It was a particularly good year for excellent books and 10 is way too few. In order of authors’ names:
“Planes” (Knopf) by Peter C. Baker: A criminally underrated novel about the ways our choices resonate far beyond ourselves, without our knowledge, in directions we never anticipate. The Evanston, Illinois-based Baker tells compassionate parallel stories: A Muslim woman in Rome pieces together redacted letters from her husband, held in an American black site during the George W. Bush administration; meanwhile, in North Carolina, a real estate agent spars with a conservative school board while having an affair with a businessman who owns a small airline leasing planes to the government for terrorist renditions. Baker does not write victims or villains — just complicated people.
“Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands” (Drawn & Quarterly) by Kate Beaton: A vast graphic memoir about a young cartoonist (Beaton) who leaves her home in Nova Scotia for the supposed gold rush to be found in rural Alberta, where dinosaur-giant machinery carves bleak scars through lush forests. Keaton needs to pay down college loans, but ends up with a street-level view of Canada’s most controversial (and rich) landscape. History rears up, as well as sexual harassment, but also a humane profile of struggling workers, the sorts who produce sneakers, smartphones and fossil fuels but remain faceless.
