How These 10 Books Are Like a Shot of Tequila for 2017
Most of us have had our own experience with the Mexican party god. Good or bad, there are stories to tell. Like a sip of the golden fire, some of these books will make you feel invincible. They will stoke the flames of inspiration and imagination. Some of them will open you like a window and let it all hang out. Others will flash some skin. Others will make you weepy — with a whopping hangover after.
Whatever the response, this list will open your horizons for creating, doing, being better next year. In no particular order, pass the lime and the salt…
1. The Heart Goes Last — By: Margaret Atwood
This futuristic excavation of the white picket fence, prison, cheating, and life-sized dolls will make you squirm in a way completely unique to Ms. Atwood. She will make your mind start the fuse on mini explosions.
2. Slade House — By: David Mitchell
From the author of Cloud Atlas, Mitchell’s new work (think The Bone Clocks) is even better. A haunted house provides a menacing refuge for the different, for the lonely. This book spirits over time, genres, forcing a modern fairy tale to bleak charm.
3. Go Set a Watchman — By: Harper Lee
We’ve all heard of it. This is Harper Lee’s gloriously vibrant found manuscript, a first draft of TKAM. This piece of beautiful uncomfortableness quietly delivers in a time when we need it most. Anyone anywhere, this will help you understand our complicated relationship with race and self.
4. Let the Games Begin — By: Niccolo Ammaniti
Reading this is akin to drinking hot chocolate with chili, a little spoonful of absinthe on the side. Bittersweet, absurd, charming, spicy — the mirror to society will make your face grimace. But, you absolutely cannot look away from this Roman party.
5. The Windup Girl — By: Paolo Bacigalupi
This is not Bacigalupi’s latest endeavor (the equally original The Water Knife), but there is something that tingles your throat in this dystopian biome of Windup People and bio-engineered terrorism. Lovely, grating science fiction that needs to be made into a film. Now.
6. The Secret History — By: Donna Tartt
Yes, Ms. Tartt did win the Pulitzer for The Goldfinch, but . . . this precious cosmos is an unexplored voyage of the soul. Entirely classical, even if you aren’t of the ‘bookish’ sort, the slow burn to devastation will mean you can’t look away from this haunt. It gave me my first tragic catharsis, no joke.
7. Aurora — By: Kim Stanley Robinson
Aurora is no different than Robinson’s other probes into social and political philosophy while colonizing space (see his epic Mars Trilogy), but for the first time, he begins to query whether we were really ever meant to leave earth. His generational ship thrusts us unrelenting into new territory.
8. The Little Paris Bookshop — By: Nina George
The most charming book I have read in a good, long while. A journey of wit, love, loss, self-awareness, quirky characters, and lots and lots of books. This is exactly what you need when you need something. Have a cuppa, and the world will sparkle a little bit brighter.
9. A Good Man is Hard to Find — By: Flannery O’Conner
This American classic, a pioneer of Southern Gothic, is one of the most unique short story collections in existence. This is the savage truth of times, steeped in tragic comedy and haunting awareness. Challenge yourself to see things from vastly different eyes.
10. Anything — By: Haruki Murakami
This Japanese author is one of the most startlingly beautiful, strange voices of the past few generations. Murakami delves underneath the skin of reality, hunting for the fantastical, peeking at what is really inside the mechanics of our world. Start with The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, or 1Q84, and float from there. Warning: Not for the Tentative.
