The Best Book I Read This Year
The Atlantic’s editors and writers share their favorite titles—new, classic, or somewhere in between—from a year of reading.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
Harry August, the narrator and protagonist of Claire North’s 2014 novel The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, is an “ouroboran,” gifted and cursed with a sort of immortality: Death, for August and others like him, is merely a reset button. When he dies, his life begins again from birth. On top of that, August’s memory is cinematic; he remembers in vivid detail everything that’s happened to him after infancy throughout all his lives.
In less deft hands, this recursive reincarnation could have easily made for a messy, thematically incoherent plot. (Though from Groundhog Day to Life After Life, it’s worth noting, this certainly isn’t the first well-crafted run at the conceit.) But this book is a marvel of plotting—intricate and fast-paced, yet lucid and digestible. Best of all is the novel’s thematic richness; this is a book about many, many things. To me, it was a striking portrayal of aging—the way an earlier stage of life can come to seem like a different life altogether, how the emotion of an intense and abruptly ended love affair gradually and unexpectedly softens, the process of coming to terms with death. To you, this book will likely be about something quite different. And perhaps it will acquire yet more meanings in the lives we have ahead.
Book I’m hoping to read before 2016 arrives: Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor
—Matt Thompson, deputy editor
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf
I’m from California, which means mostly that I have strong opinions about avocados, but also that I grew up surrounded by “Humboldts.” Humboldt Bay, Humboldt Park, Humboldt Fog … a notable number of my home state’s most notable features bear a German name. It wasn’t until reading The Invention of Nature that I appreciated why.
Andrea Wulf’s sweeping 2015 book—part biography, part vicarious travelogue, part history-of-ideas—celebrates the man behind the memorials: the explorer and author and scientist and Romantic Alexander von Humboldt, born in Berlin in 1769. The story revolves around Humboldt’s most enduring insight: that the global environment is, on top of everything else, a dynamic system. Animals, farms, oceans, storms, people—“in this great chain of causes and effects,” Humboldt wrote, “no single fact can be considered in isolation.”
Nature as network: It’s one of those ideas that has so saturated our understanding of the world that it has ceased to seem like an idea at all. But it was, in its time, revolutionary. Humboldt’s hipster naturalism (before it was cool, etc.) inspired Darwin, who credited his boarding of the Beagle to his friend’s influence, and also Goethe, and Bolívar, and Jefferson, and Emerson, and Muir. And his thinking continues to inflect our own, Wulf suggests, whether the topic at hand is climate change or sustainable agriculture or the culinary fate of, yes, the avocado.
All of which makes it especially unfortunate that today’s tributes to Humboldt—in California, and around the world—have been so neatly relegated to peaks and parks and cheese. Memory can be an arbitrary thing; The Invention of Nature argues, lyrically and compellingly, that the man who gave us “the concept of nature as we know it” deserves not merely to be remembered, but to be celebrated once again.
Book I’m hoping to read before 2016 arrives: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
—Megan Garber, staff writer
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
The Bone Clocks reads like two books at once: It’s at times overlapping, disjointed, and altogether engrossing. The story begins in 1984 with Holly Sykes, a 15-year-old British runaway who has precognition, and it follows her life—intermittently, and sometimes through the eyes of people who love her—across the globe over the course of six decades.
Mitchell is known for his skill in weaving narratives that leap through time, space, and perspective, and the scope of The Bone Clocks is dizzying and delightful this way. But it isn’t just Mitchell’s propensity for projecting far into the future and across cultures that’s impressive. He often freezes time, too, enlarging snapshot details, narrative moments that are tucked into his work like found poetry: “The dune grass sways. Clouds’re unrolling across the sky from France. I put my jacket on.”
Much of the tension that drives The Bone Clocks comes down to the way small moments in life don’t always emerge as significant until much later, if at all. Mitchell once said that the key to understanding how people change from one generation to the next is to ask what they fail to appreciate, an attitude that permeates this novel. “Having a spectrum of worlds where different things are being taken for granted, because they are in different times or different cultures, allows me to examine similarity and difference,” he told The Atlantic last year . “It allows me to examine change.”
I found the book’s odd fantasy subplot, which many reviewers deemed unnecessary, gripping. It isn’t that Mitchell, who is known for genre-busting, is able to keep the story grounded despite its supernatural elements; it’s that he convinces the reader that the experience of living isn’t ever anchored to any one reality. To live in this world is to become unmoored, again and again, and to find a way back to the things—and usually that means the people—that matter.
Book I’m hoping to read before 2016 arrives: Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins
—Adrienne LaFrance, staff writer
How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt
In an era when a dozen Tower Records’ worth of inventory can be accessed with the swipe of a finger across a screen, music can seem ephemeral and invisible, like the air it vibrates through. But Stephen Witt’s fascinating reporting reminds us that this state of affairs—which nearly killed the music industry
