2016: a year in books

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Anna Hope, Fabio Volo, Jodi Picoult, Joe Hill, Kate Atkinson, Kazuo Ishiguro

So another year has passed and it’s time to review my bookish statistics – I love to do this every year!

In 2016 I read 65 books, just enough to finish my GoodReads challenge! Of those 65 books:

• 31 were written by women and 34 were written by men.
• 12 were “my own damn books”, meaning books I owned before 2016 started.
• 12 books were written by Spanish authors.
• I read 14 books in English.
• I listened to 16 audiobooks (all of them in English too).
• 5 were ebooks.
• I read 24 books borrowed from the library, thanks to the book club, but also because I’ve been browsing the library in search for short books to complete the challenge – I’ve discovered a handful of authors I want to read more of!

I will include more categories this year, such as author’s nationality, year of publication and fiction/non-fiction books, to make it more complete.

I’m really pleased with the amount of books I’ve read, and with the quality too: I think that we, as readers, know ourselves better every year so we chose reads we know we’ll enjoy. I have only read three books that I didn’t like or did not finished: one was a gift, another was a book club pick, and the other was my own choice.

Among the best of the year, I want to share with you the following:

I have read the two novels of Anna Hope this year, and I enjoyed both, but I fell deeply for the characters in The ballroom.

Never let me go was an unexpected favorite in my list: a sad story of love and friendship with a premise so hard to assume.

Jodi Picoult is an author that always brings up ethical and moral issues, and in The storyteller she asks if a sweet old man should be forgiven from the crimes he comitted in the past.

Daybreak is a book written as a diary in which a woman has an affair with a man, and it’s so well narrated that one just can’t believe it hasn’t been written by the protagonist, but by a man!

Life after life made me think that what we call “right” or “the best for us” sometimes brings unhappiness.

And finally, The fireman was a thriller that made me realize that I should read more books of this genre, because I have such a good time with them!

*****

Hope this new year 2017 brings you wonderful reads.

Happy New Year!

The ballroom, by Anna Hope

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Anna Hope

I received this book from Netgalley

In 1911, a young woman called Ella is confined in a mental asylum against her will. In her first moments there she tries to escape and catches the attention of John, another inmate who is working in the fields around the institution. But Ella’s attempt to flee doesn’t succeed and soon she finds herself getting used to the routines and the people of the asylum.

Charles, one of the doctors of the institution, is a frustrated musician who, in an attempt to bring his job and his calling together, is studying the effect that music has on the mentally ill people under his care, gathering the women in a music room during some hours of the day, and assembling a dance for the men and the women together every Friday evening in a magnificent ballroom inside the building – the only moment men and women are allowed to interact with each other. Charles’ revolutionary method seems to go very well, supplying the doctor with enough evidence to support that mental illness can be cured – the doctor wants to present his conclusions against the Eugenics movement, whose supporters think of castrating men with these mental conditions as the solution to the spreading of illness and poverty.

The asylum where the book is set really existed.
Source.

As the previous novel of Anna Hope, I was hooked on the atmosphere of the book. Ella’s point of view is of a weak woman, scared of this new place where people are “crazy”, but secretly brave enough to try to find her way out. John’s chapters are more masculine and apathetic; he is always working outside in the fields whereas the women are always doing chores inside the building. But from his first meeting with Ella, the seed of freedom begins to grow, so he tries to bring little treasures from the outside world for Ella, taking risks to write and send her letters, and feeling like his old self again. On the other hand, Charles’ chapters talk about the way other people see the institution and how dangerous was to be considered “different” in that time, taking into account the healing methods in mental asylums.

This is probably the best novel I have read this year; from the story of impossible love between these two characters whose destiny are in others’ hands, to how easily one might confuse madness and sanity and who has the right to decide if you must be freed or locked in; I felt the author has created a wonderful story on the basis of mental health.

The ballroom
Anna Hope
Published by Random House
320 pages

Wake, by Anna Hope

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Anna Hope

This is a beautifully written story set just after World War, I in which the protagonists, three women, endure in a world that has change everyone forever.

Ada was once a mother, but her son died in the war and she wakes up everyday just to chase his ghost; she didn’t received that second letter the others seemed to get from the army, and she thinks it means her Michael is still alive. Evelyn lost her boyfriend in the war, and she now works in an office processing the government pensions for the injured, not letting herself get over her loss. Besides, her brother Ed, which whom she was very close in the past, has changed and seems like another man after the war; just the same as Hettie’s brother, who lives in his own mind since he came from France, and now she acts like the head of a broken family, working as a dancing instructor in a famous club in London and giving half of the money she earns to an ungrateful mother.

These are three women very different from each other with only one thing in common: their unhappiness. Britain won the war, yes, but that didn’t prepare them for all the broken families, the amputees begging in the streets or the general sentiment of failure that was the opposite of what a victory was expected to bring them. The three storylines run from the previous days of the Unknown Warrior parade in November 1920 to the event itself; they are not properly intertwined, they just have some characters who appear throughout the story of the three protagonists and let the reader understand the horrors the men now have to live with.

I really enjoyed this book, this unspoken reality of the months after the war, of those women longing for their men to come back, only to find that the closeness they once shared was forever lost in the battlefields.

Wake, by Anna Hope
305 pages
Published by Random House.