I know this much is true, by Wally Lamb is a gripping emotional tale about what it is like to be “the spared one”. The tale is a beautiful blend of guilt, shame, anger, mystery, and misery. What does it mean to be the one who ‘lives’? Am I not my brother’s keeper?

Despite its heft, I guarantee that once you start this tome begins to feel as light as a beach read, and becomes unputdownable. 10/10 definitely recommend, especially for those who have ever had or been a sick/troubled relative.

It was a close call this month; by far the most enjoyable book I read was Spoobenders by Daryl Gregory, but I would be remiss if I didn’t hand the top book of the month to The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami.

A lover of the horror genre and an avid reader, I only now and then stumble across a book that genuinely unnerves me. Laila Lalami’s dystopian cyber surveillance novel hit home for me. Halfway through the novel, I found myself researching “dumb-phones” and articles on how to minimize tracking metrics and other data. The book falls into the special genre of books that rattled the anxieties and fears within me, in the league of Blood Meridian, The Parable of the Sower, and Little Heaven; those truly good horror stories, graphic historical accounts, or, in Lalami’s case, a sci-dystopia that feels all too plausible, that made my spine tingle.

John Fowles’ The Magus starts out like any other pseudo-fantastical travel abroad thriller, but once you think you understand what the book is going to be about, you feel your fingers have grasped the edges of the plot; Fowles drops the first bomb on your understanding. His revelations, and lack thereof throughout the rest of the book, proceed like an aerial bombardment. Leaving you like the main character, wondering right up until the end, what is real? Which lies to believe?

A testament to any book I am reading is how it shows up in my dreams, and The Magus was floating around in my subconscious for a long time after I finished the book. Though the ending seemed a tad underwhelming at first, it grew on me, the outlandishness, the craziness, of the whole saga, the Great Game, moved me to my core.

In most books, you have a perceptual advantage over the protagonist, either from a third-person narration or a familiarity with common story arcs. The Magus steals that from you. You find yourself just like the protagonist, lost in what at times seems like a cruel psychological game. You feel like Piranesi from Susanna Clarke’s novel, except the labyrinthine maze that traps you is not made of walls but of lies.

Ken Follett’s Pillars of Earth was one of those books that I had heard about and been recommended to read for years. It was also one of those books where, upon reading a summary of the plot, I thought, How good can this be? 800-something pages about a cathedral?.

I am ashamed I wasted years not reading this masterpiece. The tale of a small interwoven cast of characters and the nuances of their lives during the early Middle Ages in England. The novel charts the harrowing ups and downs of life for common folk during that time period with astounding historical accuracy, all the while, parallel to that storyline is the plans for the construction of a great cathedral. A building worthy of God.

What turned me away from this book for so many years is exactly what made it such a beautiful read. Pillars of Earth contains no epic battles, no magic, no dragons; this is no Game of Thrones. Just the rawness of life and struggle during that time period. With all the fantasy and whitewashing of the time period stripped away, Pillars of Earth provides a beautiful look into the nature of being Human, of being a Good Person, of truly being a servant of God, both then and now.

Many books I read this past month took unique approaches to common literary themes. From Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, an exploration of beauty and ugliness within a family where deformity is a virtue and normality a sin, to Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here, about the struggles of raising children and the discussion of inequality and unfairness in society, told through the metaphor of children who, when they get upset, literally catch on fire.

All that said, by far the most intellectually curious, while also a moving tale for me this month, was Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author. The main character’s family, their struggles with her disability, the complex dynamics of a large Nigerian-American family, and the familial conundrum of what to do when the black sheep becomes the family’s biggest success all make this book a worthwhile read. What really impressed me about Death of the Author, however, was how, at the same time you read the story of a disabled woman writing a bestselling novel, you are also reading about a dystopian future with truly science-fiction elements, and slowly it dawns on you that you are not sure which story is writing the other.

Nnedi Okorafor pulls off this surrealist move with grace; it is a hard tale to spin. Books that become self-reflective are often some of the hardest novels to read and write. Unlike Italo Calvino or James Joyce, whose brilliance is often masked by an air of erudition, or a novel like Sophie’s World, which is mired in the philosophy necessary to explain what is going on, Nnedi Okorafor’s masterpiece needs none of that. It is easy and enjoyable to read, so much so that you become too confident you know what is going on, and then at the end, you feel you need to read the whole book over again from a different perspective.

First and foremost, I want to list out some honorable mentions for this month. The goddess Nisaba has blessed me with a highly rewarding month of stories (see There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak). Before diving into my top pick for this month, I want to mention that The Turner House by Angela Flournoy, When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, Stoner by John Williams, and White Noise by Don DeLillo, all would have one best pick if they were placed in the previous month.

Despite the wealth of fabulous stories I read this month, when I faced the task of picking the best, there was no contest. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry may be one of the best books I have ever read. This book contains so much that, to even leave a review, I had to reread the synopsis to figure out how to say what it’s about.
I was disappointed with the synopsis.

Rohinton Mistry drags you into a cast of characters in India during a period of political upheaval and overwhelms you with the sorrow, joy, and suffering of human life in the hardest of times. Tragic and yet endearing, the book is an emotional hurricane in the best and worst of ways. In all honesty, I don’t think text can convey what A Fine Balance is about except the book itself. It is one of those rare reads where not only the words fall away, but the internal movie falls into the background as well, and you find yourself caught up in a storm or raw human-ness that at the end leaves you feeling you have just experienced something tragic, vast, and profound that can never be put into words. And somehow Rohinton Mistry does it, throwing you into an immense, indescribable space where you feel the raw human-ness of this life.

It should be known that this month’s pick was a toss-up between Calvino’s novel and The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin. The latter was an amazing thought-experiment-like novel about an anarchic-communal political system, full of fascinating ideas about the definition and structure of both society and government. The former, however, was an amazing thought experiment novel about a thought experiment novel. Although The Dispossessed was an amazing book, and arguably more entertaining at points than If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, I have to hand the winner to Italo Calvino.

The beauty of Calvino’s prose and philosophical writing style, in books like If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and Invisible Cities, can be stated as such: Ursula K Le Guin, and others, i.e., Hermann Hesse, Neal Stephenson, Margaret Atwood, write about fascinating ideas; Italo Calvino writes around them. The beauty of Calvino’s prose is in its inherent poetic-ness, its bizarre, Kafkaesque-haiku style, where you finish the story thinking about an idea that was never even mentioned in the text. In the style of a Zen Koan, Calvino writes entertaining outlandish stories that, when finished and contemplated, you realize were no more than mere phonetic ornamentation to some grand unexpressed idea. The story is hidden in between the lines, and although that may make Calvino a harder read for some, he is one of the few authors whose work and ideas pop up in my head years after reading them.

The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward was a mind bender. Utterly disturbing at points and hopelessly depressing at others, it is a horror novel with the unending plot switches reminiscent of John Fowles The Magus.

Few books have disturbed me more than this one. This book provides a level of narrative discomfort on par with books like The Road, Blood Meridian, and Little Heaven. Unlike all those books, every 10 chapters or so in Catriona Ward’s mind-bender left me a little more unsure I knew exactly who the villain was and what exactly had happened. The repeated rollercoaster ride of “who did what and to whom” cycled chapter after chapter, repeatedly built up my confidence at spotting the villain only to knock it down again on the next page.

I would not recommend this book for the squeamish of faint of heart, but I must say for those who enjoy a page turning thriller, have a strong stomach, and the endurance to save your judgement till the final page; this is the book for you.

When we read nonfiction we expect information dumps, we expect to be innundated with facts and figures. In good historical non-fiction we expect to sense some of the narrative of history as well. Iran a Modern History by Abbas Amanat is encylopedic in the amount of information it gives you and is epic in terms of it’s narrative of Iranian history from the ruler’s and ruled’s perspective.

Chosen because of the current geopolitical struggles, and knowing a little about the history of Iran and it’s relationship to the US and other countries. I found myself desiring a deeper understanding of the country and it’s rich history before I would begin talking about what was currently going on amidst friends and at the bar.

If you have time, there is no better book on Modern Iran from the Safavid Dynasty till the Obama administration than Abbas Amanat’s tome here. He does a superb job at giving the facts and also just enough narrative not to bias you with his own opinions and perspectives of what went down. He errs on the side of giving you too much information than not enough; as a curious reader I am okay with that. All in all, this is one of the most informative history non-fiction books I have ever read.