Best Books of 2008

The New York Times just announced their Ten Best Books of 2008, which is as good a reason as any to survey my own reading for the year. While I did read one book on the list, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, my reading tends not to be quite as current, although Roberto Bolano’s 2666 is on my Christmas list.

My reading this year was not quite as novel-heavy as in recent years. For some reason I began the year by reading about half of The Reformation by Will Durant and ended it by getting heavily into short stories, occasioned in part by the death of David Foster Wallace, which inspired me to return to some of his short story collections I hadn’t finished and also explore some of the short fiction he’d included on the syllabus of a course he had been teaching, which was posted online by one of his students in one of the many tributes to DFW that either appeared or were overloaded with contributions after his death.

In the middle of the year, there were a number of false starts that confounded me: The Innocent, by Ian McEwan; Author, Author, by David Lodge; The White Castle, by Orhan Pamuk; American Studies (OK, not a novel), by Louis Menand; and The Dean’s December, by Saul Bellow, all of which were written by authors I admire, but whose work didn’t stick this time, although I imagine I will return to some of them at some point in the future.

I got out of my novelistic doldrums with The Confidential Agent, by Graham Greene, my first venture into his “oh so British” world and definitely not my last. Was it a coincidence that I received The Complete Monty Python on DVD for my birthday, soon after finishing it? Perhaps. At any rate, in August I was rewarded with the two best books I read this year, which were actually both published in 2008. So, in addition to short stories and essays by Roberto Bolano, Orhan Pamuk, Donald Barthelme, John Updike, TC Boyle, Edward P. Jones, and others whose names escape me at the moment, here are the Best (somewhat recently published) Books (I read in) 2008, with just a couple annotations:

Atmospheric Disturbances, Rivka Galchen
An exasperating and claustrophobic book that doesn’t resolve in any conventionally satisfying way, but the writing is brilliant and the meditations on identity, existence, and the perplexing nature of relationships that don’t evolve even as the individuals in those relationships mutate, grow, and shrivel, are unique and thought-provoking. Some of the technical minutiae and digressions evoke a “guy book” author like Richard Powers, say, but Galchen gives it her own decidedly female twist, although it is hard to imagine any woman having this much patience and fondness for the irascible, annoying, and mule-headed main (male) character.

Netherland, Joseph O’Neill

Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

Oblivion, David Foster Wallace
DFW’s death this fall hit me hard, and I’ve been going back and reading the stories in his various short story/essay collections that I didn’t read when they first came out. As with most short story collections, it’s best to read them one at a time. When this collection, his last fiction publication, came out, I considered it nearly unreadable. I was wrong. The “missive beyond the grave” of the suicide in “Good Old Neon” has been given new significance after DFW’s own suicide. And stories like “Another Pioneer” and “Oblivion” are beautiful, profound, revolutionary, and riveting to the word-wise. I also read or re-read “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” his best non-fiction collection, and I’ve gone back to “Girl With Curious Hair” and “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” discovering, as I’d thought, that BIwHM is really the only unreadable DFW opus, although the shortness of many of the pieces makes them less daunting.

The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai

The Ministry of Special Cases, Nathan Englander

The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

David Foster Wallace reading

Haruki Murakami on Music

From an essay in the NYTimes book review:

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more. Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow. Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work — upon ending your “performance” and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that is new and meaningful. And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of elevation with your readers (your audience). That is a marvelous culmination that can be achieved in no other way.

Thought for Food

Two great quotes from David Foster Wallace's Everything and More, A Compact History of Infinity.

"The dreads and dangers of abstract thinking are a big reason why we now all like to stay so busy and bombarded with stimuli all the time."

"Never before have there been so many gaping chasms between what the world seems to be and what science tells us it is."

NY Times Ten Best Books 2006

The New York Times recently published its ten best books of 2006, a list that I probably take a little too much interest in. I’ve read three of the 2005 Top Ten and four of the 2004 list. (Sometimes I read them before the list comes out, sometimes they’re already on my “books to read” list.) So something tells me that the collective taste in fiction at the NY Times Book Review is not too different from mine, for better or worse.
At any rate, this year, not a single book in my own Top Ten is on the NYT list (and there’s only one book on my “to read” list: Marissa Pessl’s “Special Topics in Calamity Physics.” Richard Ford might have been, but I’ve never developed a taste for his brand of suburban macho depression. Of course my list is a little different, since I have fewer titles to consider, as I only read 11 entire books. So I’ll simply rank the 11 books I read in their entirety this year. (I did start two books that I don’t intend to finish and I’m currently in the middle of a couple of others--possible candidates for next year’s list.) You’ll also notice that many of them were not published this year.

1. The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk
I added this and The Windup Bird Chronicle to my “Best Books of All Time” list this year. The Black Book was published in paperback for the first time this year, and it is stunning, though not for everyone. Chapters alternate between the plot and newspaper columns written by one of the other main characters, who has disappeared, along with the main character’s wife. The book is often best digested a chapter at a time. But Pamuk’s descriptions of Istanbul and his interwoven threads, including references to Sufism and its adherents are magical and profound.

2. The Windup Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
I’ve recently discovered the wondrous Murakami (what took me so long), and I’m still not sure what’s going on in his world, but I wouldn’t mind living there for awhile to find out.

3. On Beauty, Zadie Smith
Smith is indisputably the best of the young crop of post-modern writers along with David Foster Wallace, who doesn’t really qualify as young anymore, and this is her best yet (third time’s the charm).

4. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
5. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
Two classics I had never read. Austen and Capote write English sentences better than just about anyone, and their plots never flag. Is there really any higher praise?
Sometimes one of the best things about movie adaptations of great books is that they inspire you to read or reread the books they are based on. “Capote” and the Keira Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice were both excellent, enjoyable movies, but I’m most thankful that they got me to read these two amazing books.

6. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

7.The Plot Against America, Phillip Roth
8. Terrorist, John Updike
Two books by “The Great Whites” inspired by current events. I admit I haven’t read much by Roth or Updike, and although these are probably not their best, as most people know, they both can write masterfully, devise intriguing plots that sometimes strain credulity, and entertain.

9. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, David Sedaris
Yes, I’d read many of these stories before (or heard them on his delightful live CD), but one can never have too much Sedaris.

10. The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
Along with her husband, Jonathan Safran Foer, Krauss is one of the most inventive young PoMos, and a joy to read. I’m hoping she has a “great book” in her, but this is not it.

11. Brookland, Emily Barton
An interesting disappointment. A brilliant idea—a young woman in post-Revolutionary War Brooklyn devises a plan to build a bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan. But Barton drowns her book in detail and anachronistic feminism, and her sympathetic well-drawn characters never quite recover.