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.