Jackie's Favorite YA Books in 2010

Young adult fiction just gets better and better, I have to say. Here are what I consider the best of 2010:

The Mockingbirds


Revolution


You








I Am Number 4


Linger








Nightshade


The Allegra Biscotti Collection


Virals

TC Tibit: American Library Association's Best YA Books of 2010

This links you to the top ten list, which then links you to the complete list of the 90 titles chosen as this year's best.

Jonathan Evison's 2010 Favorites

Jonathan Evison lives on an island in the Puget Sound with 8 rabbits, 4 dogs, 1 wife and 1 son. He writes and drinks beer in the woods in his father's old mobile home wearing his grandfathers fedora. He believes in sweatpants, family, and quality fiction writing. He is the author of All About Lulu and the upcoming West of Here (hitting the stores mid January 2011). His third book, finished but still mysterious, is coming out in 2012.





2010 releases I loved, which fall all over the literary map:

Holy Water
Henry Tuhoe is the quintessential twenty-first-century man. He has a vague, well-compensated job working for a multinational conglomerate—but everyone around him is getting laid off as the company outsources everything it can to third-world countries.

He has a beautiful wife—his college sweetheart—and an idyllic new home in the leafy suburbs, complete with pool. But his wife won’t let him touch her, even though she demanded he get a vasectomy; he’s seriously over leveraged on the mortgage; and no matter what chemicals he tries the pool remains a corpse-like shade of ghastly green.

Then Henry’s boss offers him a choice: go to the tiny, magical, about-to-be-globalized Kingdom of Galado to oversee the launch of a new customer-service call center for a boutique bottled water company the conglomerate has just acquired, or lose the job with no severance. Henry takes the transfer, more out of fecklessness than a sense of adventure.

In Galado, a land both spiritual and corrupt, Henry wrestles with first-world moral conundrums, the life he left behind, the attention of a steroid-abusing, megalomaniacal monarch, and a woman intent on redeeming both his soul and her country. The result is a riveting piece of fiction of and for our times, blackly satirical, moving, and profound.

The Wilding
Echo Canyon is a disappearing pocket of wilderness outside of Bend, Oregon, and the site of conflicting memories for Justin Caves and his father, Paul. It’s now slated for redevelopment as a golfing resort. When Paul suggests one last hunting trip, Justin accepts, hoping to get things right with his father this time, and agrees to bring his son, Graham, along.

As the weekend unfolds, Justin is pushed to the limit by the reckless taunting of his father, the physical demands of the terrain, and the menacing evidence of the hovering presence of bear. All the while, he remembers the promise he made to his skeptical wife: to keep their son safe.

Benjamin Percy, a writer whose work Dan Chaon called “bighearted and drunk and dangerous,” shows his mastery of narrative suspense as the novel builds to its surprising climax. The Wilding shines unexpected light on our shifting relationship with nature and family in contemporary society.

Half a Life
Strauss shares the true story of how one high school outing in his father's Oldsmobile resulted in the tragic death of a young girl, and the beginning of a different, darker life for the author. He delves deep into the meaning and consequences of that fateful, or possibly fateless, day.




Bound
Catherine and Oliver, young wife and older entrepreneurial husband, are negotiating their difference in age and a plethora of well-concealed secrets. Oliver, now in his sixties, is a serial adulterer and has just fallen giddily in love yet again. Catherine, seemingly placid and content, has ghosts of a past she scarcely remembers. When Catherine's long-forgotten high school friend dies and leaves Catherine the guardian of her teenage daughter, that past comes rushing back. As Oliver manages his new love, and Catherine her new charge and darker past, local news reports turn up the volume on a serial killer who has reappeared after years of quiet.In a time of hauntings and new revelations, Nelson's characters grapple with their public and private obligations, continually choosing between the suppression or indulgence of wild desires. Which way they turn, and what balance they find, may only be determined by those who love them most.

The Imperfectionists

One of most acclaimed books of the year, Tom Rachman’s debut novel follows the topsy-turvy private lives of the reporters and editors of an English-language newspaper in Rome.




Super
Need a new job? Does the world need another superhero? You see the connection, don't you? If you had the chance to save lives...could you handle the adventure? The pressure, the risk, the grotesque, the insane? Most of all, could you handle your humanity? Update your resume, 'cause here we go. Either stick with being sucked down further into your life, or earn the lift-off of the elite. Aaron Dietz's debut novel moves with an experimental edge into America's heroic mythology. Structured as a novel-length job application for a superhero agency, Dietz uses his iron touch to explore themes that go far deeper than the swashbuckling world of comics and costumes. It's a story about commitment, ability, bureaucracy, possibility, crisis, and heartbreak. Super.

An Dantomine Eerly
As the Irish-American poet Dallin lay dying he recalls the surreal geography and traumatic events that lead to his end. An absence in a wind-beaten house suggests a past but somehow still-looming tragedy; vacancy fills a ghostly barroom and the campus of a condemned university; city streets and desolated forests are populated by no one except the formulations of Dallin’s own mind. The ailed poet and his beautiful, haunting wife Aìsling flee an obscure political persecution that culminates in her planned murder. The impact of her death afflicts Dallin in ways he cannot comprehend and spirals him into his meeting with the mythic celestial escort, An Dantomine Eerly.

An Dantomine Eerly is fine experimental writing, using narrative techniques, dream-world symbolism, and a poetic style of prose that takes up John Banville’s admittance “to blend poetry and fiction into some new form.” The novel itself is a re-conception of the 17th century Irish poetic form of the aisling, meaning “dream vision” or “vision poem.” As Dallin confronts his moment of death, the book assembles itself as a collage of the affinities, falsehoods, and absurdities of memory and reality.

Comparisons to pre-discovery Chuck Palahnuik (Fight Club) and early David Foster Wallace (The Broom Of The System) have been made, as well as the influence of older, experimental works. The result is a stylized exploration of the infinite world through the microscope of Middleton’s ill-fated narrator, and above all, a promising debut.

The Lambs of Men

Returning from the horrors of the First World War to recruit volunteers in his remote Appalachian home, Marine Sergeant Hiram Tobit finds the country changed. His mother has committed suicide, dredging up old resentments between Hiram and his father, Sloane. When a gruesome act of violence stuns the insular mountain community, father and son must journey together to see justice carried out while coming to terms with a deeply troubled family history.

Chuck's Favorite Sci-Fi of 2010

The Passage

Blackout

For the Win








Freedom

The Terminal State








Windup Girl

The City and the City

The Magicians








Hylozoic

House of Suns








And, from his "To Be Read" pile:

Terminal World

All Clear








Canticle

Antiphon

TC Tidbits: Jennifer Haigh's Favorite Book of 2010

My favorite read this year was JM Coetzee's Summertime. I loved the first two volumes in this trilogy, particularly Youth, Coetzee's memoir about coming of age as a writer in England -- or, to be more exact, a writer in the English language. But Summertime, the third volume in the trilogy, is something larger and stranger than a memoir. Narrated in the first person, by the biographer of a dead writer named John Coetzee, the novel focuses on interviews with the most significant women in Coetzee's life. Like all Coetzee's work, its exquisitely written and excruciatingly honest (as in the devastating description of Coetzee's attempts at dancing, by a Brazilian woman he fancied). At times it's also laugh-out-loud funny, a quality I have never associated with this writer. After more than a dozen books he is still capable of surprising.


Jennifer Haigh is the author of Mrs.Kimble, Baker Towers and The Condition.

Therese Fowler Talks About Life as a Reader as well as a Writer

Therese Fowler has believed in the magic of a good story since she learned to read at the age of four. At age thirty, as a newly single parent, she put herself into college, earning a degree in sociology before deciding to scratch her longtime fiction-writing itch. That led to an MFA in creative writing, and the composition of stories that explore the nature of our families, our culture, our mistakes, and our desires.
Four years have passed since I wrote what would become my first published novel, Souvenir. My aim with that book was to take Toni Morrison’s advice and “write to fill a space on the shelf that is presently empty.”

I’d just earned an MFA in creative writing, and had been writing long enough by then to understand that my particular identity on the page was something like Dickens’ with a dash or two (or three) of Jane Austen for good measure—but contemporary, relevant to our times rather than theirs.

That being the case, I aimed to fill a space on the shelf somewhere in the middle of an imaginary triangulation of Jodi Picoult, Anna Quindlen, and Nicholas Sparks. In doing so, I hoped I could be true to myself while offering readers something they weren’t getting elsewhere.

As a reader, I seem to gravitate toward books that offer that blend of familiar and fresh. Strong stories, written well, with unique perspectives. It was a real pleasure to read several like this over the past year. Here are a few that stood out for me:

How to Buy a Love of Reading

A brilliant debut novel with a meta-fiction angle and a nod to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Little Bee

Fantastic, engaging story about the Nigerian refugee experience in Britain, but not a bit didactic.

Motherless Brooklyn

Clever, odd, entertaining—and an NBCC award winner too.

Chosen

About the bizarre world of domestic adoption—it’s also a debut, which I had the pleasure of endorsing.

Loving Frank

Engrossing tale of Frank Lloyd Wright’s married lover and their scandalous early 1900s affair.

The Glass Castle

A bizarre memoir; hard to believe Walls came out of her childhood not only intact but successful.

As 2011 approaches, I’m looking forward to discovering new standout books—and to the release of my third novel, Exposure, on May 3^rd. As with Dickens and Austen (and many other authors), I mine my personal experiences for story inspiration. Never more so, however, than with this novel, which arises from a situation my son and our family endured in 2009. Exposure’s themes are universal (it’s a love story and social commentary and family drama) but its premise is very current: sexting, and teens.

I doubt that Toni Morrison has ever heard of me. Even so, as I ring in 2011, I’ll be celebrating her advice not only for the way it has shaped my career as a novelist, but also for the other books she will have inspired—which I hope it will be my pleasure to read.

Coming out in May, 2011:

Amelia Wilkes’ strict father does not allow her to date, but that doesn’t stop the talented, winsome high school senior from carrying on a secret romance with her classmate, Anthony Winter. Desperately in love, the two envision a life together and plan to tell Amelia’s parents when she turns eighteen and is legally an adult. Anthony’s mother, Kim Winter, who teaches at their school, knows—and keeps—their secret. But the couple’s passion is exposed sooner than planned: Amelia’s father, Harlan, is shocked and infuriated to find naked pictures of Anthony on his daughter’s computer. Just hours later, Anthony is arrested.

Despite Amelia’s frantic protests, Harlan uses his wealth and influence with local law enforcement and the media to label Anthony a deviant who preyed on his innocent daughter. Spearheaded by a zealous prosecutor anxious to turn the case into a public crusade against “sexting,” the investigation soon takes an even more disturbing and destructive turn.

As events spiral wildly out of control and the scandalous story makes national news, Amelia and Anthony risk everything in a bold and dangerous plan to clear their names and end the madness once and for all.

A captivating page-turner, Therese Fowler’s Exposure is also a deftly crafted, provocative, and timely novel that serves as a haunting allegory of the consequences of love in the modern age.

Check out Therese's other novels:

Souvenir

Meg Powell and Carson McKay were raised side by side on their families’ farms, bonded by a love that only deepened as they grew. Everyone in their small rural community in northern Florida thought that Meg and Carson would always be together. But at twenty-one, Meg was presented with a marriage proposal she could not refuse, forever changing the course of her life.

Seventeen years later, Meg’s marriage has become routine, and she spends her time juggling the demands of her medical practice, the needs of her widowed father, and the whims of her rebellious teenage daughter, Savannah, who is confronting her burgeoning sexuality in a dangerous manner and pushing her mother away just when she needs her most. Then, after a long absence, Carson returns home to prepare for his wedding to a younger woman. As Carson struggles to determine where his heart and future lie, Meg makes a shocking discovery that will upset the balance of everyone around her.

Reunion

Celebrity talk show host Blue Reynolds is the queen of daytime television—she is smart, funny, and as down-to-earth as her adoring fans. In the eyes of the world, she has it all. But no one knows about the secret she has harbored for the last twenty years—a secret that could destroy her image, her reputation, and her career. Twenty years ago, she gave birth to a son and put him up for adoption through illegal channels. And every day since, she’s been filled with regret. Now Blue has hired a private investigator to find her son, knowing full well the consequences.

A week in Key West to do her show on location brings Blue a much-needed change of pace—and an unexpected reunion with an old flame, Mitch Forrester. Helping him launch a television series may help her recapture the kind of genuine romance and affection long missing from her life. But it also means having to deal with Mitch’s disapproving son, Julian, who is only nine years younger than Blue. Emotionally battered from his years as a war photographer in the world’s most dangerous hotspots, Julian struggles to get close to his father while making his disdain for Blue crystal clear—which makes his desire for her all the more shocking.

Katie S Reveals Her 2010 Favorites

3 MPH*
Pursuing the spirit of adventure and an altruistic goal of raising global awareness and funds for breast caner, Polly Letofsky broke down barriers and walked across four continents, 22 countries and covered over 14,000 miles in five years to be the first American woman to successfully walk around the world.

With personal honesty, candor, and heart-pounding prose, Polly takes us deep into the pain and glory of being a woman that paid attention to her heart s desire and went in search of all that the world had to offer. Across four continents strangers welcomed her into their homes. The world had embraced her. But in the middle of Polly s journey, September 11 flung us all into a crossroads in world history, and she found her self in a vastly changing world.

Lego: A Love Story
There are 62 LEGO bricks for every person in the world, and at age 30, Jonathan Bender realized that he didn’t have a single one of them. While reconsidering his childhood dream of becoming a Master Model Builder for The LEGO Group, he discovers the men and women who are skewing the averages with collections of hundreds of thousands of LEGO bricks. What is it about the ubiquitous, brightly-colored toys that makes them so hard for everyone to put down?

In search of answers and adventure, Jonathan Bender sets out to explore the quirky world of Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOL) while becoming a builder himself. As he participates in challenges at fan conventions, searches for the largest private collection in the United States, and visits LEGO headquarters (where he was allowed into the set vault), he finds his LEGO journey twinned with a second creative endeavor—to have a child. His two worlds intertwine as he awaits the outcome: Will he win a build competition or bring a new fan of LEGO into the world? Like every really good love story, this one has surprises—and a happy ending.

29
llie Jerome is a young-at-heart seventy-five-year-old who feels she has more in common with her twenty-nine-year-old granddaughter, Lucy, than her fifty-five-year-old daughter, Barbara. Ellie’s done everything she can to stay young, and the last thing she wants is to celebrate another birthday. So when she finds herself confronted with a cake full of candles, Ellie wishes more than anything that she could be twenty-nine again, just for one day. But who expects a wish like that to come true?

29 is the story of three generations of women and how one magical day shakes up everything they know about each other. While Ellie finds that the life of a twenty-something is not as carefree as she expected, the sheer joy of being young again prompts her to consider living her life all over. Does she dare stay young for more than this day, even if it means leaving everyone she loves behind?

Homer's Odyssey

The last thing Gwen Cooper wanted was another cat. She already had two, not to mention a phenomenally underpaying job and a recently broken heart. Then Gwen’s veterinarian called with a story about a three-week-old eyeless kitten who’d been abandoned. It was love at first sight.

Everyone warned that Homer would always be an “underachiever.” But the kitten nobody believed in quickly grew into a three-pound dynamo with a giant heart who eagerly made friends with every human who crossed his path. Homer scaled seven-foot bookcases with ease, survived being trapped alone for days after 9/11 in an apartment near the World Trade Center, and even saved Gwen’s life when he chased off an intruder who broke into their home in the middle of the night. But it was Homer’s unswerving loyalty, his infinite capacity for love, and his joy in the face of all obstacles that transformed Gwen’s life. And by the time she met the man she would marry, she realized that Homer had taught her the most valuable lesson of all: Love isn’t something you see with your eyes.

Room

"remarkable.... Jack's voice is one of the pure triumphs of the novel: in him, she has invented a child narrator who is one of the most engaging in years - his voice so pervasive I could hear him chatting away during the day when I wasn't reading the book. Donoghue rearranges language to evoke the sweetness of a child's learning without making him coy or overly darling; Jack is lovable simply because he is lovable.... This is a truly memorable novel, one that can be read through myriad lenses - psychological, sociological, political. It presents an utterly unique way to talk about love, all the while giving us a fresh, expansive eye on the world in which we live."

-The New York Times Book Review


The Elephant Keeper
England, 1766: After a long voyage from the East Indies, a ship docks in Bristol, England, and rumor quickly spreads about its unusual cargo. In the final two crates is a pair of young elephants, in poor health but alive.

Seeing a unique opportunity, a wealthy sugar merchant purchases the elephants for his country estate and turns their care over to a young stable boy, Tom Page. It takes time for Tom and the elephants to understand each other, but to the surprise of everyone on the estate, a remarkable bond is formed.

The Elephant Keeper is a captivating tale of love and loyalty between one man and the two exotic animals that change the lives of everyone who encounters them.

The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything

St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Society of Jesus (aka the Jesuits), was known for his practical spirituality. The "way of Ignatius" has helped millions of people—from the doubtful seeker to the devout believer—find freedom, make friends, live simply, work sensibly, fall in love, experience joy, and enter into a relationship with God.

The Ignatian goal of "finding God in all things" eans that every part of our lives can lead us to God. The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything shows us how this is possible, with user-friendly examples, humorous stories and anecdotes from the heroic and inspiring lives of Jesuit saints and average priests and brothers, as well as examples from Martin's twenty years as a Jesuit. The traditional wisdom that Jesuits use to help other people in their daily lives is easily applied, but not often explained well to the general public. The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything translates these insights of St. Ignatius for a modern audience and reveals how we can find God—and how God can find us—in the real world of work, love, suffering, decisions, prayer, and friendship.

Storm of the i
"Blogs and social networking sites offer only a facsimile of a classic memoir…. Boulder artist Tina Collen's memoir … is the antithesis of such drive-by shallowness. A project five years in the making, Collen's slick, clever, refreshingly unpredictable labor of love is like no other book you're likely to read any time soon."
—Clay Evans, Daily Camera review


The Bells
I grew up as the son of a man who could not possibly have been my father. Though there was never any doubt that my seed had come from another man, Moses Froben, Lo Svizzero, called me “son.” And I called him “father.” On the rare occasions when someone dared to ask for clarification, he simply laughed as though the questioner were obtuse. “Of course he’s not my son!” he would say. “Don’t be ridiculous.” But whenever I myself gained the courage to ask him further of our past, he just looked sadly at me. “Please, Nicolai,” he would say after a moment, as though we had made a pact I had forgotten. With time, I came to understand I would never know the secrets of my birth, for my father was the only one who knew these secrets, and he would take them to his grave.
The celebrated opera singer Lo Svizzero was born in a belfry high in the Swiss Alps where his mother served as the keeper of the loudest and most beautiful bells in the land. Shaped by the bells’ glorious music, as a boy he possessed an extraordinary gift for sound. But when his preternatural hearing was discovered—along with its power to expose the sins of the church—young Moses Froben was cast out of his village with only his ears to guide him in a world fraught with danger.

Rescued from certain death by two traveling monks, he finds refuge at the vast and powerful Abbey of St. Gall. There, his ears lead him through the ancient stone hallways and past the monks’ cells into the choir, where he aches to join the singers in their strange and enchanting song. Suddenly Moses knows his true gift, his purpose. Like his mother’s bells, he rings with sound and soon, he becomes the protégé of the Abbey’s brilliant yet repulsive choirmaster, Ulrich.

But it is this gift that will cause Moses’ greatest misfortune: determined to preserve his brilliant pupil’s voice, Ulrich has Moses castrated. Now a young man, he will forever sing with the exquisite voice of an angel—a musico—yet castration is an abomination in the Swiss Confederation, and so he must hide his shameful condition from his friends and even from the girl he has come to love. When his saviors are exiled and his beloved leaves St. Gall for an arranged marriage in Vienna, he decides he can deny the truth no longer and he follows her—to sumptuous Vienna, to the former monks who saved his life, to an apprenticeship at one of Europe’s greatest theaters, and to the premiere of one of history’s most beloved operas.

In this confessional letter to his son, Moses recounts how his gift for sound led him on an astonishing journey to Europe’s celebrated opera houses and reveals the secret that has long shadowed his fame: How did Moses Froben, world renowned musico, come to raise a son who by all rights he never could have sired?


How to Cool the Earth
Right now, a group of scientists is working on ways to minimize the catastrophic impact of global warming. But they’re not designing hybrids or fuel cells or wind turbines. They’re trying to lower the temperature of the entire planet. And they’re doing it with huge contraptions that suck CO2 from the air, machines that brighten clouds and deflect sunlight away from the earth, even artificial volcanoes that spray heat-reflecting particles into the atmosphere.
This is the radical and controversial world of geoengineering, which only five years ago was considered to be "fringe." But as Jeff Goodell points out, the economic crisis, combined with global political realities, is making these ideas look sane, even inspired.
Goodell himself started out as a skeptic, concerned about tinkering with the planet’s thermostat. We can’t even predict next week’s weather, so how are we going to change the temperature of whole regions? What if a wealthy entrepreneur shoots particles into the stratosphere on his own? Who gets blamed if something goes terribly wrong? And perhaps most disturbing, what about wars waged with climate control as the primary weapon? There are certainly risks, but Goodell believes the alternatives could be worse. In the end, he persuades us that geoengineering may just be our last best hope—a Plan B for the environment. His compelling tale of scientific hubris and technical daring is sure to jump-start the next big debate about the future of life on earth.

*=not on our website but in our stores--call for availability.