”, 1934.

I’ll throw in Kenneth Pomeranz’ The Great Divergence, on Asian economic growth pre-industrial revolution (like all good history, full of small details that challenge your preconceptions) and, for fiction, Daniel O’Malley’s The Rook and Stiletto.

Machiavellian DemocracyJ. P. McCormick Cambridge University Press

PatinIowa–

I just read The Sympathizer too–I thought it was overall very well written, and with important insights about intercultural matters, but uneven enough so as not to deserve the Pulitzer. Example–one sentence composed of iterated conditional antecedents that ran almost a full two pages? There’s a difference between using concatenated intensity of prose and just being overdone. The author is often brilliant at times in turns of phrase–but perhaps sacrificing some such frequent flashes in the pan is the better part of narrative valor in service to the work overall.

I read Too Like the Lightning based on a recommendation here too. I liked it by the end, and I want to read the next one, but I found it a bit infuriating. It felt like there were only ten people in the entire world. I know the point is supposed to be that it’s incestuous, but seriously, we only ever seem to meet one family, one ex-criminal, and all the world leaders.

As I say I liked it, but I think she needs to flesh her world out a bit.

Evicted was definitely the best book I read this year. It’s an ethnography of housing insecurity (and its motives) in Milwaukee. I think it offers a very rare look at one aspect of many poor people’s lives, and its beautifully written.

Seeing Peter Dorman mention Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton from 2014, I’d also put in a plug for Matt Karp’s This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy, which actually was from 2016. I haven’t read more than chunks of it but it seems like a thorough and engaging attempt to put US history back on the hook for the kind of antebellum racist triumphalism that American liberals often seem to want to sublimate entirely onto the Confederacy so it can be cast out as a foreign object, as in Phil Ochs’ refrain “Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of”. In this telling, the way we tend to interpret Southern US statesmen like Calhoun as actually having been proto-Confederates, not to mention giving short shrift to the roles of actual Confederate leaders like Jefferson Davis in earlier US policy, becomes a way to disavow the thoroughly American nature of their ideology and legacy — which certainly seems like an important theme in today’s political climate!

Also, bob mcmanus and I have both cited John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century on CT recently, so as one would expect I have to second his recommendation here. Speaking of important themes in today’s political climate, anybody interested in the immigration and the economics of nationalism should give it a close reading, especially those anti-leftist liberals fixated on a perceived opposition between issues of class and issues of race.

AFAIK Karp identifies as a leftist (by which I mean the “not a liberal, a leftist” kind of leftist) but don’t take my word for it…