Best fiction of 2011

I feel like I read a lot of books this year, and I really can't remember what most of them were. (That's what I get for not updating my GoodReads account--curses!)

But I guess if I can't even remember the books, they can't have been all that terrific, so the prize for Best Fiction 2011 goes to Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures.

I'm even farther behind with Remarkable Creatures than with The Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks, since Creatures was first published in 2009. Nevertheless, I read it this year, and I enjoyed it very much indeed.

Remarkable Creatures tells the story of Mary Anning, a working class young woman in 19th Century England who has an uncanny gift for uncovering dinosaur fossils in the cliffs near her home. She is fascinated by fossils large and small, and sharing in her enthusiasm is the poor but genteel spinster Elizabeth Philpot. The novel pits the two women against the elements, the male-dominated world of geology and science, the prevailing wisdom about dinosaurs and the creation, and even--at times--against each other.

The novel evokes a time when science and religion were much more closely intertwined than they are today--often to the detriment of both. Yet in some ways I found myself reflecting on my own intermingling of science and religion, and how an understanding of both can lead to a strong, stable view of the natural world--and of God.

If you read Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring and weren't exactly in love with it (as I was not; I mean, I liked it all right, but it was not an overwhelmingly positive read for me), don't pre-judge Remarkable Creatures. It's really quite a good book, and I liked it even more when I learned (much to my surprise) that Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot were real women--women with a zeal for discovery and a passion for understanding the world around them.