A Year of Personal Favorites

Every year at this time, various magazines, newspapers and websites publish their list of the best books of the year. Here is The Globe and Mail’s list for example.

I thought it would be fun to think back over a year’s worth of personal reading and list my favorites, too.  Mind you, not all of these titles were published in 2015—I’m a bit behind in my reading.  In fact, I have so many books on my “to read” list that I doubt I will ever catch up; but, that said, these were the best books that I read in 2015, and I would heartily recommend them. (Note: most of these titles are available in the Collingwood Public Library, but some you will have to request (as I did) through our interlibrary loan service).

1.       Rosamund Bartlett. Tolstoy: A Russian Life. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).

I love big juicy literary biographies, and who is bigger or more fascinating than Tolstoy? Those of you who loved The Last Station, the Tolstoy biopic, will enjoy this.

2.       Patrick O’Brian. The Aubrey/Maturin Series. (Collins).

I decided to read the entire series, beginning with Master and Commander, over the course of a year and finished all twenty-one books.  These are historical fiction set in the British navy during the Napoleonic wars, starring Captain Jack Aubrey and his best friend, the naval surgeon and spy, Dr. Stephen Maturin. If you liked C.S. Forester’s Hornblower books, you will love these.  They are not just exciting adventure stories, they are also beautifully written and full of humour.  One reviewer called them “Jane Austen for men,” and that is not far from the mark.  I always felt it was an injustice that O’Brian, who passed away in 2000, was never nominated for the Booker Prize.

3.       Tove Jansson. The Summer Book. (New York Review Books, 2008).

Tove Jansson is best remembered for her Moomin books for children, but she was an accomplished novelist as well, and we are only just beginning to discover this in the English-speaking world, as her adult fiction is slowly being translated.  The Summer Book is a remarkably simple story of an elderly woman and her granddaughter spending a summer at a cottage on an island in the Swedish archipelago.  The book is about life, and learning to accept what comes.  Nothing is stated, but everything is implied.  Beautifully and elegantly written.

4.       Robert Macfarlane. The Old Ways. (Viking/Penguin, 2012).

Macfarlane is hard to classify.  He is a nature writer, but he is concerned about our connection to the natural world and how we both shape and are shaped by the natural environment that we inhabit. In The Old Ways, Macfarlane follows old track ways—pilgrimage trails, holloways, sea-roads, and ancient rights-of-way—in places like southeast England, Palestine, the Scottish Hebrides, and Spain.  Part travelogue, part history, part naturalist’s diary, but all very absorbing.

5.       Sylvain Tesson. The Consolation of the Forest. (Rizzoli Ex Libris, 2013).

Like a modern day Thoreau, Tesson leaves the busy twenty-first century behind and decides to live in a log cabin on the shore Lake Baikal for six months.  He wants to experience life as a hermit, which he claims is the most revolutionary choice anyone can make, since you are not reacting against anything, you are simply turning your back on everything.  He arrives in the depths of the winter, when the lake is frozen solid, and he leaves in summer, when the waters are free of ice and the waterfowl are returning. It should be a boring book, but it is not, and will appeal to anyone who has ever felt the desire to disconnect from our hyperactive wired existence.

6.       Hal Niedzviecki. Trees on Mars: Our Obsession with the Future. (Seven Stories Press, 2015).

Niedzviecki, founder of the Toronto magazine of contemporary indie culture, Broken Pencil, suggests that, for the first time in human history, we are more concerned with the future than we are with the past or the present. Everywhere—in education, business, and science—we are trying desperately to be the first to discover the Next Big Thing.  Millions of dollars are being invested in ideas and products that may never come to fruition.  No one is paying the slightest attention to the present or to what this obsession with capturing the future might cost us. Fascinating.

--Ken Haigh