The Best of the Rest: Great Reads from 2013 That Are Not Romance Novels

Last week I shared my top romance reads of 2013, but while I read more widely in romance than in other genres, my reading tastes are fairly eclectic. I prefer my mysteries cozy, or at least lacking the gore and graphic violence that gives me nightmares, but I have a considerable list of auto-buy mystery authors too. Historical fiction, women’s fiction, memoirs and biographies, poetry—I read them all. I don’t read as much YA as I used to, but I still find a gem or two. So, with the caveat that these have been chosen from a considerably shorter list of books read than were the thirteen romances, here’s my rest-of-the-best list for 2013.

Mystery: Speaking from Among the Bones by Alan Bradley

Five books into this series and I find Flavia de Luce as delightful as I did in the first book, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. The dead bodies in this one include that of the Saint Tancred, whose name the local church bears and whose bones are to be disinterred on the 500^th anniversary of his death, and that of the missing church organist, who is discovered by Flavia in search of a bat in an organ pipe. As usual, Flavia, now almost twelve, is in the thick of things as the mystery twists through elements that include diamonds, tin soldiers, a leper, and secrets. The real appeal of the series continues to be Flavia and her relationships with her family and other residents of Bishops Lacey. Bradley keeps his young sleuth equal parts old-soul prodigy and credible, needy child. She will make the reader laugh one minute and break her heart the next. Speaking from Among the Bones answers some questions and raises others with its cliffhanger ending. It’s less than a month now until the release of the next book, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches, a reading experience sure to brighten mid-January.

Historical Fiction: Longbourn by Jo Baker

This was a particularly good year for historical fiction. I found particularly compelling The Typewriter Girl by Alison Atlee, The Aviator’s Wife by Melanie Benjamin, Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain, I’ll Be Seeing You by Suzanne Hayes and Loretta Nyhan, and In Falling Snow by Mary-Rose McColl, but using the reread test to select my candidate for best of the year, I went with Longbourn.

Austen-related novels are common enough to practically constitute their own subgenre, and most of them are eminently forgettable. This one is a jewel, keeping the reader aware of the world Austen gave her readers in Pride and Prejudice and at the same time expanding that world to focus on the servants who are faceless, nameless background figures in the P & P world.   From the sleazy Wickham’s effort to seduce the young scullery maid, Polly, to Mrs. Hill, the housekeeper, and her unconcealed displeasure with a decision Mr. Bennett makes, the reader sees the servants at Longbourn as people with histories, secrets, fears, and dreams and the Bennets as people of their class with all the assumptions and prejudices that entailed. I found myself wishing that I were still teaching. I’d love to pair Longbourn with Pride and Prejudice and listen to the discussions the two together would provoke.

YA Novel: Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Eleanor & Park is not a comfortable book to read. The brutal world of the mob mentality that leads teens to attack, render miserable, and sometimes destroy those who are different is painfully real, as headlines persistently remind us. I suspect the reading is uniquely painful for adults who are good at burying thoughts of such viciousness, but Rowell makes the cruelties real, intimate, and impossible to avoid because she makes the reader care about these two characters, the half-Korean Park and the red-haired, flamboyantly dressed Eleanor with her body issues and the horrors of her home life. Watching the relationship develop between Park and Eleanor in all its awkwardness and wonder is rewarding, but it also adds to an uneasiness about their vulnerability. After reading the book, I was more than ever amazed by the parents who objected to this book because of the language (directed at the protagonists, not used by them) and the ugliness of Eleanor’s life rather than hoping that reading and talking about the book would make their children think hard thoughts about their own experience—whether they are outsiders or insiders. I’m giving it to some of the teens about whom I care.

Women’s Fiction: You Are the Love of My Life by Susan Richards Shreve

At its center, this is a book about the lies people tell to themselves and to others in order to protect their wounds and to create selves that are larger and brighter and more immune to the slings and arrows life throws at them. The lies exist in the microcosm of the upper middle-class lives on Wichita Avenue in Washington, D.C., where Lucy Painter, a single mother of two children, has just moved into a house she owns but has avoided for much of her life and where Zee Mallory maintains the illusions of her perfect, fragile life. The lies exist in the macrocosm where in 1973 the Watergate hearings have a nation considering secrets and lies and some very important people considering their costs. Watergate serves as mere background for the smaller stories of the fictional characters, but the point at which history and fiction intersect adds subtlety and substance to the novel.

Memoir/Biography: Marmee and Louisa by Eva LaPlante

I think I was eight the first time I read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Even at that age, while I sighed over Meg’s romance, cried at Beth’s death, and found Amy’s burning of Jo’s stories utterly unforgiveable, it was Jo and the near-omniscient Marmee who knew her so well and gave her such wise advice in whom I was most interested. That interest has not diminished through more than half a century of rereading. I knew as soon as I heard that an Alcott relative with access to newly discovered personal papers was writing a biography focusing on Alcott’s relationship with her mother that this was a book I wanted to read.

Marmee and Louisa shows Abigail Alcott as a practical woman married to a man little suited to the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood. While Bronson Alcott retreated from his family to read and contemplate ideas, his wife worked as a social worker and sanitarium matron in addition to tackling the heavy domestic tasks of the household and passing her progressive ideas about abolition and gender equality on to her second daughter, Louisa. It was Abigail who challenged Louisa intellectually and who encouraged her writing. The book is a warm and revealing look at a mother’s influence on a writer who is more often portrayed as her father’s daughter.

Poetry:  Dog Songs by Mary Oliver

More and more I discover that the poems I want to read are those by poets with whom I’ve lived for years, whose words are familiar yet always bringing some new revelation. So this year I have read Emily Dickinson, as I have every year since the summer I turned ten. I have read Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Kyrie, a series of linked, blank-verse sonnets about the effects of the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919. I have spent much time with Seamus Heaney in this the year of his death, reading again the early poems from Death of a Naturalist and Wintering Out, his translation of Beowulf, and his final collection, Human Chain. I have read John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins and Christina Rossetti and Andrew Hudgins and Kathleen Norris. I have read very few books of poetry published this year. I did read and love Mary Oliver’s Dog Songs, in part because the poems are by a poet who loves dogs and written for people who love dogs, in part because the illustrations are wonderful, and in part because my friends who think they don’t like poetry can look at this book, read the poems, and smile at poems like “The Poetry Teacher” about the speaker’s dog who, according to the terms of her contract, can be in her classroom.

Then they would all

arrive—

Ben, his pals, maybe an unknown

dog

or two, all of them thirsty and

happy.

They drank, they flung

themselves down

among the students. The

students loved

it. They all wrote thirsty, happy

poems.

What non-romance books from 2013 do you highly recommend?

My Own Voice

I have a love/hate relationship with craft books and materials. I draw inspiration from them. I keep a quote from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird where I see it every day in order to combat my perfectionist tendencies: "Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance." I turn to them for specific advice. When I reached an impasse in my current WIP recently, I spent a couple of weeks working my way through exercises from the plot section of Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook. But I have also gone through times when I find reading books or articles on craft paralyzing, when the voices of the experts drown out my own voice and I write paragraphs only to trash them because they are “wrong” according to experts. For me, timing is key to whether the study of craft will be help or hindrance.

Someone recommended a book on voice a few weeks ago, and I read it at exactly the right moment for it to resonate deeply with me. In The Writer’s Voice, poet, essayist, and literary critic A. Alvarez writes about the writer finding her voice as a process. It begins, he suggests, with reading because it is creative reading that makes us aware of “the presence behind the words” and teaches us to distinguish between the false and the true. 

A vital part of finding our voices, according to Alvarez, is falling in love with the voices of others—sometimes promiscuously as we rush from book to book enraptured by the beauty, the power, the authenticity of the voices we hear in the pages we read, sometimes discriminatingly as we immerse ourselves in the work of a particular writer, certain that this is the voice of our true beloved, the one who knows answers to all our questions about who we should become as writers, questions that we cannot even articulate. 

I can remember periods of promiscuity, of reading great numbers of writers wildly and enthusiastically, finding in each new author a turn of phrase, a trick of characterization, a rhythm or cadence that I determined to emulate. I can also remember periods of faithful attention to a single writer, working my way through every poem or novel I could find, making copious notes, living with the sound of one voice falling on my inner ear by day and reverberating in my dreams at night. 

Imitation is proverbially the sincerest form of flattery, and writers have been flattering other writers by imitating them no doubt since creative uses of written language began. We learn skills by imitating, but no one wants her work to be labeled derivative or, even worse, to be accused of plagiarism. Alvarez uses a famous quotation from T. S. Eliot (“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”) to explain that good writers move beyond mere acquisition of skills (imitation) to incorporate other voices into our own in ways that preserve the integrity of both voices (stealing).

When I think about my own voice in these terms, I remember poems carefully crafted in my undergraduate days that a professor tactfully suggested were “too Dickinsonian.” I think even at nineteen, I knew he was right, but decades later and with far greater confidence that my poet’s voice is my own, I still hear echoes of Emily Dickinson in certain lines. The same thing is true of my romance fiction. I have found my voice although I can be hesitant to trust it. I no longer imitate, but when I read a passage I often hear the echoes. Occasionally a friend will read a few pages and remark, “That sounds like X.” I know then that my friend hears the echoes too. Reading Alvarez felt as if I were being given permission to stop worrying about these echoes and end my “anxiety of influence,” to borrow a lit crit term.

I think Barbara Samuel, who has long been my favored expert on voice, would agree with Alvarez. She recognizes the role creative reading plays in forming voice. She includes three questions about reading history on her voice worksheet:

• What are your top five favorite novels of all time? What was your
  favorite book when you were 12? Fourteen?

• Can you point to a writer or a book that made you want to be a writer? Who/What?

• What book do you most deeply wish you’d written? Why? What parts of it make you swoon? Characters? Voice? Plot?

We all know the importance of having a “fresh voice,” a “strong voice.” If we don’t, there are countless agent and editor interviews, blogs, and tweets to remind us. But writing that speaks practically and encouragingly to as-yet-unpublished writers about what voice is and how one discovers (or uncovers) one’s own fresh, strong voice is in scant supply. Alvarez and Samuel offer practicality and encouragement. I recommend Alvarez’s The Writer’s Voice with the caveat that he may be too academic for some tastes. I believe writers of literary or commercial fiction will find Samuel’s words inspiring and useful. 

Finally, in this reflection on voice, I share the closing lines of a favorite poem by a favorite poet in the hope that the journey she describes may be yours as well.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

From “TheJourney” by Mary Oliver

If you are a reader (and Alvarez says reading well is as much an art as writing well), are you aware of the “presence behind the words”? Which authors’ voices do you particularly love? If you are a writer, what are your thoughts on your voice? Which writers echo most loudly in your work?