A Broad, Bold Showing for Books in 2013

(from The Denver Post
by Tucker Shaw)

Was 2013 the year that publishing's “most vital category” crown finally passed to young adult and middle-grade literature?

If not, that day is surely nigh. Titles for teens and tweens (and their parents) saturated shelves, and consumers ate them up: “Allegiant” (the third book in the “Divergent” series by 25-year-old Veronica Roth) sold 450,000 copies its first week out, and “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hard Luck” (the eighth in Jeff Kinney's series) sold 1.1 million its first week. Kid lit has legs beyond Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen.

But in an era where reports of book publishing's demise are consistently exaggerated, the grown-up bestseller lists were busy, too, thanks to familiar names: Dan Brown (“Inferno”), J.K. Rowling (writing as Robert Galbraith, “The Cuckoo's Calling”), Stephen King (“Dr. Sleep”), Donna Tartt (“The Goldfinch”), Khaled Hosseini (“And the Mountains Echoed”), and an old dead guy named F. Scott Fitzgerald (“The Great Gatsby” made a huge, Leonardo DiCaprio-fueled comeback).

On the nonfiction side, Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg made waves with “Lean In,” Fox News face Bill O'Reilly moved units with “Killing Jesus,” perennial talk-show guest Doris Kearns Goodwin proved her presidential-historian mettle again with “The Bully Pulpit,” and Lawrence Wright shed sober light on Scientology in “Going Clear.” David Sedaris re-earned his place as top comic memoirist with “Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls.”

There was also the unmistakable aroma of the bayou on the bestseller lists: The “Duck Dynasty” crew produced a handful of titles including “Happy Happy Happy” (Phil Robertson), “Si-Cology” (Si Robertson), and “Miss Kay's Duck Commander Kitchen” (Kay Robertson), together selling piles of copies.

The big literary awards went to familiar, and unfamiliar names: Canadian storyteller Alice Munro won a long-due Nobel Prize, James McBride was an unlikely (and deserving) National Book Award winner for “The Good Lord Bird,” and 28-year-old Eleanor Catton took home the prestigious Man Booker Prize for her captivating (if byzantine) tale of New Zealand gold-rushers, “The Luminaries.”

Colorado Book Awards went to Gregory Hill for literary fiction (“East of Denver”), Kristen Iversen for general nonfiction (“Full Body Burden”) and several other authors in various categories.

We lost some titans this year: Doris Lessing, Chinua Achebe, Oscar Hijuelos, Seamus Heaney, Tom Clancy, Elmore Leonard and, yes, psychic (and bestselling author) Sylvia Browne, who famously said that in heaven, everyone is 30. If she's right, one suspects it's a particularly lively salon up there.

My own favorites
Only occasionally do my own favorite titles also kiss the bestseller lists in a given year. Among those from 2013: Elizabeth Gilbert's epic character study “The Signature of All Things” (described by the author herself at a Denver talk as “monu-friggin-mental”); “Transatlantic,” the hypnotic novel by Colum McCann that explores tethers between North America and Ireland; Rachel Kushner's “The Flamethrowers” which contains the perfect line, “People who want their love easy don't really want love”; “Tenth of December” by George Saunders; and, of course, “The Circle” by Dave Eggers, a chilling cautionary tale about the saturating and dehumanizing nature of social media. It'll make you want to turn off every smartphone and social app within reach.

But more often, the titles that stick in my soul tend to have more modest profiles. That held true this year. Here are my most memorable reads:

1. In February, Twelve Books (quickly becoming my favorite publisher) offered “Schroder” by Amity Gaige, a remarkable book that tells the story of an intra-family abduction — an estranged, and perhaps deranged, father takes his daughter across state lines — from the point of view of the desperate abductor. It flipped what's become an all-too-familiar headline into a real story, one without straightforward good guys and bad guys.

2 . In December, Twelve released “The Apartment” by Greg Baxter, a remarkable stream-of-consciousness exercise centered on an unnamed narrator looking for a place to live in an unnamed city. During his search he reflects on his time in the Iraq war, on failed (and fallow) relationships and, yes, the meaning of life. Despite the headiness, it's a speedy and infectious read.

3 . “After Visiting Friends,” by GQ editor Michael Hainey (Scribner) isn't a novel, but it reads like one. Hainey's gift for compelling prose turned this real-life story about a mysterious death in his family into an unexpected page-turner about relationships, secrets and Chicagoland newspapering in the 1960s. It's a stylish, heartbreaking read.

4. Speaking of stylish, “Shocked!” by Patricia Volk (released by Knopf and subtitled “My Mother, Schiaparelli and Me”) was another memorable memoir about life and fashion in 1950s New York, with such indelible passages as: “What is it, Ma? What do you regret?”/ “That I talked my mother out of getting a face-lift.”

5. Of the young-adult books I took in this year — and before you look askance at my middle-aged self, the category has some of the best storytelling going (see “Eleanor & Park” by Rainbow Rowell or “The Infinite Moment of Us” by Colorado author Lauren Myracle) — the title that charmed me most in 2013 was “The Universe Versus Alex Woods” by Gavin Extence (Redhook), about a teenage boy who's the second person in recorded history to be hit by a meteor, an event that changes his brain, and his life. For the good? You'll see.

6. No book sank more deeply into my consciousness, though, than “Benediction,” a triumph of a novel by Kent Haruf, whom Colorado is privileged to claim as its own. The story, a quiet dissection of a quiet family in a quiet hamlet, continues his exploration of the fictional town of Holt, Colo., set on the Eastern Plains and simmering with emotion. Haruf is unmatched for ability to render a spare but substantive story that is equal parts timely and timeless; if it were up to me, everyone in Colorado (or for that matter, everyone everywhere) would spend a week with the television turned off, immersed in Haruf's stunning achievement.

*My own note: This was very surprising to me. Because I just started covering book news, I have not seen any figures for YA books versus other books. It is comforting, to me, that they have not taken over yet. But it is surely, as this author said, around the corner. I have blogged about this. Again we have to separate the good YA from the cookie cutter and less than par YA. That is my opinion. I guess I will have to wait until the end of 2014 to see how the book world evolves over the next year.