BEST OF 2008: Lindsey’s picks

  Editor’s note: The following is part of an ongoing series of blogs throughout the month of December in which The Book Nook reviewers list a few of their favorite books published in 2008.

  I read a lot of good books this year, but there is no question which one was my favorite.
  Andrew Davidson’s “The Gargoyle” is a book all fiction lovers should pick up.
  “The Gargoyle” is a fairy tale, a historic novel and a love story all rolled into one.
  The novel opens with a fiery crash that leaves the unnamed narrator, a drug-addicted porn star, horrifically burned: his flesh melted, his toes sliced off, his leg shattered, his penis turned to ashes.
  Remarkably, he survives the accident and is taken to the hospital, where he undergoes months of treatments for his burns, oftentimes wishing he hadn’t survived.
  His life now saved, it’s during his recovery in the burn ward that he meets the people who will save his soul. The most important being Marianne Engel, a sculptress who could be schizophrenic, bipolar, delusional, all or none of those. She believes they were lovers in medieval Germany, where she was a nun and he was a badly burned mercenary. Marianne Engel nurses his spirit, telling him the story of how they met as well as folk tales about love from various cultures.
  Davidson did a lot of research for this book, and it shows. He eloquently captures the harsh recovery of burn victims. The book is a beautifully written tale of redemption, touching and haunting, and is certainly a novel that I will pick up and read again.
  My second top pick is Wally Lamb’s “The Hour I First Believed.”
  It took Lamb a decade to write this book, and it was worth the wait.
  Lamb, who wrote “She’s Come Undone” (1992) and “I Know This Much Is True” (1998), once again forces his characters to endure trauma after trauma while mixing in a bit of generational history and family secrets.
  In “The Hour I First Believed” Caelum Quirk and his wife, Maureen, move to Littleton, Colo., finding jobs at Columbine High School. He as an English teacher; she as a school nurse.
  Caelum must return to his family’s farm in Three Rivers, Conn., after his aunt has a stroke. At the same time, Maureen finds herself trapped in the Columbine library, hiding in a cabinet from two students on a murderous rampage. She survives the shootings, but does not escape unscathed.
  What follows is a moving portrait of one couple struggling to deal with the chaotic aftermath of a violent incident that sends them spiraling. The story is full of surprises and kept me reading long into the night.
  Another dramatic work of fiction worth picking up is Scott Heim’s “We Disappear.”
  Heim, better known for his book “Mysterious Skin,” delivers a dark tale, but one that is poignant and memorable.
  “We Disappear” centers around Scott, a writer and drug addict who goes home to take care of his dying mother, Donna. Donna is haunted by memories of being abducted as a child and obsesses about missing children — going so far as to interview families of the missing under the false pretense that she’s writing a book on the subject. She enlists Scott in this endeavor, and as her health begins to fail, he tries to uncover the truth about his mother’s own abduction.
  This book could be a little too dark for some readers, but I found it moving. Heim is a very talented writer and has a gift for character development.
  Here are a couple of honorable mentions. There are reviews of all of them here at The Book Nook: “So Brave, Young, and Handsome” by Leif Enger; “River of Heaven” by Lee Martin; “The Story of Forgetting” by Stefan Merrill Block; and Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”