My Best Book List, 2009

Here it is, the annual (well, I did it in 2008, and now again in 2009, so I guess that qualifies as annual)  list of the ten best books I’ve read this year:

1. Jane Meyer,  The Dark Side.
2. Lawrence Weschler, A Universe, a Miracle.
These two non-fiction works are both about torture, but they both get past the inherent problem of writing about torture.  Meyer, who writes for The New Yorker, does a terrific job of showing us how the U.S. turned into a torture purveyor and suborner, and lost its status as a supporter of human rights.  Weschler, in a fine piece of look-back journalism, written long before Meyer started thinking about U.S. torture, investigates the ways in which Uruguay and Brazil came to terms with the fact that, in a troubled period in their recent histories, each country’s government turned to torture.  No sign yet, of course, that the U.S. is planning to do any coming to terms, but here are some guidelines if we should choose that path.

3.  Susan Choi, A Person of Interest. 
4. Hari Kunzru, Revolutions.
These two books, both novels, offer compelling imaginings about just how it is that someone becomes a terrorist, but in the case of Kunzru’s hero,  it’s not a Muslim teenager; it’s a middle-class white kid in the U.K. in the 1970’s.  And what becomes of him over the years.  Choi comes at it from the other side: how it is that law enforcement agencies come to see someone as a terrorist, even when he is not one.  (Strong reminders of Wen Ho Lee in this second novel.)

5. John LeCarre, A Most Wanted Man.
Also about terrorists, but more about spies and mostly the best LeCarre novel in years. 

6. Hooman Majd, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ. 
Iran and an Ayatollah (Khatami), as we don’t usually see them in the news.  This non-fiction book, written before this summer’s election chaos, is about the political nature of Iran and the status of dissent and dissenters, even among the Ayatollahs, in the country. 

7. Debra Dean, The Madonnas of Leningrad.
This is a touching and unsentimental novel about old age and memory and what old age does to memory, as well as how memory makes old age possible.

8. Lesley Chung, Chinese Factory Girls.
Another non-fiction work, this time about the astonishingly and suddenly changed lives of the teenage peasant girls from small villages in China who go to work in bigger towns in big factories.  Where all that stuff we buy comes from, in addition to who makes it, and the very different kind of life they are creating along with all that stuff in the Dollar Stores.

9. Peter Schejldahl, Let’s See.
10. Geoff Dyer, The Ongoing Moment.
Schejldahl writes the weekly art piece for The New Yorker, and he is, for my money, the best art writer/critic around.  The ‘best’ in the sense that he shows me how he sees a piece of art, even when I am not actually looking at it with him, and yet, I do see it.  Dyer does an astonishing and similar piece of work on photography.  These are both men who not only know how to look at something, but how to tell the reader what their seeing tells them about the larger issues of meaning.

And, not number 11, but a shout out for all of Geoff Dyer’s books that I’ve read so far.  If you are interested in D.H. Lawrence or in writing/literature more generally, try Out of Sheer Rage.  If you’re interested in travel writing, try Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered to Do It.  If you are a fan of classic jazz, especially, try But Beautiful.  Thinking about life and death?  Try Jeff in Venice, Death in Varnasi.  He’s got other books out there as well, but I haven’t read them all yet.  He’s the most interesting writer I’ve run into in years.  His books are novels that are simultaneously non-fiction (or vice versa).  Asked about which they were, he replied that “there’s only an inch of difference between fiction and non-fiction, but all the art’s in that inch.”  And he's putting an amazing amount of art into it.