Mindel's Top 10 Pick from 2013 for Your Kindle

This year I made an effort to include more Non-Fiction (N/F) in my reading and was greatly rewarded.  I have a compiled a list of my favorite reads from 2013 which include novels, N/F & short story collections.  A surprising number of N/F have made it on my list.  The top 10 picks are in alphabetical order by title.  Happy reading in the new year.

Billy Lynn's Long Half-time Walk - Ben Fountain - Fiction
Devil in the Grove, Thurgood Marshall and the Groveland Boys - Gilbert King - N/F
Flight Behavior - Barbara Kingsolver - Fiction
Letters to an Incarcerated Brother - Hill Harper - N/F
Lone Survivor - Marcus Luttrel - N/F
The Orphan Master's Son - Adam Johnson - Fiction
The Roundhouse - Louise Eldrich
The Yellow Birds - Kevin Powers - Fiction
This Will be Difficult to Explain - Johanna Skibsrud - Short stories
Trans Atlantic - Colum McCann - Fiction
We are All Completely Besides Ourselves - Karen Fowler - Fiction

If you count an extra pick to my list - be grateful.

Shine Shine Shine by L. Netzer is Glowing

Lydia Netzer's "Shine" was a NYT's Notable Book ('12) & shortlisted for the LA Times Prize for fiction.  Her illuminating novel on what it means to be human just falls short of being infallible.  Precisely what Netzer is telling the reader:  humans are flawed.  Being imperfect is what makes us devine.  The comparisons between man & robots are listed by Maxon Mann*, a genius mathematician & designer of robots with omnipotent capabilities.  Mann (*humans) possess the capacity for love, regret & forgiveness.  Therein lies crucial differences.  Robots can be programmed to make survival sustainable outside of earth's gravity.  However, survival & living are divergent.  Living entails irrational behaviors;  laughter, rage, preference & tolerance.  These are celestial characteristics as inherent to our existence as breathing.  There is a stirring love story between Maxon & Sunny two incredible & unique individuals who grow up together.  It is also a tale of the powerful, unqualified love between a mother & her child.  "Shine Shine Shine" is a glimmering examination of the family structure integral to civilization and what it means to be quintessentially human.  Be sure to put "Shine Shine Shine" in your orbit.  It zooms zooms zooms.

HILL HARPER's Letters to an Incarcerated Brother, HOPE & HUMANITY

"Losing My Cool" is T.C. Williams book which credits the safety net of caring parental support for a successful & meaningful life.  Unfortunately, the vast majority of Williams' friends did not have meaningful assistance.  The majority of his peers have become incarcerated or deceased.  In Hill's "Letters..." he takes us on a 5 year journey with a 16 yr. old inmate, Brian, that is both exhausting and miraculously transforming.  Hill's ongoing  correspondence & connection to Brian, imprisoned for drug possession abounds with torment, desire & healing.  Brian, father to a young boy is serving a minimum 5 year sentence for drug possession.  While imprisoned, Brian reaches out to Hill in a letter with hopes of hearing back.  "Letters..." is an affirmation of humanity, tenacity and redemption.  The reader is privy to on-going letters & communications between these two men and the bond of trust & brotherhood that developed.  Also included are letters from others Hill passes on to Brian and inspirational quotes.  However, this is NOT a preachy, cheesy tale of heroics or adversity.   It is an exercise in learning to give respect and earn respect. Reading this book is a humbling experience.  Caring is being there no matter what, with the understanding each individual is accountable for themselves.  Hill & Brian build a kinship that enriches their lives and inspires the humanity in all of us.  "The ability to forgive and the ability to love are the weapons...to live fully, bravely and meaningfully in a less than perfect world." (H. Kushner)

NonF. LOSING MY COOL, Father's Love Beats Hip-Hop

Thomas Chatterton Williams' revealing memoir elucidates how the hip-hop culture permeates black youths & subjugates them with a misguided conception of acceptable behaviors.  Thomas is son to a white mother & black father.  "Losing My Cool" pays tribute to his loving parental guidance, in particular his father's mentoring that steered him to a better way of life and to being a better person.  Obama, also of mixed heritage, clarifies himself as a black man.  Thomas identifies himself as black & aspires to be accepted as cool by relating to the lifestyle of the hip-hop culture.  "Hip-hop is a way of being street-shit." The mind-washing rhetoric drummed into young blacks is "money, hoes, and clothes, that's all a brother knows: fuck bitches, get money."  Ironically, this jargon which Thomas, along with his peers growing-up bought into, is subversive to success, in all significant wakes of life.  While there is much to feel chagrin at in Williams' adolescence, he speaks with a voice of  innocence, sauciness, wit & revelation.   There is so much to recommend from the unpretentious lessons learned here that aspire us to be independent thinkers and universally tolerant.  I am only perplexed as to who would make a cooler father, Thomas' dad or Bill Cosby.      

Trans Atlantic by Colum McCann;Winner Nat'l Book Award

Irish born author, Colum McCann received the Nat'l Book Award for Let the Great World Spin.  In "Great World," McCann brilliantly intertwines diverse lives at a specific point in time inhabiting NYC.  "Trans Atlantic," is much more ambitious & even more rewarding.  The fulcrum connecting different generations & countries originates & returns to Ireland beginning with Lily, a young, destitute maid during the great famine.  Lily encounters Federick Douglas when he toured Ireland to gain public & financial support for the abolition of slavery in the States & for himself.  Douglas stirs Lily to pursue her own liberation.  She crosses the Atlantic by ship to America and the saga of Lily and her offspring commence.  Worlds are knotted together by war, persecution & human suffering. "Tunnels of lives connect, coming into daylight and then plunge us into the dark again."  McCann's elegiac writing & captivating storytelling makes us question what is life anyway.  "An accumulation of small shelves of incident.  Stacked at odd angles to each other."  I question whether McCann will repeat another Nat'l Book Award honor.  The odds are heavily stocked for it.  

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Unforgettable

A pilgrimage is a mission to gain moral or spiritual significance.  Harold Fry is just an ordinary guy whose life somehow has gone awry.  Harold is adjusting to retirement from the same job he held for his entire adult life.  His long loveless marriage to Maureen is exhausting.  Harold is friendless, his only son David has abandoned him and he is adrift in a malaise of loneliness.  When Harold receives a note from an old colleague "that would change everything."  Queenie, an old colleague wrote informing him she is dying and wished to say good-bye.  Without premeditation or a plan, Harold sets out to mail Queenie a letter and ends up determined to walk the 600 miles to her believing that his walk will save her.  Perhaps this may deter you from Rachel Joyce's novel.  This would be a travesty.  Bear with the initial vapid "Forest Gump" character whose naivety is at first grating & preposterous.  His journey along sets him free to ponder the mysteries of life and reexamine his own.  Living takes putting one foot in front of the other "but, it never ceases to amaze how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are."  Trust this unlikely beginning transcends & marvels the reader.  "What the world needs is a little less sense, and a little more faith."

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson-Same Old, Same Old

Life after Life is a novel that is in part a time travel epic, part British WWII account, and for the most part, a philosophical examination of reincarnation.  On all parts, it seems never ending.  If you are considering reading this relentless palimpsest, let me save you from squandering your future. This story grows old just as it seemed nouveau.  It is both trite, & preachy.  "Most people muddled through events and only in retrospect realized their significance."  For those who have died in the war, "we must bear witness."  Ursula, born in Britain, Feb. 1910, dies & is reborn, over & over.  Izzie, Ursula's  quixotic aunt believes "life is an adventure."  Sylvia, Urusula's pragmatic mother thinks of life "as more of an endurance race or an obstacle course."  Teddy, Ursula's much beloved baby brother wonders "What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right?  Wouldn't that be wonderful?" I will steer you in the right direction.  Pass on this indefatigable rehash.  Read Barne's Sense of an Ending & see the effervescent film, About Time.  Life after Life was never ending & life is just too short.