Happy New Year everyone! I looked through 90 books I read this year and put together a list of the best. In this post, I’m going to give out Nicole’s Year End Book Awards.
Instead of top ten or favourite books of the year, I’d like to give out awards to different books. My reason is, the books I’m going to mention are all brilliant and I enjoyed all of them but they are brilliant and enjoyable in different ways. I hope the award categories highlight those differences. I have altogether 15 awards to give out. I’ll explain a little about the criteria for each award and then announce the winner and for some of them the runners up. For each title, I’ll give a brief summary and tell you why I love it.
Favourite Children’s Story
This award is for stories written for children or with young protagonists. The joint winners are My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologies by Fredrik Backman and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr.
My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologies is the adventure of the 7-year old Elsa delivering her grandma’s messages to her family and neighbours and to build bridges among lonely people. I love the cosy family theme. Elsa’s relationship with her dad and with her step dad is especially sweet. I also love how grandma helps Elsa to make sense of harsh reality using fairy tales. They make immense regrets, grief and sorrow gentle and beautiful. I can tell the author had great fun making up stories within the story. The novel is both chaotic and tender.
When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is an autobiographical novel about a Jewish family around the time when Hitler rose to power. The author and her family had to flee Germany and move from country to country in order to live when she was a child. The story shows the vague but ever-present dread of a child in a dark time, but also the joy and excitement of living in new places and making new friends. The novel comes across mostly gentle and full of life.
Favourite Short Story
The joint winners are the Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield and the Awful Reason of the Vicar’s Visit by G. K. Chesterton.
These two represent two types of short story. The Garden Party is a simple story on the first read. While a young woman Laura and her family are preparing for the most extravagant garden party, a man is killed in the poor village nearby. Laura wishes to stop the party but is overruled by her family. She goes to the dead man’s house for a visit and comes back with some new understanding of life and death.
It’s a simple story but there are lots of symbolism and allusion to Greek mythology and biblical imagery. There are a lot of depth to the small tale.
The Awful Reason of the Vicar’s Visit is nothing complicated in terms of symbolism. It’s just a cracking good story, a hilarious page turner, a crime thriller with an incredible twist at the end. The narrator is on his way out to a dinner with friends, when an old village vicar in distress knocks on his door and tells him about a crime. Could the narrator please help him, or an innocent man will be in grave danger tonight?
Favourite World Literature
This award is UK centred apologies for that. This is just where I live. My winners are books translated into English.
My joint winners are A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings and The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.
Coincidentally, both titles are children’s story. A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings doesn’t read like a children’s story but it is subtitled “A Tale for Children”, I think it’s a bit dark and disturbing for young minds.
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings was written in 1968 by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. Obviously I heard of One Hundred Year Solitude by the same author but I so far had not the courage to touch it. Partly because I heard it could be confusing because a lot of the main characters share the same names and partly because it’s translated. So I was eager to try out a short story by him and test the water. The good news is I like the story and the translation.
An ordinary couple in a town one day found A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings half dead in their backyard. What would they do with the old man? How would the town react?
Quoting Prof. Foster, this short story has a Christian message to it.
On one level, the story asks us if we would recognize the Second Coming if it occurred, and perhaps it reminds us that the Messiah was not generally acknowledged when he did come. The angel doesn’t look like an angel, just as the King didn’t look like a king, certainly not like the sort of military ruler the Hebrews had expected. Does the old man choose not to fly? Has he been reduced in power and appearance purposely? The story never says, and in its silence it poses many questions.
Foster, Thomas C.. How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised (pp. 138-139). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
It’s a bewildering story with a challenging message. This short story boosts my confidence, maybe to go on reading One Hundred Year Solitude soon.
The Nutcracker and the Mouse King was written in 1816 by Prussian author E. T. A. Hoffmann. It’s about young Marie’s favourite Christmas toy, the ugly and despised Nutcracker, comes alive and, after defeating the Seven-Headed Mouse King in battle, takes her away to a magical kingdom.
When I first finished it, it felt very strange, like an incoherent mix of many random things. There’s a deliberate blurring between the supernatural fairytale and reality. I thought about it for a few days and I think I cracked the nut! This story alludes to the events in the Book of Revelation in the Bible, especially towards the end. Then it feels very clever and as clear as day.
Most Cinematic
This award is for stories that I would love to see on screen because when I read them, the words on the pages conjured up images after images. My two runners up are Titus Groan and Gilead.
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake is the first book in the Gormenghast fantasy series and it’s categorised as a fantasy almost entirely because of the gothic and mysterious atmosphere. There are long sections describing the ancient, rich but rotting castle, and the natural landscape surrounding it. The characters look like caricatures and some of them even appear with personalised sound effects.
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is one of the most beautifully written books I read this year. You might have heard that I struggle with poetry, but this is poetry to me, some of the paragraphs are just stunning. Gilead is a fictional memoir written as a letter by an elder dying pastor to his young son. I don’t know if this novel has ever been adapted but it remains a beautiful painting in my head.
The winner of the Most Cinematic Book is A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
A Tale of Two Cities is about the individual people’s life caught up in the torrent of the French Revolution. I cannot believe the last film and TV adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities are both from the 1980s! Some of the scenes are so camera ready and cinematic, if it wasn’t for the date Dickens wrote them, I could have believed that he had screen adaptations in mind. Some of the paragraphs are written ready to shoot. A Tale of Two Cities is totally ready to come back to the screen!
Favourite Supporting Characters
This award goes to A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth.
In the foreground, the book is about the ordinary life of four families. One main plot line is finding a suitable boy for our heroine Lata. On a bigger scale, the novel looks at religious unrest, social and political changes in the newly post-independence, post-partition India.
A Suitable Boy is one of the longest novels in existence and it has a huge cast. The author succeeds at distinguishing them all from one another and making them stand three dimensional in my head, which is quite an achievement. Take Lata’s three husband candidates for example, it’s genuinely a tough decision and I couldn’t quite see who she’d go for until the very end.
Among the three potentially suitable boys, I particularly love Amit and the Chatterji family. Amit is a poet and his siblings constantly sing out funny couplets as effortless as breathing. They are all weird and wonderful, but at the same time feel completely natural. I wonder if the author knows people like them in real life.
Best Teacher
This award is for authors or books that have taught me lots. My winners opened my heart and mind to reading and literature. Last year my winner was George Saunders with A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, who taught me about writing and reading through Russian short stories. But your winners could have taught you about traveling or cooking, anything!
In the third place is C. S. Lewis. I read his essays sporadically throughout the year. He has such a sharp mind, whatever topics he thinks and writes about, he manages to conjure up gold dust. I read mostly his essays on literary criticism, e.g. there was an essay on Jane Austen which put her heroines into helpful categories that I never thought of before. They are always illuminating. But he’s in the third place because he’s not always accessible as the joint winners.
The joint winners are Sir Jonathan Bate and Prof. Thomas C. Foster.
Jonathan Bate is many things, to pick a few, he’s an academic – he was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education; he’s a biographer – he wrote excellent biographies of Shakespeare, Ted Hughes, William Wordsworth and John Clare. He specialises in Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. Among many universities and organisations in the UK and the US, he worked with Royal Shakespeare Company and the Folger Shakespeare Library. In Mad about Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate shares his life with the readers and introduces many literary figures in a new light, by telling stories of love and loss. It instils in me a desire for Shakespeare and for reading classics in general.
Thomas C. Foster teaches me more the technical side of reading. Foster has been an English teacher for decades. He teaches University students contemporary fiction, drama, and poetry as well as creative writing. I learnt a lot from his How to Read Literature Like a Professor. I love how he explains things plainly and genuinely wants me to understand. He’s knowledgeable but even more important to a student, he’s experienced in communicating the knowledge – I’m sure that comes with him having been a teacher for many years. The book equips me to venture out to the literature world on my own.
Favourite Audiobooks
Every single audiobook I listened to has been of high quality. My judgement for this category leans more on narrator’s performance and the listening experience rather than the story itself. The audio aspects have to much enhance the overall reading experience to be included in this award.
I had such a hard time deciding which is my favourite audiobook! I have five on the shortlist.
The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov performed by Wireless Theatre Company. The productions really bring the story and characters to life. In my humble opinion, they did a better job than people who produced BBC Radio Shakespeare. I wondered so much at the acting and production side of the audiobook, I sometime lost track of the story. The Wireless Theatre Company produced quite a few Audible Originals and other things, I can’t wait to hear more from them.
The Lost Spell is a poetry collection about nature written by Robert Macfarlane. The audiobook is narrated by Yrsa Daley-Ward, Johnny Flynn, Julie Fowlis. While the physical book has incredible watercolour illustration, the audiobook has exceptional sound design. Along with the voice of the narrators, you hear the sound of animals and the wind and the water. It’s only 40 mins long. I had it on loop and listened to it at least five times in one go. My favourite in the collection is the poem about the hare. The way the narrator reads the poem, it just sounds like a hare hopping across a snow-covered field at night. It’s a very positive experience with poetry.
Winnie the Pooh written by A. A. Milne narrated by Bernard Cribbins. It’s a unique challenge to do voice acting for an animal character, because animals don’t speak in real life, you can only imagine what they’d sound like. It’s even more challenging to do voice acting for Winnie the Pooh, because everyone seems to know what he should sound like! Cribbins’ performance is adorable. When I need to quote Pooh bear, I can’t imagine not using Cribbins’ voice to say the lines or sing the songs. There might have been many voices for Pooh bear but this will forever remain the voice of my Pooh bear.
Mad about Shakespeare written and narrated by Jonathan Bate. He has a pleasant scholarly voice. It’s very special to hear the author’s own voice speaking his own life stories. At one point his voice chokes tiny bit when talking about his daughter’s life threatening emergency. It moves me to tears every time.
A Suitable Boy written by Vikram Seth and narrated by Sagar Arya. The audiobook is 69 hours. The narration is fantastic, I’d go as far as to say my enjoyment of this book is 50% from the story itself, 50% from the narrator’s performance. There’s no fancy sound design like The Lost Spell, just plain reading. However his voice, pronunciation and intonation give an amazing authentic flavour of India. It brings out a lot of the humour and the personality I would have missed reading on my own.
I genuinely can’t decide which one should be the winner of this category. What do you think?
That’s the end of Nicole’s Year End Book Awards ceremony part 1. I’ll tell you my favourite screen adaptations, most comforting books, favourite plays, favourite non-fiction, favourite novels, favourite protagonist, favourite author and my books of the year in part 2.
A Day of Small Things 