English Department Announces Its 'Top 10' Picks of 2016 Books
In the long nights between Christmas and the New Year, what could be more beguiling than settling down with a good book?
Faculty from SLU's Department of English, as their Christmas gift to the University community, offer their choices of the 10 most thought-provoking, absorbing and surprising books to have been published during the past year.
The Books
- Emma Cline, The Girls (Random House, $27). A group of teenagers who join a Charles Manson-style cult in the 1960s epitomize that moment in life when everything can go horribly wrong. Recommended by associate professors Ellen Crowell and Anne Stiles
- John Le Carre, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from my Life (Viking, $28.88). About as close as we'll ever likely get to the interior life of a cold-war warrior: a kind of wryly cynical James Bond. Recommended by professor Jonathan Sawday
- Seamus Heaney, Aeneid Book VI: A New Verse Translation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23). Virgil's hero visits the underworld and sees the future of Rome. Heaney's spare, raw version reminds us that classical literature is only timeless because it's always timely. Recommended by associate professor Antony Hasler
- Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Belknap/Harvard, $35). Don't be daunted by the length; more than a new biography of Marx, it's a breathtaking intellectual biography of the European C19. Recommended by associate professor Nathan Grant
- Paul Kalamithi, When Breath Becomes Air (Random House, $25). Memoir by Stanford physician and former English major about his struggle with cancer. Powerful, affirmative, and well-written. Recommended by professor Sara van den Berg
- Nnedi Okorafor, Binti (Macmillan, $9.99). Nigerian science fiction, in which the female protagonist encounters extraterrestrial adventure and saves the galaxy. Recommended by associate professor Joya Uraizee
- Zadie Smith, Swingtime (Penguin, $16.20). The story of two girls who love to dance (only one of whom is actually good at it), this novel moves back and forth between their childhood in the 1980s and the present. Smith offers powerful reflections on issues including race, celebrity and motherhood. Recommended by associate professor Rachel Greenwald Smith
- J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy (Harper, $27.99). A wonderfully written memoir of how one "hillbilly" from a deeply broken family and community overcame the odds and made it all the way to Yale Law School. Vance's story will convince any reader of the crisis of class in contemporary America. Recommended by professor Hal Bush
- Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (Doubleday, $26.95). Retells the "traditional" story of slave escape with imagination, nuance, emotional depth, surprise, and narratological sophistication. Recommended by professor Joe Weixlmann
- C. D. Wright, ShallCross (Copper Canyon, $23). When poet C.D. Wright passed away unexpectedly earlier this year, this collection evidences the gaping hole she left in American poetry. Recommended by assistant professor Ted Mathys