Best Books Read In 2016

I was so close to being able to call this a "Best Books of 2016" post, but there are 3 from 2015 oops. 2016 honestly wasn't astounding for books and there are definitely amazing books that I didn't get to because of my hardcore reading slump. Here are my top ten best books read in 2016, sort of in order but not really. Stay tuned tomorrow (my birthday) for my top 10 weirdest books read in 2016!

A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

MY REVIEW

ADD TO GOODREADS

The best collection of short stories I have EVER read. Every story is a masterpiece. I feel so lucky that this book came into my life and I will treasure it forever.

Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt

MY REVIEW

ADD TO GOODREADS

I can't stop recommending this book to people. If you are at all interested in cults and/or Carl Sagan, you're going to get suck a kick out of this novel. Incorrectly categorized as horror in the Goodreads Choice Awards, this weird-ass literary novel will blow your mind in so many ways. All of the seemingly disparate weirdness comes together in the most beautiful way. I want more Samantha Hunt NOW.

Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

MY REVIEW

ADD TO GOODREADS

My new favorite horror novel! This is especially fun for Shirley Jackson fans and avid watchers of horror movies. Clever, but not ridiculous, and genuinely scary. Horror novels very very rarely scare me.

Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter
MY REVIEW

ADD TO GOODREADS

This book got me in the fucking heart. A small punch in the gut about a family who loses their mother and the crow that stays with them once she's gone. As someone who lost a parent, Grief is the Thing with Feathers nails what grief feels like. Meeting Max Porter this year was an amazing experience for me.

Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein

MY REVIEW

ADD TO GOODREADS

This is just the collection of short stories I needed during my reading slump. Very Black Mirror. If you like dark sci-fi-ish short stories that are near future to the point where they feel scary and not ridiculous or hyperbolic, read these. It definitely won't make you feel better about the world, but it's soooooo good.

Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

MY REVIEW

ADD TO GOODREADS

I'm SO HAPPY I read this. The audiobook was so solid. Great political fantasy a la Game of Thrones with LGBTQ representation. This book is enthralling and Baru is the baddest bitch. I'm so hyped that Seth Dickinson is working on a sequel.

The Red Car by Marcy Dermansky

MY REVIEW

ADD TO GOODREADS

Marcy Dermansky is amazing, please read this. Weird, quirky, raw, funny, real af. And it's super quick to read. So you don't really have an excuse, do you? Perfect for fans of Miranda July.

Version Control by Dexter Palmer

MY REVIEW

ADD TO GOODREADS

This is some amazing literary science fiction. It has it all: online dating, wormholes, memory, loss, big data, difficult marriages, and technology. I love books and movies about time, so this was definitely a book for me. But it is such an immersive and moving novel, even readers who haven't read a lot of genre fiction would love this book. So powerful!

The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts by Laura Tillman

MY REVIEW

ADD TO GOODREADS

Whoa, a nonfiction book made it onto this list!! That's nearly unheard of for me. This was an absolutely beautiful and throat provoking look at a horrific crime, an American city, and the death penalty. Highly recommended.

Tender by Belinda McKeon

MY REVIEW

ADD TO GOODREADS

Beautiful! I had so many feelings! This is a novel I couldn't put down at a time when I was putting down books left and right. Tender captures the insecurity and mania of being in love in your college years. It is bananas. So real, so moving. My heart is breaking just thinking about it.

2015 Reading Stats & Challenge Update

2015 was a year of more reading surprises than I could have reasonably been prepared for. Half of my reading veered toward sequential art out of nowhere, and at the second half of the year reading slowed really really dramatically. Regardless, I got some pretty interesting numbers out of it all. Especially because at the beginning of the year I started low key keeping track of every single book I acquired. And boy are the results scary. Check it out.

GENRE

Unsurprisingly to anybody who has watched my reading, but surprisingly to me, comics took up 47% of my books read. Baby 2014 Julianne would have never guessed!! Something that's disturbing to me: the sci-fi number. I apparently only read 3 straight science fiction novels in 2015. I definitely felt myself falling into the self-inflicted "must read currently acclaimed literary fiction" feelings every once in a while and probably disliking books more than I would have normally (looking at you Fates & Furies). I'll be posting about reading goals/resolutions tomorrow and this has an influence on some of my 2016 plans.

SOURCE

I read 74 books from the library! What!! This has something to do with me wanting to "test out" comics in their volumes before putting them on my pull list. But I'm also just a holds monster.

BOOKS ACQUIRED

I'll save you the math. At the bottom there? I acquired 187 books this year. I thought it was kind of weird that I'm almost out of bookshelf space despite having received two big new bookshelves this year. That's a new book in the apartment every other day of the year. EVERY OTHER DAY. Some of them are ebooks, but still. This is a problem. Nobody needs that many books (is what I've been told). This is another thing that will be covered in my resolutions tomorrow.



And now...

CHALLENGES

I failed the TBR Challenge. Ok, moving on.

I finished Shaina's 12 Books of Christmas Challenge! It got dramatic and suspenseful at the end there. I annoyed my friends and family by desperately trying to finish two books on my birthday, but it was all worth it in the end. Here's what I read:

1. // Bitch Planet, Vol. 1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick

2. // You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman

3. // Descender, Vol. 1 by Jeff Lemire

4. // The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho (audiobook!)

5. // ODY-C, Vol. 1 by Matt Fraction

6. // Slade House by David Mitchell

7. // Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein

8. // The Hunt for Vulcan by Thomas Levenson

9. // Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson (another audiobook!)

10. // Revival, Vol. 5 by Tim Seeley

11. // Moon Knight, Vol. 1 by Warren Ellis

12. // Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville

Thanks for hosting the challenge, Shaina! #12forXmas kind of showed me how useful audiobooks are and I'm going to try to integrate them more into my life. It was a good time.

Did you have any reading surprises this year?

 

Best Comics of 2015

I'm being sneaky again and calling this a "best of" list next to "2015," but it's really just the best of the comics/graphic novels I read during 2015. GOTCHA! To be fair, 7 of them were published in 2015 (or one in their series was).

As I've mentioned before, 2015 was the year of sequential art for me and I really loved exploring what the format has to offer. For the sake of this list, I'm only counting comics that have been published in bound volumes. Otherwise it would be WAY too complicated.

I noticed I don't really review comics/graphic novels here, because I'm not sure if it's too niche an interest. Let me know if you feel otherwise and maybe I'll consider ~changing my ways~.

This week: - Best Backlist of 2015 - Weirdest Books of 2015 - Best Books of 2015 -

1. // Rat Queens, Vol. 1 by Kurtis J. Wiebe
I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed with volume one (Sass & Sorcery) and I'm obsessed with volume two which actually came out this year. The characters are just phenomenal, the story is fun, and the dialogue is hilarious. Always excited to get a new issue in my pull.

2. // Saga, Vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan
Yup, I finally started Saga. And got caught up with Saga. Realizing that I had no more volumes to read in the middle of the year was absolutely devastating, because this series absolutely lives up to all the hype. READ IT.

3. // Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
This standalone graphic novel simultaneously gave me all the feelings and made me feel not well-read at all. Bechdel is super smart and incredible at story telling. Her life is worth hearing about. It will definitely move you.

4. // Nimona by Noelle Stevenson
Sweet, sweet Nimona. This is a graphic novel that's technically for kids, but it is pure unadulterated fun at any age. An absolute hilarious delight to read.

5. // Bitch Planet by Kelly Sue DeConnick
BADASS. SO GOOD. Like Orange is the New Black in space. But more sci-fi-y. You don't need me to tell you how glorious this feminist series is. I'm sure you've already heard.

6. // Lumberjanes, Vol. 1 by Noelle Stevenson
This series for kids is also a delight to read at any age and, SURPRISE, it's written by the same beautiful person. Stevenson really knocked it out of the park with volume one and volume two of Lumberjanes. Girl power! Friendship! Magic!

7. // The Divine by Boaz Lavie
I wrote about how beautiful this is before, and I still find myself plucking it off the shelf at the bookstore just to gaze at the colors. A graphic novel with a Princess Mononoke feel, you will be unsettled and in awe.

8. // Black Hole by Charles Burns
Black Hole is perhaps the weirdest thing I read/saw all year. If weird sex-related mutations is off putting to you, maybe don't check this one out. But I really loved it. The black and white illustrations are bizarre and the story will leave you saying "what the fuck" every other page. It's a good one.

9. // Pretty Deadly, Vol. 1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick
Kelly Sue DeConnick can do no wrong. I'm so excited that this series started its second arc and I'm getting Pretty Deadly in my pull a year or so after the first volume was published. Manga-y western magic folklore is my new favorite genre.

10. // X'ed Out by Charles Burns
And by X'ed Out, I pretty much just mean the entire trilogy that this book begins. Charles Burns' work is so startling and strange. It's like a beautiful acid trip of a car crash that I can't look away from. And it helped that the plot sort of vaguely reminded me of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, everyone's favorite Gameboy Advance game (right?).

What was your favorite comic or graphic novel of 2015?

My Birthday & Looking Back at 2015

IT'S MY BIRTHDAY, NERDS!! Your girl is 23 years young today and she is ready for some book presents. Or feel free to tweet as many cat related gifs to me as your heart desires.

READING THIS YEAR

I'm looking back now on my first post of the year. I was hesitantly reemerging in the blogging world from my weird hibernation, not unlike now. I had read 44 books in 2014 and marked that as my best reading year ever. Oh sweet baby Julianne, if only you knew what was in store.

According to Goodreads, I've finished 131 books in 2015. BUT you shouldn't fully trust that number. 62 of those were books with only words in them. 46 were graphic novels, and 23 were single issue comics (I like keeping track of everything, ok?) 

2015 was definitely the year of the comic for me. I discovered how much I liked them, and then I sort of felt this need to "catch up." Which ended up with me doing a lot of binge reading. In reality, catching up is totally unnecessary. Also, considering I was mostly interested in horror comics (of which there aren't nearly as many as, say, superhero comics), I actually am sort of caught up. Sooo my comic reading has slowed to a normal pace and I feel myself coming back to books with fewer pictures.

CHALLENGES

I do plan on finishing 3 books today, so I'm not going to post year-end stats quite yet. I have 100 pages left in a book of short stories, I'm halfway through a graphic novel, and I have one more graphic novel waiting for me. So that'll leave me at 12 books in December and will mean that I've completed Shaina's 12 Books of Christmas challenge! Which makes up for me failing the 2015 TBR challenge as dramatically as I did!

I'm also going to wait to talk about goals and plans for the new year, because I truly haven't thought about it yet. IT'S MY BIRTHDAY. But, what better time than now to announce my participation in Bout of Books 15? I hadn't realized it was starting January 4th, but I have way too much nostalgia not to go for it again.

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda @ On a Book Bender and Kelly @ Reading the Paranormal. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01am Monday, January 4th and runs through Sunday, January 10th in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 15 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team

MY YEAR OVERALL

This year was pretty crazy. I graduated from college, I got my dream job as a bookseller at an indie bookstore, I moved into a new apartment in Minneapolis. What else? I was a bridesmaid, I met TWO book bloggers in real life, I started exercising (I only do push-ups because of All the Birds, Singing), I finished my internship at an animation studio, I went camping a lot, I went to California for the first time, made some amazing new friends, and was glam as hell throughout.

Overall, it was also a really good year for books and sort of for blogging. I had my best period of blogging ever during the first half of the year. But life tends to happen whether we want it to or not, and that caused me to drop the ball a bit at the end of the year. I also have a tendency to not read/blog as much between September and December FOR WHATEVER REASON. Oh well. At least I won National Novel Writing Month again this year. Not all is lost.

My Most Popular Posts of 2015

  1. // 5 Quirky Books to Make You Feel Normal

  2. // 10 Books Celebrating Diversity: A Guest Post

  3. // Top 10 Books for Readers Who Like Experimental Formats

  4. // Grapes of Trash: Dating & The Apocalypse

My Favorite Posts of 2015

  1. // Reading Kent Russell's Essays When My Dad is Dead

  2. // A Day in My Life: A Nonsense Drama of the Ages

  3. // Books And How To Read Them For Any Trip

  4. // 6 Reasons Why The People in the Trees is Perfect

Here's to lengthy post titles! Here's to even more words in 2016! Happy New Year, everyone!

Best Books of 2015

Without further ado, the top ten list that's actually focused exclusively on 2015 releases. Let me know if any of these picks made your personal top ten!

This week: - Best Backlist of 2015 - Weirdest Books of 2015 - Best Comics of 2015 -

1. // A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
This book actually made me weep. Like actually weep in the middle of the night. More of an experience than a book. If you haven't witnessed Yanagihara's writing yet, you must.

2. // The Shore by Sara Taylor
Dark, female-driven grit lit? Sign me up. This collection of interlinking stories that jump back and forth in time is an astounding debut. The writing is incredible and the stories are intense. I want to read it all again just thinking about it.

3. // The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips
WEIRD AND CREEPY AND WONDERFUL. This little book is impossible to put down once you start and Phillips has a startlingly disturbing/very funny mind.

4. // Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller
Here's another book that I raced through AND cried about. Parallel stories about a girl's past where her survivalist father steals her away and convinces her that the apocalypse happened and they're the only ones alive, and her present when she finally leaves the woods to go home. Actually amazing.

5. // Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein
After reading a couple dud memoirs this year, I didn't have particularly high hopes for this book written by the Sleater-Kinney musician and Portlandia star. Luckily, it blew me away. Incredibly well written, this account of Brownstein's life and struggles is honest and relatable.

6. // Sweetland by Michael Crummey
Old curmudgeonly white dude on an island didn't originally appeal to me plot-wise, but here's another 2015 release that made me sob. Moses Sweetland is so endearing, even when he refuses to move off the island he's called home for all his life, and the book is haunting and emotional. Please read this.

7. // The Animals by Christian Kiefer
A dark, raw, emotional literary thriller that impresses with some really gorgeous prose. Bill's childhood friend is released from prison, which spirals our main character down a path where he has to confront his own past and try to protect the life he's built as the owner of a wildlife sanctuary.

8. // Hammer Head by Nina MacLaughlin
Maybe this book just came to me at exactly the right time and that's why it made my list, but I'm also pretty sure that it's really good. Journalist Nina MacLaughlin decides that she needs a drastic change in her life and she answers a CraigsList ad looking for a carpenter's assistant. Her short memoir is both inspiring and beautifully written.

9. // The First Bad Man by Miranda July
Miranda July's first novel is impossibly funny. Being in main character Cheryl's head is both cringey and delightful on so many levels. If you liked July's quirky, twee, and often moving short stories, you will love this novel.

10. // You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman
Despite part of the ending not being super impressive, this debut novel edged out a runner up to make it into my top ten mostly on how delighted I was the whole time I was reading it. It was dark, it was clever, it was quirky and weird. I wanted to write down every other sentence Kleeman wrote. There's a roommate with boundary issues, there's a bizarre chain of grocery stores, there's a cult, and there's commentary about consumerism and body image. What more could you want??

What was your best book of 2015?

Weirdest Books of 2015

This reading year was a really good year for weird books. I've pretty much honed in on how to find just my type of weird/creepy/quirky/dark books. But I'm always on the lookout for surprises!
To be clear: These are the weirdest book I personally read in 2015. I was going to keep it to only books published in 2015, but I wanted the weirdest of the weird featured in this post. So I think at least half of them were published in 2015, which is close enough, right?

This week: - Best Backlist of 2015 - Best Books of 2015 - Best Comics of 2015 -

1. // Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville
These stories are some of the most inventive, strange, and disturbing that I've ever read. Glaciers suddenly appear floating above London? Dead people suddenly acquire a new condition where they're always perfectly horizontal and they swivel around so their feet face you? I don't know how he comes up with this stuff.

2. // Black Hole by Charles Burns
I wasn't going to put graphic novels on this list, but I couldn't help myself and I didn't really have a reason not to. Not only are Burns' illustrations bizarre and very dark -- the plot is centered around sexually transmitted mutations like being able to molt and having a second mouth on your neck, etc. Just the usual stuff.

3. // The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac by Sharma Shields
There are literal monsters/cryptids in this (yeah, I said cryptids. I listen to coast to coast fm every once in a while, whatever). At first I thought the sasquatch was a metaphor, but one of the characters is literally just a sasquatch (and also sort of a metaphor, but mostly a sasquatch).

4. // Of Things Gone Astray by Janina Matthewson
Somebody loses the front wall of their entire house. Someone loses their place of work (like it's gone gone). Someone begins to turn into a tree. This book is so charming and whimsical.

5. // Light Boxes by Shane Jones
February has gone on for many many years in one town. And February is also a god/person. Also the format is a bit experimental. Tiny and magical book.

6. // The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips
A man with no face is the main character Josephine's new boss in her new horrifyingly claustrophobic and nonsensical office job where she enters strings of letters and numbers into a database for hours. The walls of her office have grimy handprints on them. There are weird doppelgangers?? This book was incredible, please read it and be creeped out.

7. // The Blue Fox by Sjón
This novella is so dreamy and interesting. It feels like a fairy tale and it has a lot of layers for so few pages. A man in Iceland hunts a magical blue fox that can sort of talk. I don't even know. I really don't know how to talk about it.

8. // Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann
OH my god, this is so dark and strange. Another graphic novel pick that uses the form incredibly. At first it feels like a fun illustrated kids' book with little fairies and animals, but then they are also living inside a dead girl. These adorable little fairies are much more vicious and charming than you could ever have expected. I laughed, I gasped, I cried.

9. // You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman
Man oh man, this is a good book. It's like a quirkier, more contemporary version of "White Noise" by Don DeLillo. Kleeman's writing never lets up in being beautiful, funny, and disturbing -- often all in the same paragraph. If you want some social commentary with your weird, here you go. Also there's a reality show in the book where if you can't recognize your significant other, you're contractually obliged to sign a restraining order and never see them again. MAKE THAT A REAL SHOW, PLEASE.

10. // The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink
The characters are what's weird in this book. They're pretentious, they're bad at being loyal or communicating anything, and their lives float around in the strangest non-structure I've ever read. And suddenly eco-terrorism out of nowhere?? This tiny book is very difficult to define.

What's the weirdest book you read this year? PLEASE TELL ME.

Best Backlist of 2015

I have put off posting my "best of" lists, because I was SO convinced that I could read another 10+ books in the second half of December, but it looks like my reading has pretty much wound down for the year. I'm starting with the completely Julianne-specific list of best backlist books I read this year (there were a lot and they were so so good). You may see that there are no comics/graphic novels featured here despite how many I read in 2015. Fear not! They're getting their own list, so I don't have to make any hard decisions. That is my Christmas gift to myself.

This week: - Weirdest Books of 2015 - Best Books of 2015 - Best Comics of 2015 -

1. // The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara
I've gushed about this book so much, I don't want to bore everybody. Yanagihara is a spectacular writer and this book goes to to some very strange and dark places. New favorite author? She's up there.

2. // All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld
One of the first books I read this year and one of my new all time favorites that I only ever mention in passing. Chilling, well paced, and beautiful. Just read it.

3. // The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin
This book made me reconsider my weird bias against fantasy. Ok, I wasn't necessarily biased against it. I knew I loved Lord of the Rings, but figured I wouldn't be able to focus for as long as fantasy books/series are. But BOY WAS I WRONG. N.K. Jemisin's world building based on Egypt is so fascinating and well done. This book has no flaws.

4. // Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
This book continues to fix my life and make me cry and be introspective in a way I hadn't before. Strayed's writing is beautiful.

5. // Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
I absolutely devoured this book. The experimental format is done brilliantly and everything Offill says is true, funny, and often devastating. SO GOOD.

6. // The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin is my new sci-fi goddess. This short book about what happens when man tries to play god is well written, clever, thrilling, and thoughtful. Absolutely loved it and I'm mad I didn't read it until now.

7. // We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
I already knew I loved Shirley Jackson, because of her short stories. This novella only solidified those feelings. Perfectly creepy and funny.

8. // Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
I had also been sort of biased against historical fiction, and this new favorite readjusted all of my thinking. A beautiful book about the last woman put to death in Iceland. Stunning.

9. // White Noise by Don DeLillo
White Noise stayed with me in ways I didn't expect it to. I find myself making references to it all the time. Weird, funny, dark social commentary and overall a really good read. DeLillo just gets it.

10. // Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Everybody loved it and I did too.

What backlist book did you love this year?

Happy Birthday to Me & 2014 Stats

Happy New Year, everybody! It was my birthday a few days ago, so a lot of my life kind of revolves around years ending and beginning. I've received more calendars as gifts than I've ever known what to do with most years. This year was my best year ever as far as reading goes. Here are my stats for the year in classy infographic form (inspired by both Books Speak Volumes and River City Reads, please be flattered).

Also, if you missed my Best/Weirdest Books trifecta of lists, check them out here, here, and here.

Not bad, if I say so myself. I tried to be much more aware of how many female authors and authors of color I was reading. I'd like to do better in 2015 as far as authors of color go (20% of my reading), but this was a good start.

I don't really have any reading or blogging resolutions apart from "trying harder." Try to read more and try to read more diversely. That's really important to me.

This year I'm graduating from college, so it seems like a bad time to be making resolutions. My life is going to, inherently, be in a state of flux as I try my best to be an adult and not fuck everything up. So all I can really resolve to do is to try hard to do the things I like to do and not lose sight of that.

On Goodreads, I set my goal to 50 books this year. I set it to 24 in 2014 and managed 44. So I think 50 won't be that unreasonable, especially since I won't be in school for like 8 months of the year. Wow, that's weird to think about.

I know I haven't been a consistent blogger, but I really love the blogging community and I think it's a lot of fun to blog when I'm not holding myself to weird standards that nobody else is holding me to. I've found a pattern of ditching during the fall semester, because I end up too stressed or whatever. This year, I won't have a fall semester. So I'm hoping that this blog, if anything, will be like a solid place for me to come back to when my life is changing a lot. A familiar constant when my life is becoming less familiar to me.

I can't at this time make any real resolutions or promises when it comes to reading or blogging or, really, anything in my life. I'm just going to try my best.

Happy birthday to me and happy new year to you! Here's hoping 2015 is a good one.

What are your resolutions for the new year?

Weirdest Books of 2014

Finally, what we've all been waiting for. The weirdest books I've read in 2014! And it did get pretty weird. Bonus: Half of them were published in 2014.

Check out my Best Books of 2014 and Best Backlist of 2014 posts, too!

 

1. Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck. Actually the weirdest stories I've ever read. Surreal, Scandinavian tales that can become very, very dark. Many involve strange creatures (some that can be grown in a pot), women who are fed until they burst only to find a new tiny woman clinging to the old heart, men in love with machines, alternate dimensions, and so much more. Often disturbing, always whimsical and beautiful.
2. Cock & Bull by Will Self. Let me make this clear, reading this book was a waste of time. It's a wildly self-indulgent attempt at satire that isn't original or profound in any way. The writing was overly pretentious and it felt like I was just watching him jerk off the whole time. But it was still one of the weirdest things I'd read this year. A woman grows a penis out of nowhere and a man grows a vagina behind his knee. It's very bizarre and there's weird rape stuff, and I just couldn't get into it. Credence to the idea that weird isn't always good.
3. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. By this I really mean the entire Southern Reach Trilogy, but it's easier to just say Annihilation. Nothing makes sense in Area X. There's a border nobody can see. Fungus grows in the shape of words. There are strange creatures. Maybe people turn into animals? Doppelgangers? Psychosis? SO MUCH WEIRD.
4. The Troop by Nick Cutter. Tapeworms. Giant, genetically modified tapeworms that really like to eat people from the inside out. What.
5. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. Carnies. High stakes dramatic relationships between carnies. A family trying to breed children with more deformities. Dwarves, conjoined twins, deformed limbs, tails, etc. Intense, borderline Grecian drama and power struggles.
6. Equus by Peter Shaffer. BESTIALITY. A dude who worships horses and just likes to get naked with them sometimes. It's no big deal. Ok, it's a really big deal. A very weird, profound play.
7. A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride. Probably the weirdest format of book I've ever read. Or, if not format, writing style. It's all in this strange borderline stream of consciousness style, but it's written in like non-grammatical fragments to represent how people think. But it was so impossible to read most of the time that I just couldn't imagine that this is how anybody really thinks fundamentally. Very little punctuation. Didn't feel like I was reading English.
8. Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball. Written almost entirely in collections of interviews. Some photographs. Write-ups of cases. And the story itself is bizarre, featuring murder of the elderly, a man who confesses to a crime he probably didn't do and then refuses to speak, contradicting stories about seduction and deals. It's slow and subtle, kind of creepy, and very interesting.
9. Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle. Written backwards chronologically. I love experimental formats, and this one really worked. We got closer and closer to the main event that triggered the rest of it, and it was paced so well. The idea of a mail in role-playing game is pretty weird too. The book involves itself in an interesting, niche gaming culture.
10. Revenge by Yoko Ogawa. A collection of horror short stories that are often bafflingly surreal. A woman's heart exists outside of her body, carrots grow in the shapes of hands, a mysterious woman show's up in someone's hotel room with a bundle she won't open, and so on and so forth. They're very dark, covering murder and torture, as well as surprising. Finding out that all of the eleven dark tales were connected to one another was a delight.

What are the weirdest books you read this year? Here's to keeping it weird in the new year.

Best Backlist of 2014

Ok, so the title doesn't make a WHOLE lot of sense, but I really wanted to compile the best backlist books that I read this year. So clearly the nominees are atypical, because I do what I want and play by my own rules. I just couldn't NOT mention some of the best books I read this year that became new favorites of mine.

Check out my Best Books Published in 2014 here, and the top ten weirdest are coming tomorrow!

 

1. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. Amazing and so bizarre. This book follows a family of circus performers that made a point of doing drugs while pregnant to create babies with stranger and stranger developmental problems. There are conjoined twins, an albino hunchback dwarf, a boy who is referred to as "Aquaboy" due to his flipper-like limbs, and a young boy whose talent isn't revealed for quite some time. The plot was twisted, and the writing was beautiful and moving. I cried multiple times because of the very human tragedies this family faces. A new all time favorite of mine. Did I say the writing's beautiful yet? Wow.
   
2. Suicide by Edouard Leve. A powerful, small experience of a book. Leve explores the what suicide means in a stream of consciousness style that captures a lot of insightful things about time, memory, and people. Dark and packs a big emotional punch. If talk about suicide is triggering, I wouldn't check this book out. If you feel like you're in a good place to ruminate on something this heavy, I would suggest it. It's beautiful and it's short, so you're not stuck there for too long.
   
3. Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck. I've praised this collection of short stories before. If you want weird fiction that's not quite sci-fi, not quite fantasy, but kind of eerie and very Scandinavian, you have to read these. Very weird and very well written.
   
4. Just Kids by Patti Smith. I'm obsessed with Patti Smith. I have been since the age of 12. If you love her, you'll love this book detailing her early life in New York finding her way as a poet, and her often tragic love story with Robert Mapplethorpe. An amazing honest capture of a relationship and a time that no longer exists.
   
5. When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams. Get out the tissues. Right before Williams' mother died, she told her to take her many journals and only read them once she had passed. A while after her mother died, she finally looked through them. They were all empty. When Women Were Birds is part memoir, part exploration on voice -- having one and choosing whether or not to use it. She explores being a woman, being a mother, being a daughter, and what her mother could have been trying to say. Poetic and beautiful.
   
6. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. This was just a really good time to read. I know I'm late to jump on the Gone Girl boat, but I'm glad I did. I don't even have to summarize this book, you know what it is. The twist got me. The end of every chapter got me. I couldn't stop reading, despite any flaws with the book itself. It was dark and fun.
   
7. Equus by Peter Shaffer. Dark and less fun. This is the infamous play that Daniel Radcliffe played in in his birthday suit. I hadn't seen it, but the plot interested me. Mostly because a guy is in love with horses to the point of having kind of sexual feelings toward them. This play was much more moving than I expected it to be and the developments were fascinating.
   
8. The Honey Month by Amal El-Mohtar. A strange little volume of short stories/poems/vignettes. Every day for a month, Amal El-Mohtar was sent a different kind of honey. She would taste it and then she would write something inspired by it. I'm incredibly impressed by how much she was able to come up with considering how simple her inspiration seemed. The stories were strange almost in the way Jagannath's were. Eerie.
   
9. Revenge by Yoko Ogawa. If you want some bizarre Japanese horror short stories, step right up. Here they are. There are some sinister murders, a character whose heart hangs out of her body and is in search of a bag for it, torture museums, a woman with a mysterious bundle, I don't even know where to begin. Each of the stories connect to each other, which I love.
   
10. Graphic the Valley by Peter Brown Hoffmeister.  This book caught me by surprise. The writing style is super spare and a little hard to get used to at first, but it becomes so emotional and raw. It's about a young homeless man who lives in Yosemite National Park, and has all his life. Obviously this comes with some problems. I got so into it in parts that I would gasp audibly in public. A beautiful look at the troubling commercialization of nature.
    

Oh my, I had a lot to say about these. What are the best backlist books you finally got around to this year?

Best Books of 2014

2014 was an amazing year for books, and I'm so glad I made the time to read a bunch of new releases! I definitely didn't read even close to all the big books released this year, but here are my top 10 favorite books that were published this year.

Be sure to stop by tomorrow and the next day for my top ten backlist and top ten weirdest books read this year!

1. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. A team of unnamed women go into a strange place called Area X. Everything's really fucking weird and it gets weirder. There is actually no book more perfect for me than the ones in the Southern Reach Trilogy. It filled the hole LOST left in my heart.
   
2. Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer. The third book in the Southern Reach Trilogy. It doesn't disappoint. The second book, Authority, was a little bit of a slow let down, but Acceptance brought back everything I loved about Annihilation and more. The ending gave us just enough explanation and lack thereof. And can we talk about these covers? Damn.
   
3. An Untamed State by Roxane Gay. An absolutely beautiful first novel exploring the trauma a kidnapped Haitian-American woman goes through. Every cruel, tragic thing that the main character could experience happens. Brutal, devastating, and absolutely necessary.
   
4. Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle. A strange first novel by the lead singer of The Mountain Goats. Darnielle crafts a sort of YA novel backwards through time. The main character, Sean, has created a mail-in sci-fi RPG game that two young teenagers get wrapped up in. The game becomes too real, tragedy strikes, and Sean is held accountable. We're very much in his mind, exploring what happened to the kids and to him slowly and painfully. Subtle and much more beautiful than I expected. Extra points for the experimental format.
   
5. Karate Chop: Stories by Dorthe Nors. These short stories are compact, sparse, and beautiful. The slim volume packs a huge punch. Translated from Danish, these stories are about small moments (that are often bigger than they seem) in every day life and the meanings they have between the people who share them. Stunning.
   
6. Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball. Weird weird weird. Murders take place in Japan and a man confesses to them. He then refuses to speak. It looks like he probably didn't actually murder anybody, but he doesn't say anything. The novel is composed in a series of interviews with different people involved in the case. The tangential stories are strange and fascinating, the format is unique, and the story was haunting. I still find myself thinking about it.
   
7. Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham. I have to say, I expected Lena Dunham's book to be a bit funnier, because I thought season 1 of Girls was extraordinary, but I still loved her book. It's touching and insightful in ways I didn't expect it to be. I know she's a controversial character, but she's still smart as a whip and really fucking funny.
   
8. The Martian by Andy Weir. An amazingly fun kind of sci-fi book about a man who gets stranded on Mars and has to do whatever he can to survive. Like Gravity, but less melodramatic and slightly more scientific, but still funnier. And on Mars.
   
9. The Bone Clock by David Mitchell. I went in ready to hate this. I didn't really like Cloud Atlas and I didn't need to like this. But I really really did. Up until there were like ~200 pages left, at least. I can't discount the bulk of the novel. It follows a woman, Holly Sykes, from when she's a teenager, through sections focusing on different characters that touch her life throughout time. They're all wonderful and interesting. There's also warring immortal demigods sort of. It's not really worth talking about.
   
10. Bird Box by Josh Malerman. An excellent horror novel. A woman has been in her house with her two children for four years. They don't look outside. Something out there makes people violent when they see it. One day she blindfolds herself and her children and sets out to canoe down a river to find a safer place to live. GREAT IDEA. I've never been more horrified by noises and touches in a novel. Walking around my apartment was hard as I read this. So was closing my eyes.
    
    
    What were your favorite books this year? Have you read any of these?