Every year at this
time, various magazines, newspapers and websites publish their list of the year’s
best books. Here, for example, is TheGlobe and Mail’s list.
Last year, I published my own list of favorite
reads. I thought I might make it an
annual tradition, so here are some of my favorites of 2016 (not all published
in 2016). All are available in the Collingwood Public Library:
1. Helen MacDonald. H is for Hawk. (Penguin/Random House, 2015).
After the death of her
beloved father, MacDonald, jobless and directionless, sinks into despair.
Inspired by T.H.White’s The Goshawk,
MacDonald, decides to try and train a goshawk, the fiercest
and most difficult of birds. This is a hard book to pigeon hole. Part memoir,
part literary biography, and part animal story, MacDonald’s journey as an
apprentice goshawk trainer is a heart-wrenching but ultimately satisfying read.
2. Robert D. Kaplan. In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a
Thirty-Year Journey through Romania and Beyond. (Random House, 2016).
As a young man, Kaplan
became fascinated with the Balkans, particularly the troubled country of
Romania. He made many visits, beginning in 1971, and as a journalist became the
acknowledged expert on this region. In
Europe’s Shadow is a summing up of all he’s learned and observed over
thirty years. Travelling back and forth in time, between modern Romania and her
often troubled past, Kaplan shows us how Romania’s geography, as the
intersection between the Latin West and Byzantine East, has shaped her history. An extremely literate, entertaining, and
thoughtful book.
3. M.G. Vassanji. And Home was Kariakoo: A Memoir of East Africa. (Doubleday Canada, 2014).
Canadian novelist,
Vassanji, explored his Indian roots in the Governor General’s Award-winning A Place Within. In And Home was Kariakoo, he decides to return to his African roots and
revisits his childhood haunts in Kenya and Tanzania. Driving about the
countryside, trying to reconnect with old friends and old memories, he gives us
a remarkably intimate portrait of African life. This is not Africa as the
tourist sees it, but Africa as it is lived by Africans, particularly Africans
of Indian descent who have not always had an easy go of it in the post-colonial
era. An affectionate, but honest portrait of East Africa.
4. Helen Simonson. The Summer before the War. (Penguin/Random House, 2016).
Simonson sets her
story in the small Kentish town of Rye in that golden Edwardian summer before
the First World War blew everything apart. We follow the lives and loves of a
small cast of characters who struggle against the constraints of class, society
and gender, particularly the young teacher, Beatrice Nash, the first female
Latin master appointed against some opposition to the local school. It is a
gentle story about society on the cusp of change, ignorant of what is to come,
and feeling that this golden age will last forever. Exquisitely written.
5 Adam Hochschild. Spain in our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War,
1936-1939. (Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 2016).
Hochschild, perhaps
best known for his account of the history of the Congo in King Leopold’s Ghost, here tells the story of the Spanish Civil War
as seen through the eyes of American (and a few British) volunteers who served
with the International Brigade. Some of his eyewitnesses are well known
figures, like Hemingway and Orwell, but most did their part and are forgotten
by history. “Never before,” writes Hochschild, “had so many men, from so many
countries, against the will of their own governments, come to a place foreign
to all of them to fight for what they believed in.” Hochschild captures the idealism and the
folly of the Republican cause with immediacy and sympathy.
6. Sarah Bakewell. At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails. (Knopf Canada, 2016).
This was my favourite
book of 2016. I loved Bakewell’s
previous book on French essayist Michel de Montaigne, so I couldn’t wait to read
this, and it didn’t disappoint. She gives us a lively history of the
existentialist movement told through the biographies of its leading lights,
beginning with the movement’s predecessors, philosophers like Heidegger and
Husserl, and moving through to Sartre and Camus. Bakewell is extremely good at
explaining difficult concepts in a clear but entertaining manner, and injects her prose with
a welcome dose of humour. She also shows us the influence the existential
movement has had on our own world, not all of it useful, and manages to
convince us that we still need the existentialists, particularly in an age where
there are so many questions and so few answers. The basic question posed by the
existentialists in the early years of the twentieth century is still valid: In
an age without meaning, how does one lead an authentic life?
--Ken Haigh
