My Favorite Books I’ve Read Since 2009

Alas, this list-making endeavor would have been ideal for the tail-end of December but, hey, the first quarter of 2016 is coming to a close so the new calendar year is still more on the new-ish side, no?

Anywho, this post is a response to my homeboy, Justin’s list of the best books he has read since 2008. Like Justin, I, too, joined Goodreads around the same time. 

It was fun to browse through my list of books read since 2009 to try to determine which were my favorite books read during each calendar year. Like many of our other lists, it was challenging to decide upon one favorite book I read that year because, let’s be honest, I have great taste in books. (So you know, I was smirking while I typed that.) I’ve read a lot of good fucking books over the past seven years—and many did not make this cut.

If you feel inspired to write a similar list, please let me know! I’d love to read it. And now, without further ado, my favorite books I have read for each of the past seven calendar years:

2009 

Although the Coen Brothers’ cinematic adaptation of No Country for Old Men was my introduction to the bloody, remorseless world of men evoked by Cormac McCarthy, this was the first book of his I read. 2009 was the second year in my MFA program so I devoured a bunch of books but this one still sits with me the most. It’s probably the most violent book I’ve read but it felt mythic to me—incisive about an aspect of humanity that will always percolate within one of us. And the ending, sweet baby Jesus, is one of the best and most perfect story endings I will ever read. 

2010 

Along with Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, Nick Flynn’s first memoir is probably my favorite in that broad genre. Without a doubt, it’s the most important memoir I’ve read. It was instrumental in shaping the structure of my book, which is why Another Bullshit Night in Suck City rises to the top of the pile of books I read in 2010 over such books like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Frederick Exley’s autobiographical novel, A Fan’s Notes. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is an exceptional back-and-forth narrative between Flynn’s life in Boston and the trajectory of his father, who becomes a homeless man within the same metropolis. It’s an incredible story, and Flynn does such a great job of running both of those life tracks together within a book and showing how they weaved together. Inventive, sparse yet vivid, this was the year I realized that poets have a knack for writing the best memoirs. (Other examples to substantiate this case: Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, Happy by Alex Lemon, and Luis J. Rodríguez’s Always Running—which is already in the running for best book I’ve read this year.)

2011 

My homegirl, Tara, and I happened to discuss this novel last week. She noted that Murakami’s protagonist, Toru Okada, basically remains flat from the beginning until the end of the novel. Though it’s been a while since I’ve read the book—and my memory can be dicey—that seemed about right. And that’s partly what makes this bizarre novel so exceptional: I don’t know how Murakami pulled that off! It’s a 600-page tome but I remember devouring it, even when Toru remains down at the bottom of a well for a significant amount of page time. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is such a quirky-meandering riff on the hero’s journey—as my homegirl pointed out—and there’s something absolutely charming about Toru. There’s something magical about this novel and its English translation. 

2012

Goddamn, I read a lot of good books this year: Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club (one of my top-3 memoirs of all time), Lysley Tenorio’s Monstress, which is one of the best short story collections I’ve ever read, and Joshua Mohr’s masterpiece-thus-far, Damascus. But 2012 is the year I tackled and devoured two tomes about the Spanish conquistadors invading the “New World,” including John Hemming’s classic, The Conquest of the Incas. The timing behind re-reading this book was impeccable: I finished it just before my sweetheart and I went together to my ancestral homeland for the first time. Revisiting Incan ruins in Cuzco’s Valle Sagrado de los Incas was a heightened experience for me since all the history I had read about at some of those sites was fresh on my mind. As a mestizo living in the United States, Hemming’s historical text has always been instructive in showing me where I come from and what my homeland lost when the Conquistadors overthrew the Incan Empire. I would be a different person if I never read this book.  

2013 

So I love good history books, and Japan at War: An Oral History is an incredible book consisting of hundreds of interviews with Koreans, Okinawans and an array of people living and fighting in Japan during World War II. It’s a monumental collage of perspectives from people affected by the war. Although I wasn’t alive at that time, nor does my ancestry tie directly to their plights, while I read this tome, I continually stumbled upon truths that relate to all men. In that way, their perspectives about the warfront in and around Japan in the 1930s and 1940s was universal. I remember several accounts were really fucked up to read but I'm glad I pushed through.

2014 

Like 2012, 2014 was filled with exceptional reading. That year, I read Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada’s League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth (which is one of the most perfect nonfiction books I will ever read), David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster and Erin McCabe’s I Shall Be Near to You (probably my favorite historical novel to date). Anyone of those books would have been the best one I read in 2015 but in 2014 they simply couldn’t surpass Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X. It’s a remarkable oral account of Malcolm X’s life and the evolutions he embarked upon as a human and as a black man living in the United States. It was a fascinating read and contained a litany of truths about this country. If I had read it as a young man, it would’ve undoubtedly been a game changer, but reading it as a grizzled, mid-thirties dude only cemented some views on our society that I had already formed.

2015

Last year, I read a bunch of good books but none with the strength and magnitude of a book such as Malcolm X’s autobiography. That said, Ben Fountain’s novel was a fun, quick read. While many of my favorite books were ones written a while back, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk feels like a modern read. It’s a juicy, comical behind-the-scenes read on modern war and all the spectacle and performance behind it. I suspect it’s a bro-friendly book but from beginning to end I found it to be fairly flawless. Of all the excellent books I read last year, right now I see it as the one I’m most likely to read again.