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My Favourite Books of 2014, Brooke Kosty
by Alisha
Fiction + Psychology & Self-Help / December 12, 2014
I was recommended this book by a fellow Raincoaster and a native Russian who heard I have a thing for Russian literature, and this did not disappoint. Melnik tells five interwoven stories that center around characters who share the same Russian hometown as the author herself. Melnik has an elegant writing style that lets you find moments both haunting and beautiful – without being told they are such – and by doing so, she plants them in your mind long after you’re done reading. One story about a mother’s painstaking journey to purchase a rare bundle of bananas for her children still tends to pop up in my mind every time I’m in what feels like a painfully long line at the grocery store.
As many of my Raincoast coworkers know by now, I love anything and everything Oprah; this book is no exception. A curated selection of her ongoing magazine column, What I Know For Sure is the perfect amount of Oprah’s life lessons, wisdom, and anecdotes, all in small, beautifully-packaged doses.
As a literature major in school, I thought I’d worn myself out of anything and everything pertaining to classic literature. Apparently all it took was publishing a funny blog to knock me back off the wagon. Writer Mallory Ortberg captures famous novels and their characters so well that I often found myself (embarrassingly enough) thinking I was reading texts between old friends, ‘Oh man, that’s classic Jane…’ My favourite were the texts “by” Daisy Buchanan of Great Gatsby fame; the quintessential self-centered brattiness that made you forget she even had a child in the original novel is conveyed perfectly through Daisy’s manipulative texts pestering Nick for a ride home from the Valley of Ashes.
