obligatory end-of-year book list.

Columbia just sent us a new revised packet of course listings and master classes....and their line up this coming Spring is fantastic, I have to say. Eileen Myles, Sloane Crosley, Emily Fox Gordon, Elisa Albert....super excited. I would love to take ALL THE CLASSES. I just read Albert's book (I blogged about it in the last post), and would love to take her class. Myles is a poetry goddess superstar, Gordon's essays are great, and Crosley is awesome. sigh.

I'm seeing all these lists everywhere about the Best Books of 2011, and I feel like I should list some. I don't have specific rankings, but here are some books I read this year that I loved:

1. Blue Nights, by Joan Didion. Memoir of losing her daughter, Quintana, and thoughts about aging, death, life and mortality. Didion can do no wrong.

2. The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern. A beautiful, richly described, vibrant book about two illusionists who fall in love, despite being pitted against one another to be the best. I stayed up until the early morning hours reading this and finished my ARC of it in 2 days.

3. We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love and Literature at Iowa Writers' Workshop, by Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer. A book filled with alumni rememberances about the Workshop, how they write, their thoughts on process, etc. Honest, engaging and insightful for any writer.

4. The Cure for Grief, by Nellie Hermann. Quietly devastating but cautiously optimistic, this is a book about a young girl whose family implodes, leaving her to deal with the loss of her father and two brothers to mental and physical illnesses.

5. Death is Not an Option, by Suzanne Rivecca. A wonderful short story collection about strength, life, survival and love.

6. The Vanishers, by Heidi Julavits (coming out in March 2012). I read this ARC back in November and wanted to skip class to finish it, it was that good. I didn't love her other books, but this one, about a young woman with psychic gifts who is caught in a web of deceit and magic, is brilliantly crafted.

7. Anthropology of an American Girl, by Hilary Thayer Hamann. Despite the 400+ pages, I finished this in 2 days this past summer. The book follows Eveline through her adolescence and young adulthood in the late 1970s and early 80s, and Hamann captures miniscule details perfectly, which transport the reader right into the richly written prose.

8. Best American Essays 2011, edited by Edwidge Danticat. Some years are a miss, this year's collection is a hit. Essays on family, illness, writing and more fill this book, with a few contributors who are alums of the Columbia MFA program, actually. There was not one essay in this collection (which includes Zadie Smith) that I did not like, which is amazing.

9. Hold Still, by Nina LaCour. This is a YA book that rivals "13 Reasons Why," and I actually think is a little bit better. After Caitlin's best friend Ingrid commits suicide, she finds Ingrid's journal in her room. While still struggling with grief, she begins reading the journal to find out why Ingrid killed herself, and in the process, finds out how to continue living.

10. The Homecoming of Samuel Lake, by Jenny Wingfield. A great Southern story about a family who returns to the father's hometown, where the daughter Swan (reminiscient of Harper Lee's Scout) befriends an abused little boy, with devastating yet ultimately positive results.

To read over break: new issues of Ecotone and Ploughshares; "Blue Blood:Duke vs Carolina;" Best Food Writing 2011; Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011; Narrative Medicine