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Subscribe!Favorite Books of 2008
Friday, December 19, 2008
'Tis the season for Best Of lists, so here's mine. If you're reading this, you're probably just trying to fritter away the last moments before your Christmas vacation begins, so I'm happy to oblige. All of these books would make fine presents, of course. Please think of the beleaguered publishing industry when buying your gifts! Books make great presents! (Okay, no more industry shilling.)
Unlike most lists, these aren't necessarily books that were published in 2008, they're just my favorite of the books I happened to read this year -- most were published one to three years ago.
My faves:
Lush Life by Richard Price. A true American masterpiece disguised as a police procedural. In the gentrifying Lower East Side of a few years back, three drunk white hipsters are mugged, and one of them is killed. The investigation is Price's means of plumbing the depths of his disparate characters: burned-out cops, disillusioned artists, young New Yorkers full of dreams, street kids trying to get by. As sound an examination of its time and place as any straight-up literary work of the last few years; it reminded me of The Corrections but with more drive (and I loved The Corrections). The best dialogue I've read in... well, I can't remember reading better dialogue.
Citizen Vince by Jess Walter. I hyped this in my summer reading post, so I'll be brief: this book and Walter's newer one, The Zero, constitute as good a 1-2 punch as any author has delivered in recent years. A sheer pleasure from start to finish. I myself have given this book as a gift a number of times in the last ten months and no one has been disappointed.
Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris. I devoted an entire post earlier this year to Ferris' fine first novel, so I won't repeat myself here. But I loved the book, and its theme of corporate layoffs has only become more timely.
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. Telling you that this is a novel about a civil war in Africa is probably the best way of scaring you away from it. But don't be scared. For the first 100 pages it calmly details the mild tensions of a relatively priveleged household -- a professor, his rich girlfriend, and his young servant -- just like any other modern, priveleged "literary novel." But the book gradually and then suddenly shows the ways the characters are torn apart by the Biafran War in Nigeria. Adiche shows that you don't need caffeinated, overwrought descriptions when your subject matter is this powerful: just stick with simple sentences and perfect clarity and your prose will pack a whallop.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Speaking of caffeinated prose. But here it works. This book has been hyped enough elsewhere, so I won't add to the chorus other than to say: Man, I really liked it too.
And in the nonfiction category:
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner. Brilliant and fascinating, this is a secret history of America since World War II. Weiner's thesis, backed up in historical moment after historical moment, is that the men who run the Central Intelligence Agency (mostly, paranoids and alcoholics) have been uninterested in the difficult task of gathering intelligence (the agency's core mission) and would much rather overthrow foreign leaders and start insurrections. As a result, our intelligence gurus failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, failed to predict China's entry into the Korean War, failed to predict 9/11, failed to predict pretty much every major foreign event that's impacted our nation, because they were too busy starting coups and assassinating people (and drinking). Picture the guys in Mad Men, but with a license to kill. Terrifying stuff.
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. Should be required reading, for many reasons.
Hmm, I didn't mean to end the year on such a down note, with books on the CIA and Al-Qaeda. But I'm sure I'm not alone in that I've wanted to do a lot more reading on such matters recently, to try and better understand the complicated world we find ourselves in today.
I know the hard times are making most of us feel like the Cratchett family at the moment, scrimping and worrying, and wondering what the viciously spinning wheel of time has in store for us next. If we ever needed a holiday, we need it now. I like to read so much not as a way of hiding from the world, but grappling with it, trying to figure it out. Writing and reading can be an escape, yes, but more than that: an escape without escaping. Tackling the world's issues from a new angle. Looking at a vexing problem through someone else's eyes. Asking questions that you know you won't get answers to, but want to ask all the same, just to hear how they sound in different voices. Like most people, I plan on spending a lot of time with family this month, eating and drinking and laughing and trying not to worry. But I'll always find a moment to sneak off with a book, and escape, and wonder, and enjoy.
Happy holidays, everyone.
link to this | File: Book Reviews
Unlike most lists, these aren't necessarily books that were published in 2008, they're just my favorite of the books I happened to read this year -- most were published one to three years ago.
My faves:
Lush Life by Richard Price. A true American masterpiece disguised as a police procedural. In the gentrifying Lower East Side of a few years back, three drunk white hipsters are mugged, and one of them is killed. The investigation is Price's means of plumbing the depths of his disparate characters: burned-out cops, disillusioned artists, young New Yorkers full of dreams, street kids trying to get by. As sound an examination of its time and place as any straight-up literary work of the last few years; it reminded me of The Corrections but with more drive (and I loved The Corrections). The best dialogue I've read in... well, I can't remember reading better dialogue.
Citizen Vince by Jess Walter. I hyped this in my summer reading post, so I'll be brief: this book and Walter's newer one, The Zero, constitute as good a 1-2 punch as any author has delivered in recent years. A sheer pleasure from start to finish. I myself have given this book as a gift a number of times in the last ten months and no one has been disappointed.
Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris. I devoted an entire post earlier this year to Ferris' fine first novel, so I won't repeat myself here. But I loved the book, and its theme of corporate layoffs has only become more timely.
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. Telling you that this is a novel about a civil war in Africa is probably the best way of scaring you away from it. But don't be scared. For the first 100 pages it calmly details the mild tensions of a relatively priveleged household -- a professor, his rich girlfriend, and his young servant -- just like any other modern, priveleged "literary novel." But the book gradually and then suddenly shows the ways the characters are torn apart by the Biafran War in Nigeria. Adiche shows that you don't need caffeinated, overwrought descriptions when your subject matter is this powerful: just stick with simple sentences and perfect clarity and your prose will pack a whallop.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Speaking of caffeinated prose. But here it works. This book has been hyped enough elsewhere, so I won't add to the chorus other than to say: Man, I really liked it too.
And in the nonfiction category:
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner. Brilliant and fascinating, this is a secret history of America since World War II. Weiner's thesis, backed up in historical moment after historical moment, is that the men who run the Central Intelligence Agency (mostly, paranoids and alcoholics) have been uninterested in the difficult task of gathering intelligence (the agency's core mission) and would much rather overthrow foreign leaders and start insurrections. As a result, our intelligence gurus failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, failed to predict China's entry into the Korean War, failed to predict 9/11, failed to predict pretty much every major foreign event that's impacted our nation, because they were too busy starting coups and assassinating people (and drinking). Picture the guys in Mad Men, but with a license to kill. Terrifying stuff.
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. Should be required reading, for many reasons.
Hmm, I didn't mean to end the year on such a down note, with books on the CIA and Al-Qaeda. But I'm sure I'm not alone in that I've wanted to do a lot more reading on such matters recently, to try and better understand the complicated world we find ourselves in today.
I know the hard times are making most of us feel like the Cratchett family at the moment, scrimping and worrying, and wondering what the viciously spinning wheel of time has in store for us next. If we ever needed a holiday, we need it now. I like to read so much not as a way of hiding from the world, but grappling with it, trying to figure it out. Writing and reading can be an escape, yes, but more than that: an escape without escaping. Tackling the world's issues from a new angle. Looking at a vexing problem through someone else's eyes. Asking questions that you know you won't get answers to, but want to ask all the same, just to hear how they sound in different voices. Like most people, I plan on spending a lot of time with family this month, eating and drinking and laughing and trying not to worry. But I'll always find a moment to sneak off with a book, and escape, and wonder, and enjoy.
Happy holidays, everyone.
link to this | File: Book Reviews
Hard Times
Friday, December 12, 2008
OK, this is swiftly becoming the Dead Writers blog, owing mainly to my slow pace. So far this autumn I've posted new bits at roughly the same rate as major American authors have passed away. But I feel compelled to write a little about Studs Terkel, who died earlier this month. He's credited with inventing, or at least popularizing, the genre of oral history with his books like Working, The Good War, and Hard Times. I would be dishonest to go on and on praising him like long-time admirer since I've only read one of his books, but the one book of his that I have read has been sticking with me for a variety of reasons.
About a year and a half ago I read Hard Times, his oral history of the Great Depression, as research for my second novel (which is like 99.99999% finished, I swear). My novel is set during the Depression, and I'd read some histories of the Depression itself as well as some more specific works focusing on particular issues or figures of that time. But Hard Times opened up that world for me in a way nothing else had. Terkel rarely writes with his own voice and instead lets his many interview subjects speak for themselves. Not only do you benefit from the fact that he gets so many completely different people to chime in (stockbrokers who lost everything, CEOs who emerged unscathed and never understood what all the fuss was about, union workers who fought with cops, cops who had to help evict people from their homes, career criminals, priests, social workers, society wives, Pullman porters, Latino fruit pickers, etc), you get to hear it in their own words. As a fiction writer, that is priceless -- to hear the pacing and rhythm of their sentences, the slang they used or didn't used, the things they talked about and the things they talked around... you just can't get that from reading straight history, or old novels, or old newspapers, or even from watching old films. You need to hear the way people really spoke, and Terkel's book is like a giant microphone hanging over the heads of legions of people who lived through that time.
The other benefit of reading oral history is that it reminds you that, no matter the era or place, viewpoints are as varied as people themselves. When you think historically, it's tempting to put certain time periods into one box or another, to categorize them. So in the Twenties, everyone was drunk and prosperous; in the Thirties, everyone was hardscrabble and threadbare; in the Forties, it was all about fighting the war with dignity and courage. Partly this is how we're taught in high school, partly it's the result of the shortcuts and sifting that any historian not writing a 1,000-page book has to make. But when you read Hard Times you see just how fractured and complicated and messy every time period is. There are people in the book who tell Terkel that one of the oddly nice things about the Depression was how it brought people together, how the fact that everyone was poor meant that people were more willing to pitch in and help out, to get through this together. But then there are people who tell him the opposite, that folks in the Thirties were under such pressure that they fought each other for every scrap, that they were too afraid to help the less fortunate because more poor saps would ask for their help, that during the Depression they saw the depths of human meanness. There are people who tell him that FDR saved the nation, and some who say that he destroyed it. Some blame the banks, some blame the government. (Sound familiar??) Some say that survivors of the Depression lived on to become extremely thrifty for the rest of their lives, so terrified that everything could be taken away again that they let nothing go to waste. Some say that the survivors could only expunge their awful memories by living exorbitantly for the rest of their lives, working to acquire all the luxuries they'd been deprived of during those awful years.
This is what I love about reading histories, and why I've wound up writing two historical novels even though it's not a genre I feel wedded to. Looking closely at a past time allows us to see through the easy categorizations and labels, to see all the layers and contradictions and madness in the human heart. We live with this day by day, yet sometimes we assume that "times were simpler back then." They weren't. We have always been this complicated, this divisive, this confused.
link to this | File:
About a year and a half ago I read Hard Times, his oral history of the Great Depression, as research for my second novel (which is like 99.99999% finished, I swear). My novel is set during the Depression, and I'd read some histories of the Depression itself as well as some more specific works focusing on particular issues or figures of that time. But Hard Times opened up that world for me in a way nothing else had. Terkel rarely writes with his own voice and instead lets his many interview subjects speak for themselves. Not only do you benefit from the fact that he gets so many completely different people to chime in (stockbrokers who lost everything, CEOs who emerged unscathed and never understood what all the fuss was about, union workers who fought with cops, cops who had to help evict people from their homes, career criminals, priests, social workers, society wives, Pullman porters, Latino fruit pickers, etc), you get to hear it in their own words. As a fiction writer, that is priceless -- to hear the pacing and rhythm of their sentences, the slang they used or didn't used, the things they talked about and the things they talked around... you just can't get that from reading straight history, or old novels, or old newspapers, or even from watching old films. You need to hear the way people really spoke, and Terkel's book is like a giant microphone hanging over the heads of legions of people who lived through that time.
The other benefit of reading oral history is that it reminds you that, no matter the era or place, viewpoints are as varied as people themselves. When you think historically, it's tempting to put certain time periods into one box or another, to categorize them. So in the Twenties, everyone was drunk and prosperous; in the Thirties, everyone was hardscrabble and threadbare; in the Forties, it was all about fighting the war with dignity and courage. Partly this is how we're taught in high school, partly it's the result of the shortcuts and sifting that any historian not writing a 1,000-page book has to make. But when you read Hard Times you see just how fractured and complicated and messy every time period is. There are people in the book who tell Terkel that one of the oddly nice things about the Depression was how it brought people together, how the fact that everyone was poor meant that people were more willing to pitch in and help out, to get through this together. But then there are people who tell him the opposite, that folks in the Thirties were under such pressure that they fought each other for every scrap, that they were too afraid to help the less fortunate because more poor saps would ask for their help, that during the Depression they saw the depths of human meanness. There are people who tell him that FDR saved the nation, and some who say that he destroyed it. Some blame the banks, some blame the government. (Sound familiar??) Some say that survivors of the Depression lived on to become extremely thrifty for the rest of their lives, so terrified that everything could be taken away again that they let nothing go to waste. Some say that the survivors could only expunge their awful memories by living exorbitantly for the rest of their lives, working to acquire all the luxuries they'd been deprived of during those awful years.
This is what I love about reading histories, and why I've wound up writing two historical novels even though it's not a genre I feel wedded to. Looking closely at a past time allows us to see through the easy categorizations and labels, to see all the layers and contradictions and madness in the human heart. We live with this day by day, yet sometimes we assume that "times were simpler back then." They weren't. We have always been this complicated, this divisive, this confused.
link to this | File: