- Pale Fire – “a constant reminder of just how stimulating and delightful reading a book can be.”
- Lolita – “this is art at the highest level, a deeply felt affirmation of all the things literature can do best, a book which features jaw dropping prose, a singular and precious cultural artifact produced by a master craftsman working at the peak of his abilities.”
- 2666 – “2666 can’t always make up for its failings. But goddamn do I appreciate the effort.
- Waiting for the Barbarians -”Well worth the little time it takes to read.”
- Beloved – “the rare piece of capital L Literature, book club type book that swings hard and at your gut.”
- Climbers - “so many problems just go away when you write well. Harrison’s got that covered, plus a weary, intermittently brilliant aesthetic that flat out works.”
- Netherland – “it’s more than a great pastiche of Gatsby – it’s just a great book.”
- The Poems of T.S. Eliot – “Let me say this: I don’t get it.”
- The Executioner’s Song -”While it’s three hundred pages too fat, The Executioner’s Song hurts you, makes you feel all raw and scraped out.”
- Home - “Robinson’s craft strikes the right balance.”
- Arctic Dreams – “We come to care about the Arctic the more we learn, as Lopez imparts some of his amazing passion for this ostensibly barren land with ecstatic prose.”
- The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta – “If you’re willing to put in the work, Llosa will reward you.”
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – “An unabashed crowd pleaser with some serious heart.”
- The City and the City – “a great high concept, but bobbles the execution.”
- All Our Yesterdays – “can bring home the horror of war with devastating poignancy. But only if you let it.”
- Inner Workings – “critic-Coetzee isn’t quite as compelling as novelist-Coetzee”
- Deliverance - “TESTOSTERONE.”
- The Darling – “a book that manages, no matter which angle you peer at it from, to seem competent.”
- Mao II -”no, it’s probably not as good as White Noise.”
- A Bend in the River – “can you hate the creator but love the created?”
- Things Fall Apart – “must be considered a dishonest novel… Achebe’s writing like he’s an ambassador and not a storyteller.”
- More Information Than You Require – “a showcase of a really remarkable, demented imagination, with even a little poetry.”
- The Book of Basketball – “Like Simmons’ web articles, it will keep your attention, but sometimes only barely.”
The Top 5
1/2.) The Year of Nabokov
Pale Fire and Lolita top the list in a LeBron-Kobe kind of way — order them however, but there’s no doubt they are the 1 and 1A best players in the league. Pale Fire gets the crown just because I read it more recently, I was already familiar and comfortable with Nabokov, and its form is an out-and-out pleasure.
3.) 2666
After struggling through 2666, my respect begrudgingly outweighed my resentment for Bolano. The further I get from the long tedium of its middle passage, though, the more the respect wins out. I was going to say more, but I revisited my review and discovered that I’d already done so.
4.) Waiting for the Barbarians
I usually remember where I read great books. I finished Gravity’s Rainbow on the plane, for instance, and looked around at everybody sleeping in the dim cabin and sat with that mind-blown emptiness for the whole descent. Waiting for the Barbarians I read at the school library, in one of the glassed-in reading bays that jut out of the building proper. It was late, the library was empty, and everybody else had something else to be doing, but I was reading Coetzee out loud, because that line about the hunt that I referred to was amazing me. You could read that book in 2 hours if you wanted, but I was going sentence by sentence with a pen, trying to see just how he did it.
5.) Beloved
Not one of “my” books, or something that connected with me like a Stones of Summer or Revolutionary Road, but Morrison’s book is so good and so very much its own thing. Having read Calvin Baker in 07, and finding his Dominion a unique and excellent novel, imagine my surprise at discovering he owed Toni Morrison half his royalties at least. It’s a classic, by which I mean a book anybody should read, regardless of taste or preferences. (Still, it wasn’t as good as I thought when I first read it.)
Other thoughts
The Fall of the Book Club Book
Oscar Wao and Netherland were both set to round out the top 5, but after revisiting the rankings I can’t remember enough about them to say confidently they were better than Barbarians or Beloved. This might have to do with the fact that I read them in January of 09 — or maybe they were too unobjectionably enjoyable to stick in the memory. Certain books get better in retrospect (2666 being this year’s best example), and others just… fade.
Biggest Surprise
“I am Lazarus, come from the dead”
I read TS Eliot this summer as the El train tossed me back and forth and I tried not to make eye contact with the homeless guys. I wrote at the time:
I don’t get it. My hope is that I will look back at this post sometime in December and laugh at how naive and narrow-minded I was. For right now, I can only say that some parts connected with me, and some didn’t. I rolled my eyes at the pretentious use of foreign languages, got sick of flipping to the explanatory notes to learn that this was a reference to some Greek myth, and found many of the poems opaque.
Happily enough, I was right. It took a semester’s worth of class, but I can now I say I (sorta) get what Eliot was doing. My complaints — pretension, allusiveness, opacity — have not gone away, but my appreciation has expanded. I wouldn’t say Eliot is a favorite poet by any stretch (the prosaic and thoroughly American William Carlos Williams has that distinction), but there’s no doubt his verse has some strange power to it. Lines of it have been reverberating in my head all semester, both the section heading and “the heart of light, the silence”.
Biggest Disappointment
The Book of Basketball, by far. Simmons did a good job of hyping this book, and when it came out, the theme of most reviews was “Hey, it’s Simmons. If you like his shtick, you’ll like this book. If not, you won’t.” I went from the first camp to the second — something about seeing that much lazy writing legitimized on a physical page really pissed me off. I didn’t quit on it, but I did skim a hundred pages of it.
