Hi everyone. I'm rincey and I am one of the contributing editors over at book riot.
Today's video is inspired by an email that was sent out by Jenn
Northington who works for book riot. So if you are a part of book riot insiders,
which there will be link to that down in the description, you get monthly emails
from different people who work at book riot. And so in November, Jenn sent out an
email and she did a list of her favorite books from the past decade. And I
really like that idea. And when I was going through her email and like reading
about the books that she has loved over the past ten years, I realized that I
could also do this myself. I've been on Goodreads since 2007. 2007? Yeah, around
then, six, seven, something like that. And so I have kept track of all the books
that I've read for the past decade, which is crazy to think about. And I also have
the benefit of one, creating a favorite shelf. So I can easily like go back and
see all the books I marked as favorites from previous years. And two, I very rarely
give 5 star ratings on Goodreads. And so basically what I did is I went back to
2008 and I found what books I marked as 5 stars in every year since that point.
I had one five star book every single year but there were a couple of years where
there were two or three. And so I basically picked the one that I think
is my favorite from that year out of those few recommendations. But for the most part,
it was only ever like one book that I gave a five star rating to. People
ask me like when I'm talking about books like why I only gave a book four
stars versus five stars and it's because there's that something special that
there's nothing the author really could have done to make it a five star book a
lot of times. But it was just like that perfect timing, perfect book sort of
situation. And those books end up leaving a lasting impression on me
to the point where like even today when I was picking out these books for this
video, I still have very strong memories of reading that book and that time
period in my life. So yes, what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go from the oldest
book to the newest and just talk about my favorite books of the past decade.
So the first one that I have is one that when I
saw was my pick for 2008, oh man, it warmed my heart a little bit. It's
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri. Anyone who knows me knows I adore
Jhumpa Lahiri and this is my favorite book from her. She won the Pulitzer Prize
for interpreter of maladies but honestly I love this collection so much more.
These short stories are on the longer side for short stories. I think there's
like six. There are eight stories in here and they-- and this book is around 300
pages long. So yeah, these stories are a little bit on the longer side which
means that there's like more detail and all these different things to them. But I
like distinctly remember being in college picking up this book and like
reading some of the stories and just like bawling my eyes out. They're
beautiful and moving and if you haven't read Jhumpa Lahiri before, this is a great
place to start with her. Or if you think you are someone who doesn't like short
story collections, I highly recommend this one because I consider myself
someone who has a hard time with short story collections. But this one is
amazing. Alright for 2009 I have A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled
Hosseini. I don't think I need to talk about this one very much. I know some
people who didn't like this book as much as The Kite Runner but I think a lot of
people were expecting The Kite Runner like part two or something along those
lines when they picked up this book. And I think that if you just take it for
what it is, this is a really beautiful, really moving book as you would expect
from Khaled Hosseini. But yeah, I can't imagine anyone here who hasn't given his
books a shot yet. So yeah, Thousand Splendid Suns, I loved it so much.
Alright for 2010 I have the war for late night by Bill Carter. This is one of those
books that was like the perfect book at the perfect time thing. Because when I
was in college I was like super obsessed with network television. And not just
like the TV shows that were on, but like I wanted to almost become a network
executive and like be the person who handled programming. Like I loved seeing
the schedules come out and to see how different networks were changing things
up in order to get better ratings and what shows got picked up and which shows
that canceled then I love that whole sort of puzzle and game and everything
along those lines. Also, I was obsessed with Conan O'Brien. And so when he was on
late night with Conan O'Brien, I watched them any
chance I could. And then I was super excited when he got switched over to
late night and then-- or not late night, when he got switched over to the Tonight
Show. And then this whole drama occurred where there was like this fight for The
Tonight Show between Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno. This book has all of the
information you need to know about that. Bill Carter is a fantastic journalist.
He writes or he writes a lot for the New York Times now I think. He also did a
book called the late shift which was about the whole kerfuffle between Jay
Leno and David Letterman when Jay Leno got The Tonight Show originally. He also
has another book called desperate networks which I've read which has to do
with like network television's like big shift back in like 2005 I want to say
now when like Lost was on the air and Desperate Housewives were on the air.
When NBC was like this huge network and ABC ended up grabbing the reins from
them and all of these different things. Like I was so into all of that stuff. Now
television is just a completely different landscape and world and none
of those things matter anymore. But yes, so this is a fantastic book all about the
Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno kerfuffle and it's fantastically done. The amount of
information Bill Carter was able to get from people, like people trust him. He
does a good job. Like he's very fair and his reporting and analysis and things
like that. I don't know if this book holds up unless you are someone who
again like me, really enjoys network television and like drama, behind the
scenes drama like this. But yeah, it's really well done. I love it a lot. I mean,
I read the Leno-Letterman one way after it all happened and I still
thought it interesting. All right for 2011 I have a very popular book and that
is the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. This is a book that I, to
this day, am still recommending to people, especially if they are someone
who thinks that they don't like nonfiction books. This is a great
non-fiction book that I think anyone in the world would enjoy. I also recommend
this book a lot to my friends because a lot of my friends work in the medical
field and so they are aware of HeLa cells but they don't know necessarily
this whole history behind them all the time. So yeah, in case you aren't aware,
this follows the story of how back in the 50s, yeah, Henrietta Lacks was
having a procedure done. She was this black woman. She was having a procedure
done. Some doctors took some of her cancerous cells from her and like kept
them to use in the lab and they didn't ask for her consent or anything like
that because it was the 50s and she was black woman. Her cells were so
extraordinary that they would reproduce so quickly that doctors and scientists
were able to get results on different experiments really fast using her cells.
And to this day HeLa cells are still being used in labs by scientists and
doctors. And Henrietta Lacks never knew, her family never knew. She never got any
sort of compensation even though her cells were used for medications and in
different pharmaceutical things and for different companies and all these
different things. So this is a fantastic report about how all that happened, why
it was allowed to happen, and what's been done since then. Yeah, if you haven't read
this book yet for some reason, highly, highly, highly recommend it. Especially if
you're someone who thinks that they don't like nonfiction, I think this will
change your mind. All right the next book that I have is
one that I, again, just really loved but I also feel really weird saying that I
love it a lot because it's a really disturbing book and it's the devil all
the time by Donald Ray Pollock. This is a book I picked up completely on a whim.
I remember being at Barnes & Noble and just seeing this on a table and like
just picking it up being like, "oh, this sounds interesting." And then I took it
home and it was just like [explosion sound] Like this book is so dark and so disturbing. And so when
I'm recommending this book to people, I have to give them that warning and be
like, look this book is messed up but it's so well written and you're not
going to be able to put it down. Like there are serial killers in here, there
is rape, violent, is extremely graphic, like all of that stuff happens
in here. But this book is so well written. Like I've read Donald Ray Pollock's other
books but this one is still, by far, the best in my opinion. um You are following
I think it's three different characters and all of them are completely messed up.
But if you can handle like dark and disturbing books, you have to pick up the
devil all the time. It's so well written and so well done. But if you cannot
handle dark and disturbing books, stay away. All right next one is
one that I know is kind of a universal favorite. So for 2013 my pick is Where'd
You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple. If you can see, my copy is super beat-up
because I have lent this book out to almost everyone I know. I adored this
book. I remember reading this entire thing in basically one day because I
could not put it down. I thought it was so smart, so funny. Maria Semple wrote for
a bunch of different comedies including Arrested Development. And when you like
read this book and you know that, you can see the connection. So if you like
that sense of humor, you'll like the sense of humor in here. I don't think I need to
say a whole lot about this book because I feel like everyone and their mother at
this point has basically read this book. But if you're looking for a light, funny
read, but funny in terms of like Arrested Development funny specifically, where'd
you go Bernadette I think is hilarious. And like legitimately everyone I've
given this book to you has adored it. Alright 2014 was one of those years
where I had like three five-star books because I also read brown girl dreaming
and Station Eleven that year. But the book that I'm picking for this because I
think it's the one that I still think about is The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld.
And part of the reason why I still think about and talk about this book is
because I still feel like it's pretty underrated. In this book you are
following this unnamed lady prison investigator and she works with people
who are on death row to try to get them off of death row. And so she comes across
this one prisoner who is refusing her help. And she's like really confused
because she doesn't understand like why he doesn't want to get off of death row.
This story is kind of like an exploration of her past, an exploration
of his past, as well as a couple of the other people who like work in and around
the jail. This is a really short book but it's a really impactful book. There is a
little bit of like magical realism in this book. So just be forewarned of that.
But I feel like it's relatively, I don't want to say self-explanatory, but I feel
like it all works really well together. This book is really, really beautiful, but
it does tackle some dark topics. And I think that's part of the reason why I
like it, is because it handles these dark topics in a way that's like your heart
broken while reading this book. But it's just like so beautiful and so well
handled. And Rene Denfeld works as a prison investigator herself.
And so it feels a little bit like she's pulling from her own experiences and
things like that for this book. And you can feel the heart for these people when
you're reading this book. Alright my 2015 pick is a book that I don't have on me
because I have lent it to a friend because, again, I love that book so much
and it's one that I recommend constantly. And that is signal to noise by silvia
moreno garcia. This was another one of those books that
I picked up completely on a whim. I think I may have heard someone talking about
it over on book riot at some point. But I just remember like getting it from the
library and being completely blown away by it. It takes place in like 1980s in
Mexico City, I believe. It takes place in a major city in Mexico. You are following
this main character and her two best friends and she finds out that she has
like the ability to conjure magic. But it's a very like low fantasy sort of
book. So it's not like they're in a completely different world. Like it feels
very much like they're in our world but they're able to sort of like do these
small little magic things. And obviously that has impacts on the way that they're
living their lives and you sort of flash forward to the future and you find out
that the three of them aren't friends anymore and you see sort of what
happened in their relationship. It's a really, really well handled book about
like what it's really like to be an angsty teenager. I know some people
didn't like this book because they found the main character to be a little bit
annoying, which I understand. But also I feel like that's just how teenagers are.
But yeah, like I said, I'm constantly recommending that book to people, still
constantly giving my copy away to my friends so that way they can read it.
And again, it's another one where I feel like the vast majority of people who I give
this book to end up loving it. Alright for 2016, I have a little bit of a
literary darling and that is homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. This book, again, completely
blew me away. I actually got an ARC copy of this book and I remember reading it
and being like, this is gonna be my favorite book of the year for sure.
In case you haven't heard all of us talked about this already over the past couple
of years, this book takes place over 300 years. You started off with these two
half sisters living in Ghana. One of them ends up getting taken into slavery
and sent over to the United States. The other one ends up marrying an English
slave owner and staying in Ghana. And you follow a generation down every chapter.
And the way that Yaa Gyasi's able to weave these stories together is
brilliantly done. I'm someone who generally doesn't like books that have
multiple perspectives because it feels like you don't really get to sink your
teeth into the story. But because there's enough time overlap between all the
different chapters, you still feel like you're getting bits and pieces of these
characters histories and futures while going down through the generations.
And the way that it all ties up together, I think was really, really well handled.
I think some people have a little bit of quibble with the ending. But overall I
mean I love this book so, so much. I was just very surprised by how much Yaa
Gyasi was able to pack into a book that's like only around 300 pages. And
finally, for my 2017 pick, it was a back list book but it was, again, one of
those books that I read at the perfect time. And that's we gon' be alright:
notes on race and resegregation by Jeff Chang. I was in Madison, Wisconsin when
there was, I think it was the white supremacists marching in North Carolina
or something along those lines like the dudes with the tiki torches, and I was
like on vacation. And I was just like, I can't deal with this right now. And I
remember being-- going to the bookstore, seeing this book and being like, yeah, I'm
gonna, I'm gonna read this right now. And this book was just like the perfect book
at the perfect time, again. This is a really, really well-done nonfiction book
that talks about, obviously, race and resegregation. It connects all of these
different events of the recent past from like black lives matters to Oscar so
white to looking at the ways that our cities and neighborhoods are resegregation.
It looks at the recent protests from Ferguson to Washington DC. It just sort of like
creates this link about how this is a thing that has been building and how
this didn't just pop up out of nowhere. Like there were hints of this in the
past and we can see sort of how everything's been moving towards this
point. But it doesn't leave you completely hopeless either, like the last
chapter is full of hope and is about the work that can be done in order to
fix what we're seeing in our society today. So yes, if you haven't read this
yet, highly recommend it. It's super tiny. So it doesn't take very long to read but
I like took my time with it because there's so much great information here.
I didn't want to rush through it. So those are my favorite books of the past decade.
I didn't talk about the one from this year because, even though it's December,
there's still technically time left for a book to become my favorite of the year.
So I don't like to pick my favorites until like literally the last minute. All
right, so that's everything that I have for you guys. Leave me a comment down
below letting me know if you've read any of these books and if any of these are
on your favorites list. I think it's kind of fun, especially like when you have
like the record of all the books that you read, to go through and see what some
of the books you've loved in the past are. Especially the farther cast when you
might not remember that you read it in a certain year or something like that or
you like pick up a book and you remember the situations that you were in when you
were reading that book. Stuff like that I always really, really loved. So yeah,
that's all for this week and I will see you guys next week. Bye.
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