What’s The Best Book You’ve Read This Year? We Asked The Prime Minister And Several Other Maltese Personalities
Another year is coming to an end and if you’re like most people you probably haven’t read as many books as you’d have liked. But that’s why we have New Year’s resolutions. As you compile your reading list for 2018, here are a few recommendations from some major Maltese personalities.
1. Joseph Calleja: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behaviour crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.
2. Ira Losco: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant–and that her lover is married–she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son’s powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan’s finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee’s complex and passionate characters–strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis–survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.
3. Ben Camille: The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck by Mark Manson
In this generation-defining self-help guide, a superstar blogger cuts through the crap to show us how to stop trying to be “positive” all the time so that we can truly become better, happier people. For decades, we’ve been told that positive thinking is the key to a happy, rich life. “F**k positivity,” Mark Manson says. “Let’s be honest, shit is f**ked and we have to live with it.” In his wildly popular Internet blog, Manson doesn’t sugarcoat or equivocate. He tells it like it is—a dose of raw, refreshing, honest truth that is sorely lacking today. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k is his antidote to the coddling, let’s-all-feel-good mindset that has infected modern society and spoiled a generation, rewarding them with gold medals just for showing up.
4. Mario Vella: New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
The New York Review of Books has called Paul Auster’s work “one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature.” Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this uniquely stylized trilogy of detective novels begins with City of Glass, in which Quinn, a mystery writer, receives an ominous phone call in the middle of the night. He’s drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case that’s more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself. In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission, as well. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems.
5. Roberta Metsola: Invicta by Joseph A. Debono and Caroline Muscat
On 16 October 2017, Daphne Caruana Galizia, the most formidable Maltese journalist of her time, was murdered by a bomb placed under her car. That bomb did not just kill one of the most prominent characters in the history of Malta since Independence, it also tore a hole right through Maltese society and politics. For over 30 years, Daphne took a pen to Maltese society and politics and, wielding it like a razor, shaved as close to the flesh as she possibly could. Her cause was democracy in its fullest sense, Daphne insisted that democracy was not just majority rule, it also comprised minority rights, checks and balances, rule of law, autonomy of the institutions, accountability and good governance. Above all, she upheld freedom of expression as the fundamental instrument through which to scrutinise authorities and hold them to account. For her pains, she was demonised and came under sustained fire for all those thirty years, but not once did she wilt or flinch. To pay tribute and to commemorate Daphne’s significant contribution to democracy and to journalism, this book brings together an array of Maltese and international academics, journalists and friends.
6. Mark Laurence Zammit: Born A Crime by Trevor Noah
Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.
7. Marlene Farrugia: The Festival Of Insignificance by Milan Kundera
Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time completely avoiding realism—that’s The Festival of Insignificance. Readers who know Milan Kundera’s earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the “unserious” in a novel is not at all unexpected of him. In Immortality, Goethe and Hemingway stroll through several chapters together talking and laughing. And in Slowness, Vera, the author’s wife, says to her husband: “you’ve often told me you meant to write a book one day that would have not a single serious word in it…I warn you: watch out. Your enemies are lying in wait.” Now, far from watching out, Kundera is finally and fully realizing his old aesthetic dream in this novel that we could easily view as a summation of his whole work. A strange sort of summation. Strange sort of epilogue. Strange sort of laughter, inspired by our time, which is comical because it has lost all sense of humor. What more can we say? Nothing. Just read.
8. Miriam Dalli: The Shadow Of The Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer’s son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julián Carax. But when he sets out to find the author’s other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax’s books in existence. Soon Daniel’s seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets–an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.
9. Michael Briguglio: The Return by Hisham Matar
When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father went missing under mysterious circumstances. Hisham would never see him again, but he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. Twenty-two years later, he returned to his native Libya in search of the truth behind his father’s disappearance. The Return is the story of what he found there. The Pulitzer Prize citation hailed The Return as “a first-person elegy for home and father.” Transforming his personal quest for answers into a brilliantly told universal tale of hope and resilience, Matar has given us an unforgettable work with a powerful human question at its core: How does one go on living in the face of unthinkable loss?
10. David Ozi Borg: Devil In The White City by Erik Larson
Erik Larson — author of #1 bestseller In the Garden of Beasts — intertwines the true tale of the 1893 World’s Fair and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death. Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction.
11. Tamara Webb: Lean In 15 by The Body Coach
Discover how to SHIFT your body fat and get the lean physique of your dreams by eating better and exercising less in this essential cookbook and exercise guide—an instant bestseller in the UK—that combines 100 delicious recipes and signature HIIT (high intensity interval training) home workouts from personal trainer and Instagram sensation @thebodycoach, Joe Wicks.
12. Seb Tanti Burlo: M Train by Patti Smith
M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, and across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations, we travel to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico; to a meeting of an Arctic explorer’s society in Berlin; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith’s life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith. Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable artists at work today.
13. Carina: The Life You Were Born To Live by Dan Millman
Dan Millman presents an entirely new way of understanding life and the forces that shape it. The Life-Purpose System, a modern method of personal growth based on ancient wisdom, has helped thousands of people find new meaning, purpose, and direction in their lives. The Life You Were Born to Live features: the thirty-seven paths of life, how to determine your life path and the life paths of others, core issues, inborn talents, and special needs of each path, including health, money, and sexuality, guidelines for finding a career consistent with your innate drives and abilities, the hidden dynamics of your relationships, and how to live in harmony with the cycles of life. The Life-Purpose System explores key spiritual laws — universal principles specific to each life path — that help you clarify the past, understand the present, and shape the future. It can generate a quantum leap in self-understanding and may even change the course of your life.
14. Adrian Delia: The Tao Of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff
Is there such thing as a Western Taoist? Benjamin Hoff says there is, and this Taoist’s favourite food is honey. Through brilliant and witty dialogue with the beloved Pooh-bear and his companions, the author of this smash bestseller explains with ease and aplomb that rather than being a distant and mysterious concept, Taoism is as near and practical to us as our morning breakfast bowl. Romp through the enchanting world of Winnie-the-Pooh while soaking up invaluable lessons on simplicity and natural living.
15. Joseph Muscat: Salt, A World History by Mark Kurlansky
In his fifth work of nonfiction, Mark Kurlansky turns his attention to a common household item with a long and intriguing history: salt. The only rock we eat, salt has shaped civilization from the very beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of humankind. A substance so valuable it served as currency, salt has influenced the establishment of trade routes and cities, provoked and financed wars, secured empires, and inspired revolutions. Populated by colorful characters and filled with an unending series of fascinating details, Salt is a supremely entertaining, multi-layered masterpiece.
Bonus. Valentina Rossi: I read more articles on Lovin Malta than I read books. That’s one of my resolutions: read a book!
And on that note, tag a friend who needs a book to read this year!
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