Best books to put under the tree
From Amy Schumer to Zapiro, there were plenty of good reads this year, writes Beverley Roos-Muller
the season to be baffled by all those books winking at you from the stores, while you try to figure out what to give as gifts and what to pack in your beach bag. So let’s decorate an imaginary festive tree with the best and the brightest baubles from this year’s book choices.
Brightest star
At the very top has to be Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime. It’s a multiple best-seller, on the NY Times list, and locally. Dimpled Trevor is an international icon, homeboy made good, despite his shockingly impoverished childhood.
Literally “born a crime” under the infamous Immorality Act, to a Swiss father and a Xhosa mother, he stole food from pigs to survive, played pranks and slept in a car for a whole year of high school.
It’s a series of linked essays, often funny, sometimes poignant, always interesting, on his extraordinary and meteoric rise to fame, and a deserved praise song to his mother. What could be more Christmassy?
Shiniest Angel
The Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. Conversations on how to find happiness, by two of the cheeriest people around. No strangers to hardship, they’ve found the secret to joy and are generous enough to share it.
Brilliant baubles
There’s a sleigh-full of enticing autobiographies about this year. Besides Trevor in the funny field, there’s the multi-talented Tina Fey’s Bossy Pants and fellow comedian Amy Schumer’s The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, an, um, cheeky reference to the Larsson trilogy. Helen Zille, who as a young journalist broke the story of the death/murder of Steve Biko, tells all (or much of it) in Not Without a Fight. And, if you must, there’s Gareth Cliff on Everything.
Champagne-popping
Best biography was Adam Sisman’s voluminous and detailed John le Carré. Not to be outdone, that bestselling author responded elegantly, if selectively, in his own memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, a cracker of a book for Le Carré’s legion of fans; the characters he writes about, movie stars, celebrities, politicians – are worth reading about even if you don’t know his work well.
An unexpected hit is Defiance, the remarkable story of a feisty woman well before her time, Lady Anne Barnard, by Stephen Taylor. She was bright, skilled and wilful, with a toyboy husband. Hats off to her.
Sparkling thrillers
Great for chilling out after the braai and/or plum pudding.
Cuddle up on the couch, or slouch in a deckchair with a couple of Nordic noir chillers, The Ice Child by Camilla Lackberg and The Owl Always Hunts at Night by Samuel Bjork (warning: you may have to avoid feathers after this last one).
Dark Christmas
Our most frightening fear is that of the missing child, which Shari Lapena skriks us with in a gut-wrenching nailbiter, The Couple Next Door. Old favourite John Grisham is back with a vintage number, ie bad judge, good investigator, in The Whistler.
A new book by Martin Cruz Smith (author of the delicious Gorky Park and Polar Star) is The Girl from Venice, set in Italy during the final months of World War II, although it didn’t quite do it for me. Perhaps I was expecting too much, for it was a pleasant enough read. Go back to his greats.
Twinkling lights
This year we said farewell to the great Oliver Sacks, neurologist, humanist and author, who has been beguiling us with his fascinating books for years ( The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Awakenings and my personal favourite, Hallucinations).
His autobiography, On the Move, wasn’t entirely well received, perhaps for its frankness, but I shall miss him and his work very much.
He brightened my life.
Santa’s Best Elf
Bernhard Schlink ( The Reader) has written another thoughtful, tender winner in The Woman on the Stairs. A beautiful woman is painted, in her youth, descending a staircase. Three men love her – and meet her again in her old age. Very memorable.
Also not to be missed is Simon Winchester’s Pacific, which like all his books, is a firecracker of information, wit and bemusement.
And my own favourite Elf this year was Daniel James Brown’s The Boys in the Boat, the incredible true story of the dirt-poor rowers from the US who beat the cream of the world’s rowers in the 1936 Olympics to snatch gold from right under Adolf Hitler’s furious nose.
Even better than Chariots of Fire.
The Last Laugh
Zapiro is always a must-have. This year’s annual is Dead President Walking… It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry.
Let’s hope for a happier New Year.