The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane

This haunting, gorgeous novel revolves around two plot lines. Elderly Ruth hears a tiger sneaking into her home at night. Then a mysterious woman shows up to help Ruth around the house, supposedly sent by the government. The novel’s realism is subtly undermined by Ruth’s fantasies, memories, and personality quirks. As Ruth tries to uncover the truth about the tiger and the government helper, the novel becomes surprisingly suspenseful, while still lavishing attention to language and setting. This is such a stunning book, it’s hard to believe it’s McFarlane’s first.

Nine Inches by Tom Perrotta

As a person of small town origin, I loved seeing the suburban milieu treated as a serious subject in this story collection. Perrotta’s examination of suburban life is simultaneously entertaining and arresting. Especially of note were the title story (a masterclass in the perfect last sentence) and “Senior Season.” “Senior Season” dealt with the life of a high school football player who suffers from a concussion. The subject might seem ripe for satire or cliché, but Perrotta treated it with gravity and generosity.

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

The more I read this book (this was my fourth or fifth read), the more I’m impressed by its perfect plot construction. A rich dinosaur enthusiast hires some scientists to figure out how to clone dinosaurs. He plans to create an island zoo/amusement park that will feature several extinct species.  Experts are brought in to assess the park’s safety for the public, and things go horribly awry. Readers of “literary” fiction might be tempted dismiss this novel as a simple thriller, but it’s so much more than that. Although the plot involves a cool sci-fi concept, it is mainly driven by individual characters’ personality traits and ambitions (in other words, what you’re taught to write in every fiction class: character-driven plot). Also impressive is Crichton’s world-building. A lesser writer might have just had some generic dinosaurs and left it at that. Crichton imagines several different dinosaur species in great detail, describing not only their appearance, but also their behaviors and movements. These traits, in turn, affect parts of the plot, in such a strong way that the dinosaurs almost function as characters.

How to be Both by Ali Smith

This novel has two sections, each with an unusual narrator. The first is a grammar-obsessed sixteen-year-old whose mother has passed away. The second is a fourteenth-century artist. The writing style is original and surprising, almost experimental in sections. Yet Smith’s playful style doesn’t detract from the emotional content of the novel, as sometimes happens in books that focus a lot of attention on language. The jacket copy compared Smith to Woolf, which is sort of a lofty comparison. But after I finished the novel, I felt that Smith had lived up to it.

Guess the books in the comments.  Make your English teacher proud.

1. It seems like this book is pretty much everyone’s favorite classic.

2.  Sleeping is actually super interesting, if you think about it in depth.

3.  A bromance gone wrong

4.  This has to be the worst suicide plan in all of literature.

5.  College BFFs gone wrong

6.  A man vs. nature tale where you kind of end up sympathizing with nature

Feed and The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson – Two enormously intelligent books that were remarkable not only in themselves, but also for how different they were from each other.  Feed is a brilliant dystopia about the internet, consumerism, and environmental destruction.  Octavian Nothing is a historical novel set during the American Revolution, narrated by a young black boy.

Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood – This remains one of my favorite dystopias of all time.  It seems I am confronted weekly with some piece of news that confirms the chilling accuracy of Atwood’s predictions about people, science, and environmental destruction.

Jurassic Park, Timeline, Sphere, and The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton – Crichton is a master of plot, and he’s also great at coming up with intriguing and sometimes terrifying ideas for science fiction.

A Mixture of Frailties by Robertson Davies – The coming of age story of an opera singer.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert – Once I read this absolutely perfect classic I couldn’t believe I’d waited to approach it.  Coming up for a re-read shortly.

The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman – I still get chills when I think about how amazing this book was.  It’s a literary novel about two sisters set during the dot com bubble… but also so much more than that.  Goodman is notable for the warmth that comes through her novels.  Sometimes it seems too easy to write about all the bad stuff people do.  Goodman sees beyond that and makes you love everyone in the book–and somehow encourages you to see the good in people, even in this jaded 21st century.

The Secret Place, Broken Harbor, The Likeness, and In The Woods by Tana French – Beautifully written mysteries with a heavy dose of psychology and setting.  What more could a literary suspense lover want?

Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry by B.S. Johnson – A wicked little work of metafiction by a mid-20th century experimental writer

Bobcat and The City is a Rising Tide by Rebecca Lee – I’ve been plaguing all my friends by telling them to read Bobcat, a story collection that instantly became my favorite.

Music for Wartime by Rebecca Makkai – Makkai is one of my favorite short story writers.  Also, this collection features a lot of musicians, obviously a favorite topic of mine.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami – Another book I’ve told everyone I know to read, and they’re probably getting annoyed by now… one of those books that’s good enough to get obsessed with, and weird enough that you can’t explain why.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl – A coming of age murder story narrated by a brainy teenage girl.  I admired the unique voice Pessl achieved, and the character of the girl’s father was quite memorable.

The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips – A pleasantly terrifying, Kafka-esque tale about that soul-crushing place, the 9-5 office job.

Orfeo, Galatea 2.2, and Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers – Powers shares my fascination with music, science, and technology.  He’s not exactly a science fiction writer, but sort of borders on it by being a literary writer preoccupied with science.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell – This was a stunning, heartbreaking story of adolescent love. I was astounded by how well Rowell captured the awkwardness of teenage years and how it feels to be a teenager in love–as well as by the devastating story wrapped around the narrative core.

The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust – I tackled volume 3 of the 7-volume saga.  This one featured stalking a duchess and the tragic death of the grandmother.

Non-fiction

Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo by Nicholas Carlson – A study of Yahoo and the career of its current CEO, one of the youngest female CEOs

The Boy Who Played With Fusion by Tom Clynes – Not only the story of one scientific prodigy, but also an examination of the conditions under which genius can flourish (or falter)

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance – A fascinating biography of the most innovative, daring tech industrialist of our time.

The Double Helix by James Watson – Watson’s memoir of discovering the DNA molecule.  Interesting not only for its close-up look at a major scientific discovery, but also for Watson’s eccentric narrative style and for a glimpse at gender norms of the time (Rosalind Franklin famously got the short end of the stick)

 

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Pale Fire is a novel in the form of a poem, with notes and commentary by a crazed would-be academic.  Nabokov’s humor and cleverness are on full display.  It’s an essential read for anyone who enjoys his books.

 

The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin (translated by Ken Liu)

Science fiction dealing with physics is unusual, and the book’s cultural setting (China immediately after the Cultural Revolution) is quite interesting.  For me, the most striking part of the novel (besides the fact that half the physicists are women) was a virtual reality video game where physicists must decode the rules of a seemingly arbitrary planet.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

“House of Leaves” is an academic text concerning a (perhaps nonexistent) film, the manuscript of which is discovered by a lonely tattoo artist, who adds his own copious footnotes and commentary.   The novel’s form most closely resembles Pale Fire, but the mood is entirely different.  Pale Fire is satire, sometimes even burlesque, but House of Leaves is a creepy story about a house that is bigger inside than it is outside.

Night Film by Marisha Pessl

This fast-paced mystery begins with the suspicious death of a famous filmmaker’s daughter and quickly becomes a tale full of ambiguity and eerie events.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

A list of weird cool books wouldn’t be complete without this experimental classic, which tells of a family’s decline through four memorably eccentric points of view.

The Likeness by Tana French

Detective Cassie Maddox is called in to investigate the murder of a girl who eerily resembles her–and who happens to be using the name that was once her undercover alias.  Pretending that the victim was only in a coma, not dead, Cassie infiltrates the girl’s strange group of five best friends to find out what happened.

The Secret Place by Tana French

In order to solve the murder of a teenage boy, two detectives must investigate warring girl cliques at an exclusive private school.

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

John Dowell believes he has the perfect marriage and the perfect set of friends.  Then he discovers that everything his friends and wife have told him is false, and his entire life is based on lies.

 

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

Blue van Meer befriends a strange group of kids and their charismatic teacher at a fancy private school.  When the teacher is found dead, Blue must find out what happened.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

Tsukuru Tazaki once had five very close friends who expelled him from their group for no apparent reason.  Years later, he tracks them down across Japan to find out what happened.