Wrapping Up A Year in Reading

Year in Reading
December 24, 2008 | 14

With the year drawing to a close, so too is our Year in Reading series. We at The Millions would like to thank all of those who contributed to the series as well as all the helpful folks who assisted us in putting together such a great group of participants.

Though we are undoubtedly biased, it was a thrill to watch the series unfold this year. We discovered that Joshua Henkin liked a book by Charles D’Ambrosio, who liked a book by Nam Le, who liked a book by Toni Morrison. We discovered that two highly regarded authors (named Charles) were fans of Slash’s memoir this year. And we saw that many of our most admired writers were rediscovering (or discovering for the first time) literary legends like Saul Bellow, James Cain, Richard Brautigan, Anthony Trollope, Dostoevsky, Melville, and the aforementioned Toni Morrison.

We’d also like to thank all of our readers for a great year at The Millions. It was another year with more visitors than we’ve ever had before, but the numbers alone shed little light on the best aspects of The Millions this year, which came through in the edifying and enlightening discussion spearheaded and spurred on by our readers, guests, and regular contributors.

We’ll do a little roundup of some of the best posts at The Millions this year in a few days, but in the meantime, we’re going to take a breather from the breakneck pace of A Year in Reading.

As we enjoy the last few days of 2008, we invite all of you to take part in A Year in Reading by finishing this sentence in the comments or on your own blog: “The best book I read all year was…”

created The Millions and is its publisher. He and his family live in New Jersey.

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Year in Reading

A Year in Reading by Patrick Brown

Year in Reading
December 12, 2006 | 1 2 min read
It was a slow year for me as a reader. I'm not sure if it's because I moved cross-country again, or because I was getting married, or because there were so many pictures of celebrities exposing themselves on the Internet, but I just didn't get around to reading very many books. I had trouble starting new books, quit several books midstream, which is something I rarely do, and felt bored by the majority of what I read.That isn't to say that there weren't a few standouts in the field. Robert Baer's terrific CIA memoir See No Evil, the first book I read this year, was excellent, in spite of having several key passages blacked out by CIA censors. My main man Somerset Maugham came through again with The Moon and Six Pence, his examination of the choices and sacrifices a man must make to become an artist. And Jesus' Son, by Denis Johnson, was good enough to make me wonder why I hadn't read it back when I was living in Iowa City (Also, the edition I bought, which is the only one I've seen, fits in my pocket, literally. Isn't that great? Shouldn't more books fit in our pockets?).The best book I read in 2006 was Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. Pollan examines three different modes of food production and distribution. His critique of industrial agriculture, and its reliance on corn (which he points out is present in nearly everything in the supermarket, including beef, gossip magazines, even the walls of the market itself), is damning if not all that original (many of the points are made in Fast Food Nation), but the rest of the book, which examines organic farming, self-sustaining grass farming, and modern hunter-gathers, is truly eye-opening. He takes Whole Foods to task for their somewhat misleading labeling, spends a week working on a grass farm in Virginia, and cooks a meal entirely from foods that he hunted, gathered, and grew himself. What's great about Pollan's writing is his ability to take pages of statistics and endless lists of ingredients and turn them into something that is not only fun to read, but fun to discuss. I can't remember reading a book that gave me more cocktail party ammunition that the The Omnivore's Dilemma. While this review on Slate points out some of the flaws in Pollan's approach, I still highly recommend the book to anyone who is interested in what they eat, and how they've come to eat it.Some non-book related best and worsts of the year:Best Movie: Brick (IMDb) It actually came out in 2005, but in 2005 I lived in Iowa, and movies don't get to Iowa very quickly, so I didn't see it until 2006. It won't win any awards, which is surely a mark of its greatness.Worst Movie: Rumor Has It (IMDb) edging out Loverboy (IMDb). Both of these movies left me wondering not only how they got made, but how I was duped into seeing them.Worst Trends: Baseball general managers giving ludicrous contracts to borderline ballplayers. Juan Pierre? Gary Matthews Jr.? I'd be worth more money to a baseball team than either of these two out machines.
Year in Reading
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Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Anthony Doerr

Year in Reading
December 7, 2010 | 2 2 min read
In a year in which some remarkable books found me—Anne Carson’s weird, exquisite Autobiography of Red; Brad Watson’s hallucinatory, radioactively-good story collection Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives; Siddhartha Mukherjee’s massive, massively interesting biography of cancer The Emperor of All Maladies--no book afflicted me with such jealousy as Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will. What is it?  It’s a blue hardcover containing hand-drawn maps of fifty super-isolated islands, paired with a page of text about each.  It’s also a collection of fifty prose poems.  And a quest for the loneliest places in the world.  And a testament to the transformative power of maps. You can read it in an hour.  Or a month.  It contains lots of lines like: “Here in Neptunes Bellows, at the gates of hell, in the jaws of the dragon, the waves crash interminably” (128).  Or, “ They soak the rock-hard leather in the sea for four or five days to soften it, fry it on the coals, and force it down their throats” (70). “It is high time for cartography to take its place among the arts,” Schalansky argues in her introduction, “and for the atlas to be recognized as literature, for it is more than worthy of its original name: theatrus orbis terrarum, the theatre of the world” (23). Atlas of Remote Islands is a celebration of what can still be accomplished with imagination, paper and ink.  Holding it, you feel as if you’ve stolen the composition book that dreamy girl in the back row of your high school English class is always scribbling into.  You page through it and think: Oh my God.  She’s a genius. More from a Year in Reading 2010 Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions
Year in Reading
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14 comments:

  3. The best book I read all year was… also Never Let Me Go by Kasuo Ishiguro. And the best new book was Netherland by Joseph O'Neill.

  6. Fiction: Stoner by John Williams.
    Non-Fiction: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.
    Poetry: Ooga-Booga by Friedrich Siegel.

    year of publication irrelevant!

  7. …not yet determined, because the year isn't over yet. I probably have another two books to go, and either of those could be brilliant.

  8. Non-Fiction: American Shaolin by Matthew Polly
    Fiction: His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman. (Ignore the movie.)

  10. The best book I read [for the first time] all year was Ann Patchett's "Bel Canto"; the beest book I read [again] all year was Dickens's "Bleak House."

  11. The best book I read all year comes out of this group:

    The After Life by Kathleen Stewart
    The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island by Chloe Hooper
    The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
    The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
    Disquiet by Julia Leigh
    The Liars' Club by Mary Karr
    The Other Side of You by Salley Vickers
    Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

    Sorry, can't separate them, all unforgettable.

    Cheers to The Millions!

  12. Fiction:
    #1 Edgar Sawtelle, then in no order
    Lush Life-Richard Price
    Cellist of Sarajevo – Steven Galloway
    Out Stealing Horses-Per Petterson
    The Other – David Guterson
    all 5 Ripleys – Patricia Highsmith
    Tenderness of Wolves – Stef Penney
    The English Major – Jim Harrison
    Katherine Weber – Triangle and The Music Lesson
    St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves – Karen Russell
    Desertion – Abdulrazak Gurnah
    currently: The Quiet Girl by Peter Hoeg–so far very good
    Non Fiction:
    The World Without Us – Alan Weisman
    The Ghost Map – Steven Johnson
    The End of Food – Paul Roberts
    The Soloist – Steve Lopez
    Enrique's Journey – Sonia Nazario
    The Good Good Pig – Sy Montgomery
    The Zookeeper's Wife – Diane Ackerman
    Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell
    A Spring Wihtout Bees-Michael Schacker
    Deep Economy – Bill McKibben
    To See Every Bird on Earth – Dan Koeppel
    The Horses of Proud Spirit – Melanie Bowles

    I retired this year and my dream came true–unlimited reading time, averaging 13 books a month. Is this heaven or what?

  14. My ten favs from '08:
    1) Revolutionary Road
    2) The Human Stain
    3) The End of Vandalism
    4) The Things They Carried
    5) The Prince of the Marshes
    6) On Chesil Beach
    7) His Dark Materials trilogy
    8) Sex, Drugs, & Cocoa Puffs
    9) Mountains Beyond Mountains
    10) The Audacity of Hope

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Year in Reading

Year in Reading Outro

Year in Reading
December 23, 2015 | 3 3 min read
Year in Reading reminds me of that cinematic device where the camera slowly backs away from the characters we’ve been following until it’s looking at them from outside their window, and then back farther still until you see into their neighbors’ windows as well, and farther still to show a whole building of occupied windows, and then a whole city, until you are looking at hundreds of little scenes in hundreds of little windows. And you think, if I contain multitudes, and there are multitudes of people, then there are multitudes upon multitudes, and your brain starts to spin. What I’m trying to say is that over the last few weeks, 78 writers have written about close to 500 books, and following the posts as they roll out is as intimidating and overwhelming one day as it is invigorating the next. Of those books, nearly half were fiction, the most popular genre by far, followed by biography and memoir, making up roughly 15% of the recommendations. Another 15% was taken up by traditional non-fiction — books I categorized as either “history,” “essays,” or “events.” And our contributors recommended 55 books of poetry during the series, a healthy list for anyone who is definitely, no take-backs, going to read more poetry in 2016. Surprising no one, Ta-Nehisi’s Coates’s Between the World and Me and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet were the twin titans of this year’s series, each being cited by 12 of our contributors. Close behind, A Little Life and The Argonauts were each mentioned eight times. What is surprising, and a little delightful, is that two contributors read Colette’s Claudine at School this year, and two more read Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles. I’ve added Eileen Myles to my reading list for next year based on that, and because Chelsea Girls wasn’t even her only book to be recommended this year. I’ve also added Joy Harjo’s Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings based on Sandra Cisneros’s recommendation, and the line she quoted, and its awesome title. I also added Vivian Gornick, especially The Odd Woman and the City, because Hannah says it’s “about what it feels like to be lonely, and what it feels like to be free. It’s about what it feels like to change your mind, about the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional growth that comes after you’ve come of age, and even after you’ve ‘come into your own.’” It’s been a privilege for Lydia and I to edit the series this year. We hope you’ve found a few things you’d like to read, a few writers who share your tastes, and a few who don’t. Year in Reading is like drinking from a firehose of literary wonders. It always helps me start off my new year itching to get into the books I’ll write about at the end of it. See you then. More from A Year in Reading 2015 Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.
Year in Reading
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