My Favorite Books of 2006
Books on CD played a big role in my “reading” consumption this year. In the spring I was driving over five hundred miles a week to and from Gville, so I got through a whole load of books on CD. Here were some of my favorites and disappointments:
1) Michael Berube – What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts – A passionate defense of the liberal arts and a fascinating look inside the college classroom.
2) Zadie Smith – On Beauty – Zadie uses E.M. Forster to analyze the dynamics of a small college town.
3) James Loewen – Sundown Towns – Loewen uncovers the secret history of towns across the U.S. that drove out its Black and immigrant populations.
4) David Winner – Those Feet – In Brilliant Orange, Winner dissected Dutch football; in his latest, he gets under the skin of English footballing culture.
5) Kazuo Ishiguro – Never Let Me Go – Ishiguro’s latest novel starts with a group of innocent boarding school students and builds to a shocking and sad revelation.
6) Mike Davis – Planet of Slums – Davis outlines a nightmare vision of the future with a global sprawl of desperately poor urban areas.
7) Gary Younge – No Place Like Home – Younge takes a bus trip that replicates the 1964 “Freedom Rides” through the segregated south.
8) Anthony Hayward – Which Side are You On? – Hayward traces the career of Ken Loach – my favorite director – from his early “kitchen sink” tv dramas to his latest victories at the Cannes Festival.
9) Jonathan Kozol – Shame of the Nation – Kozol has been documenting the sorry state of public education for forty years; in his latest, he exposes the return of segregation to our nation’s schools.
10) Jonathan Safran Foer – Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud – Foer’s protagonist is a young boy who uses old letters and helpful neighbors to retrieve the memory and history of his father.
11) Glenn Greenwald – How Would a Patriot Act? – A constitutional lawyer takes on the outrageous illegalities of the Bush administration.
12) Carl Hiassen – Skinny Dip – Hiassen gets a lot of the flavor of Florida right in his bright, breezy novels like this tale of a wife getting her righteous revenge on her ne'er-do-well husband.
Other Notables:
Chuck Palahniuk – Diary
Andrea Levy – Small Island
Robert Jensen – Citizens of the Empire:
Elizabeth McCracken – Niagara Falls All Over Again
Most Embarrassing:
Tom Wolfe – I Am Charlotte Simmons – The septuagenarian uncovers the shocking reality of sex and drugs on American college campuses.
Worst Book of the Year:
David Horowitz – The Professors – A modern-day McCarthyite blacklist.
posted by gatorbob @ 11:02 AM
8 Comments:
Nice one.
My list would also include the Palahniuk book. I found that memorably creepy. And Ishiguro's book was a very delicate treatment of what's becoming a more and more worrying debate.
My favorite book of the year was Le Carre's "Mission Song." Now that the Cold War has past and he's put George Smiley in a retirement home, Le Carre has turned his attention to Africa. This time it's a very cynical look at the would-be saviors of the Congo seeking to impose democracy by getting into bed with some very unsavory sorts.
"Carry Me Down" by M.J. Hyland was also one of my favorites. An outcast Irish boy and his childhood struggles with schools, priests, street gangs and what is his ultimate undoing, an adolescent's attempts to do the honest if not right thing.
David Mitchell's "Black Swan Green" reminded me of Huck Finn, set against the gray and brutal background of the Thatcher years of rapacious greed and assault on the working class.
I'm glad you liked Winner's "These Feet." My favorite footie book that I read this year was "Once In A Lifetime" by Gavin Newsham. It fleshes out the movie with more of the interviews that Newsham got on camera. Chinaglia especially comes off as particularly odious, even more so than in the movie.
"Murder In Amsterdam" by Ian Buruma was a fascinating exploration of how the Dutch are struggling to retain their vaunted open-minded society while at the same time being stretched to the limit by the recent influx of Muslim immigrants from Turkey, Morocco, and Bosnia.
Nail-On-The-Head. The Tom Wolfe book has now set the standard for totally embarrassing. A Tara Reid-Paris Hilton-Britney Spears-Lyndsay Lohan guide to dating collabo could not be worse than "I Am Charlotte Simmons." The Duke lacrosse scandal gave him some oxygen for sales, but this really does read like the old geezer was completely taken in by some frat boys who b.s.-ed him tales of the hook up scene. Shame on Wolfe for not having a better crap-detector than to produce this ridiculous turd.
"El Diego" was also rubbish. This is Maradona's autobiography. It's even more self serving than you might imagine and it's particularly disappointing that instead of merely translating this puff-piece, journalist Marcela Mora y Araujo didn't ask a few probing questions. But clearly, this is as close a glimpse into this fantastically talented looney's psyche as we're likely to get.
I've just started the Will Self book, "The Book Of Dave" and it's nearly unputdownable. It'll be on the list next year for sure.
I'm also looking forward to reading Dave Eggers "What Is The What" just as soon as I get to the top of the list at the library.
Thanks for the list, Gooner. Le Carre is an interesting one, eh? Total Cold Warrior for decades, he's now shifted quite far to the left in his critique of globalization. Another one I'll put on my list is the Ian Buruma - I read quite a bit of his stuff about Asia while living in Japan, so that's a must. I'm fascinated with how Europe is struggling with the diversity issues that have confronted us for more than a century. I remember when I was last in Paris thinking "enough of the smug anti-Bushism - clean up your own crap." Any country that still has signficant numbers voting for Le Pen has little room for criticism, IMHO.
I don't read!!!!
I don't read!!!
Nice one with the Alain de Botton references Trev. I read his book on Proust a few years ago because I'm a Proust nut - I've read about half of Remembrances of Things Past and hope to finish it before my time's up - and he's a terrific read. I'll definitely check out his book on architecture.
Thanks also Trev for the Chandrasekaran reminder. I saw his appearance on the Daily Show and thought then that I wanted to read his book.
I don't read!!!
A fine example to set as a public educator, that is. I'm going to chalk it up to the ManYoo influence rather than your teacher training experience. I doubt that Wayne Rooney's an Umberto Eco fan either.
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