The Librarian's Shelf by Lisa Guidarini: 2011 Best Reads

What a great reading year for me! It was tough choosing a Top 10 List from the amazing crop of choices, let me tell you. I hemmed and hawed over a couple of them, ultimately changing my last choice after reading one more tremendous book a week ago. I thought I wouldn't finish any more books this year but Ali Smith's 'There But for the' completely blew me away. Sorry to the book that would have had that last spot...

Most of these books will probably be unfamiliar; I enjoy reading "off the beaten path" titles, plus, as a book reviewer, I'm sent a wide variety of books to read.

So, here are one librarian's choices for Best Reads of 2011 (in no particular order):

1). The Paperbark Shoe by Goldie Goldbloom

An albino woman agrees to marry a dwarf-like man - who happens to collect corsets and cross-dress - in order to escape a life spent in an asylum, where her step-father had dumped her. Together the two farm the arid, forbidding wheatland of Australia, living happily enough, until two Italian prisoners of war are assigned to their farm to help until the end of WW II. Then the true nature of their love is challenged: long-term love competing with the first blush of new romance.

2).  The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht

A complex novel weaving fairy tale with real life. A daughter searches for her beloved missing, terminally ill grandfather in one plot line, while the "fairy tale" he'd told her since her childhood is explained in terms of his early life in the other. A magical book, worth the bit of effort some may have getting into it.

3).  Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Survival by Laura Hillenbrand

An Olympics-bound athlete is drafted into World War II. He proves himself not only an extraordinarily talented runner but a flying ace, flying successful sortie after sortie. He is inhumanly brave, excelling in everything, and for that he's a national hero.Then his plane is brought down, his crew set adrift in a rubber raft for weeks and weeks. They run out of food and water, hallucinating, nearly mad and at death's door. But that wasn't all that awaited them. There was even worse to come.

This is nonfiction that reads like fiction. Heartbreaking, beautiful and uplifting. Humbling knowing there are actual people in the world like Louis Zamperini. It's so easy to forget the sacrifices those who serve make for those back home. Read this and you'll feel grateful for so many things we take for granted every day, the freedom we enjoy that's anything but free.

4).  On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry

A novel based on stories from his own family's past, Sebastian Barry's book is told in flashback by 89-year old Lilly Bere. Following the death of a beloved grandson, Lilly is a woman broken by sorrow, intent on suicide, remembering - one last time - all she's experienced and endured.

The tale follows her long life through its ups and downs, generation by generation, in prose that is sumptuous and sensual. Enchanting. Mesmerizing. Beatific.

5).  The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

"This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about - until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he'd left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he'd understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world."

6). I Married You for Happiness by Lily Ross

The story is about a woman named Nina who discovers her husband dead in their bed. She had been preparing dinner while he went upstairs to nap. When she called up that dinner was ready and received no reply she went up to check on him, finding his hands already beginning to cool.

Throughout the night Lily keeps visit at Philip's side, wanting this time with him while she went through memories of their long-term marriage. Through her introspection the reader comes away with a realistic portrayal of the ups and downs of relationships, the moral slips and - in their case - ultimate forgiveness. It is so honest, refreshingly so. Anyone married a significant length of time will be able to identify with Lily and Philip and the changing nature of love as it matures.

7).  The Curfew by Jesse Ball

"...  A dystopian unnamed country and city are the setting. In this post-revolutionary state, systematic purges and bloodbaths have given way to everyday ambiguous incidents of what could be state-sponsored persecution or random street violence. It’s hard to tell, because the police have all become secret police—even their stations are undercover—and government agents are in disguise, principally from each other. William, who was once a virtuoso violinist before the symphonies were disbanded and music itself banned, now works writing epitaphs—quirky ones for people whose sole creative outlet these days is imagining what should be inscribed on their own or others’ tombstones. William’s 9-year-old daughter Molly is mute but gifted with a prodigious imagination. He has raised her ever since his wife Louisa was “disappeared” by the government years before. William and Molly lead a colorless but relatively placid existence, carefully avoiding drawing attention to themselves, especially by going out after evening curfew, when citizens not at home are deemed to be up to no good—whatever “good” is."

An extremely powerful book.

8). The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dustbowl by Timothy Egan

"The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod homes to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out. He follows their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black blizzards, crop failure, and the deaths of loved ones. Drawing on the voices of those who stayed and survived—those who, now in their eighties and nineties, will soon carry their memories to the grave—Egan tells a story of endurance and heroism against the backdrop of the Great Depression."

9). The Double Life of Alfred Buber by David Schmahmann

Alfred Buber is an attorney. Finding himself wealthy, middle-aged and alone, on a trip to Asia he finds a beautiful young prostitute he decides he can reform and bring home as his wife. Only, he doesn't. He sends her money and letters of promise, allowing her to attend school and live in the city instead of the muddy countryside she's from.

His fantasies of a beautiful, almost criminally young wife dissolve into the realization of how she would be received in his social circle. Buber continues alternating fantasy with reality while charging through a mid-life crisis complicated by bad behavior that's demonstrated on more than one front. As he's making a complete mess of things the reader can't help feeling a certain empathy for this poor, hapless man systematically destroying his entire life and reputation.

10). There But for the by Ali Smith

A middle-aged man named Miles Garth leaves the table in the middle of a dinner party, locks himself in his host's spare room (with a verified C18 door!), and refuses to come out. For months. And months. And months. His only communication is  a note outside the door letting his captive hosts know he's all set for water but will need food. And he is, as they know, vegetarian.

Outside the house becomes a circus atmosphere. Television crews set up, food vendors appear and there's even a psychic who will relay Miles's thoughts to those with the money to spend. A self-appointed caretaker rigs a pulley system to deliver fruits and vegetables to Miles. At the same time each day the food is wheeled up, a hand reaches out and chooses, then disappears again under the shade. Because how have his hosts chosen to feel him? By sliding thin slices of ham under his door, because really, how else can you feed a "guest" who won't let you in?

The reader gets Miles's story via four other characters: Anna, who went to Europe with a youth group he was in half her life ago; May, an elderly woman living out the end of her life in a nursing home; Mark, a man whose brief acquaintance with Miles is the reason he was at the dinner party to start with, and Brooke, a precocious, "cleverist" ten-year old girl who's appointed herself the official historian of the whole, crazy affair.

I hope 2011 was a great reading year for all of you, too! If you'd care to let me know your top reads just leave a comment. I'd love to see them.

Happy Holidays to all.