Thomas’s Ten Top 2014 Reads

Sometimes I forget that I should write about books on this blog, so here we go with a list of my top ten 2014 reads (as in, books I read in 2014, not just books published in 2014)! I have split them up into fiction and nonfiction, the latter of which I notice I read more of as I get older. The list contains a healthy mix of genres, or at least I like to think so. Without further ado, here starts the list:

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The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult

Cover via Goodreads.

Rating: 5 stars.

Damn.

I don’t curse. When I finished The Storyteller, I couldn’t craft a coherent sentence. I just sat and thought to myself: damn.

Sage Singer bakes bread. It’s therapy for her, in addition to the grief support group she attends after losing her mother in a car crash. One day she befriends Josef Weber, a fellow support group goer and an elderly man who is a cherished member of their small town community. Sage soon realizes that Josef doesn’t just want her bread: he wants her to kill him. She learns that Josef has committed a terrible crime against humanity and that someone in her own family has suffered at the hands of the Nazis. With this connection in mind Sage struggles to make the right choice. Is it her to duty to deliver him from his wicked past, or would she bringing herself down to his level by doing so? Why is it so hard to find out what’s right, when faced with someone who’s done so much wrong?

Sophie’s Choice by William Styron

Cover via Goodreads.

Rating: 5/5 stars.

Sophie’s Choice revolves around three characters and three story lines. The protagonist, Stingo, is an aspiring writer from the South who stumbles upon Sophie and Nathan when moving into his apartment in New York. Sophie serves as the beautiful and damaged love interest, a Polish woman and a survivor of Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp. Nathan, a handsome and successful biologist, brings both darkness and light into their lives. Stingo’s journey as an individual and a writer, Sophie’s troubled past, and Sophie and Nathan’s tumultuous relationship all come together in a convoluted, intensely passionate triangle that will break readers’ hearts.

This was my first time reading Styron.

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Cover via Goodreads.

Rating: 2.5/5 stars.

Everything is Illuminated is the tale of a young writer traveling to eastern Europe in order to find a woman named Augustine. It is a tale about a young woman named Brod, and her battle with and against love and sadness. It is supposedly a heart-wrenching tale that ties together past and present, and inevitably illuminates everything.