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Sunday, Dec 23, 2012 3:55 PM UTC

What To Read Awards: Marjorie Kehe

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Topics: Books, What To Read Awards, Best of 2012,

What To Read Awards: Marjorie Kehe

Marjorie Kehe is the books editor of the Christian Science Monitor.

Marjorie’s top 10:

The Christian Science Monitor ranked the 10 best novels of the year here and the top nonfiction of the year here.

1. Explain why your No. 1 book was your favorite title of the year: We don’t rank our books in numerical order. However, if I had to I would put “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” on the top. This is the kind of book – a beautifully written nonfiction work that takes readers deep into a world that they would otherwise not encounter – that resonates best for Monitor readers.

2. What was the strongest debut book of 2012? It would be hard to beat “The Yellow Birds” for an astonishing debut.

3. What book sits outside your list, but has either been overlooked or deserves more attention? Quite a number of our readers wrote to us this year about “Home Is a Roof Over a Pig” by Aminta Arrington. This is a memoir about a U.S. family who move to China in order to return their adopted daughter to her roots. Arrington focuses on the process of language acquisition (for the whole family) as well as painting a vivid picture of life in today’s China outside the few cities that we Westerners best know. The book clearly spoke to a fascination many of our readers have with China and its language and daily culture.

4. Was there one book, either on your list or off your list, fiction or nonfiction, that seems to best encapsulate America in 2012? I think that “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” says a lot about where we are today.

5. What was the single most memorable character from a 2012 book? I was fascinated and heartbroken by the whole family in Richard Ford’s “Canada” but perhaps most of all by the bank-robbing father.

6. What is the book from 2012, either from your list or not, fiction or nonfiction, that is most likely to join the canon, or still be discussed 20 years from now? I hope that it’s going to be “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher.” I don’t know that we will ever get a better biography of Edward Curtis and I hope that we will still be talking about him a decade or two from now.

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  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

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