I like to read. In the last year I've read over thirty books, and started a great deal more. Because books requires so much more of a time commitment than any other form of entertainment, it's very easy for me to jump ship. Just a couple weeks ago I started reading Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, absolutely loved it at the beginning, read 290 pages in (that's about four fifths done), and thought it got so stupid that I just stopped reading, and I'm not sure when I'll pick it up again. So just to finish a book is a testament to it's quality. Now I present my top five favorite books from the last year (note: this are just books that I read in 2009, not necessarily books that came out in 2009; there is one 2009 release on my list, and it's actually in the number one slot, but the other selections run the gamut.
In case anyone is curious about my movie pics, I didn't feel compelled to make a list because there were so many releases I didn't see, but my favorites of the year were The Hurt Locker and Fantastic Mr. Fox, two vastly different releases that both provoked very strong, visceral reactions in me. I can't think of any other movies that kept me so completely engaged, physically as well as mentally- watching the Hurt Locker I was shifting in my seat, sweating, gasping... for most of the movie, I had half of my own shirt in my mouth. Mr. Fox, meanwhile, slapped a permanent, goofy grin on my face. When it comes down to it, all of my favorite movies are the ones that cause these kind of uncontrollable physical reactions. Any other considerations come after that.
Looking over my final list, it's an interesting assortment. The selections run pretty dark, as does my taste, but they're also pretty dense. Several of the choices are among the most difficult reads I've had all year (numbers five and four on this list may very well be numbers one and two on that one). Now, this could just be because the harder reads left me with more to think/write about (there are several books that could just as easily have filled the number five spot, but I read Blood Meridian recently, so it was fresh in my mind and I wanted to write about it). Or maybe I'm just getting to be more of a prick in my older years, and I find that if a book isn't a tough nut to crack, then it isn't worth reading. Fair warning.
5. Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
“Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work”- Judge Holden
I find it funny that Cormac McCarthy, a notoriously private, seventy-something novelist who writes uncompromisingly dense books about mankind’s capacity for unspeakable evil, has suddenly become the “It” Author in America. This new level of fame began with No Country for Old Men (more due to the uber-faithful adaptation by the Coen Bros than the book itself, which is generally regarded as a minor work), but then went into hyperdrive when he released The Road, a short, incredibly sad novel about a father and son traveling through the apocalypse that deservedly won the Pulitizer Prize, and has since been endorsed by Oprah, made into a pretty good movie, and become the most translated book since The Bible. I read The Road last year, and it’s incredible. If you’ve never read a Cormac McCarthy book, start there. It’s a fairly easy read, it’s short, and the horrors (of which there are plenty) are counterbalanced with lots of moments of sweetness and compassion and genuine beauty. It’s a hard book not to like.
The same can not be said for Blood Meridian, Cormac’s breakthrough novel from 1985, and a different beast altogether. While his elevated writing style remains consistent throughout his career, whereas The Road is a perfect introductory look at McCarthy, this is the hard-hitting advanced course. Blood Meridian tells the nightmarish story of a group of Scalphunters heading West in the early 1800’s. That is, people who’s occupation consists of murdering Indians, scalping them, and selling those scalps to the local government. The writing in the book is often breathtakingly beautiful, even as each scene is more unbelievably violent than the one before. It is about a group of men who’s entire life, day-in and day-out, consists of murder, a constant, unrelenting stream of violence that has twisted them into something truly inhuman. The leader of the bloodthirsty army, an outsized presence named Judge Holden, has been described by the literary critic Harold Bloom as “the most frightening figure in all of American literature.” That’s a very heavy claim, and it’s hard to gauge how frightening a character is, as fear is such a subjective and deeply personal sensation. I would, however, go as far as to say that the Judge is one of the most fully-imagined and absolutely compelling villains I have ever encountered, in any medium. I don't want to say anything more, as the character's nature is very slowly and meticulously revealed over the course of the book. But needless to say, we are talking about a very, very, very bad man.
The violence in this book is truly horrifying; the only book I can think of that operates on the same level is American Psycho, but the violence in that (also brilliant) novel comes in short, concentrated, incredibly disturbing bursts. In Blood Meridian brutality is a constant. Which of the two is more unsettling is a topic for debate (a very upsetting debate, but debate nonetheless).
This is not a book for everyone. It starts off pretty slow (most of the main characters, besides the protagonist, don’t even show up until about a hundred pages in), there isn’t much in the way of a traditional plot, and I can think of a number of friends who would be instantly put off by the book, either the graphic violence or the purple prose. And it does take a good deal of concentration to read (much moreso than The Road, which holds McCarthy’s same lofty style but is composed entirely of really short paragraphs and reads more like a long prose poem than a novel proper). But if you’re up for the gauntlet and don’t mind delving into some murky waters, give this book a shot. I honestly can’t stop thinking about it. And I also can’t name many other books where you can literally open to any page (any page) and read a turn of phrase that knocks the wind right out of you. McCarthy is truly a master of wrenching poetry out of the hideous. Which, in all honesty, I find a lot more interesting than someone finding poetry in flowers or sunsets or any of that sappy shit.
4. Consider the Lobster – David Foster Wallace
“ " "The American Academy of Emergency Medicine confirms it: Each year, between one and two dozen adult US males are admitted to ERs after having castrated themselves.”
In general, I’m not a huge fan of nonfiction. I appreciate it, and know how difficult it is to making it compelling (just look at this blog, if you aren't already fast asleep), but I've always found it much, much harder to get hooked into a nonfiction book. Fiction has always felt more fun to me; nonfiction is more formal, staunch, a representative of education and homework and Reading for Information rather than Reading for Pleasure. Maybe part of the problem is my own psychological mindset. In any case, when a nonfiction book really compels me, then it must be something special. This year I found two books that I think, in their separate ways, represent the pinnacle of what can be achieved in journalistic writing. One of them is We Regret to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch (a definite Honorable Mention for this list), an absolutely shattering account of the early-90’s genocide in Rwanda. It’s a brilliant book, and what makes it work is Gourevitch’s voice, which manages to be deeply empathetic and relatable, while at the same time incredibly informed and eloquent. Basically, he sounds like a good guy – nice, funny– who also happens to be incredibly intelligent and perceptive about the world around him. It's a tough book to read, but it's absolutely worth it.
But that’s neither here nor there. That book didn't make this list. What did was Consider the Lobster, a bravura collection of essays by David Foster Wallace. I’d dabbled in DFW’s work before and always liked it, but he also always seemed a little dense and intimidating to me (much like Cormac McCarthy, oddly enough). Then this year I read an incredible profile of him that ran in Rolling Stone right after his suicide, and I resolved myself to read more of his work. I’ve now completed both of his nonfiction collections (the first, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, contains a couple of his best and funniest essays, but overall I think Consider the Lobster is stronger). In this collection Wallace writes about a vast range of topics, but his real subject all along is what it is like to be alive today, in this batshit crazy world we live in. There are lots of things I could say about Foster's writing, but nothing can do it justice. The man can literally make any topic compelling. The one thing I really discovered about him this year, though, is how funny he is. Yes, his style is extremely dense, and yes, he is prone to go off on lots of hyper-intellectual tangents and he layers footnotes on top of footnotes until the font is so small you practially need a microscope to read it, but you go along with him the whole way because the guy is so unbelievably fucking funny.
When he’s writing about an ostensibly funny topic (one of the essays deals with his trip to Las Vegas to attend the Adult Video Awards) the humor comes in effortless waves, but it’s the times when it emerges unexpectedly that really got me. Get this: While reading this book I laughed out loud – let me repeat, that’s me laughing out loud while reading a book – at an essay about linguistics. Let me repeat that: linguistics. Yes, this man can make a fifty page essay on the history and nature of word usage not only compelling, but bend-over, laugh-until-you’re-red hysterical. I know, you probably don’t believe me. Neither would I if I’d never read this work. Truly one of the greatest minds of the last hundred years. Next up: Infinite Jest.
3. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz
"As I'm sure you've guessed by now, I have a fuku story too. I wish I could say it was the best of the lot - fuku number one - but I can't. Mine ain't the scariest, the clearest, the most painful, or the most beautiful. It just happens to be the one that's got it's fingers around my throat."
I’m going to start grouping this book with Confederacy of Dunces (one of my all time favorites) under the moniker of Great Literature About Grotesquely Overweight Nerds. The central character of this kaleidoscopic book is Oscar De Leon, a Dominican Male who subverts every single masculine/virile archetype of his heritage. Oscar is fat, nervous, and socially awkward in the most horrible, pervasive, life-crippling definition of the word. His greatest passion is Genre and Fantasy, because it allows his imagination to escape from the barren realities of his world.
The book isn’t just about Oscar though, not by a long shot. It tells the multi-generational story of his entire family. There are sections about his mother growing up in the Dominican Republic under the almost unbelievably awful dictatorship of Trujillo. There are sections about his sister, trying to fuse her own identity. The narrator, writing in a baroque, massively entertaining Spanglish, even becomes a character in the story later on. Still, the central axis around which the rest of the narrative spins has to be Oscar himself, who could be the “loser” character in any number of goofball Frathouse comedies, yet who also manages to be a deeply tragic, almost Shakespearean figure. This is the only book on my list that I would recommend unequivocally to absolutely anyone. It’s so fun to read, yet has enough thematic heft to please any level of pretension. It has violence and grit, yet it’s also deeply romantic. And if the only thing you ever read is cheesy sci-fi, well, it’s got plenty for you too!
There are so many different levels to this book, it really is astonishing how perfectly they all fit together, how it tells ten different stories at once yet it effortlessly meshes into a singular, complete work. It’s both deeply tragic and full of slapdash, low-brow humor. It quotes from The Fantastic Four and Derek Walcott. In terms of a shifting, complex plot, you really can’t beat my number two choice, but this book is certainly the most thematically adventurous on my list, walking an incredible tight rope throughout and jumping from one character to another, from one time period to another, from one thing to another until, somehow, it becomes about everything.
2. The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe
"She was right. The Master of the Universe was cheap, and he was rotten, and he was a liar."
A classic, epochal book from the 80’s about an unassuming investment banker and the vast, hierarchal forces that destroy him. I will say up front that Wolfe, as a prose stylist, is not the most elegant guy in the shop. This is a big, fat book, one that aspires from it's opening pages to greatness, and Wolfe lays it on pretty thick: lots of excitable words, lots of exclamation points. But you don’t read Tom Wolfe for the poetry. This book features about twenty characters on all different levels of social and economic hierarchies, and it’s incredibly elaborate, perfectly calibrated plot shows how all these different people affect one another, how power dynamics subvert themselves, and how insignificant issues of vanity and jealousy can lead to cataclysmic, destructive effects.
I would go as far as to say that this book, thematically, is the closest thing I’ve read to The Wire, the greatest television show ever made and my personal lord and savior. But where The Wire is deathly serious, Bonfire is a crazed, rollicking satire, full of elaborate comic set pieces and outrageous characters. More than anything, this book is just an absolute blast to read: it’s about eight hundred pages and I tore through it in less than a week. Every time I got on the subway I was literally itching to pull it out and read. It’s not that often that I find myself so unstoppably addicted to a book, and it’s always a great pleasure when it happens. Also, the book is all about New York City, which is certainly an added perk at this time in my life.
Also, extra points for one of my favorite titles ever.
1. Say You’re One of Them – Uwem Akpan
" "Selling your child or nephew could be more difficult than selling other kids."
Here we go again. Now, after getting Oprah’s sanctified seal of approval, this book and it’s unassuming author (a Jesuit Priest from Nigeria who does a little writing on the side) have become media darlings, deeply embedded in the popular culture of the moment, and placing it at the top of the list seems about as original as some wannabe intellectual saying that they loved reading Salinger and Fitzgerald in High School, but always found Hemingway a bit dull.
But let me explain: I read this book on a friend’s reccomendation last summer, before any of that jazz. I read it over the course of four days, and when I put it down at the end, shaken and exhausted and ready for a stiff drink, I thought to myself that this will be the best book I read all year. Six months later, it’s still true, and I certainly won’t bend because of my desperate desire to seem edgy. This exact same thing happened with me with The Corrections, Johnathan Franzen’s demented family saga that I tore through a few years ago and then watched as it was also anointed by our lady Oprah, and also became a temporary media sensation. This isn’t to say that a book being chosen for her book club means it’s bad (quite the contrary, if these two serve as our examples), but it does attach a certain stigma among young, hipness-minded literari who wear vests over their t-shirts. I’ve had a hard time convincing at least one friend to read Say You’re One of Them because of her. Johnathan Franzen also understands this unfortunate trend, as he came out in opposition to The Corrections being placed in Oprah’s clubhouse / jail and was (I’d argue unfairly) ripped to shreds by the media (On the other hand, I’ve read and seen some interviews with Franzen that make him seem like a bit of a prick. But then, on the other, third hand, he’s a genius so who the hell cares? I feel like I already wrote about this…)
But we’re getting off-topic. Maybe that’s because there’s nothing I really want to say about this book. It’s so brilliantly written, so unique, so completely and utterly devastating, that nothing I write will come close to approximating the experience of reading it. Here's the basics: it’s three short stories and two novella’s. Each is written about a different region of Africa, and all but one center around children. It has the unmistakable power of actuality, which comes from the author’s intensely personal familiarity with his subjects. The dialogue, a mixture of English and Africana, is poetic and gritty and is like nothing you’ve ever read. The characters captivate and shock you. The prose is written like a dream. I think at core the reason any of us read any books (or really, watch any movies or TV shows, listen to any music, play any videogames…) is the desire to be transported to a new place, to inhabit somewhere wholly different from our reality. This book took me to a place I’ve never been before with an incredible, all-consuming clarity. Read this. It’s magic.
Anyone else out there keep a running list of every book they read? Is that weird?
