Kia ora koutou, It seems we are beginning this year, by pining for life 10 years ago. 2016 has been called the ‘last normal year’, a time before the pandemic and global instability.
This nostalgic trend is reflected in social media. People post images from 2016 or use a ‘2016 filter’ to make pictures look faded and comforting in warm colours.
Whatever your recollections of 2016, we thought it was time to look back to the most popular books of that year. Maybe you have read some of them and the titles spark memories of your life back then. Or, maybe, these books provide suggestions for your next read.
Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us, was a massive hit and by 2019 had sold one million copies globally, thanks in part to featuring on BookTok. The book also spurred a sequel and movie. If you do like romance novels with some grit, then this is the book for you. There is a dark undercurrent of domestic violence that runs through the novel, that ultimately questions the nature of love.
Another blockbuster turned into a movie was Paula Hawkins’ debut novel The Girl on the Train. A psychological thriller about an alcoholic’s daily train commute and her fixation on a couple, Megan and Scott, who also travel on the train. Things get tense when Megan vanishes.
From commercially successful books to critical hits. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, received a huge amount of praise and awards. It was one of the top books voted by Goodread Readers, won a Pulitzer and was praised by then US president Barak Obama. This is the story of a young slave on the run from a Georgia plantation, heading along the Underground Railway (which in this novel becomes an actual railway) towards freedom.
The last book is nonfiction, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone. It is a memoir of the author’s lonely time in New York combined with an analysis of artists who also lived in the Big Apple. It is a very personal and inventive way of looking at the topic of isolation. If you have not read anything by this author this is a great starting point.
That’s our little trip down memory lane.
Ka kite!
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