Writer Recommendations for Great Books
Michael Hingston
The best book I read this year was The Intuitionist. Colson Whitehead has basically set the literary world on fire with his latest novel, The Underground Railroad, but his debut, from 1999, is a slick and endlessly inventive story about the secret lives of elevator inspectors. Part noir, part fantasy, and part meditation on race and racism, it kept me on my toes right up to the last page.
Michael Hingston is the publisher of the Short Story Advent Calendar, the author ofThe Dilettantes, and the author of Let’s Go Exploring: Calvin and Hobbes, out in May 2018.
Marty Chan
Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right is a must read for those who are still scratching their heads over how Donald Trump became president. This book doesn’t delve into his campaign. Instead, it reveals some keen insight into the frustration that drove conservative Americans to vote for change, even when it might be against their own self-interest. I was riveted from page one, and the ideas in the book forced me to examine the echo chamber that blinded me to the pain that some conservative Americans were feeling.
Marty Chan is a playwright, the author of over a dozen children’s books, and the host of numerous writing workshops.
Janice MacDonald
Walter Mosley’s The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey reminded me in some ways of Flowers for Algernon. An old man with dementia is given medicine in a questionable medical study, and finds the capacity to finish all the deeds he was meant to accomplish. It’s Mosley’s deft writing of confusion without being confused, and of the blossoming of memories as they occur, not linearly, but like raindrops falling on water, and rippling outward, overlapping and joining other ripples, that is glorious to read.
Janice MacDonald is the author behind the Randy Craig Mysteries, and recently released a creative non-fiction book, Confederation Drive.