books | Melanie Bates

Oh, SQUEE… Have I got a gift for you! I’m so stoked to share my best reads of 2015 with you. You might be thinking, Hey, she already has her top books listed here. And you’d be right. But… I want to go a bit deeper, in my own words, about why I adore them so much, and why I think you should read ’em (like… yesterday.)

So, whether you’re looking for a few last minute gifts for the readers in your life, or you’re just wanting to hide out and hunker down with a cozy tome while Aunt Ethel imbibes her seventh spiked eggnog, well then, here you go:

The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness. Holy Hannah, I adored this book. L.O.V.E.D. it. One part Japanese myth, one part magic, and two parts awesome, I loved the ethereal quality of this book. It set the tone for my entire year of reading. I was constantly on the lookout for fiction based on the myths and folklore of other cultures. The prose of this puppy was flat out lyrical, breathtaking and full of substance.

The Golem and the Jinni: A Novel by Helene Wecker. I went wholly gaga over this book and read it twice this year. The characters and their natures… how they never strayed far from those natures—the story, the myth, the religion, what Wecker had to say… All of it was sublime. I’m always on the lookout for my trifecta: great character, great story, and what the author has to say about our world through her fictional world. This book had all that in spades.

Yellow Crocus by Laila Ibrahim. I have a bit of an addiction to books set in WWII and stories about slavery. This was the latter. I may not need to say anything but this: I started this book at 11:00 pm and read until I was finished. The characters were amazing, the tension tight throughout, and the symbolism was just the cherry on top of it all.

The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo. Above, I mentioned that The Crane Wife set me on a search for books based on myth. I feel like I fully lucked out in finding this lil gem. Wowza. If I weren’t afraid of commitment, I would say this was my top pick for 2015. It’s chock-full of Chinese folklore and awesome sauce. I don’t usually say this, but if done right, this would make one heck of a movie. *gasp*

Counting by 7s by Holly Sloan. Got a middle grade reader in your life? This coming of age and well, frankly, coming of transformation was a deep, deep delight to read. I love the main character’s voice. It won about every award under the sun and I wasn’t alone in calling it a best book of the year. Lots of great metaphor, in fact that may have been my favorite part.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley. This one. This. Just this. *jumps up and down and chokes on own saliva* Oh folks, oh!!! If you only read one book this year, or next, let it be this one. I’ve got a funny story around this one too. I’d had it on my Kindle for over a year. I thought it was literary fiction. When I finally dug in, I was shocked to learn it was a mystery. Now, I’ve got not a single thing against mystery, I just wasn’t expecting it. Let me tell you, it could have been baboon sex space opera meets horror with a toenail fungus antagonist and I wouldn’t have cared. I fell so deeply in love with the young main character Flavia de Luce, that I read all seven in the series in a matter of a few weeks, and then sobbed into my Cap’n Crunch because there weren’t any left to read. There’s nothing worse than soggy cereal, people. I blame Alan Bradley.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. This book was just plain dreamy, and I mean that literally. There was such a dream-like, ethereal quality to this story. I really loved the way Morgenstern plays with storytelling and point of view in this book. The characters were phenomenal. I’m not a huge fan of the circus, but I’d visit this one in a nanosecond.

A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. Hey, what’s happening? Yep… that’s pretty much how I felt the entire time I read this. I don’t read a lot of horror these days, but I try to go back to my roots and pick up one or two a year. It’s certainly not like my old heydey of reading every word Stephen King had ever written. (Gosh, I do still love him though.) Anyhoo… this book had a creep factor that’s hard to describe without spoilers. Yum. Yum. Yum.

Well… there you have it. Looking back over the year, I love how I can see the synergy among so many of these books—the ethereal, dreamlike, myth/folklore, magic of them. It was a fantastic reading year. 56 books and over 19,500 pages (57 if I finish The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton before the bell tolls midnight on 12/31.) Lord, I’m such a nerd. (And I love it.)

Happy Reading y’all. And do please share your faves of 2015 with me. The 454 books on my Wish List are lonely and shivering.

P.S. All links above are set to Amazon for ease, but by all means visit your indie bookstore to pick these beauties up.

I know. I know. You’ve heard the concept of love versus fear about a trillion times, so I’ll just let Oprah boil it down briefly: “Every single event in life happens in an opportunity to choose love over fear.”

This idea has knocked around in my head for years, but it wasn’t until recently that I pulled it from the recesses of my mind to conduct a little experiment:

Every time I go to make a decision, I have to ask myself if I’m making the decision out of love or fear.

Experiment #1:

A few weeks ago, I wanted to go to a new farm-to-table, upscale Southern restaurant with people I love more than anyone on the planet. They said they wanted to go too. Later that day they opted for Olive Garden. (Let’s put aside my disdain for chain restaurants momentarily.) They were getting ready to move and were sticking to a budget—something I totally get.

But I so wanted them to experience the taste of the strawberry balsamic shrub on their tongues—the notes of vinegar, the seeds of the strawberries, the tangy, tart, weird sort of yumminess of it all. I wanted them to cut into a piping hot, fried green tomato and have the light batter crunch in their mouths, and I wanted them to watch as the butter melted into a pool on the iron skillet cornbread.

It wasn’t just about farm-to-table versus chain. It was about experiencing this food with people I love. It was about dining on the porch in the late summer sun. It was about watching them taste some of this stuff for the first time. I asked myself if my budget would allow me to help pay for dinner. My Inner Bastard went crazy:

Me: All the bills are paid. More money’s coming in. Let’s do it!

Inner Bastard: You’re one fried-green tomato away from the poor house and you’re gonna “end up eating a steady diet of government cheese and living in a van down by the river.”

Me: That’s ridiculous. I’m fine. I’ve got savings. I don’t even have credit card debt.

Inner Bastard: You better save the strawberry seeds from your shrub ’cause that’s all you’ll have to eat for the next few weeks.

I stopped myself. That was fear talking.

I redirected: Does it feel like love? Really, does it FEEL like love to take these people you worship to this restaurant and help to pay?

The answer was a resounding yes.

We went, and it was everything I hoped it would be, minus the fly that wouldn’t leave me or my spoon alone. (Let’s set that aside though as well, shall we?)

Experiment #2:

I’m tired.

Just plumb worn out.

Summer sometimes does that to me.

It’s like the first time I went to Europe, and I packed my bag so full that I ended up zipping my favorite gray cable-knit sweater right through the zipper. To boot, there wasn’t room to take anything back, so I had to buy a whole new bag while I was there to schlep all my new stuff home.

Summer feels like that—like cramming in too many trips, parties, barbecues, and concerts, until my very soul is stuck in the zipper. No wonder we hibernate in the winter. We’re exhausted.

Summer should be long, lazy, and sloth-like with space to sit around a campfire and try to remember all the constellations you learned in Astronomy 101 decades before. There should be time to head up to your power spot on the mountain, top down, with the pups in their carseats as their long, pink tongues flap in the breeze.

I told my family I would come visit them for my birthday. I keep asking myself if it feels like love or fear.

I’m afraid the answer is fear. I’m worried they’ll be hurt if I don’t come. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want to nap, and read, and nap some more.

The jury is still out for me on this one. I’m torn. I love them beyond what I can express, so that part feels like love. Taking another summer trip doesn’t. My Inner Bastard doesn’t help:

Inner Bastard: They’ll never speak to you again. When you die, they won’t go to your funeral, and when your mom sends them little vials of your ashes, they’ll end up rattling around in the bottom of the grand-niece’s toy boxes underneath the Happy Meal plastics.

Experiment #3:

Nothing feels more like love to me than summertime reading. Or wintertime, springtime, and fall-time reading.

And… admittedly, I have some quirks around reading.

You see, I go in spurts with things. It’ll go something like this: I read every fiction book I can find that’s set in WWII/Nazi Germany until I can barely lift my head from the sadness, and I’ll only have eaten one single, solitary, sliced olive over the course of two days. Books like: Sarah’s Key, All the Light We Cannot See, The Book Thief, The Nightingale, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Ooh… pie? I immediately switch genres and read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, and I fall so deeply in love with Flavia de Luce that I read all seven novels in Alan Bradley‘s series in just over a month. Once finished, I’m bereft. I sob. I grieve. I resign myself to waiting for book eight like all the other sad sacks in the world.

After a day or two of mourning Flavia, I remember one of my other favorite characters in literature: Scout Finch… Thus begins my annual binge of Southern/Southern Gothic fiction with young quirky characters in an epochal Bildungsroman (Coming of Age): Bastard Out of Carolina, The Homecoming of Samuel Lake, The Secret Life of Bees, My Last Days as Roy Rogers, Whistling Past the Graveyard. And… on it goes until I find myself on a witch kick or a fictional Mary Magdalene obsession.

This is all a long way of saying that deep in the heat of summer I always come back ’round to my Coming-of-Age-set-in-the-South books. I inevitably end up worrying that I’ve read all books of the kind, but then I find: Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, which leads me to Because of Winn-Dixie… because ice cream leads to store. Literally and figuratively.

So… aside from sharing my unequivocal reading neuroses, which may land me in a padded cell with no books whatsoever, I do have a point. I finished Because of Winn-Dixie the other night and felt profound yuck. How was I going to find my next book? I’ve read them all. I fell asleep with a lone tear barreling down my cheek.

The next day, before I’d finished my first cup of coffee, I had performed an exhaustive search on Google for books in that genre. Next thing I knew I had purchased The Pecan Man, The Secret Sense of Wildflower, and Orphan Train —-> because, clearly, I’ll be jumping tracks to orphans fairly soon.

Yes, I’m still getting to my point. Really. Just one more thing. Have I ever let leak the fact that I have over 200 kindle books? 75% of which I haven’t yet read? Or… did I fail to ever mention the fact that my bookshelves each hold double stacks of books that I haven’t yet read? I’ll bet you I have over 300 books in my “to-be-read” piles/shelves/whole bookcases.

And here we are, finally, at the point. When I performed that exhaustive search and bought more to-be-read books, I was acting wholly out of fear. Fear that I wouldn’t feel the same feeling with a single one of those three-hundred books I already have. Fear that the books I was searching for would suddenly be out of print. Unavailable. Not for me.

My Inner Bastard had nothing to say on this one. He was buried under a pile of said books.

I had forgotten to check in before I clicked buy. I hadn’t asked myself the question. Am I buying these books out of love or fear? Typically, any type of book buying for me is a love thing, but sometimes it’s not. This time it was not.

The next day I told a dear friend about my experiments, and all about my thoughts on love versus fear and how it’s everywhere. Every. Where. And how it’s the foundation of everything we do in our lives.

She asked, “So what’s next for you?”

“Practice. That’s it. Nothing big or grand or deep. Just practice.” I told her, as I stroked my Kindle.