Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Favorite 2016 Releases So Far This Year

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! I'm actually barely squeaking this one out: I've only read about 15 books published in 2016 at all (I'm doing some backlog catching up!), so here are the best ten I've read, some of which I haven't even gotten to publish my reviews for here yet!

 

The Serpent King: I loved this YA novel about a group of outcast teenage friends in the rural South and only wish I had been 16 when I read it for the first time because I would have loved it all the more. 

Enchanted Islands: This piece of WWII-era historical fiction based on a real person is written beautifully and has the kind rich character development I can't resist. Not your typical WWII by a long shot (it takes place in American and the Galapagos Islands, not Europe).

The Big Rewind: Fun, witty, engaging, light...I've recommended this as a beach read more than once and I stand by that: put it in your tote bag and bring it along to the water!

The Winged Histories: This loose sequel is slow to start and get yourself oriented in, but the writing is just heartbreakingly lovely and it is very worth it to stick with it even if you can't get into it at first. 

And After Many Days: I love books that work on multiple time tracks, and the way this novel parallels a family's despair when a beloved son disappears with the lives of his parents and the choice they made during their younger years 

Private Citizens: Millennials (especially those on the older edge, like me) are finally old enough to have biting satire written about us by one of our own. Thought-provoking and skewering at the same time.

Mr. Splitfoot: This wasn't always the most even book to read, but it was haunting and as I thought it might, it's stuck with me since I read it.

On The Edge of Gone: A teenage biracial autistic girl with a drug-addict mother and a transgender sister could seem like melodrama in the wrong hands. But in Corinne Duyvis', Denise and her family are real and relatable. A fresh take on the "end of the world" drama.

Approval Junkie: With super well-known comedians, there's such high expectations for these kinds of books of short essays to be just incredible from top to bottom. Faith Salie's lower profile makes the genuine humor of hers a pleasant surprise

Thirst: Living out west, especially with the protracted drought we've seen lately, makes you wonder about a world without fresh water. The pacing is spotty, but the horror is real and visceral.

Share:facebook - twitter - pinterest

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Favorite 2016 Releases So Far This Year

Book 14: Thirst

"She sat on the step, her skirt hugging up and exposing the tight skin at the bend of her knee. The stairs were lipped with crosshatched edgings that looked like graphite. Something about it made him sad- that brutal edge so close to Laura's knee. There was nothing in either one of their bodies as permanent as those emergency stairs"

Dates read: January 2-5, 2016

Rating: 6/10

Almost four years ago now, I moved from Michigan to Nevada. In Michigan, I lived right on the water, on an inland lake. Like, open the door and the water was no more than a stone's throw away. I've been swimming in the summer and on ice skates in the winter for as long as I can remember. Moving to Nevada was a very real change from that. Nevada is the driest state in the country in a good year, and we haven't been having good years lately. We're in the middle of a serious drought, and it's not hard to imagine a future in which there could be significant water restrictions.

But the action in Thirst is kicked off by something not so prosaic as a drought. Rather, the fresh water simply vanishes.  The grid goes down, as does the network, and emergency services are so overwhelmed that they can't respond to the crash causing the enormous traffic snarl Eddie Chapman finds himself in. He doesn't know about the water yet. Frustrated at the delay, close to home, and wanting to avoid worrying his anxious wife, Laura, he leaves his car behind and jogs back to his house. On the way there, he notices that the stream he crosses is dry, the trees around it singed and ashy. And thus Eddie, Laura, and their suburban neighbors find themselves in an awful bind: unable to communicate with anyone besides the people they're in physical proximity to, no access to news or information, and no water during the steamy summer weather. How everyone deals with the circumstances they find themselves in is really what the book is about. How do you provide for yourself? Your neighbors? Strangers? The initial panic, the dwindling supply of liquids, the delirium as the dehydration kicks in...the pretense of civilization vanishes quickly. 

This novel read, to me, of a mix of two books I've read recently: Jose Saramago's Blindness (which I loved), and Knut Hamsun's Hunger (which I hated). Like Blindness, the story follows a group of people cut off from the outside world in a place where rules and the social ties that bind are disintegrating after a catastrophic event. Like Hunger, the inability to meet basic needs of physical survival cause the characters to become delusional and therefore unreliable narrators. Thirst is better than Hunger, but not nearly as good as Blindness. The plot took a while to start moving, and I felt like it ultimately wrapped up a little too quickly. Less exposition at the beginning, more denouement at the end would have made it stronger. But it's engaging, and once I got into the thick of it I was intrigued and wanted to know what happened next. It's pretty quick to get through, and I enjoyed it. I'd recommend it to a friend interested in post-apocalyptic style literature, but don't think I'll end up re-reading it myself.

Tell me, blog friends...what do you think is the worst doomsday scenario? Running out of water sounds like a pretty awful one to me.

**I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review**

Note: Review cross-posted at Cannonball Read

Share:facebook - twitter - pinterest

Book 14: Thirst