Books of the Teens: Top 9 Fiction Books

One conclusion I draw from compiling this list: 2014 was an incredible year for reading fiction for me.  Three of the nine novels I savor from the decade, I read that year.

Here's the best fiction I read last decade in descending order of awesomeness.


Best Fiction

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet, David Mitchell, 2010, read in 2011

I picked up this book because it made a lot of NPR 10-best lists from 2010.  That proved to be a reliable recommendation.  I especially appreciated the quality, long-form novel because I started reading it at the beginning of a 27-hour flight to Asia.  The story’s setting in turn of the 19th century Nagasaki felt appropriate despite the fact that my destination was Vietnam.  Although the plot  keeps the reader interested, that setting in Nagasaki and its Dutch trading post is pleasingly unfamiliar.  Although I have no way of judging its accuracy, it felt historically plausible and educational.  We meet the title character when he is a newly-arriving clerk at the trading post ad follow him as he navigates the machinations of both the half-marooned population of the trading post and the complicated politics of closed, Shogunal Japan.  This is a page turner that achieved an all-too-rare feat - making me wish I didn’t have to participate in real life so I could have more time to just read the book.  This is the book I have recommended more in the teens than any other.  And so, I do it again.

The Interestings, Meg Wollitzer, 2013, read in 2014

The Interestings is the novel about which I raved to people all through the end of 2014.  Although I'd heard Meg Wollitzer interviewed before and was aware of her Ten Year Nap, I'd never read any of her work.  The Interestings tells the story of six teenagers who gather at an arts camp in the 70s.  They somewhat ironically dub themselves "The Interestings".  The novel then goes on to tell their stories and the paths they take after that summer all the way into middle age.  With all of them being artistic, creative types, the path to the future is not clear.  Who will follow their art and live it out?  Who will make different decisions?  Wollitzer writes in an understated fashion that lets the characters come through.  She deftly drops little foreshadowing bread crumbs that pull the reader along in a plot that does not disappoint.  Time, especially, early on in the novel follows an anything-but-linear path.  I read an interview after reading the book that cited the -Up movies (7-Up, 14-Up...) as a point of inspiration.  The comparison I made before reading that was to John Updike's Rabbit novels.  It's fascinating to follow these characters over such a long arc of time and life.  As the novel came to a close, I didn't want to finish it because I would mourn the chance to spend time with the characters and see what they were up to.  At over 450 pages, it's substantial.  Still, I read the last 12 pages in three sittings, delaying the inevitable.  I may be at the perfect age to read this book.  Two late thirties/forty-something friends and I had a conference call book club to discuss it.  In fact, I owe Catherine Christopher a great debt of gratitude for pointing me to this book in a facebook discussion in which she asked *me* for book recommendations.  She and Angelique Bamberg and I had a terrific conversation about it that only enhanced the reading experience.


The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson, 2012- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2013, read in 2014

The Orphan Master's Son is a masterpiece.  Demanding, engrossing and eventually deeply satisfying.  A novel set in what has been called "a hermit state" possibly couldn't be honest without being demanding.  North Korea is a black box for those outside it.  Johnson apparently got some access to this forbidden place because he thanks people who helped him in his travels to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea in his acknowledgments.  The book contains two parts, one focusing on a character called Pak Jun Do, and the second focusing on a character called Commander Ga.  Only people who have read it will understand the significance of the phrase "a character called" such and such.  Three different narrators tell the story - a third person narrator describing events; a propaganda version of some of those events; and a government interrogator trying to make sense of some of those events.  The novel demands much of the reader because it's set in such a strange and walled terrain.  Also, though, one of the points the novel makes revolves around the nature of truth.  Reading through the shifting nature of truth and reality slowed me down at times.  I found myself not always enthusiastic to return to the work of parsing these shifting sands.  Johnson takes on a difficult task with high ambition and fulfills.  I read the last forty pages pretty much at one sitting - something I virtually never do - because the narrative propelled itself that compellingly.  Reflecting on my struggles to read some early and middle part of it, I believe that I would have been happier had I read the entire book in 40-page chunks.  Perhaps that makes this a good beach read.


City of Thieves, David Benioff, 2008, read in 2018

I heard Brian Koppelman talk about this book on Bill Simmons's podcast, and he said something like he'd given it away to 30 people.  On my list, it went, and I'm glad it did.  Benioff is the opposite of prolific.  This is his third and final book, and it was written ten years ago.  He went on to be a Game of Thrones show-runner.  City of Thieves throws together unlikely groups of people during the siege of Leningrad in World War II.  Two in particular go on a surprising quest together.  To say more would be to ruin the story, which is prodigiously page-turning.  The setting is educational without feeling like it.  The characters and plot are a little over-the-top and cinematic, but guess what?  I like movies.  A book that reads like a movie is fine by me.  It's a terrific novel.


The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead, 2019, read in 2019

The Nickel Boys is the most genius work of art I've encountered in 2019, and that's saying something in a year with my first visit to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Boots Reilly's Sorry to Bother You in the theater, Donald Glover's Atlanta, and Hobbs and Shaw.  Well, I should temper that because Hamilton, the biography and musical.  So second.  Or third behind a tie for first.  Whitehead has fictionalized the real, ghastly Dozier School for boys in Florida as Nickel Academy.  A brutal reform school that ruined the lives of generations of young men, the crimes at Dozier only came to light after the school closed in 2011 and decades after the worst abuses had occurred.  The focal point for Whitehead's telling is Elwood Curtis, a promising student who was in the wrong place at the wrong time through no fault of his own and gets sent to Nickel Academy.  Although Whitehead does not hold back from the brutality, what impresses most about this book is the hope and humanity that persist in the face of inhumanity.  There is plenty of unspeakable horror here, but if the book had been only that, it would have only been half of the survivor's tale that Whitehead weaves.  The ending left me speechless but hopeful.


Transatlantic, Colum McCann, 2013, read in 2014

Despite my aversion to hype, I sometimes have to give it its props.  There was a lot of hype around Colum McCann's novel TransAtlantic.  I felt like I heard about it from every quarter for a while.  I believe the first time I requested it from the library, the wait was outlandish.  But since my library buys up tons of copies of bestsellers, no matter how hard it is to get this year's best seller, it's always quite easy to get last year's bestseller.  Having managed to get a copy in time for our beach week, I didn't read it at the beach.  I was finishing a book and a little more interested in another novel I'd brought along - my anti-hype stance kicking in, perhaps.  Thanks to a little summer insomnia and the amazing quality of McCann's writing, I read this book in a week at home.  I can't remember the last time I read a book start to finish in a week at home.  Having read Steph Cha's noir mystery Follow Her Home on vacation - a book in which Cha - as a math teacher would say - "shows her work" in every sentence, I appreciated McCann's reliance on simple language to provide thorough description.  I just opened the book at random and found the first paragraph my eyes settled upon.  Here it is:  "Lily did not know what to say.  She reached out and touched the framed edge of the painting.  Looking into it was like looking out another window.  Clouds.  Fast water.  Geese gunneling through the sky."  It feels like one of those writing exercises in which one is challenged to write with only single-syllable words.  Except the result is perfect.  They're not all one syllable words, obviously; having maintained the reader's attention with straightforward language through the whole paragraph, McCann opens up space to use the specific and rare verb "gunneling".  And the whole book feels that perfectly weighted.

What's it about?  Oh, yeah, three historical trips across the Atlantic form the backbone of the novel.  In the mid-nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass, being an ambiguously free escaped slave in the US traveled to Ireland for a speaking tour among those sympathetic to abolitionism and to buy his freedom.  Just after World War I, flight had advanced to the point that venture capitalists challenged pilots to fly across the Atlantic.  The novel embroiders what history tells us about one such attempt and what McCann thinks happened outside of the known history.  Finally, and most improbably, McCann includes a trip by George Mitchell (or rather three years of trips) to broker peace between Ireland and Northern Ireland in the 1990s.  It doesn't even sound like that good a setup for a novel, frankly.  In lesser hands, it would be hackneyed and tiresome.  In McCann's hands, it's page-turning bliss.


Old Filth, Jane Gardam, 2004, read in 2016

My competent wife loved Old Filth.  Her law school classmate, Cassie Christopher, did too.  Perhaps it's because the eponymous protagonist is an English solicitor who makes his career in Hong Kong.  Filth is an acronym for "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong."  This sublime novel beguiles with elliptical storytelling and well-formed characters.  Gardam depicts her various settings with rich detail in sparse language.  The novel covers a long sweep of time - a lifetime - depicted in bits and pieces with flashbacks and foreshadowing.  Certain aspects of the story we never learn here.  Good thing Old Filth is the first book of a trilogy.  The Man in the Wooden Hat and Last Friends fill in the gaps and extend the story in time and scope.  This is very satisfying novel on its own and the best of the three, but the trilogy is a worthwhile use of time for the story arc with this set of characters.


The Sellout, Paul Beatty, 2015, read in 2017

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.


Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout, 2008 - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2009, read in 2015

When this won the Pulitzer Prize, it had its moment on my social media feed.  I remember people being excited about the book, and I remember not being able to get a copy at the library.  I just parked it on my list of books to read and waited until the furor died down.  It died down enough that I could not only get it out of the library but also renew it enough times to finish it while reading other books.  I seem to have left my book monogamy ways behind me, at least for now. 

But to the book itself, this is a loose collection of short stories with the Olive Kitteridge character as a throughline connector.   I've become jaded to the short story form in general (too many seem to rely on the supernatural to advance plot).  Refreshingly, Strout does not rely on the supernatural to move her stories forward.  And it's stories, but it's almost a novel.  Also, she strikes a nice balance between introducing new characters and vignettes while keeping enough of the core team together that the reader cares all the way through.  I'm a sucker for big arc of life literature, and Olive Kitteridge fits that mold, although we only really get to know Olive as she gets older.  Strout's writing is not only perceptive, descriptive and humane.  It also feels important. 

Worth the hype, amazingly.

Books of the Teens: Family Fiction

Our sons turned 13 and 17 this year.  We still read as a family in the evening - the remainder of the earliest bedtime reading traditions - into this year.  With no one around to tell any of us that this should stop, we just kept doing the thing that's brought us so much collective pleasure over the years.  We're in a pause right now and might be done forever.  There are fewer evenings when we are all at home now, so reading a book together takes months (see below for an all-time record).

The kinds of things we read changed vastly over this decade, and it makes me sad that I haven't kept records of all of those books like I have of the books I read "for myself."  If I did, I might have more to recommend.  Still, these are solid recs for reading with tweens and on up to teens.

Best Family Fiction 

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, 1868, read in 2018

I discovered and loved Little Women (for credit!) in college.  Rereading books doesn't generally excite me, and I almost never do it.  But we have tried to choose material carefully for our precious and persistent family ritual.  Rereading it, I remembered all of the things I loved about it and some of the parts that I wished were different.  This being the longest book we've read as a family, it was rather a slog.  We had it from the library and we renewed it 13 times, which means it has been in our house for more than 39 weeks.  The characters are interesting, and those who don't start out that way do evolve, which is nice.  Alcott was a prophetess against the bounds of gender roles, and the strictures put on the female characters by their environment still drive me nuts.  The March family's genteel poverty is one of the most romantic things I've ever encountered.  Yes, the ending is bolted on and sad in its own way but this is still the great American novel.


The War that Saved my Life and The War I Finally Won, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, 2015/2017, read in 2017/2018

A simple two-part series, these flawed books appealed to all four of us.

I sometimes had to pass these books on to someone else in the family to read because I got too choked up.  The first 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 the house.  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.

This book continues the story of Ada and Jamie, two kids subjected to different levels of abuse by a low-resource barmaid in London.  Ada is the emotional heart of the two books, and I'm very impressed with how Brubaker Bradley depicts the uneven path of a child recovering from trauma and trying to learn how to trust people and situations more.  Her characters surprise the reader in nuanced portraits of evolving behavior.  The books may be accused of anachronistically infusing current social and political mores into World War 2-era England (town and country), but I admit to rooting for that more often than not when it happens in these stories.  And she's not alone.  Exhibit A: Downton Abbey.  If there's a theme in these two books, it is empathy in some people overcoming its lack in others.  Our whole family, with boys aged 15 and 11 at the time, have been completely engaged by the storytelling.


The Incorrigible Children series, Maryrose Wood, 2009-2018, finished in 2019

 I won't attempt to review a six-book series here, but everyone in my competent family also enjoyed these.  They are fanciful and imaginative with good character development and enough plot to keep the readers engaged.  The pace sometimes flags, but they're generally winningly off-the-wall books.  There is winking humor that the boys understood pretty well throughout.  The suspense will grip younger children more than the high schooler and middle schooler who ended up reading the final book, but it's not like they told us to stop reading either.  Might be more of an upper primary read than a series for really young kids.

Books of the Teens: Recommended History, Work, and Life Books

My last bundle of non-fiction recommendations from the expired decade contains the remaining categories of history and what I'm terming work and life books including parenting books.  The teens provided lots of interesting and thought-provoking material in these categories, and their practicality makes them stick with me as we round the decade pole.

Of note: I call out several book-recommenders in this post, and nearly all of them are women.  I know who I shall listen to for book recommendations in the '20s.

Best History

A Kim Jong-Il Production; The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, & a Young Dictator's Rise to Power, Paul Fischer, 2015, read in 2015

A book that includes the word "extraordinary" in its subtitle ought to deliver, and this one does.  Kim Jong-Il loved movies and wanted North Korea to rival the world leaders in filmmaking.  Unable to create an indigenous film industry that was up to his standards, he kidnapped South Korea's best actress and best director to use them to create films in North Korea.  Any story out of the hermit kingdom is very difficult to research, but Fischer did exhaustive research.  What's more impressive is that he tells the story in a gripping way.  Some creative non-fiction authors can't get over the hump of not showing their work.  Fischer tells this story with cinematic detail.  It's just amazing.  Looking back on 2015, I said in 2016: "If you read nothing else this year, read this book."


Hamilton, Ron Chernow, 2004, read in 2019

I came late to the Hamilton party.  Although I knew that people everywhere were going nuts over the musical, I didn't really engage with it until friends had two tickets to share with us when the tour came through Pittsburgh.  I binge-listened to the soundtrack and discovered what all of the fuss was about.  Because of demand for Chernow's massive biography in our library system, I didn't get a copy until after we saw the show.  At 731 pages, this hefty book posed problems for my lifestyle.  I often read right around one page before bed.  It took me around three months to get through, which really suppressed my books-read number for 2019.  A three-week lending period at the library wasn't going to cut it, so I was grateful that my friend Angelique lent me her copy.  But enough about me. Hamilton was a genius; Lin Manuel Miranda is a genius.  Ron Chernow is a genius.  This biography took a staggering amount of research, but if anything, the storytelling is more impressive than the research.  One can easily see how Miranda got caught up in the story and wanted to make his own art from it.  Of course, it's impossible to tell Hamilton's story without telling the broader story of the revolution, and we meet all of the big players in their relationship to Hamilton.  He didn't have a lot of just-so-so relationships.  They tended to extremes of affections, rivalry, and even obsession.  While it's hard to argue that Hamilton would have contributed more if he'd been less passionate - after all, that's what drove so many of his contributions to our system of government - but had he found a way to manage his passion and slow his pace and decision-making in early middle age, he might have survived more of that period, and one never knows what might have happened in a late chapter of leadership of a still-young country.


Hellhound on his Trail, Hampton Sides, 2010, read in 2010

Hampton Sides uncovers what James Earl Ray did in the weeks and months before he assassinated Martin Luther King.  A drifter trying to remake himself after escaping from prison, Ray eventually found meaning in his life via the George Wallace campaign and the racial hatred that opposed the civil rights movement.  Although conspiracy theories abounded, Sides tells the tale of a lonely man stalking MLK and finding his opportunity in Memphis in April 1968.  Most of the narrative tension leads to the moment of the killing, but there is also plenty to tell about where Ray went afterward and what the FBI, Memphis police and eventually other law enforcement agencies did to catch him.  Very gripping read. 


Best Work-Related Books

Switch; How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Chip and Dan Heath, 2010, read in 2011

I got this book (free!) at a conference where Dan Heath gave the keynote speech.  It was a terrific talk and made me really interested in reading the book.  Although Heath used most of the best examples in his speech, it was still good to read through the complete framework and have him reinforce the framework with more examples that help flesh it out.  The framework is that change happens when we engage the rational mind with clear direction, motivate the emotional center with positive things to go for and make the best choice the easy choice by controlling defaults or altering culture.  Although it's informed my work with clients and my own life decisions, just about anybody would get value from this book.

Crucial Conversations; Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, Kerry Patterson; Joseph Grenny; Ron McMillan; Al Switzler, 2002, read in 2017

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 have found it valuable in my professional and personal life.

Winning the Story Wars, Jonah Sachs, 2013, read in 2013

I learned about this book through my Pittsburgh-native professional acquaintance Susan Finkelpearl.  She worked at Free Range Studios (makers of the Meatrix and the Grocery Store Wars viral videos) with the author.  I read it for work and really enjoyed Sachs's take on stories.  We all have to learn about Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey somewhere; this book is where I learned about it.  He draws a lot on Campbell's seminal work on myths, but he goes on to treat that material in light of a kind of marketing called empowerment marketing - think Nike's Just Do It.  The book runs at both the big idea thought-provoking level and the practical how-to level, which is no mean feat.


Best Books on Life 

Mindset; the New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck, 2006, read in 2015

Having seen and heard references to this book seemingly everywhere, I finally decided to read the source material.  Although I haven't gone back to verify, I'm pretty sure the first reference that struck me was in Nurtureshock, a terrific book summarizing human behavior research that parents should know about.  Dweck's book offers a useful framework about mindsets.  It's so simple that it may not actually need to be a whole book.  That's probably why the references to it elsewhere are so alluring - because they're brief.  Anyway, people either tend to have a fixed mindset - my abilities are fixed - or they have a growth mindset - I can get better (or worse) at something.  The fixed mindset bites you two ways.  First, if you believe you're smart, you don't take on challenges that might harm that impression.  Second, if you think you're not smart, you get discouraged and don't make progress.  In the growth mindset, you chart small progress and you work to make your brain or body grow in incremental ways.  Dweck looks at athletes, business leaders, parents, teachers and coaches through the lens of the mindsets.  These practical applications do help, although shelf life can be a dangerous thing; one of her growth mindset paragons is Tiger Woods.  Oops.  Somehow, Dweck has written a book that's kind of dull and utterly fascinating all at the same time.


The War of Art, Steven Pressfield, 2002, read in 2012

I heard about this book on Marc Maron's podcast (in a somewhat dismissive context) and from our then-Associate Rector, Josh Miller (in a rather reverential tone).  Having read this slim volume, I can understand the latter better than the former.  Pressfield describes what he believes holds writers and other creative people back, a vague internal force he labels "resistance".   In the first third of the book, he describes that many forms resistance may take.  Wily and creeping, this malign enemy will linger and lurk and thwart.  In the second third of the book, he describes what he calls "going pro".  Pressfield believes to be a professional, a writer must write for at least four hours a day.  He doesn't go into as much detail as I would like about how one arrives at the pass wherein one can do that.  The classic question to ask an author is about his or her process.  The audience always wishes that there will be a magic formula to follow.  In describing the pro state so wanly, I believe he hopes to dispel the notion of magic.  It's work, and you do the work by doing the work.  In the final third of the book, he describes the spiritual dimension that he sees in the creative realm.  He believes in angels and muses and God and believes that if we will call on these positive forces, they will help us to overcome resistance.  The book inspires and stimulates and is difficult to describe.  An interesting note: I got excited about the book and wanted to buy it for some friends.  I expected to find used copies of a ten-year-old paperback for cheap.  No such luck.  The market holds the book in such reverence that used copies are priced the same as new.


Best Books Related to Parenting

iRules; What Every Tech-healthy Family Needs to Know about Selfies, Sexting, Gaming, and Growing Up, Janell Burley-Hoffman, 2014, read in 2016

Janell Burley Hoffman got famous at Christmas of 2013 for giving her then-13-year-old son Greg an iPhone along with a contract detailing conditions of his ownership.  They included things like mom and dad always knowing the password, turning in the phone at 7:30 on school nights and 9:00 on non-school nights, and no nude pictures.  Her tour of the talk show circuit - often with Greg - turned into a cottage industry, and she's written about parenting for the Huffington Post and been regularly featured on American Public Media's Marketplace Tech podcast.  iRules is a terrific parenting book for our time.  Burley Hoffman is frank about the possibilities and risks of technology and offers a refreshing take on what to do about it.  She's big on making explicit and simple rules for kids to follow and then sticking to them.  Her kids play no electronic games during the school week, for instance.  One thing she's frank about is her own personal struggle to put her #$%! phone down, experience the world and be available to those around her.  One can't really read this book without trying to be a little less phone-addicted.  We have not gotten to phone ownership but already apply some of these rules to our kids' tech use.  We could stand to improve and also to be better at explaining WHY we have certain rules.  Sometimes it helps smart kids to know that we're limiting something in order to help them be better people.


Excellent Sheep; the Miseducation of the American Elite, William Derresiewicz, 2014, read in 2017

There was a time when we read parenting books about developmental stages and how to parent as children progress through them.  Now, apparently, we read parenting books about how to get kids launched out of the nest.  Excellent Sheep isn't actually a parenting book.  Nor was Cal Newport's How to be a High School Superstar.  Still, they are both extremely relevant to how we parent our high schooler and look ahead to shaping the path of our middle schooler.  Deresiewicz taught at Yale and Columbia and is a cultural critic for a lot of brand name publications.  In Excellent Sheep, he takes on the elite college system and the path high school students take to get there.  He traces the shift from pre-1950s American elite colleges, which were the province of private-school-educated WASPs to the current crop, which are the province of ethnically diverse strivers with startlingly-similar high school resumes.  He asks how a system in which some parents help their kids figure out how to work like hell in a certain way in high school, pack an excessive number of the right classes (APs) onto their transcripts, attain leadership positions in all of the extracurriculars they pursue and score high on the SAT is helping our democracy while state higher education also rises in price at a faster rate than private education.  Unlike a parenting book, Deresiewicz doesn't explicitly flip into prescriptive mode.  Rather, he closes the book in a conflagration of anti-elite barricade-rushing.  His message might be summed up: "Don't kill yourself in high school in order to be a bland and thoughtless Ivy League student on your way to an investment bank.  Have a more interesting (to you) time in high school, go to Kenyon, and become an adult who knows how to think.  Then do something interesting that saves the world from that platform."  We're proud of our Oberlin-bound high school senior and happy with the high school career he was able to have.  He's an interesting person.

Books of the Teens: Recommended Commentary and Personal Essays

Dear Reader, I may be parsing my non-fiction categories too finely, but this decade saw more non-fiction than fiction in my reading - 52% to be exact.  As you know, I posted about the memoirs I liked yesterday.  Today's post collects social commentary and personal essay collections I enjoyed in the twenty teens.

Best Commentary/Analysis

The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg, 2012, read in 2012

A fascinating book unlocking secrets (hidden in plain sight) about how habits work in our lives.  Unfortunately, I didn't write this review right after I finished the book (as is my habit), so I had already forgotten some details by the time I did.  This is disrespectful treatment for what I would call the most memorable non-fiction book I read this decade.  The key framework is that habits work via a three-step process: a cue, followed by the routine, followed by a reward.   Duhigg applies this framework to everything from an afternoon cookie habit to alcoholism and gambling addiction.  Along with negative habits, Duhigg recounts how exercise and better eating habits can be cultivated and maintained.  He also covers organizational habits and how changing habits can change the fortunes of a company.  For this material, he cites Paul O'Neill's focus on safety when he arrived at Alcoa.  He also talks about why 12-step programs seem to work even though they lack any essential scientific soundness.  The author even tries to turn the book into a self-help book by publishing a "how to use this framework" section for the reader to attack personal habits or form new ones. If you pick up no other book from these recommendations, pick up this one.  That's what someone tells you when they mean it.

The Geography of Nowhere; The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, James Howard Kunstler, 1993, read in 2010

My good friend, Jason Hansen has generally different reading tastes than mine, but he recommended this book, and I'm glad he did. Kunstler may be a little crazy (he declared the end of the automobile age in this book 27 years ago), but he's smart crazy. The book outlines how land development evolved in this country and how we ended up with the crappy suburbs we have today. Kunstler grew up in Manhattan and now lives in small-town Saratoga Springs, NY. Because I also listened to his podcast (the Kunstlercast), It can be hard to remember what I heard there and what's in the book, but the book lays out what makes traditional urban fabric work and what makes the suburbs so dysfunctional. It's a seminal book by a unique thinker that will make some people muse "oh yeah" and others fling the book across the room. A the end of the decade, I still think within the framework Kunstler provides for evaluating a built landscape as I pass through it.  This can be a little tedious for my friends and family.


How to Be Black, Baratunde Thurston, 2013, read in 2014

Although I had heard Baratunde Thurston on Fresh Air, it didn't register that he'd written a memoir in the form of a parody self-help book called How to Be Black.  I happened upon the book at the library on a "staff picks" shelf.  I'm really glad I picked it up.  Thurston, the online editor of The Onion, is very funny and brings social commentary in the most delightful way here.  In chapters like "How to be the Black Friend" and "How to be the Black Employee," he delves into the current and recent state of race relations in our country with acute observation, warmth and heaps of humor.  In addition to his own thoughts and experiences, he assembles a panel of black comedians, performers and writers (as well as Christian Lander of Stuff White People Like fame) to weigh in with their own insights.  An enjoyable read that made me think a lot and taught me some things about the black experience that I didn't know.  Reading this at the beginning of 2014 turned out to be significant timing.  The events of 2014 proved to be tragic for black men especially, and the decade did not improve form there.  In 2014, I also took in Dear White People, which frankly was not as cogent or straightforward as How to Be Black.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain, 2012, read in 2013

This book got lots of press when it came out, and I finally managed to get to it on my reading list and pick up a copy from the library a year later.  Now that I work in a software firm with lots of introverts, this book means more to me than when it made its initial impact.  It's a very interesting read in the vein of good business bestsellers with a tinge of self help.  Starting with research about how introverts and extroverts differ (chief takeaway - introverts are more sensitive to stimuli), she eventually touches on what you should do as a manager, spouse or parent of an introvert if you're an extrovert.  She makes compelling arguments that the world is tilted in favor of extroverted traits and that "shy" is a bad word.  She argues for making space for individual processing of ideas.  Split the tables apart in classrooms.  Let people work alone to generate ideas and then submit them.  This form of crowdsourcing is kinder to the introvert's pace of processing, but more importantly, it empirically produces more good ideas than group brainstorming.  

Against Football; One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto, Steve Almond, 2014, read in 2015

Pittsburghers hear all kinds of creepy things about Ben Roethlisberger, especially earlier in his career.  Things that fall into the "Don't leave your daughter alone with the dude" category.  Then, of course, it really appears he got away with a bar bathroom sexual assault.  When that went down, I started finding it hard to root for the Steelers.  Then we saw first-hand disturbing abuse in the case of Ray Rice and Janay Palmer and the even-more disturbing light suspension initially imposed by the NFL.  Other examples followed.  Concussions have been ravaging current and, especially, retired players.  All of that made me essentially sit out the 2015 NFL season and then give it up altogether.  Since then, I've watched a game here and there to be social, with my boys, extended family or neighbors, and I've watched the Super Bowl.  After reading the book, I went on to write what may be the most-remembered post in this blog's history.  Steve Almond would probably call me a hypocrite for not giving it up completely.  In this short book, he lays out everything that's icky about football, starting with the NFL but also reaching into the college and high school games.  And there's a ton that's icky.  The writing is crisp and incredibly frank.  With this ammo, I have taken back my autumn weekend hours from football and skip all articles about the f-word in the paper.  That leaves more bandwidth for baseball and basketball, which I enjoy more in my forties anyway.  

Best Personal Essay Collections

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, Ann Patchett, 2013, read in 2016

Having previously read an Ann Patchett novel (Bel Canto) and being married to a huge A.P. fan, I was intrigued by my friend Cassie Christopher's recommendation of Patchett's collection of essays.  This is one of those books that gets produced after an author has written enough magazine articles to collect them into a bound volume.  Except this may be the best.  One.  Ever.  Reading this book brought me so much pleasure.  It didn't really feel like reading.  It felt like listening to an interview - that's how completely Patchett conveys her own voice in simple, straightforward, unguarded writing.  More than that, it felt like sitting in the backyard talking with a good friend one has only just met.  I loved it.  The title essay is terrific (and cagily placed towards the end, its loaded title beckoning the reader).  Also memorable were:  "My Road to Hell was Paved," which starts as a cheesy magazine assignment to rent an RV, drive around for a week and write about it.  That could be a disaster or a bore, but not in Patchett's hands.  Also, "The Mercies" about Patchett's adult relationship with her first grade teacher.  She's such an interesting person and such a fabulous writer.  This book was a joy.


Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2015, read in 2016

Having enjoyed and learned a lot from Ta-Nehisi Coates's work in The Atlantic, I was really interested to read his book.  Framed as a letter to his son, it's a frank mixture of memoir and advice to him.  Coates deploys language so masterfully that the book feels like a 150-page poem.  The violence and lack of control Coates describes in being a black boy and man in this country can be devastating.  A friend who read this before I did said she needed time to process what she was taking in while reading it.  Between the World and Me can bring outsiders into the experience of being a black man in America without the hallucinatory pretension of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.


Liturgy of the Ordinary; Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, Tish Harrison Warren, 2016, read in 2018
 
Tish Warren wrote this book before she joined the clergy of our church.  Then it won Christianity Today's book of the year.  These events have made her arrival - job sharing with her also-ordained husband - pretty exciting. The book - with the first edition's evocative peanut butter and jelly cover art - steps the reader through the day in 11 chapters, starting with "Waking," discussing in Warren's open, confessional tone how we can worship and celebrate in the midst of everyday life.  The theme is that although we have liturgy to guide our worship on Sundays, each day has its own liturgy of things that we should be careful to notice and embrace.  Actually, some of the items here, we need to exercise caution that we're not taken over by them.  Other chapters include "Losing Keys," "Checking Email," and "Fighting with my Husband."  See, I told you her tone was open and confessional.  I read this book one or two chapters at a time between other books, and I enjoyed consuming it that way.  Warren's writing is clear as a bell.  Simple word choices making up clear sentences building into well-structured paragraphs.  I took great pleasure in the quality of the writing, and it enhanced what I got out of the book - which is that this life is fleeting and that a default mode of focusing on the negative or self-seeking will make it flee that much faster and less satisfyingly.


We Were Eight Years in Power; An American Tragedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2017, read in 2018

Clearly, if I could only take the works of two authors to a desert island, it would be Patchett and Coates.  Now, I kinda want to go to a desert island.  As a category, books that compile previously-published materials have an uneven track record.  In this unique volume, Coates, a modern-day prophet, selects eight essays and long-form articles he wrote for The Atlantic during the eight years of the Obama presidency.  Rather than just publish that group by itself, though, he has written an introductory essay for each of those pieces in which he remembers and analyzes the events of his personal life during that period and/or what it took to create the work we are about to read.  Or, in my case, re-read.  But actually, in my case, not re-read.  I had read all of the original essays/articles contemporaneously when they were published in the Atlantic, so I gave myself permission to read the intros but skip the essays and still count it as rereading the book. As a completist, this was both death-defying and rather satisfying.  Reading these essays and remembering the pieces and the period in which they were written was moving and throught-provoking.  I call Coates a prophet because he interprets what's going on in the culture in a way that I don't hear others doing it.  And yet, he's a prophet for our time because his writing tends to the personal and sometimes confessional.  Reading him feels like having a very smart, interesting friend, and that's never more true than in We Were Eight Years in Power.

Books of the Teens: Top 5 Memoirs I've Read This Decade

Finally, some positive reviews for books I would recommend.

Although I would not think of myself as an avid reader of memoir, looking back over the teens, I found that I read several and that five have stuck with me over the years.  The authors form a diverse set of people, which is cool.

Best Memoirs

The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance, Elna Baker, 2009, read in 2011

I heard Elna Baker on an incredible live episode of the incredible Marc Maron's WTF podcast.  And that was sometime in or before 2011, for all you Johnny-come-latelies to Maron and his podcast.  That appearance came a few years after this book was published, but it made me very curious to read it.  In this memoir - yes, it's a memoir with that crazy long title - Baker details her life as a Mormon in New York City.  Baker is a standup comedienne, and the book is funny, but that's not what made it so gripping for me.  She went on to work at This American Life after publishing the book. Baker details her struggles and questions with her Mormon faith in the midst of her lively social life in New York City.  Mormonism as much as any other faith enforces social norms of behavior that are understood to manifest in a long line of "no's".  No drinking, no drugs, no sex.  And caffeine is a forbidden drug.  Baker shares incredibly frankly her hopes and fears in relation to remaining committed to her church while being pulled toward life outside of it.  The real action comes (not really spoiling here) when she meets an atheist whom she really, really likes.  Her family members definitely play their roles in her narrative a la David Sedaris; she lives with her older, more beautiful sister in New York.  Her parents sound like generous, awesome people.  I've been highly recommending this book for its honesty and page-turning narrative.


Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun, Geoffrey Canada, 1995, read in 2010

I became aware of this book long before I read it, and I can't remember exactly where I first heard about it.  I've heard Canada interviewed several different times on public radio shows and seen him speak once.  I have a total intellectual man-crush on this guy.  He approaches urban strengths and challenges with such unique insight.  The subtitle "A personal history of violence in America" gives the title its context of progression.  Canada talks about growing up in tough neighborhoods of New York City and almost reminisces about how simple violence was before most anybody could carry a handgun.  In hand to hand combat, even with a stick or a knife, violence had limits, and the herd enforced those limits.  Gun violence privileges the rogue and creates the possibility that any argument could escalate to the deadly without a moment's notice.  From this background, Canada has done an impressive amount of work in Harlem since the publication of this book with the Harlem Children's Zone to create a path out of violence and despair for today's families who live there.  A terrific read and a must-read to understand how Canada got to where he is today.

Orange is the New Black; My Year in a Women's Prison, Piper Kerman, 2010, read in 2013

With the Netflix television show being discussed at every gathering of late summer 2013 and NPR fawning over it, I heard that the book on which the show was based was really very good.  This memoir is flat out fantastic.  An unlikely prisoner, Kerman describes her experience over a year in primarily a minimum security prison with some additional time at different facilities.  She has no idea what to expect, living among women who are largely of a different class from her.  What she discovers horrifies and heartens her and her readers.  I don't want to give away too much more.  If I have a quibble, it's that she sometimes stops short of describing why certain aspects of prison life were terrible, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks.  A friend who has read the book said she turned off the TV show after five minutes because it's "too raw".   Perhaps Piper was saving her dear readers by being oblique.  My Competent Wife and I watched several seasons of the show, and I really adored the narrative gadget of flashing back to the characters' lives before prison and showing the circumstances that put them there.  We quit watching, however, when the narrative and market demands of keeping the show on the air distorted the narrative so that the Piper Kerman-based character had to keep doing implausibly stupid things in order to stay in prison.  Because it's a prison show.  I heard the last season is really fantastic.  But the book is still better.


The Long Haul; a Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road, Finn Murphy, 2017, read in 2018

I read this fantastic book in a most unusual fashion for me.  Essentially in one sitting.  We were flying back to Pittsburgh from Washington state, where we'd been on vacation.  I'd just barely started the book - I believe I was still on the introduction - when what was to be a 75-minute layover in Dallas turned into 3.5-hour lightning delay.  At the gate, I set to reading the book and found that I was gobbling up pages quickly.  The infotainment on the flight consisted of free wifi if you downloaded the American Airlines app.  By then, I was well into the book, and I just kept reading.  I finished the book in bed after we arrived home at 2:30 in the morning.  So, sort of one sitting.  It's terrific.  I heard Murphy interviewed on Fresh Air.  He confesses in the book that he's always had a crush on Terri Gross's voice and because she asks interesting guests interesting questions.  He's a long-haul mover of the high-end executive type, and he just describes how he got into that field in the first place, what it's given him, what it's barred him from, and the interesting things that have happened to him over a decades-long career.  He was basically an educated middle-class guy who decided that a job job was not going to be for him and that manual labor wasn't all bad.  I loved it.  It made the whole travel nightmare feel like a boon.  I think about and recommend this book regularly still.

 
How About Never?  Is Never Good for You?; My Life in Cartoons, Bob Mankoff, 2014, read in 2015

This book had been on my list for a while, since I'd heard Mankoff interviewed on Fresh Air in 2014.  It's very cleverly assembled.  I choose the word "assembled" advisedly because this memoir combines text and New Yorker cartoons (both accepted and rejected) and other illustrations.  Apparently, Mankoff has worked out this format on his blog.  By the time it got to book form, it was humming.  Of course, it would have been impossible to write about cartoons and what makes them funny without the visuals.  Fortunately, they didn't have to be lumped into a center section and numbered - they can just be sprinkled throughout the text.  Mankoff is funny and has thought a lot about what makes things funny, but he hasn't thought about that so much as to not be funny about it. He comes across as pretty honest in this memoir, which includes some moments of arrogance and chutzpah.  A really enjoyable read that I looked forward to picking up every time.

Books of the Teens: Fiction Stay-Aways

Of the books I read in the teen years, I only really disliked 20%.  These are among that portion, rated in order of dislike.

The teens were the decade when I stopped reading short stories.  The form is broken; it relies too heavily on magic to fit a plot in a short space.  Sorry, emerging authors.

I don't like how yesterday's and today's posts start the decade off with negativity, but, hey, bad books get published, and time is too precious a resource to waste. I promise: sunnier posts are coming.


Worst of the decade: fiction

The Giver, Lois Lowry, 1993, read in 2015

Sometimes, a book disappoints by failing to fulfill expectations.  Other times, a book flat out makes me angry.  Take this steaming pile of misanthropy, for example.

Lois Lowry must hate children, or possibly all people.  Now, that's harsh language for the author of the impeccable A Summer to Die, but to be fair, in that book, there's a dying child.  The Giver's dystopian hell made me angry and confused all at once.  We read this for family bedtime reading, and I soldiered through it because the whole family was reading it.  I also, though, dearly hoped (and expected) that Lowry would eventually explain why the neutered, colorless, feelingless society would have been created in the first place.  Alas, (spoiler alert spoiling an absence of something), it never comes.  Things just happen in the unnamed community, or rather, they happened a long time ago, and the characters we meet inhabit this totally messed up world.  No doubt, The Giver is a comment on something, but God knows what.  Maybe air conditioning.


The Last Boy and Girl in the World, Siobhan Vivian, 2016, read in 2017

This is a young adult novel, that's OK and 25% too long.  That's what I wrote about the book in 2017.  As the decade ends, I can tell you that I'm still angry that I read this awful book.  It was for a team trivia contest sponsored by our library system.  That's the only reason I started it and finished it.  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.


The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, Hannah Tinti, 2017, read in 2018

I don't remember how this book got on my list, but it was on my competent wife's list, too.  I do know that national treasures Meg Wolitzer and Ann Patchett blurbed it.  I don't know why.  It's a good yarn, I suppose, told in a theoretically realist fictional fashion.  The problem is that characters don't behave in a realistic fashion.  There's a level of violence that becomes literally unbelievable.  Literally.  I don't mean it's a lot of violence or more than one might expect.  I mean that I don't believe people actually live lives that are that violent or that if they set out to do so, they wouldn't live as long as the titular protagonist does.  It's not giving away too much to say that the "twelve lives" refer to this character surviving twelve bullets.  Come on.  Also, his dark and murky life of crime stretches credulity.  The family story that gets told in inverted order is somewhat interesting, but there are too many distractions.  Too many characters who emerge from a plot smoke machine.  There's enough plot teasing to keep even a reader who came to hate this book as much as I did reading in order to see where the teases lead.  Begrudgingly, I can give Ms. Tinti that.  But wait! There's more to dislike.  The omniscient narrator turns seriously omniscient - nay, pedantic - on all manner of topics: constellations, whales, dyeing and weaving yarn, fishing, first aid.  This is an author who knows how to do the work of research but lacks either the skill or the will to weave it in without announcing "I did some research!"  Tiresome in the extreme.  Don't waste any of your one life on these twelve.


In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniyal Mueenuddin, 2009, read in 2011


First of all, who gives a rip about stories in a collection being linked?  This book falls into that rash currently afflicting literary fiction, the linked story collection.  As LitCritHulk tweeted: 

"HULK SMASH TREND OF HIP NOVELISTS WRITE 'LINKED' SHORT STORIES AND CALL IT NOVEL. YOU WANT WRITE SHORT STORIES, FINE. IT NOT A ####ING NOVEL"  

The stories in this collection link together very tenuously with the names of some characters repeating.  They jump around in time so that we're to understand we're reading about a couple of generations of the same family, but the fact that one character is another character's son has so little bearing on a particular story that it doesn't matter.  I fail to see the point.  But that's not the big problem.  The big problem is that more than half of the stories in this collection have the same plot.  No joke.  One story in which a woman of modest means decides to "give herself" sexually to a financially successful older man only to have it end badly when he returns to the wife of his youth might have been interesting.  Six in a row can only be considered bizarre.  It's a shame because the stories at the back end of the collection when he sheds the single plot are actually pretty good.


Follow Her Home, Steph Cha, 2013, read in 2014

Steph Cha graduated from Yale Law School and, as such, got her first novel reviewed in the Yale Alumni Magazine.  She loves Raymond Chandler's novels, and she refers incessantly to him and to his detective hero Philip Marlowe.  I probably shouldn't even review her book without knowing more about Chandler's novels.  I know that LA Noir is a thing, and this is a self-consciously noir novel.  An interesting twist is that Cha, a Korean-American woman, incorporates Korean-American women into her plot as more than femmes fatales or victims.  They play integral roles, including the amateur sleuth protagonist, and relate to others as sisters, daughters, mothers, friends and lovers.  But back to whether I should review a noir debut with little knowledge of the genre.  To my eye untrained by the genre, this book is ridiculously overwritten.  Sentences are jammed with texture.  No simple verb is used when a more descriptive one can be substituted.  This is clearly part of a style tradition into which Cha is determined to fit, but it can make the reader feel starved for air.  An example pulled relatively at random:  

"Her long, dark eyes squinted as her wide red mouth gaped with silver laughter.  Loose curls dyed a toasted honey brown fell past her shoulders, ends trembling on a modest bosom.  She crinkled a nose that could hide behind a penny.  One crooked incisor poked just a couple millimeters ahead of her front teeth - this would be her moneymaker, the Cheshire detail, the bite mark in your memory." 

Oh and the (apparently Chandleresque but reachingly so) similes:  

"My tongue felt like a dead oyster in my mouth and my voice passed through the thick sieve of air around my ears like piano music smothered by a stuck pedal."  

It's a mystery, and it's gripping.  I read it at the beach and despite its overwritten nature, I had no hope of putting it down.  Cha structures two loosely interwoven plots that keep a reader in suspense effectively.  But it's a guilty pleasure; I'm not proud to record that I read it. 


Train Dreams, Dennis Johnson, 2011, read in 2012

What is wrong with the short story form?  Why must all short fiction depend on magical events to drive the plot sooner or later?  I'd heard lots about Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, and right on the front cover, it says "Winner of the National Book Award,"  But that's Johnson, not this book.  He won it in 2007 for Tree of Smoke.  This book starts out normal and interesting, the tale of a small life lived quietly in western Canada.  Then, for no apparent reason, late in the book turns to this dreamlike, magical plotting that just pissed me off.  Don't read it, unless you go in for that sort of thing.



The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty, Vendela Vida, 2015, read in 2019

This book had been on my list for a while, probably from a review on Fresh Air.  It's hard to classify.  I guess second-person thriller is the best description.  It received much fanfare when it was published, and its unusual voice and bent probably explains that.  The plot was propulsive, but I personally found the book unsatisfying.  It's clever, and it's well-written, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.  It's hard to say much without giving away too much, but a story that starts with a woman traveling alone getting her backpack with everything meaningful and important to her stolen in Morocco is just too stressful for my blood.  The stress wrought by her cascading decisions never lets up.  Wanting to know where a story lands is not the same as enjoying the story.

Alice Adams, Booth Tarkington, 1921, read in 2016

Alice Adams is a bleak book that I would never have read absent my goal of reading all of the Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction.  That project sometimes has me dipping back into the deep past for a title like this.  Tarkington won in 1919 for The Magnificent Ambersons, a story that captured the moment when a family's grip on power in its town gets overwhelmed by the growth and progress of the town and the culture.  That story had shadows but not like the delusional shadows of the striving Alice Adams and family in this book.  Reading about people being deceitful can be stressful.  Reading about people deluding themselves while deceiving others is downright squicky.  I will say that it's no wonder Tarkington won the 1922 prize for this novel; it both captures a moment in the culture and feels modern enough now that it must have really appeared ahead of its time when it was originally published.  Unfortunately, a depressing and unsettling book is a depressing an unsettling book. Hollywood liked, it too; it's been made into a movie twice - once in the same year it was published and later in a more well-known version with a young, dewy Katherine Hepburn playing the title role.