Best of 2011 Countdown: #3

Bronze Medals!  It's like Belgium at the Winter Olympics!  (I actually have no idea how Belgium performs in the Olympics.  They could be horrible.  I just like the idea of Belgium.)

Gianna:

Swamplandia!
Karen Russell
Knopf

I have a deep love and appreciation for the Florida Everglades. In fact I lived in Pembroke Pines, Florida, for quite a while…and sadly that huge town was once part of the Everglades. When they were building it up one would see alligators chugging along the backyards of new homes. I hope they took a contractor or two with them on their travels. The Everglades are a rich, mysterious, beautiful place. The locals that live nearest the heart of Everglades National Park (also known as Shark Valley, no...there are no sharks but plenty of gators) can be, in the nicest terms…characters. I think Susan Orlean did a great job of writing about the people that live in and around Everglade City in The Orchid Thief.  Anyway, the Everglades is a truly special and amazing place and if you’re going to write about such a place, man you better nail it.

 

Yeah, Russell nails it in Swamplandia! So many great things have been said about this novel (yes, another first novel on our list – though Russell did write an outstanding book of stories called St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves – based on Liz’s life), that I will only say a few things. One, you aren’t going to find a more original plot. You will not find a group of characters like these who not only are strange but completely human and lovable. [Gianna is strange and lovable but possibly not human, I'm strange and human but not exactly lovable.] The book revolves around the Sawtooth family who own a struggling alligator wrestling farm, and if you don’t come out the other end of this book adoring this family, you have a heart of stone. You won't find a smarter, wittier book this year. You just won’t. Okay, I will leave it at that, but you haven’t heard the last about this book.

Liz:

The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes

Knopf

I think this is the third or fourth time I've written about The Sense of an Ending on our little blog. What more is there to say?  Is it a surprise that the Man Booker Prize-winning novel is my #3 pick of 2011?  Probably not.  This book is pretty much perfect.  Short, tightly plotted, great characters, and a holy shit ending that smacks the reader upside the head.  It's a book that begs for discussion.  It's a literary novel that will appeal to book groups.  Did I mention that it's really, really, really good?

The Sense of an Ending is part Dead Poets Society, part A Separate Peace, part The Graduate.  It's a story about friendship and love and the secrets kept.  It's a story about betrayals and the over-intellectualizing of emotions and human relations.  Four friends, particularly Adrian and Tony, bond while in prep school.  Adrian, the genius of the bunch, goes to the elite university, while Tony goes to the respectable college.  There Tony meets a girl, one who is more cultured, more worldly, and in his mind, too cool for him.  He also meets her family.  Tony and his girlfriend visit Adrian at school.  Months later, after Tony and the girl break up, she begins dating Adrian.  Flash to the present: Tony is notified that he's inherited Adrian's journal after his friend's death.  What the journal reveals about Adrian remains a mystery though; the ex girlfriend from 20 years earlier won't relinquish it.  The plot twists keep moving a philosophical novel, and here is Julian Barnes at his absolute best.

Best of 2011 Countdown: #8

Gianna:

The Sense of an Ending
Julian Barnes
Knopf

I hope I don’t sound like too much of an idiot (I want to sound just enough like an idiot), but I absolutely love a well-done, compact novel. It's rare and it's incredibly hard to do. To write a well-developed original story with fully realized characters in fewer than two hundred pages is remarkable, yet Barnes has done just that.   This is a one sitting read, much like On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. I know what you're thinking, why shouldn’t you read such a short novel in one sitting Gianna? Well some don’t lend themselves to it, some you don’t want to, some you can’t, and some blow.

Julian Barnes,
Man Booker Prize winner

Barnes has been nominated several times for the Booker,  and there is something so right about him finally winning it for this book. Liz called this book a masterpiece and while I hate agreeing with her about anything at all…she got this absolutely right. It’s a perfect book.

I won’t go into plot here, we’ve written about this on the blog two or three times, but I will say that Barnes hits major themes here: love, loyalty, life and death. Have I mentioned this is a perfect book? 

Liz:

The Night Circus

Erin Morgenstern

Doubleday

Words like "delightful" and "enthralling" best describe one of the biggest books of 2011.  Erin Morgenstern's first novel involving dueling magicians and the most incredible circus ever placed on paper has proved a sensation, and deservedly so.  I quite simply love this book.  I loved it when I first read it about 11 months ago, and I haven't shut up about it since then.  My booksellers love it.  My friends love it.  I want to visit The Night Circus.

Let's set the mood:

Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus is so descriptively stunning that if I possessed any artistic talent at all I would have created my own illustrated edition.  The film rights were optioned to Summit Pictures and there's lots of Hollywood chatter and speculation.  And Erin Morgenstern wrote this book during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an annual writing challenge to create a novel during the 30 days of November.  This book is charmed.  It's magical.