I am going to do a mid-year list of Biblioracle Book Awards. I am doing this even though “best of” books lists are largely arbitrary and meaningless. But we love lists. We love them because the world produces more books than we can possibly read, and it’s reassuring when making a choice of how to spend your time to feel like someone else has vetted it.
The fall book season, always crowed under usual circumstances, will be even more packed than usual thanks to releases delayed by COVID, and I will not have room to put all the worthy books on my inevitable end-of-year list. So here we go with the mid-year Biblioracle Book Awards:
Best Illustration of What Ails Society (tie)
“The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town” by Brian Alexander (St. Martin’s, $28.99). Using a single independent hospital in rural Ohio, Alexander unpacks how health care has become a financial game that puts barriers between patients and what they need to thrive.
“Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty” by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday, $32.50). Lots of people were getting rich off of addicting massive numbers of people to painkillers, with the Sackler family buying indulgences for their central role with philanthropy. Keefe’s book unpacks every last sordid detail.
Most Promising Solution for What Ails Society
“The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together” by Heather McGhee (One World, $28). Chicago-native McGhee has written a thorough unpacking of the ways that racial strife gets in the way of shared mutual benefit — and what kinds of policies and programs can get us out of this mess.
Best Book to Better Appreciate the Arts of Reading and Writing (tie)
“A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” by George Saunders (Random House, $28). Saunders offers a class in paying close attention to the ways four Russian writers wove their stories.
“Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping” by Matthew Salesses (Catapult, $16.95). Ostensibly written for the academic creative writing crowd, I think this book is for any engaged reader, as it illustrates the impact of dominant cultural narratives on how we create and judge fiction. I’ve been teaching writing for 20-plus years, and this book delivered epiphany after epiphany.
Emotionally Wrenching Novel of the Mid-Year (tie)
“Infinite Country” by Patricia Engel (Avid Reader, $25) and “The Night Always Comes” by Willy Vlautin (Harper, $26.99). Both of these books tell stories of young women fighting against a system stacked against them from birth, and my emotional investment in their fates was total, to the point I held my breath at times while reading.
Mind-bending Novel of the Mid-Year
“The 22 Murders of Madison May” by Max Barry (Putnam, $27). Barry can take a potentially eye-rolling premise — in this case, murder mixed with the multiverse — and turn it into a page-turner that also holds up in terms of its metaphysical conceit. This novel about a young woman who is murdered in multiple dimensions, while a journalist follows her trail, kept me up well past my bedtime.
Laugh Until You Cry Novel of the Mid-Year
“No One Is Talking About This” by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead, $25). Lockwood’s mordant observations had me chuckling through the first half. An emotional turn in the second part transports you into a story of deep love and appreciation for the world and people in it.
John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World” by Haruki Murakami
2. “The Trial” by Franz Kafka
3. “Fidelity” by Wendell Berry
4. “Mad at the World: A life of John Steinbeck” by William Souder
5. “Bluebeard” by Kurt Vonnegut
— Odin B., Indiana
I see a penchant for books that explore existential questions in potentially unusual situations. This brings to mind, “Remainder” by Tom McCarthy, book about a man trying to bring forth something trapped in his own mind.
1. “The Book of Lost Friends” by Lisa Wingate
2. “The Dutch House” by Ann Patchett
3. “The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah
4. “The Henna Artist” by Alka Joshi
5. “The Masterpiece” by Fiona Davis
— Debbie, Anne, Sue, Cheryl and Dian of the STN book club, Naperville
Oh, boy, a book club pick. I never hit a home run with every member, but I hope I can at least hit a double. It’s got less obvious plot elements than what’s listed here, but I think Niall Williams’ “This Is Happiness” will give them plenty to talk about.
1. “All the Devils Are Here” by Louise Penny
2. “The Devil and Dark Waters” by Stuart Turton
3. “Uneasy Lies the Crown” by Tasha Alexander
4. “The Last Secret of the Temple” by Paul Sussman
5. “Garden Spells” by Susan Addison Allen
— Judy A., Chicago
I’m going back a bit to an epic from Barbara Kingsolver, which I think will keep Judy involved for its full length, “The Poisonwood Bible.”
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you’ve read to biblioracle@gmail.com.
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June 28, 2021 at 07:00PM
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