Thomas’s Top Ten 2016 Reads

Hello all! As per tradition, here lies the top 10 books out of the 114 I read in 2016. While the United States’s political climate may have sucked this year, I did read a ton of stellar nonfiction, so that served as a coping mechanism for me to escape the bigotry and prejudice so prevalent within our country benefits this blog post, at least. Fiction, on the other hand, did not satisfy me as much this year – perhaps because I read A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara in 2015, a masterpiece that has ruined my ability to appreciate less-than-stellar writing forever. I would love to see if any of our top picks match up, so without further ado:

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Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide by Kay Redfield Jamison

Cover via Goodreads.

Rating: 5/5 stars.

*Note: I do not post all of my book reviews on this blog. For more, check out my Goodreads page.*

“Suicide is a particularly awful way to die: the mental suffering leading up to it is usually prolonged, intense, and unpalliated. There is no morphine equivalent to ease the acute pain, and death not uncommonly is violent and grisly. The suffering of the suicidal is private and inexpressible, leaving family members, friends, and colleagues to deal with an almost unfathomable kind of loss, as well as guilt. Suicide carries in its aftermath a level of confusion and devastation that is, for the most part, beyond description.”

A gripping, masterful book about a topic shrouded in horror and sadness.

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:

Personal Update: Thomas, Revisited

About a month and a half into summer vacation, I still have not published much on this blog. I ask myself why: is it a bad case of writer’s block, or have I lost interest? At first I wondered whether I was just waiting until after I got my license to start anything serious, but even after attaining it after endangering the lives of me and my examiner, here I am writing this post.

Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman

Cover via Goodreads.

5/5 stars.

I first fanboy squealed on page 11, when Judith Lewis Herman created a connection between mental illness and feminism, two of my favorite topics.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

Cover via Goodreads.

Rating: 5/5 stars.

Bird by Bird is my new bible. Not just for writing, but for life – it is my favorite work of nonfiction so far.

The Violinist’s Thumb by Sam Kean

Cover via Goodreads.

Rating: 3/5 stars.

Have you ever wanted to hoard cats? Did you know that there’s a sonic hedgehog gene that can make your skin peel off? Can you fathom that pheromones could make you fall in love?

The Violinist’s Thumb contains chapters on all of these topics – it combines shocking facts with biological premises with the history of DNA discovery.