Best bookish thing that is not a book

To nobody’s surprise, Emma Approved. Are you watching it yet, or have you been holding off because you were burned by Welcome to Sanditon? If the latter, I’d like to take this opportunity to endorse Emma Approved with a full heart. Emma and Mr. Knightley have excellent chemistry; Sen. Elton is pleasingly personable but you can see how he will turn out to be secretly douchey; and as in most Emma adaptations, Harriet and Mr. Martin steal any scene they’re in together. This creative team is brilliant, and my wish is that they keep on doing video blog adaptations of 19th-century classics forever. The 19th century was a good time for Lit’rature. It’s not like they’d run out of ideas. Mainly I don’t want them to stop before they get around to Jane Eyre.

Best job by me of convincing my mother of an opinion of mine that she disagrees with and I have been trying to talk her around to my position for more than a decade now

This defense of Sirius Black. Mumsy still does not love him, but she conceded that I had a point, and that my point made her like him better than she used to. Hooray for me!

Most deserving of its hype

Eleanor and Park, Rainbow Rowell. The blogosphere could not stop talking about Eleanor and Park this year. Y’all were not lying. This book is damn amazing. I wanted to read it again the minute I finished it. I cannot wait to own my own copy, which I will cherish and put a book plate in with my name in my fanciest handwriting.

Most deserving of how m.f. excited I was about it before it came out

More Than This, by Patrick Ness. I went into A Monster Calls with too-high expectations, and when More Than This started off so slowly, I became terribly anxious that I wouldn’t love it the way Patrick Ness’s books deserve to be loved. But it rallied with the introduction of two new-and-wonderful characters, and I ended up loving it. In particular I love it that Patrick Ness is not in a rut. More Than This is totally different to the Chaos Walking series, which is totally different to The Crane Wife (review forthcoming), which is totally different to A Monster Calls. I love him, and I am excited for whatever he wants to do next.

Lowest expectations for a book that ended up being pretty good actually

Shadows, by Robin McKinley. As I’ve mentioned before, I count a couple of Robin McKinley’s books among my favorite books in the world. But only a couple, and the rest of her books leave me feeling dissatisfied and bored. My expectations of Shadows were rock-bottom, and it turned out to be a really fun read.

Most wanted to be The Secret History and was angry and disappointed when it wasn’t

You thought I was going to say The Goldfinch, didn’t you? Ha, ha, you were wrong. The answer is, The Bellwether Revivals, by Benjamin Wood. I did not like it. Why wasn’t it more like The Secret History? Why aren’t all books more like The Secret History? These are questions I cannot answer.

Loveliest surprise

You’ll be tired of me saying it, but Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye. I didn’t expect not to like it, but I was surprised by how much I ended up liking it. A runner-up, because I did expect not to like it, was Kate Atkinson’s strange and wonderful Life after Life.

Saddest fictional death

Uncle Finn in Tell the Wolves I’m Home, by Carol Rivka Brunt. That book wrecked me. Although it’s difficult to say in a year so packed with wonderful reads, I am going to go ahead and say that Tell the Wolves I’m Home was my best book of 2013. Eleanor and Park was awfully, awfully good, but I’m giving it to Tell the Wolves I’m Home by dint of the fact that it’s not getting quite as much play and thus needs me to love it extra.

Saddest real-life death

Elizabeth Peters, of course. I am crushed that Elizabeth Peters has died, and I regret that I never wrote her a letter to tell her how much enjoyment I got from her books over the years.

Made me feel the best about myself for enjoying it

HHhH, by Laurent Binet. I often struggle with books in translation, so I’m always thrilled — with the author and myself — to encounter a book in translation that I unreservedly love. HHhH is that kind of book. It is surprisingly lovely and sweet for a book about assassinating a Nazi officer.

Whack-a-doodlest book lent the most gravitas by its author’s serious, Southern-accented radio interviews

Going Clear, by Lawrence Wright – If you haven’t read this book about scientology yet, now’s a good time to read it. I think it would be fun to read over a vacation: lots of crazy parts that you can read out loud to your friends-and-relations, who can’t escape from you because y’all are on vacation.

Favorite term I coined myself like a genius

“Process dystopia” to describe the kind of book that shows the world all going to hell, instead of starting the book after the world has already gone to hell.

Coolest design

Obviously, Marisha Pessl’s Night Film. No contest, because I haven’t finished reading the JJ Abrams / Doug Dorst collaboration S yet.

Best execution of a tricky premise

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler. This book! So good! Karen Joy Fowler does not invent a premise and coast on it. She follows through all the way. She commits. I loved the writing, I loved the jokes, and I loved the sadness. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves gets additional credit for reminding me to care about James Tiptree Jr., an author I now really like.

Jolliest good fun

Lexicon, by Max Barry. This was just fun. It was fun and fun and fun, and there are not enough books in this world that are just pure fun.

Lovablest book that did not appeal to me on paper

Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. Nothing about the synopsis for this book would have called to me, but fortunately I read part of it in a NetGalley excerpts package and fell in love with the narrative voice. I loved it, and I think it’s something special and particular, and I’m not just saying that because the ending is perfectly geared towards my sensibilities.

Best Harry Potter news

It’s a tie! It’s a tie between the news that JK Rowling is writing a movie about Newt Scamander and his escapades as a wizard naturalist in the early twentieth century, and the news that the UK is releasing beautiful new editions of the Harry Potter books illustrated by Jim Kay of A Monster Calls. Y’all, I miss Harry Potter.

Most merits its long long length

Again, not The Goldfinch! (I think that could have been edited down a bit.) This one goes to Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s great. I didn’t want it to end.

Author least afraid of going balls-to-the-wall crazy with plots

Laini Taylor! I am well excited for the third book in her Nouns of Substances and Atmospheric Nouns trilogy. She just goes all out with her storylines, and that is wonderful to me, as anyone who has ever heard me speak about The Vampire Diaries will know.

Best character

Boris, from Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. There aren’t enough good things to say about Boris. If the book only consisted of passages with Boris in them, and had no other plot, it would be worth it just for that. I don’t remember the last time I encountered a character in a book that I enjoyed spending time with as much as Boris from The Goldfinch.

Insanest that I still haven’t finished reading it

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman. I know I know I know I know. But here’s what’s up: I’m reading it to Social Sister. I’ll finish reading it when I finish reading it to Social Sister. That’s how we roll.

And that’s 2013, my friends! I’ll be away from blogging over the next couple of weeks to celebrate holidays with the family, and I wish you all happy holidays and a wonderful New Year. See you in January!

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The beginning: A boy called Seth drowns. When he wakes up (from death), he is at the house in England where, through some unspecified but terrible fault of Seth’s, an unspecified but terrible Event with lasting neurological consequences befell his younger brother Owen. Seth has not lived in England for years; his family lives in America now, and he goes to an American school and has American friends. But here he is — dead, evidently — and all alone in this long-empty house on a long-empty street in a long-empty British town.

This is…a lot of aloneness. Where are the other people? There is too much aloneness! Is this going to be a mystical sort of book where he’s all alone the whole time and the only other characters we meet are in the flashbacks? And then it ends with him finding peace? I really don’t want that to be what’s up.

The end (spoilers in this section only; highlight blank spaces to see them): Oooo, wow, y’all, that is not at all what is up with this book. I discovered many juicy details from the end. I also did some judicious searching around to discover what exactly happened to Owen, because the last chapter or so wasn’t giving up the secret. Evidently Owen got kidnapped by an escaped convict and found three days later, and he was not the same after that (Seth was supposed to be watching him). Also, apparently, Seth drowned himself on purpose. The other characters (hooray, there are other characters) and Seth all seem to be substantially unimpressed with him about this.

But the real news from reading the end is that something is legitimately up with the world Seth is in. It seems like a sci-fi kind of situation (unclear), and Seth has these two afterlife buddies who are figuring shit out with him. I am so glad I read the end. I am now very excited for the rest of the book.

Note from the future: Turns out there were some fairly key plot points I did not catch on to by reading the end. That’s okay. That can happen sometimes. I’d like to mention them here, but I want to be truthful about what it is like to read the way I read.

The whole: Fwoof. At the beginning of this book, Patrick Ness describes what it is like for Seth to drown, how he keeps getting buffeted by wave after wave, and he can’t catch his breath, and it never ends. This is not altogether dissimilar to the experience of reading a book by Patrick Ness. The night before the day I finished reading More Than This, I stayed up late reading — intending to finish it! — but I hit the two-thirds mark and needed a breather. Because Patrick Ness really really does not let up. (You will know this if you have read his Chaos Walking books.) It’s just event after revelation after revelation after event.

To be clear, I loved it, and I expect I will love it even more when I own my own (physical) copy. There is something about the experience of turning the pages of a Patrick Ness book that is imperfectly recreated when reading electronically. I loved so many things about it that I just want to rave and jump up and down, but instead I will be try to be chill and enumerate its virtues in measured tones.

The fault in More Than This is that it is a little slow to get going. Ordinarily one does not imagine that one will have to read the end of a Patrick Ness book to gain momentum, because if there is one thing the Chaos Walking books have, it is momentum. More Than This begins with Seth spending an awful lot of time alone in his new world, being pleased that he’s found a windbreaker or whatever. Luckily there are flashbacks to his life before, and the events that led up to his drowning, and those were wonderful and melancholy and touching. But Seth’s aloneness depressed me. I wanted more things to be happening in his weird afterlife present.

Maybe a third of the way through, Seth meets up with two other denizens of his strange afterlife world, Regine and Tomasz, and then we are off to the races. The events in the afterlife are suddenly so gripping, and meanwhile we continue to learn more about Seth’s life and what happened with Owen and what happened with Gudmund. This moment — when he meets Regine and Tomasz and the Driver — was the moment at which I realized I was going to be up very, very, very late reading this book.

I love about Patrick Ness how he treats diversity like a given. I am not sure how to describe this. Regine and Tomasz and Seth all come from very very different backgrounds, and their gender and ethnicity and sexuality has made a huge difference to the people they are, but none of those things are the point of them — as people or as characters. Indeed, one of the themes of this book — a theme I loved so hard and I bet Ana did too — is that no one thing is the point of anyone. Not your demographics nor your saddest day nor the worst deed you ever did are the point of you. People are always more than this.

More Than This also features a healthy dose of plausible deniability. Regine and Tomasz are certain they know what’s happening, and they are able to find plenty of evidence to bolster their beliefs. Seth believes them, mostly, but there are times when he thinks that this might all be happening inside his head. Because he and his friends are in perpetual danger, he has to act as though the world is real. Still, there are times when he has serious, serious doubts about its reality. The case for what Seth believes is not weak. The case for what Regine and Tomasz believe isn’t weak either. Patrick Ness doesn’t resolve this, and I love him for not resolving it.

Again I say: This book is wonderful. If you have been curious about Patrick Ness but haven’t wanted to commit yourselves to a whole trilogy, pick up More Than This. You can thank me later.

Note: I received this review copy from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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