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.
Showing posts with label booklist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label booklist. Show all posts
Monday, December 28, 2009
Monday, December 29, 2008
Read a Good Book Recently?
Living away from the excited states, I find that books are ever more important. That may not be true; I’ve always found books to be absolutely essential, regardless of where I lived. My father would come home and find me, as a teenager, on the couch on a summer Saturday, exactly where he had last seen me when he left for work that morning, and say, ‘Are you still reading?’ He kept on saying that to me, all his long life.
So, it’s probably not true that books are more important up here on the fringes of contemporary living, but it feels like it anyway. I read two or three books a week and mostly they are books provided for me by the Point Roberts Library, via its mother institution, the Whatcom County Library. Bless you all at this insufficiently honored civic institution. On Fridays, I order up the books I want via the internet, and on Wednesday at noon (the library is open only three days a week, and the delivery of books only on Wednesday), I see what they have sent me to read next.
This has been my pattern for years here, but there is now a big change, I guess as a result of the financial chaos we are experiencing. I used to put a book on my list and see that I was maybe number 2 or 3 on the list if it was a very recent and very popular book. Nowadays, when I put a book on my list, I am more likely to be number 13 or even number 48, as I was the other day. I guess a lot of book buying is discretionary. Of course, I’ve considered it that for years, so I can’t complain that others have figured it out as well. So next year, I may be working on reading older books for which there is less demand.
In honor of books, here, in no particular order, is my list of ‘Best Books I Read in 2008.’ Very few of them were published in 2008, but I don’t see why that should matter. A good book is worth knowing about any year.
1. Calamities of Exile, by Lawrence Weschler. This is a non-fiction work, in which Weschler introduces the reader to (as I recall) five people who have lived in exile and explores what it has meant to them. The thing about this book that is most important is that it is by Lawrence Weschler. Everything he writes is terrific, so I’d recommend not only this book, but anything else you run into by him. (I started to write, I also really liked ‘Vermeer in Bosnia,’ but then I thought about ‘Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders,’ and there was no going back. Just read anything by Weschler and you’ll be smarter than you were before you read it.)
2. Kristin Lavransdattar, by Sigrid Undset. I first read this novel when I was about 14, and I’ve read it probably four more times since then. Undset received the Nobel Prize for Literature in the 30’s, I think, and re-reading it this time is part of my off-and-on attempt to read at least one work by everyone who has ever gotten the Nobel Literature award. I don’t plan to re-read Faulkner, though.
3. Those Troublesome Young Men, by Lynn Olson. The ‘young men’ in question were those who supported Winston Churchill’s re-rise to power in the U.K. in 1939. It’s interesting to read about all the political finagling that got him to head the war effort and the country.
4. Oblomov, by Ivan Goncharov. Another re-read (but the first time) of an old novel. I first read it in grad school, and I liked it even more this time. About a man who can’t stay awake long enough to get engaged in life, and the friends who try to pull him into it. If you’ve occasionally imagined spending much of your life in bed, this is the book for you.
5. Lush Life, by Richard Price. Nobody writes contemporary urban crime stuff better than Price. I first ran into him with a novel called Clockers, later made into a less successful film. His ability to write dialogue is amazing; he also wrote some of the scripts for the later seasons of The Wire, and it showed.
6. The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. Oscar Wao has some things in common with Oblomov, except he’s a guy who would sort of like to become engaged but is repeatedly pushed away. Diaz is a terrific, relatively new writer from the Carribean.
7. Hotel de Dream, by Edmund White. I’m not normally a big Edmund White fan, but I liked this a lot; perhaps because it is an imagined novel starring Stephen Crane, whose writing I do like a lot. Strange, exotic book.
8. Moth smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both by Mohsin Hamid. A new Pakistani/U.S. educated novelist, Hamid tells strange and compelling stories. I think what I particularly like about these is the way his familiarity with American sensibilities is interwoven with his understanding of Pakistani sensibilities. The novels appear in a midground, unlike a lot of English-language novels by immigrants, which are often very here or very there. This one's there, but you read it through here.
9. A Free Life, by Ha Jin. Another immigrant writer, all of whose work I like a lot. His novels are more typically very there, but this one is very here.
10. Common Carriers, by John McPhee. McPhee, like Weschler, a New Yorker writer, tells me just exactly all the things I wanted to know about the things I didn’t even know I wanted to know about. This book is about how things get places: ships, barges, trains, trucks, common carriers of all sorts.
11. Game Control, by Lionel Shriver. Shriver is perhaps an acquired taste, but I’ve acquired it. This novel is about academics and NGO do-gooders in Africa, and is smart and funny and painful, as I might equally describe any of her novels.
12. Angel of Grozny, by Asne Sierstad. Sierstad wrote The Bookseller of Kabul several years ago, about Afghanistan under the Taliban, a very revelatory book. In this next outing, she writes of her experiences as a journalist during the Chechen war. It’s grim reading, but it certainly gives one some insight into how much we don’t know about what’s going on around the world.
13. The Muses Are Heard, by Truman Capote. In 1961, I assigned this book as the text for my Comp classes at UCLA, and I thought it was time to see whether it held up. It does: Capote was a careful observer and terrific writer. You want to know how to describe something, read this book. This was also Capote’s first entry into journalism, accompanying a touring company of Porgy and Bess in its non-State Department sponsored performances in Russia at the height of the Cold War (the early 1950’s), when both the Russians and the American performers were highly concerned about what to say about the U.S.’s ‘Negro Problem.’
So, it’s probably not true that books are more important up here on the fringes of contemporary living, but it feels like it anyway. I read two or three books a week and mostly they are books provided for me by the Point Roberts Library, via its mother institution, the Whatcom County Library. Bless you all at this insufficiently honored civic institution. On Fridays, I order up the books I want via the internet, and on Wednesday at noon (the library is open only three days a week, and the delivery of books only on Wednesday), I see what they have sent me to read next.
This has been my pattern for years here, but there is now a big change, I guess as a result of the financial chaos we are experiencing. I used to put a book on my list and see that I was maybe number 2 or 3 on the list if it was a very recent and very popular book. Nowadays, when I put a book on my list, I am more likely to be number 13 or even number 48, as I was the other day. I guess a lot of book buying is discretionary. Of course, I’ve considered it that for years, so I can’t complain that others have figured it out as well. So next year, I may be working on reading older books for which there is less demand.
In honor of books, here, in no particular order, is my list of ‘Best Books I Read in 2008.’ Very few of them were published in 2008, but I don’t see why that should matter. A good book is worth knowing about any year.
1. Calamities of Exile, by Lawrence Weschler. This is a non-fiction work, in which Weschler introduces the reader to (as I recall) five people who have lived in exile and explores what it has meant to them. The thing about this book that is most important is that it is by Lawrence Weschler. Everything he writes is terrific, so I’d recommend not only this book, but anything else you run into by him. (I started to write, I also really liked ‘Vermeer in Bosnia,’ but then I thought about ‘Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders,’ and there was no going back. Just read anything by Weschler and you’ll be smarter than you were before you read it.)
2. Kristin Lavransdattar, by Sigrid Undset. I first read this novel when I was about 14, and I’ve read it probably four more times since then. Undset received the Nobel Prize for Literature in the 30’s, I think, and re-reading it this time is part of my off-and-on attempt to read at least one work by everyone who has ever gotten the Nobel Literature award. I don’t plan to re-read Faulkner, though.
3. Those Troublesome Young Men, by Lynn Olson. The ‘young men’ in question were those who supported Winston Churchill’s re-rise to power in the U.K. in 1939. It’s interesting to read about all the political finagling that got him to head the war effort and the country.
4. Oblomov, by Ivan Goncharov. Another re-read (but the first time) of an old novel. I first read it in grad school, and I liked it even more this time. About a man who can’t stay awake long enough to get engaged in life, and the friends who try to pull him into it. If you’ve occasionally imagined spending much of your life in bed, this is the book for you.
5. Lush Life, by Richard Price. Nobody writes contemporary urban crime stuff better than Price. I first ran into him with a novel called Clockers, later made into a less successful film. His ability to write dialogue is amazing; he also wrote some of the scripts for the later seasons of The Wire, and it showed.
6. The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. Oscar Wao has some things in common with Oblomov, except he’s a guy who would sort of like to become engaged but is repeatedly pushed away. Diaz is a terrific, relatively new writer from the Carribean.
7. Hotel de Dream, by Edmund White. I’m not normally a big Edmund White fan, but I liked this a lot; perhaps because it is an imagined novel starring Stephen Crane, whose writing I do like a lot. Strange, exotic book.
8. Moth smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both by Mohsin Hamid. A new Pakistani/U.S. educated novelist, Hamid tells strange and compelling stories. I think what I particularly like about these is the way his familiarity with American sensibilities is interwoven with his understanding of Pakistani sensibilities. The novels appear in a midground, unlike a lot of English-language novels by immigrants, which are often very here or very there. This one's there, but you read it through here.
9. A Free Life, by Ha Jin. Another immigrant writer, all of whose work I like a lot. His novels are more typically very there, but this one is very here.
10. Common Carriers, by John McPhee. McPhee, like Weschler, a New Yorker writer, tells me just exactly all the things I wanted to know about the things I didn’t even know I wanted to know about. This book is about how things get places: ships, barges, trains, trucks, common carriers of all sorts.
11. Game Control, by Lionel Shriver. Shriver is perhaps an acquired taste, but I’ve acquired it. This novel is about academics and NGO do-gooders in Africa, and is smart and funny and painful, as I might equally describe any of her novels.
12. Angel of Grozny, by Asne Sierstad. Sierstad wrote The Bookseller of Kabul several years ago, about Afghanistan under the Taliban, a very revelatory book. In this next outing, she writes of her experiences as a journalist during the Chechen war. It’s grim reading, but it certainly gives one some insight into how much we don’t know about what’s going on around the world.
13. The Muses Are Heard, by Truman Capote. In 1961, I assigned this book as the text for my Comp classes at UCLA, and I thought it was time to see whether it held up. It does: Capote was a careful observer and terrific writer. You want to know how to describe something, read this book. This was also Capote’s first entry into journalism, accompanying a touring company of Porgy and Bess in its non-State Department sponsored performances in Russia at the height of the Cold War (the early 1950’s), when both the Russians and the American performers were highly concerned about what to say about the U.S.’s ‘Negro Problem.’
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