The 2017 Nagappala Book Awards

It’s the most wonderful time of the year – book roundup time! I’ve done this for the past few years on Facebook, but now that I have this blog, I figured this was definitely the best avenue for my annual collection. (Obligatory disclaimer: I joined the Amazon Affiliate program, which means if you buy any of these books via my link, I’ll get a little pocket change. To spend on more books.)

Favorite Fiction:

1. “Sing, Unburied, Sing” by Jesmyn Ward. Shortly after I finished this, I raved about it several times on Twitter and Jesmyn Ward herself began following me! I have less than 100 followers sooo, it’s a pretty.big.deal to me. Every so often I double-check to make sure she hasn’t unfollowed me. So far, so good.
2. “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas. I always go into YA novels with low expectations, even this one despite its many, manyaccolades.  But THUG really and truly blew me away. I fell in love with Starr and her whole family and ached for them and rooted for them and cried with them and laughed with them. I cannot wait for the movie adaptation, though I’m sure I’ll be that annoying person who won’t stop talking about how the book was better. (It always is!) I also envisioned Starr as Yara Shahidi the whole time, but I’m sure Amandla Stenberg will kill it.
3. “Shelter” by Jung Yun. I love a good family drama and come to think of it, I don’t read a ton of contemporary novels with male protagonists – so score 2 points right away for Shelter. I was fascinated by the different mother-son and father-son dynamics at play here.

Favorite Nonfiction:

1. “One Day We’ll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter” by Scaachi Koul. Scaachi was a guest at this year’s Wisconsin Book Festival and I had the pleasure of meeting her. She was as delightfully blunt and raw as she is on paper and I adore her.
2. “We Are Never Meeting In Real Life” by Samantha Irby. I laughed harder at this book than any other in recent memory. I wish we could, actually, meet in real life. No one gives fewer fucks than Samantha Irby and I love every second of it.
3. “The Wrong Way To Save Your Life” by Megan Stielstra. Yes, all three of my nonfiction faves are books of essays. *shrug emoji*

Most Disappointing:

1. “Fates and Furies” by Lauren Groff. Everyone RAAAAVED over this one! OBAMA said it was his favorite last year, for God’s sake! What is wrong with me! I just thought everyone in it was appallingly insufferable and unoriginal.
2. “Selection Day” by Aravind Adiga. I’ve read all of Adiga’s novels and quite liked them, but he majorly missed the mark with this one. I could not bring myself to care about any of the characters at all, and I honestly don’t think being a big cricket fan would’ve helped. The father-son journey just wasn’t compelling to me.
3. “The Border of Paradise” by Esmé Weijun Wang. Again, everyone LOOOOVED this, and I really wanted to. The subject matter was uncomfortable, which usually isn’t a problem for me – I read weird and depressing shit constantly – but I couldn’t get past the whole tongyangxi concept. It’s definitely not a badly written novel, by any means. If I could stomach what is, in all but the most technical sense, incest, I probably would’ve enjoyed it a lot more.

Most Pleasantly Surprising:

1. “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas. See above.
2. “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” by Caitlin Doughty. Look, straight up, I have pretty severe death anxiety, so I picked this one up in the spirit of staring those fears in the face and not blinking. I didn’t expect it to really help, but it did, and I still haven’t quite put my finger on why. Doughty is never disrespectful or caustic, but she brings a warm levity to the topic that I guess I needed. And be honest, you’ve always wondered what it’s like to be a mortician.
3. “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler. I don’t do sci-fi, but this isn’t sci-fi in the aliens and wizards sense – it’s dystopic fiction, or speculative fiction, depending on who you ask. Honestly, after the year we’ve had I’m kind of dystopia-ed out, but I read somewhere that this book was semi-prophetic about certain things we’re currently experiencing in real life 2017, so I wanted to check that out. It’s a great story with, indeed, a lot of freaky parallels. The heroine, Lauren, is badass AF and you can’t help but be engaged from start to finish.

Most Depressing (but good!):

1. “A Moonless, Starless Sky” by Alexis Okeowo. Slavery in Mauritania, kidnappings in Nigeria, terrorism in Somalia – good news is hard to come by in this deeply researched exposé. In every country, Okeowo finds people working hard for change, but the book overall is obviously very dark.
2. “Crash Override” by Zoë Quinn. Everybody hates internet trolls, but very few of us are familiar with the level of harassment that Zoë Quinn has lived through. While fascinating, this book really plumbed the depths of how far some people will go to ruin a stranger’s life, just for the sport of it.
3. “The Destruction of Hillary Clinton” by Susan Bordo. We know what happened; we lived through it just a short year ago, but reliving it through Bordo’s analysis is fucking painful. A lot of it I think I had purposely forgotten. What I said about Zoë Quinn works here as well, except HRC had many more people, both ordinary and powerful, just salivating to ruin her from day 1.

Most Plain Uncomplicated Fun:

1. “The Hating Game” by Sally Thorne. This is a rom-com in novel form. It is what is sometimes derisively and chauvinistically called “chick lit” (I could and perhaps someday will write a long ass treatise about that whole paradigm but today is not that day). It is highly predictable but also really genuinely enjoyable. Like I said, I read a lot of depressing fiction and nonfiction over the course of a year, and something like this is a much-needed palate cleanser. If they made this into a movie, I’d definitely go.
2. “The Little Book of Hygge” by Meik Wiking. I don’t know if I first learned about hygge in 2016 or 2017, but whether or not I had a word for the concept, it has been my life philosophy since 1986. God bless warm blankets, candlelight, books, and comfort food. I fully intend to write more deeply about hygge in the future.
3. “The Windfall” by Diksha Basu. I try to read some Desi fiction every year, and this one was so fun. It’s a modern comedy of manners, I guess, as a previously middle class family comes into a lot of money and moves to a rich area of Delhi (Gurgaon). Hilarity and lessons about what really matters in life ensue. This would also make a good movie.

That’ll do it for 2017. Let me know what your favorites were, or if you strongly agree/disagree with any of my selections!