Books of 2008!
It's that time again! 2008 has been jam packed with historic events and it's about time to take stock of them. I'll start things rolling with a list of my favorite books from the past year. I'll look forward to hearing what you've been reading.
1. Tom Perrotta – The Abstinence Teacher: Perrotta latest novel focuses on what happens in a small town when a sex educator speaks the truth with her students. Need I say more?
2. Joe Boyd – White Bicycles: Boyd's memoir of the sixties music scene is the best book on music I've read in yonks. As Kate Bush says on the dust jacket - "Joe Boyd knows."
3. Junot Diaz – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Diaz’s epic narrative of Dominican family history won the Pulitzer for literature this past year.
4. Naomi Klein – The Shock Doctrine: Klein’s latest puts forward the interesting thesis that free marketeers have taken advantage of natural disasters from the tsunami to Katrina.
5. Chuck Klosterman – IV: Someday I’d love to publish a book simply called “IV;” but while I’m waiting for that to happen, it’s fun to read Klosterman’s latest take on popular culture.
6. Sarah Vowell – Assassination Vacation: Vowell's television persona is really irritating but this travelogue through the history of Presidential assassinations was hilarious.
7. Miranda July – No One Belongs Here More Than You – A weirder collection of stories is hard to find, combining almost childlike innocence with a sharp look at modern alienation.
8. Marc Spitz – Too Little, Too Late: Spitz’s funny and wise second novel details the rise, fall and rise again of a garage band from Ohio.
9. Stephen Kinzer – Overthrow: Kinzer answers the question "Why do they hate us?" by documenting the catalog of crimes against humanity committed by U.S imperialism in the last century.
10. Chuck Culpepper - Bloody Confused: The LOB's foray into book clubbery was an amusing memoir of one season in the life of a American rookie Pompey fan.
Notable others:
• Daniel Levitin – This is Your Brain on Music
• Sebastian Faulks – Engleby
• Wynton Marsalis – How Jazz Can Change Your Life
• Tracey Chevalier – Burning Bright
• David Cay Johnson - Free Lunch
Disappointments:
• Nick Hornby – Slam: Hornby's first foray into young reader's literature is a cheap morality play about teen pregnancy.
• Ann Patchett - Run: Patchett's follow-up to the sublime Bel Canto is a messy sociological study of race and privilege with none of the charm of her earlier work.
Worst:
• Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint – Come on, People: A millionaire entertainer hectors the poor about their supposed cultural deficiencies.
posted by The Blue Devil @ 12:23 PM
12 Comments:
Nice list Gator,
I definitely enjoyed the Culpepper and the Vowell book. I'm happy you enjoyed the Spitz book too. I just wish he wrote more.
I'd add John Le Carre's "A Most Wanted Man." He's come a long way from his cold warrior days and this book about the secret services getting ramped up to take down a possible Chechen terrorist has the requisite outrage over Gitmo and extraordinary rendition.
T.J. English's "Havana Nocturne" was a really good read too, full of fascinating details about how the mob ran Cuba after the war until the revolution.
I loved Per Pattersen's "Out Stealing Horses." It's a small story of a boy and his father and the boy as an old man's memory of growing up on the Norwegian border. It's a very reflective and slow moving one, and better for it's slow pacing.
Chuck Klosterman's "Killing Yourself To Live" was very funny. He isn't Gonzo like Hunter, but he fills a gap in rock journalism vacant since Thompson died.
I finally got around to reading H.G. Bissinger's "Friday Night Lights" and can say without reservation that every person who has recommended that was right. It just kept on getting pushed down my list but it's a story that stays with you.
Leslie Gordon Goffe's "When Banana Was King" tells an amazing story of a black Jamaican businessman that took on racism, the mob, and United Fruit to become the foremost and richest banana importer to the United States in the 1900s. The one drawback is that Goffe is a direct descendant of the Banana King, so he forgives some pretty atrocious behavior by his ancestor.
I read Christopher Moore's "A Dirty Job" and it was funny enough to lift itself above the pretty disturbing plot. He pushes the envelope, but if you go with it, you're rewarded.
I'm pages from finishing Andrea Levi's "Small Island" which made the Gator's list last year. I really enjoyed the story of the West Indian immigrant to London.
I'm a big fan of the Wallander series of detective novels by Henning Mankell, and quite expected to see Inspector Kurt show up in "The Eye Of The Leopard." No such luck. This was a colonial tale of Africa and a man called to travel there for mixed reason. He stays and becomes a foreman on a egg farm and lives through some very hairy times.
I wait with impatience for Irvine Welsh's new books, but "Crime" was a disappointment. There's a gritty comedy to his tales of Glaswegian criminality and carnality. This one is just simply grim and finds a dissolute Scots copper on vacation in Miami who runs stumbles across a ring of child molesters. Very few laughs in this one and not at all like any of his previous books.
Jake Arnott's "He Kills Coppers" was recommended to me, but it wasn't worth the shitty looks that pulling this book out on the train got me. It's fun to read about turn of the decade 70's London because we were there, but this was a pretty by-the-numbers copper-versus-villain piece with a rushed ending. Johnno recommended another Arnott last year and I'm going to give that a go.
Martin Amis's "House Of Meetings" about Soviet workcamps and two brothers competing for the same alluring woman was customarily intense. It's short so he ratchets up that tension in quick fashion.
Another book I was waiting for with impatience was Salman Rushdie's "Enchantress Of Florence." It was a bit of a let down because a good halfway through it, you just had to step back and ask "what the hell is going on here?" It rambles, and it takes diversion after diversion from the central plot of three friends and how their lives end up in Akbar-the-Great's court, telling stories to stay alive. Yes, the language is customarily gorgeous, and so is the imagery, but when you close the back cover after reading the last bit, it's more hmmmph than ahhhhh.
Ian McKewan's "On Chesil Beach" was so completely sad that I found it pointless and it put me in a bad mood for days. Give it a miss.
Rui Barros' "Bossa Nova" is so overwhelming with his expertise in the subject matter that you get lost in the detail of which club on the Copacabana was a Gil Farnay hangout and which club in Ipanema was full of radical Sinatristas. And why Joau Gilberto got his first contract and which deejay played his record to which producer... ach, you just have to quit.
Which leads me to finish with my favorite book this year. Without question, it's Netherland by Joseph O'Neill. Set in post 9/11 NYC, it focuses on the deterioration of a Dutch banker and his English wife's marriage, and sets it against his ever increasing involvement in an ex-pat cricket league and the dreams of a Trinidadian scamster to build a Oval capable of hosting a cricket world cup. This is a note perfect book. It's a book I couldn't read in public without someone interrupting me to tell me how deeply it effected them. And now that I've read it, I'd be one of those people too if I spotted someone reading it now.
I've got Jonathan Carroll's "The Ghost In Love", Aravind Adiga's "White Tiger, and thanks to the Gator, the hilarious John Hodgemen's new book on my bookshelf, so those will feature in next year's list.
I've put several of those on my wish list. I've been keeping the librarians in the SUNY inter-library loan system working over time here between requesting the complete works on all my favorite jazz artists and four or five books a month, I keep wondering when they're going to shut me down.
Totally agree with you about "On Chesil Beach." I'm going to chalk that one up as a slight work into between "Saturday" and another masterpiece to come.
As always, thank you both for sharing. I certainly wish I was as well read as you two. Based on Steve's recommendation, I'm going to pick up Netherland for my brother-in-law for Christmas. He's a banker who loves the Dutch.
As usual, I didn't read many novels this year, and most of the novels I read weren't published in 2008.
Don't tease us, Trev. Put something on the shelf for us, eh? How did the Proust go?
Steve,
Don't read the Arnott . . .it was not recommeded by me in 2006 and it's still not recommended today . . .here's my post circa December 2006
8. Jake Arnott, The Long Firm, A novel of British gangstas in the early 1960's -- not gripping enough to hold the interest of this reader.
Ahh, I remembered that differently. Thanks John.
I’m not a great reader anymore – it usually takes me weeks to slog through any book. I did get into a biography phase this year -- mostly of Eleanor of Aquitaine. I also delved into some of Terry Jones’ works (such as “Who Murdered Chaucer?” which was fabulous). Some beachy drivel paperbacks over the summer. I currently have the three “Wicked” novels on my radar screen, which provide the back-story to “Wizard of Oz”. It’s great to read about the real literature that Gator and Gooner take on! "Bridge of Sighs" is next.
Betsy, I have a friend who reads fantasy fiction almost exclusively and she has recommended the Wicked novels unreservedly. I'm likely to pick one of those up the next time I see it in a thrift store because the waitlist at the library is pages long for them.
If you decide to delve into fantasy fiction, I can unreservedly recommend anything by Guy Gavriel Kay. "Tigana" is my favorite. He bases his worlds on real countries (Tigana is really Italy, for instance).
I'll look that up. Are you familiar with Jonathan Carroll? He's my go-to author in that literary genre. "Bones Of The Moon" is probably my favorite of his.
I haven't, but I'll certainly put that on my list!
Here are the NYTimes' Books of the Year:
1. Steven Millhauser - Dangerous Laughter
2. Toni Morrison - A Mercy
3. Joseph O'Neill - Netherland
4. Roberto Bolano - 2666
5. Jhumpa Lahiri - Unaccustomed Earth
6. Jane Mayer - The Dark Side
7. Dexter Filkins - The Forever War
8. Julian Barnes - Nothing to be Frightened Of
9. Drew Gilpin Faust - This Republic of Suffering
10. Patrick French - The World is What it is
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