Books of 2023: Stay Away

This past year must count among the best reading years of my life.  I am grateful to have enjoyed a whole lot of books and disliked very few.  In coming days, I will share all about the good stuff.  Today, dear reader one stinker of a book stands out, and I shall do my best to warn you away from it.

Bad Book of the Year

Book Lovers, Emily Henry, 2022

My friendship with Cassie Christopher will survive me reading this book under her recommendation banner of "anything by Emily Henry."  Hopefully, it will also survive this review. ;)  The thing about books is that each reader responds to each book subjectively.  Cassie has long defended the romance genre to me, and she has built up a solid trust account with more literary recommendations.  Alas, she and I don't share the same taste for escapist reading.  She probably wouldn't like my spy novels.  I definitely didn't like Book Lovers.  I suppose I can see the appeal of this particular kind of carefully-constructed escape, but subjectively, I hated it over and over again.  Book Lovers, in particular, turned out to be an extremely self-conscious, self-referential romance novel.  The story is framed with the conceit of essentially Hallmark movie plots, winking relentlessly at big city movers and shakers descending on a small town to follow familiar paths to romance with a local lover, saving a local business, and generally living happily ever after.  That Book Lovers plays with the tropes doesn't make the constant references to the tropes more bearable.  If one is subverting tropes while treating them as a lode star, the ratio still ends up out of whack.  Some characters stand out as nearly believable.  The rest, I could neither believe nor stand.  The dialog may have been generated by an AI that had been fed nothing but Saved By the Bell scripts.  I'll stick to Cassie's reliable recommendations for actual literature and my own preferences for schlock.

 

Dishonorable Mention

Think Again, Adam Grant, 2021

Pirates Win Predictions: Labor Day Weekend

As we round the final curve of this baseball season, the Pirates have assembled one of their most interesting irrelevant years.  They followed up a torrid April with a horrid May.  Similar ups and downs followed.  July turned out largely forgettable.  Since they've started playing mostly prospects in August, fortunes have ticked back up again (to near .500).  Entering September, we never know what we'll see from this team night to night.  Sublime highs follow dispiriting lows.

Their projected number of wins has ticked up just one since the all star break. In late August, they eliminated me from Forster Family Prediction contention by winning their 58th game.   Three prognosticators remain, but one will fall soon.

Their current 63-73 record/0.463 winning percentage maps to 75 wins, which would make optimistic Charlie the most accurate.  Things would have to go deeply south for them to only win 5 more games out of 26 remaining, so Teddy's chance of perfection won't last too long.  If they perform as badly as their worst month (May, 0.308), they'll win 71 total, and Paige will be right.  If they finish how they started at April's .679 winning percentage, they could finish a non-losing 81-81.

All-Star Break Update: 2023 Pirates Win Predictions

 With the season (slightly more than) half over, it's a good time to check in about which Forster is prognosticating the Pirates win total most accurately.

Charlie and Paige have an equal chance of being closest.  During the team's wild upswings, you'll think Charlie has nailed it.  During their losing streaks, you'll actually think I'm right.  It's a young, exciting, unpredictable team with some olds who can still play.

2023 Pirates Win Predictions

 More like hopening day, am I right?

Paige predicted the Pirates success exactly last season at 62 wins.  The rest of the family flanked her.  While Andrew McCutchen's return has increased the middle entries, the mostly unproven pitching yields both a lower ceiling and a lower floor on Forster expectations.  There will be days of magic and days of disappointment, but at least those results should come faster due to rule changes.  Viva la pitch clock!

Books of 2022: Fiction

Some readers have waded through category after category of a higher-than-normal volume of recommendations just to get to the only genre they care about.  For you lot, here are the novels.  I didn't set out to love sad novels this year; it just happened.

Best of the Year: Fiction

The Dutch House, Ann Patchett, 2019

Hoo boy.  This being an Ann Patchett novel, it's brilliant and beautifully written.  And yet, it's so incredibly sad.  The tale unfolds of a gorgeous, opulent, unique house outside Philadelphia and the relationship of a multi-generational family and how they orbit through it and around it.  To say more about the plot might spoil it, but it's always easy to describe an Ann Patchett novel the way she does: an unlikely group of people get drawn (thrown?) together by circumstance, and the story develops from that departure point.  The characters here are finely drawn as are the locales.  I found myself thinking I could look up the Dutch House on Zillow at some point before remembering that all of this sprang from Patchett's unmatched brain.  The novel plays with time, but in a narrative way, not a magical one (phew).  Starting from one point on the string as it must, the story bounces back and forth, slowly revealing more and more about how the characters had arrived at that starting point and where they went from there.  Paige and I agreed that cinematic writing defines the book.  There's too much here for a movie, though.  Netflix option for a European-style miniseries, perhaps?  Sometimes the sadness did get to me, but I would still recommend this to all readers.

Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi, 2016

While reading this book, I mentioned to Paige, who was among those who had recommended it, how sad it was.  She could not recall the book being sad, which is interesting because the story covers the wrong that befell generations and generations from African slavery to the 21st century in Africa and the US.  It's incredibly sad.  And yet.  And yet, Yaa Gyasi's gifted, evocative storytelling and weaving in of reasons to hope might very well change a reader's memory after the fact, even if a current reader gets weighed down by the sadness.  I kept rooting for something to break right or even non-oppressive in one of these generations. Gyasi takes the reader to the deep complexity where Africans are both enslavers and enslaved.  Her research seems strong and sturdy in that the depictions of village and regional 19th-century African culture come across as authentic.  If nothing else, they're densely detailed and transportingly visual.  Homegoing is a difficult but meaningful, even enjoyable, read in the end.

Honorable Mentions

Less, Andrew Sean Greer, 2017

Real Tigers, Mick Herron, 2016

Books of 2022: Essays

Trying to keep my posts to a relatively-short length I divided a good year in non-fiction reads in a possibly-arbitrary way.  One might call Sacks's book memoir, but it's more than that because he was so complex and multi-faceted.

Best of the Year Essays

Everything in its Place; First Loves and Last Tales, Oliver Sacks, 2019

My coworker Tom Persinger recommended this posthumous collection of mostly previously unpublished essays.  Here, Sacks - as always - blends the scientific with his personal and professional experiences.  He waxes elegiac about scientific heroes, succinctly summarizes cases of his neurological patients, and reveals how nerdily he has engaged with interests like ferns over the years.  He also gets nostalgic and intimate about his early years and some key, unique relationships like the one with his Aunt Len.  Sacks thought at breadths and depths inaccessible to many, certainly to me.  To read this book is to be thrilled by how interestingly he could write about so many different things. Ironically, although I've been familiar with Sacks from other media, I've never read any of his books including, of course the famous ones with the engaging titles like The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.

Dusk, Night, Dawn; on Recovery and Courage, Anne Lamott, 2021

A pandemic-appropriate book, whether these essays were all written during the pandemic or not.  I couldn't tell, honestly.  I picked this book up on an early visit to the downtown branch after it reopened and I started going to the office a few days a week.  It hadn't been on my to-read list, and I didn't even know Ann Lamott had a new book.  Nonetheless, it was easy to know that I would be in competent and familiar hands.  As it turned out, this sat under my nightstand for months until a little bit into my resolution project to read my floor piles before bringing any more books into the house.  And it hit when I needed it.  I was going through one of those rough patches common to us all - circumstances, seasonal affective blahs, and the vicissitudes of life.  Lamott's big-hearted messy mom persona comes through in these wide-ranging essays about her life experience, and several turns of phrase in her steady on-rush of thought helped me.  The best is this:

"Here is what I know of love.  Love is the gas station and the fuel, the air and the water.  You might as well give up on keeping the gas cap screwed on tight, keeping love at bay, staying armored or buttressed, because love will get in.  It will wear you down.  Love is ruthless, whether you notice this or not.  It is Sandy Koufax, Megan Rapinoe.  It will win.  It always does, at least in the long term - think Susan B. Anthony, who died before people like me could vote.

"Trust me on this: We are loved out of all proportion.  Yikes and hallelujah."