I‘ll be posting My Favorite Books of 2019 soon, but I need a few more weeks to get that ready—so I thought I‘d re-share My Favorite Books of 2018. Here are books 1-6. #KennyCobleBookAwards #BestBooks2018
pickThese are My Favorite Books of 2017
1. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. It‘s this sweeping family saga set in Korea and Japan (!) and the US and it basically covers all my things—human connection, fidelity to your culture, identity, time. It‘s brutal, loving, and generous. It‘s part of my family now.
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See the entire list on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kennycoble/status/938844128418324480
pickMy Favorite Books of 2017
2. Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli. Like many of us, after Donald Trump was elected President, I had to ask myself how I wanted to show up in the world. Very soon after, this book arrived. Honestly, it changed me. It has shaped my activism, my heart.
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pickMy Favorite Books of 2017
3. Autumn by Ali Smith. This book is perfect. Is it the first great Post-Brexit novel? Is it a meditation on art and society? Sure, sure. But more, it is this consumingly compelling story of friendship, between Daniel and Elisabeth, seventy years his junior.
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pickMy Favorite Books of 2017
4. Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich. One of my favorite writers of all time writes her first dystopian work. People, I could have died. And of course it‘s so good—so brutal, so honest, so honoring of women and indigenous people, so real.
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pickMy Favorite Books of 2017
5. What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons. This beautiful, experimental, elegiac, smart novel not only completely wrapped itself around my entire heart and my entire body, it also encouraged me to reconsider how/what I write. I‘m so thankful for it all.
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pickMy Favorite Books of 2017
6. Mammother by Zachary Schomburg. I think what this book wants to do, if it cares for you in the way it cares for me, and I think it must, is make a home for itself in your heart. This novel-by-a-poet is so weird and so beautiful.
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pickMy Favorite Books of 2017
7. Electric Arches by Eve Ewing. I love work that defies category, both in form and concept. This is Afrofuturist and extremely contemporary. This is poetry and essay and fiction. This is a good reason to get up in the morning in these hard times. This is.
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pickMy Favorite Books of 2017
8. Passage by Khary Lazarre-White. Set in 1993 and set in a certain timelessness, this book is haunting and heartbreaking and still bursts with life. An unforgettable voice—no other book I read this year talks like this, speaks like this, prophesies like this.
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pickMy Favorite Books of 2017
9. The Power by Naomi Alderman. If you call a book a feminist dystopia I will basically always read it. This one, though, is next level. Electric, compelling, rich, nasty, deep, everything. It could have gone on for a million more pages. I wish it had.
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