It feels impossible that another year is on the verge of ending and a new one beginning, but when I look back on this year with a wedding, some medical challenges, and some extra vacations, I can see where the time has gone and why it seemed like it went so fast!

Now on to the highlights of my 2016 reading life. The following books are my top recommendations for this year.

I started the year with A Confession of the Lioness by Mia Couto. Set in Africa, the story follows the efforts of a hunter hired to kill a lion that is attacking villagers and oil workers. However as the hunter begins to try and track the animal, nothing is what it seems and there seem to be other malevolent forces at work that need to be confronted before the killing stops. Wonderfully written and rich with unique cultural insights, this was an impressive book.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara was a thoughtful and poignant story of friendship and the limitations of love. Following the lives of four young men as they graduate from college and try to make it in New York, Yanagihara’s  seem to burst from the pages. With lilting prose, and a plot built from the complicated relationships of these four men, Yanagihara plumbs the depths of friendship and love in such a powerful way that long after you finish, it is still apart of you.

Jane Steele was a complete and utterly special surprise. Based somewhat on Jane Eyre by Bronte, Jane Steele contains a much more modern sensibility even though it is set in the same time period.  “Of all my many murders, committed for love and for better reasons, the first was the most important,” says Jane Steele in the first paragraph and with that you are hooked until the final page!

Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance was a powerful non-fiction book about one young man’s struggle to make it out of Appalachia. Promoted widely as a way to understand why white working class voters in the fly over states were so disaffected in this election, it painted a disturbing  but real picture of the cultural and economic dynamics which create their dissatisfaction and feelings of being left behind by the new economy. Drug abuse and addiction is another part of this heart wrenching story, but despite it all, Vance was able to make it out and create a different life for himself.

Finally I ended the year with A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman. This is a tender and heartwarming story of a incorrigible curmudgeon whose plans for his life are foiled time and time again; first by a new family who moves next door and keeps needing him to help them and next by a stray cat who decides to move in permanently after almost freezing to death by his front door.  It seems that everyone needs Ove  just when Ove thought no one would need him at all. Funny and sobering, Backman makes us see the true humanity of Ove as he struggles to find a new purpose for his life.

Thanks for reading this blog and I hope that I will have more to share with you from my reading life in the New Year! Happy Reading from my bookshelf to yours!