I read some good books in 2017. You should read them in 2018. And true story: a good friend pinged me for a book recommendation while I was drafting this post.
Best of the Year: Fiction
The Sellout, Paul Beatty, 2015
Marc Maron had Paul Beatty on his podcast and raved about The Sellout without managing to describe it. Having read it, I now understand why. This novel is a work of towering satirical genius and social commentary on race whose pages are as crammed with details, ideas, and references as James Joyce's Ulysses. Early in my reading of the book, I found it took a lot of energy to focus and read it, especially at bedtime. I noticed a woman reading it in the park near my office and chanced to interrupt her reading and ask her whether it was worth continuing. She immediately said yes, and I used this stranger's reassurance to soldier on. I'm glad I did. The Sellout is set in a fictional all-black submunicipality of Los Angeles where the eccentric protagonist was raised by an arguably-more-eccentric single father. From a whole vein devoted to a character from the Little Rascals to a sly reference to David Sedaris, the book ranges far to depict, confront, and - perhaps most surprisingly - have fun with racial identity. I loved it, and I'm happy I had the guts to ask a stranger in the park a book question.
Honorable Mention:
Rare Objects, Kathleen Tessaro, 2016
Best of the Year: Family Reading
The War that Saved My Life, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, 2015
We read this book for family reading (which we still do with our busy teenage and pre-teen son), and I sometimes had to pass it on to someone else in the family to read because I got too choked up. The novel tells the story of Ada and her brother Jamie, who get evacuated from war-threatened London to a small town in the English countryside. Their mother is an abusive moron barmaid. Ada has a club foot and is not allowed to leave their apartment. Though the welcome is not always warm in the countryside, their evacuation achieves the goal of saving them from the violence of war. There are worse fates than war, though, and the evacuation plays a role there, too. The children are taken in by a gruff woman named Susan, whose stiff-upper-lip practical care reminded me so frequently of my mother-in-law. It's a touching story that the whole family enjoyed.
Best of the Year: Non-Fiction
Crucial Conversations; Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, Kerry Patterson; Joseph Grenny; Ron McMillan; Al Switzler, 2002
If I honestly record that it took me a calendar year to finish this book, you might think I didn't like it very much. Far from the truth. I pulled this book off the shelf of my friend Karen Dreyer, for whose maternity leave I was filling in at the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank. She'd read it with her staff in the Southwestern Pennylvania Food Security Partnership. During my brief tenure there, I read about 30 pages of the book during downtime. By then, I was hooked on this practical guide to avoiding the kinds of traps that too easily happen in high-stakes conversations at work and at home. The big theme is that all participants in a conversation should add to a pool of shared meaning. If anyone is doing things other than that - for instance, silence of violence - the conversation isn't succeeding. The authors describe well the many ways that conversations break down. They also prescribe ways to spot our own failings and move conversations back to productivity. I finished it in bits and pieces over the busy first nine months of my job at Truefit and found it valuable in my professional and personal life.
Honorable Mention:
Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz, 2014
It's that time of the year again. Well, that time of two years, I suppose. Sometimes I get my book recommendations published before the year is out; sometimes I don't. This year, I confess, I was trying to squeeze in another book in 2017, but I fell short. Trying to finish that book prevented me from publishing my book posts until the new year. The good news is that I have a jump start on my 2018 reading, having finished that book on New Year's Day.
A library-sponsored book trivia contest dominated my summer reading this year. In fact, five of the 17 books I read this year were on that contest list. Our team, Paige and the Turners, came in second out of 12-14 teams at a fun, nerdy night at Wigle Whiskey's Spring Garden barrel house.
As is a CP tradition, before I tell you what I loved reading this year, I shall ward you away from the titles that disappointed and bugged me this year.
Worst of the Year: Fiction
The Last Boy and Girl in the World, Siobhan Vivian, 2016
This is Battle of the Books book. A young adult novel, it's OK and 25% too long. The story unfolds through a mist of vaguery, but basically, it's the story of teenagers in a town that is threatened by an environmental disaster. It's not entirely clear how preventable the disaster is and to what extent its true cause is mother nature or politics. In the heightened atmosphere of a looming potential sudden end, friendships are tested. Relationships are formed and tested. The possibilities of mass advocacy are tested. And my patience was tested. I hate-read the last 100 pages both to find out how an early plot tease resolved itself and to fulfill my duties to my teammates in the Carnegie Library's reading trivia contest. Siobhan Vivian lives in Pittsburgh; Last Boy and Girl is set in a fictional city and an unnamed state that bear some resemblance to Western PA towns and our commonwealth. For reasons unknown, the pizza place in the book is named Mineo's, Pittsburgh's most famous pizza shop. This book is the novel equivalent of Sbarro pizza. Technically, it checks all the boxes of being a thing in its category. But I wouldn't recommend it to my sworn enemy.
Honorable Mentions
Baker Towers, Jennifer Haigh, 2005
The Idea of Perfection, Kate Grenville, 1999
Worst of the Year: Non-Fiction
Grit; The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth, 2016
Angela Duckworth made the rounds of my favorite nerd media outlets when Grit came out. She gave great interviews, and there was a lot to learn about grit in the space of 20-45 minutes. Namely that grit is equal parts passion and perseverance. Gritty people love what they're doing so much they don't necessarily realize how much they're putting into it. And yet, real accomplishment derives from deliberate practice of that skill, trade, art, or sport. That's what takes perseverance. Ten thousand hours yadda yadda. Actually, the ten thousand hours guy is the source of the deliberate practice idea.
I really wanted to like this book. The problem is that when she tried to take 30 minutes of interview fodder and turn it into a 270-page book, she ran out of interesting material. Many business best sellers do a better job of staying interesting by combining results of multiple different social science research studies. Duckworth relies mostly on her own research, some interviews, and collected quotes from profiles of "gritty" people. Lacking the necessary quanttiy and variety of sources, she goes to the same wells too often. Lots of swim coach quotes, for example. Also, I called this a business best seller (aspirant, anyway), but I'm not super clear who Duckworth thinks her book is best for. There's a "parenting for grit" chapter, but it's not a parenting book. There's the social science research, but it's not really an academic book or a business manual. Finally, there's a section on building one's own grit, but it's not prescriptive enough to qualify as a self-help book. All in all, not enough there there. It took a certain perseverance to slog through this so so book.
Marc Maron had Paul Beatty on his podcast and raved about The Sellout without managing to describe it. Having read it, I now understand why. This novel is a work of towering satirical genius and social commentary on race whose pages are as crammed with details, ideas, and references as James Joyce's Ulysses. Early in my reading of the book, I found it took a lot of energy to focus and read it, especially at bedtime. I noticed a woman reading it in the park near my office and chanced to interrupt her reading and ask her whether it was worth continuing. She immediately said yes, and I used this stranger's reassurance to soldier on. I'm glad I did. The Sellout is set in a fictional all-black submunicipality of Los Angeles where the eccentric protagonist was raised by an arguably-more-eccentric single father. From a whole vein devoted to a character from the Little Rascals to a sly reference to David Sedaris, the book ranges far to depict, confront, and - perhaps most surprisingly - have fun with racial identity. I loved it, and I'm happy I had the guts to ask a stranger in the park a book question. 
We read this book for family reading (which we still do with our busy teenage and pre-teen son), and I sometimes had to pass it on to someone else in the family to read because I got too choked up. The novel tells the story of Ada and her brother Jamie, who get evacuated from war-threatened London to a small town in the English countryside. Their mother is an abusive moron barmaid. Ada has a club foot and is not allowed to leave their apartment. Though the welcome is not always warm in the countryside, their evacuation achieves the goal of saving them from the violence of war. There are worse fates than war, though, and the evacuation plays a role there, too. The children are taken in by a gruff woman named Susan, whose stiff-upper-lip practical care reminded me so frequently of my mother-in-law. It's a touching story that the whole family enjoyed. 
If I honestly record that it took me a calendar year to finish this book, you might think I didn't like it very much. Far from the truth. I pulled this book off the shelf of my friend Karen Dreyer, for whose maternity leave I was filling in at the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank. She'd read it with her staff in the Southwestern Pennylvania Food Security Partnership. During my brief tenure there, I read about 30 pages of the book during downtime. By then, I was hooked on this practical guide to avoiding the kinds of traps that too easily happen in high-stakes conversations at work and at home. The big theme is that all participants in a conversation should add to a pool of shared meaning. If anyone is doing things other than that - for instance, silence of violence - the conversation isn't succeeding. The authors describe well the many ways that conversations break down. They also prescribe ways to spot our own failings and move conversations back to productivity. I finished it in bits and pieces over the busy first nine months of my job at Truefit and found it valuable in my professional and personal life.
