Top 20 Books I Read in 2017

My friend Natalie asked me to create a top ten list of the books I read in 2017. Of course, I have more than ten. So to celebrate this plethora of riches, I present to you my favourite reads of 2017.

Historical Fiction

• His Bloody Project: Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae by Graeme Macrae Burnet
• Outlander by Diane Gabaldon

Very different books. Both set in Scotland. There may be a few more Scottish titles on this list. I've been hypnotized by the Edinburgh Book Festival.

I had intended to add book covers and links to all of the books below. But then I'll never get this posted and it's already February. Here goes!

Young Adult

Rodent by Lisa J. Lawrence
Fifteen Lanes by S.J. Laidlaw

Both titles were nominated for the White Pine 2017 awards. Please keep in mind that I'm only listing books which I actually read in 2017. There are a couple of other White Pine 2017 titles that I loved, but I read them in 2016.

Education
Launch: Using Design Thinking to Boost Creativity and Bring Out the Maker in Every Student by John Spencer

Enjoyed meeting up with my Tweeps old and new in the #LaunchBookChat this year!

International
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Goblin by Ever Dundas

Essays
Nasty Women by 404 Ink
One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter by Scaachi Koul

Nasty Women led the revolution in the year of the great shake up of #MeToo #BlackLivesMatter and #OscarsSoWhite.

Scaachi Koul's acerbic essays hit the funny bone. Clever book jacket design, too.

Non-Fiction
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
Mind blown
The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
Finely peeling away the layers of secrets
The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Valazquez by Laura Cumming
Winner of the 2017 James Tait Black Prize for NonFiction, a stunning tale of how art can consume us.

Picture Books
The Tale of Tam Linn by Lari Don
Scottish fairytale. A favourite of my niece's.
Journey by Aaron Becker
Only illustrations. Beautiful ones, at that. Great way for pre-literate or early literate children to tell stories.

Literary Fiction
What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell
Nominated for the 2017 James Tait Black Prize for Fiction
The Last Neanderthal by Claire Cameron
Made me mourn for the extinction of the neanderthal. I want a lip like Girl's. Nominated for the 2017 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

Mystery
All the Devils by Neil Broadfoot
Broadfoot's writing keeps getting better. Novel is set in Edinburgh. Scotland, yet again!
Glass Houses by Louise Penny
A perennial favourite - it's a good thing that Penny tends to publish a book a year!

Fantasy
A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab
This book was partly written in Edinburgh. And it shows.

Short Stories
The 2017 Short Story Advent Calendar by Hingston & Olsen Publishing
Forget about the chocolate - open a new short story every morning leading up to Christmas. Great being introduced to new writers and chatting with other readers about the tales on Twitter. #ssac2017

Poetry
I tend to read bit and bites of poetry, but what got me hooked on poetry this year like never before was the FutureLearn course, "Literature and Mental Health". Highly recommended.

Other Recommendations
This list from Kirsty Logan who read 220 books. Quite a diverse range of books that puts my list to shame. Enjoy!
http://www.kirstylogan.com/best-books-of-2017/

Enter the Darkness

As we head into darker days and longer nights, we celebrate what scares us. Perhaps, in our fear, we will cling to each other to keep safe until the daylight comes. Or perhaps the darkness will follow us - as Del Toro wishes - home.

Here are three of my favourite spooky things from this year:

1. "Time Warp Saloon" from Epidsode 2 Lost in Time https://spookedpodcast.org/
2. The Ghost Box from Hingston & Olsen https://www.hingstonandolsen.com/store/the-ghost-box
3. The AGO's Guillermo Del Toro Exhibit: At Home with Monsters https://ago.ca/exhibitions/guillermo-del-toro

Neuromancer

Neuromancer by William Gibson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"The globalization of technology, therefore, as Gibson dramatizes, will increasingly deprive humanity of its spiritual dimension..."

"In 'Gibson's world, human beings have nothing left but thrill' (191). The characters in the novel get thrilled through the nonphysical embodiment of cyberspace or intense sensual experience, but although thrill may replace reflection, Case and others find that it liberates them from the oppression of everyday concerns."

How do you envision the future? Does technology create a dystopian existence

or utopian world?

 

For further exploration of this dichotomy, consider taking this MOOC: https://www.coursera.org/course/edc)

William Gibson's imaginary future is not a sunny, happy place, but one in which humans continue to live and struggle. (To think more deeply about Neuromancer, I've been reading essays about it. Great to model this kind of reading for students, btw. Literary essays are supposed to help you discover more about a work of literature, not just help you finish your homework.)

Neuromancer is a book of ideas. The detachment of the characters from their own humanity may also place readers of the novel at arm's length. Many other reviews on Goodreads call for a re-reading of the book in order to get a fuller appreciation of what it is trying to say. The reason that I give this book five stars is that I will be thinking about it for a long time.

Neuromancer is an excellent resource to use with students to talk about how their world is changing: Do we shape technology, or does technology shape us? That is the question. Think Raymond Williams vs Marshall McLuhan. More recent texts include the graphic novel The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, Stratosphere by Michael Fullan (the use of technology in education) and The Shallows by Nicholas Carr.

Quotes from:
Haney, William S., II. "William Gibson's Neuromancer: cyberpunk and the end of humanity/William Gibson'in Neuromancer Adli Eseri: siberpunk ve insanligin sonu." Interactions 18.1 (2009): 73+. Canada In Context. Web. 27 Sept. 2013.


View all my reviews

Death in Breslau

Death in Breslau: An Eberhard Mock Investigation by Marek Krajewski
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Independent described this book “as noir as they get”. I also love some of the other reviews. They give you a sense of the muscle in the book:

“A dark and compelling novel, full of perverse sex and violence as the world begins to spin off its axis.”
-The Mail on Sunday

“The city of Breslau is as much a character in this thriller as the parade of gothic loons that inhabit it...This addictive soup has an air of burlesque about it.”
-The Daily Telegraph

“Krajewski relishes the period detail as takes us from bloody interrogation cells to Madam LeGoef’s sweaty bordello...What’s haunting about Krajewski’s book, however, is the worst was yet to come.”
-Independent on Sunday

There’s something about a corrupt police department still trying to uphold the law and do what’s right. They need devious means to cut through the criminality of others. It’s a power struggle between bad, evil and ultimate evil.

Set mostly in interwar Germany, bordering on Poland, in a city which would become Polish again after WWII, the Machiavellian protagonist, Eberhard Monk, tries to solve the chilling murders of a young girl, her nanny and a railway worker.

What I love about the book is that Mock, for all his dastardly methods, is still the good guy. After all, the ends do justify the means when you’re dealing with the Nazis. Ironically, he still longs to be a “[m]an pure, by crime untouched.”

Breslau is the perfect setting, with its own layers of multiple identities.

There are many dead cluttering the stage by the end of the book. Indeed, for all the blood and gore, it feels as if there are only two people surviving by the conclusion.

The writer sets out clever clues for the reader. We get to understand what is going on just before the characters do. Just, just.

I would have liked the translation to have been a little less melodramatic. It may be echoing the original book, but I haven’t seen the Polish edition.

View all my reviews