Best Books I Read in 2016

I’ve finally finished my “book a week” challenge (meaning I’ve read, rated, and reviewed 52 books for the year). I actually read quite a few more than that but didn’t mark them down (on my Shannara binge, I was getting through them every 2-3 days).

This year I went through audiobooks more than any year in the past. My guess is they still made up less than half the books I read, but it’s close. I don’t know if I have relevant commentary on what this means. I still like reading actual books a lot more than listening, but if I’m out on a two-hour run, it feels wasteful to not put one on.

I rated ten of the books five stars. I thought I would only choose from this list, but I’ve now noticed some of the ones I hoped to talk about didn’t make this cut.

BEST OVERALL:

Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood

Wow.

I somehow went 27 years of my life without reading Atwood. This is my third book of hers in three years.

She is consistently one of the most original writers of our time. It is almost painful to realize this because I only notice it as I’m reading her. So much of SF consists of doing a slight variant on the Hero’s Journey. She never stoops to this trope.

Atwood is like if Pynchon wrote an SF character study. The way this story gets told is a fascinating and delicate thing.

There almost isn’t a story. She creates a magnificent world, rich in detail, and deep, believable characters. The story is an emergent property of these elements. It is such a breath of fresh air to have story subordinate to these elements rather than the other way around.

I’m not sure what my favorite Atwood is, because they are all so good and different. But it might be this one. Be warned, though, this novel is quite graphic and disturbing in parts. She hits the horror of a post-apocalyptic more than any other book I know.

The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes

Somehow there seems to be this swath of British novellas that pack more story and emotion into 150 pages than Americans can do in 500.

Now that I’ve decided to do “The Year of Short Fiction” next year, I kind of wish I hadn’t found this until then.

The voice in this story is so compelling, I often looked up from the page confused that I wasn’t chatting with a longtime friend recounting some stories of his life I had missed.

This is a deep meditation on some facts we often want to forget.

One: Life breezes by too quickly (which makes this short form such a great choice).
Two: Little things we do that we don’t think of as mattering can be all-consuming wreckage for another life.

I’ll leave it at that.

2666 – Roberto Bolano

What can one even say about this book? I wrote a whole post on it here. Even that cannot summarize the artistic masterpiece that is this book.

BEST NONFICTION:

Blue Nights – Joan Didion

I’ve read Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking several times. I had no idea, until recently, that she covered some of the same material in this newer book.

Didion is probably the best “creative nonfiction” writer out there. She meshes sterile facts with personal anecdote with repetitious use of poetic language to bring about real emotional depth to this tragic part of her life.

Galileo’s Middle Finger – Alice Dreger

This is probably one of the most important books of the year.

It does a great job documenting the details of how highly-educated, social-justice motivated scientists can spin and falsify data to serve a narrative that isn’t necessarily the Truth.

It shows how activists can malign and slander researchers who do controversial research (a fact we’ve already seen many times in the now-infamous Twitter hate mobs that ruin ordinary people’s lives).

This book is truly terrifying.

It reminds us that we live in a dangerous time. Lay people don’t have the time or resources to hunt through complicated, technical journal articles to see if there are problems. Working researchers have their own research to conduct, so they can’t do it either. But we need people in academia devoted to the pursuit of truth to keep vetting.

One of the scariest stories in this book showed how a biased researcher could get an error-ridden article published in a peer-reviewed journal because the editor and reviewer all had factors motivating them to publish it. Then the media and general public could point to this to make their case.

Someone trying to explain how it got published would come off as a science-denying conspiracy theorist. So what is one to do?

This is a real problem, and the book only scratches the surface in laying foundations for minimizing this social justice skewing of science.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The activists have to realize that their activism is best served with the truth. Faking it will only get people hurt, no matter how well-intentioned the motive.

BEST PUBLISHED IN 2016:

A Doubter’s Almanac – Ethan Canin

I’ve been a long-time fan of Canin. Carry Me Across the Water and For Kings and Planets are both exquisite. I thought America, America had lost something in both style and substance. This novel continues on the same trajectory.

The first three-fourths had a flatness to it that his earlier novels didn’t have. His usual style is rich and complex and enhances the ordinary tragic experiences of people trying to live their lives.

The first part of the novel really gets what it is like to do high-level math in a way that no other novel has captured.

At the same time, it relies on a tired trope: the mad genius with messed up social awareness. I couldn’t help but cringe when these stereotypes came forward.

Going into the last 100 pages or so, I was still on the fence about how much I liked it. I won’t give anything away, but the end is well worth getting to.

He returns to his older, stylistic prose and delivers a stunning conclusion through poetic language and a brilliant shift in structure. This may not be my favorite Canin, but it is still the best novel I read published in 2016.