#THE BEST BOOKS TO READ 2017 SERIES#

Marlena by Julie Buntin “Buntin’s debut novel about a pair of self-destructive teenage girls stayed with me long after I had finished reading it. When it comes to the way that America has treated (and continues to treat) its first inhabitants, you won’t like it-and you won’t be able to put it down.” It has all the thrust of a thriller, and all the expertly rendered research we’ve come to expect from Grann. The always-excellent David Grann-whose 2009 book, The Lost City of Z, is the best kind of nonfiction escapism, and is now a sumptuous film directed by James Gray (that, by the way, totally should win something for the lush visuals conjured by director of photography Darius Khondji, or for the truly excellent turn by Robert Pattinson)-fully delivers here. But I find myself referencing it often, not least in terms of the current ( contested, polluted, pipe-line riddled) state of Native American lands after Standing Rock and the election of the seemingly earth-preservation-averse Donald J.

#THE BEST BOOKS TO READ 2017 SERIES#

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann “It seems like a lifetime ago that I first read this book, which turns its focus to a series of unsolved 1920s murders that plagued the Osage Indian Nation, and the subsequent birth of the FBI, which tried to help solve them. (While most of our choices were new in 2017, some were older efforts that have been thrust back into the zeitgeist by forces in Hollywood, the news cycle, and beyond.) Fiction or nonfiction, books continue to be the imaginative, thought-provoking vehicles for sanity-and sometimes revolution-that we desperately need, and it was hard to pick what we loved most.īut we did! And lucky for you, just in time for the holidays, when the previously rare time to read becomes a very real possibility-as does the need to buy thoughtful gifts for your nearest and dearest. But that isn’t to say that the bulk of the reading we did this year was pure escapism on the contrary, in some cases, we dove deeper into the issues that mattered- gender politics, the collapse of “post-racial” America, climate change, technology-to help better process the world outside ourselves. It felt more vital than ever to pick up a solid, ideally wireless object (okay, e-readers count too) that we could sink into for hours at a time, without seeing a red notification symbol, or feeling it vibrate under our hands with some new development. Books provided much-needed solace this year, both from the insanity of the news, and even from the way we consume the news itself.

The best books to read 2017