The 5 Best Books I Read in 2017
This year I read 31 books. I've made a short list of my favorite 5. Bear in mind I don't often read new books so I won't say this is my "Top 5 of 2017" but instead my "Top 5 Books Read in 2017"
In reverse order then:
5. The March Trilogy by John Lewis, Andrew Ayon & Nate Powell (2017)
A three-volume graphic memoir of Congressman John Lewis from his youth in Alabama to his work as a young man in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. It would be difficult to boff this story as John Lewis has led one of the great lives of the 20th Century but he and his collaborators have done something, in stark, almost-worldess black & white, bold, epic and beautiful.
This book won the National Book Award in 2017 for Young People's Literature. With good reason.
4. The Odd Woman & The City by Vivian Gornick. (2015)
I was only familiar with Ms. Gornick's name and her legendary standing as a critic and intellectual of the Second Wave Feminist movement until I picked up her short memoir/essay collection which came in 2015. I was unaware of how sure and effortless her prose is, how conversationally perfect, how she seems, despite being pointed at times like a marvelous traveling companion.
This book is about her late-in-life friendship with a man named Leonard, her own relationship with New York City having grown up there nearly 80 years ago and gone to school there in the early Eisenhower era.
Read if you simply love a writer at the very top of her game even after being at it for a good 40 years.
3. Animals Strike Curious Poses by Elena Passarello (2017)
One of my favorite writers new essay collection about famous animals throughout human history (including Jumbo the Elephant and the Starlings that colonized America) is funny, sweet, sad and ridiculously smart. It's fair to say that if you love animals you would be missing out not to read this book because you will never see them the same way again.
2. Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit (2005)
A short, indispensable essay collection that should be required reading by anyone who considers themselves of a left-leaning political persuasion. In it, Rebecca Solnit simply argues that to be progressive and to be cynical is a stupid self-defeating contradiction and to be politically conscious and humorless is an argument against being politically conscious in the first place.
The first must-read book of these insane political times.
1. Bluets by Maggie Nelson (2009)
The kind of book where you say "OMG!" on every 3rd page. A mediation on both the color blue and having your heart broken, Maggie Nelson is so smart, so gifted and so good at what she does that I immediately spent the rest of the year binging on her books, one after the other in a spirit of reading ecstasy and joy.