A Year in Reading: the Best, the Rest and the Disappointments

December 1, 2005 | 13 books mentioned 2 min read

Among the people I asked to contribute to this year’s “Year in Reading,” are readers that I admire. Garth reads a great deal more than me and can digest the voluminous input impressively (just wish he’d start blogging again!). He’s also the guy responsible for the great Lawrence Weschler reading list I posted early this year. Some of his reading this year comes from that list:

Top 3 Books I Read This Year:

  • Tony KushnerAngels in America: The Great American Drama? Kushner moves forward the form of the theater, but that’s only what lures you in. What keeps you is that no living writer engages more fully with his characters. The Mike Nichols directed miniseries isn’t bad, either.
  • Joseph Mitchell: Up in the Old Hotel: An unparalleled raconteur. All of his New Yorker writings are compiled in this omnibus. His style lucid, compassionate, modest, wry, and charged with the wonder of being alive.
  • Zadie SmithOn Beauty: As many have pointed out, flawed. But she rivals Kushner in her degree of empathy for her characters while, like him, never letting them off the hook.

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The Best of the Rest (of Stuff I Read This Year)

  • Walter BenjaminIlluminations: The most sensitive and elliptical and sad of 20th century philosophers. One of Benjamin’s ideas is worth a thousand of someone else’s arguments.
  • Gertrude SteinAlice B. Toklas: Who knew I’d like Gertrude Stein? Don’t believe the hype – read this book.
  • Norman MailerThe Executioner’s Song: Again, who knew? In Cold Blood on amphetamines, this is a chilling, gripping, and strangely humble work. The second half opens up to depict the media machinery of which this book is brilliant!
  • Patrik OurednikEuropeana: Behind a sui generis form, itself worth the price of admission, lurks a quiet anguish at the depredations of the 20th Century.
  • E.L. DoctorowRagtime: All it’s said to be, and a great read to boot.
  • Benjamin BarberJihad vs. McWorld: A lucid articulation of all the things you’ve ever suspected about late-capitalist globalism and factionalism but weren’t sure how to say.
  • Jonathan LethemThe Disappointment Artist: The most complete thing Lethem has published. Not an enduring classic, but a totally charming read.

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3 Disappointments

  • Rick MoodyThe Diviners: Bummer, man. This book has so much potential – and is definitely worth reading – but needed an editor who could say, in the end, “Something more has to happen!” Concludes not with a bang but with a whimper. But has HBO optioned the TV rights to “Werewolves of Fairfield County?”
  • Charles ChadwickIt’s All Right Now: Here, the whimper sets in after a completely fantastic first 180 pages – and continues for 400 more. You had me at hello, Chuck, and could have stopped after Part I. Again, where’s the editor?
  • Bret Easton EllisLunar Park: Underrated, my ass. This book is terrible. Everything after the introduction is embarrassing. I don’t know that an editor could have saved it, or why I read it. Avoid at all costs.

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is the author of City on Fire and A Field Guide to the North American Family. In 2017, he was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.