The distractions of a good book have been in high demand this year. A quiet corner and a transporting story offered a reprieve from relentless campaign news not to mention cheap entertainment for the many feeling a sudden impulse for thriftiness. 2008 was a loud year, and this final month seems likely to be only more deafening. The annual shopping frenzy has already ramped up, this year with overtones of desperation and the macabre.
Yet in the spirit of the season (though in defiance of the prevailing mood), we offer a month of gifts – collected with the help of many generous friends – to our readers. There will be plenty of lists in the coming days assigning 2008’s best books (and movies and music and everything else you can think of), but it is our opinion that these lists are woefully incompatible with the habits of most readers. As it does with many things in our culture, what we call “the tyranny of the new” holds particularly strong sway over these lists. With books, however, it is different. We are as likely to be moved by a book written 200 years ago as we are by one written two months ago, and a list of the “Best Books of 2008” feels fairly meaningless when you walk down the aisles of your favorite bookstore or library.
Being a reader is about having millions of choices, and a lucky reader has trusted fellow readers as her guides. With this in mind, we’ve asked a number of our favorite readers (and writers and thinkers) to be your guides for the month of December, with each contributor sharing with us the best book(s) they read in 2008, regardless of publication date. And so we present to you our 2008 Year in Reading, a non-denominational advent calendar of reading recommendations to take you through to the end of 2008.
We’re doing it a little differently this year. The names 2008 Year in Reading contributors will be unveiled one at a time throughout the month as we post their contributions. You can bookmark this post to follow the series from here, you can just load up the main page for more new Year in Reading posts appearing at the top every day, or you can subscribe to our RSS feed and follow along in your favorite feed reader.
- Stephen Dodson author of Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit, proprietor of Languagehat
- Nam Le author of The Boat
- Benjamin Kunkel founding editor of N+1 and author of Indecision
- Rosecrans Baldwin founding editor of The Morning News and author of You Lost Me There
- Hamilton Leithauser lead singer of The Walkmen
- Mark Binelli author of Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!
- Dan Kois founding editor of Vulture
- Amanda Petrusich author of It Still Moves
- Joseph O’Neill author of Netherland
- Rex Sorgatz of Fimoculous.com.
- Elizabeth McCracken author of An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
- Joan Silber author of Ideas of Heaven and The Size of the World
- Ander Monson author of Other Electricities
- Don Lee author of Wrack and Ruin
- Traver Kauffman of Black Garterbelt
- Buzz Poole author of Madonna of the Toast
- Edan Lepucki of The Millions
- Jim Shepard author of Like You’d Understand, Anyway
- Peter Straub author of seventeen novels
- Rachel Fershleiser co-editor of Not Quite What I Was Planning
- Charles Bock author of Beautiful Children
- Edward Champion of The Bat Segundo Show and edrants.com
- Helen Dewitt author of The Last Samurai
- Manil Suri author of The Age of Shiva
- Charles D’Ambrosio author of The Dead Fish Museum
- Christopher Sorrentino author of Trance
- Wells Tower author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
- Lawrence Hill author of Someone Knows My Name
- John Wray author of Lowboy
- Ed Park founding editor of The Believer and author of Personal Days
- Sarah Manguso author of The Two Kinds of Decay
- Krin Gabbard author of Hotter Than That
- Josh Henkin author of Matrimony
- Josh Bazell author of Beat the Reaper
- Brian Evenson by The Open Curtain
- Carolyn Kellogg of Jacket Copy and www.carolynkellogg.com
- Hesh Kestin author of Based on a True Story
- Scott Esposito editor of The Quarterly Conversation and proprietor of Conversational Reading
- Garth Risk Hallberg author of A Field Guide to the North American Family: An Illustrated Novella, contributor to The Millions
- Sana Krasikov author of One More Year
- Seth Lerer author of Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History
- Lorraine López author of The Gifted Gabaldon Sisters
- Anne Landsman author of The Rowing Lesson and The Devil’s Chimney
- Mark Sarvas author of Harry, Revised and proprietor of The Elegant Variation
- Brad Gooch author of City Poet
- Kyle Minor author of In the Devil’s Territory
- Christine Schutt author of Florida and All Souls
- Todd Zuniga founding editor of Opium Magazine
- David Heatley author of My Brain is Hanging Upside Down
- V.V. Ganeshananthan author of Love Marriage
- Frances de Pontes Peebles author of The Seamstress
- Laura Miller cofounder of Salon.com author of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia
- Dustin Long author of Icelander
- Maria Semple author of This One is Mine
- Rob Gifford of NPR, author of China Road
- John Dufresne author of Requiem, Mass
- Matthew Rohrer author of Rise Up
- Mickey Hess author of Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory
- Gregory Rodriguez author of Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds
- David Ebershoff author of The 19th Wife
- Tim W. Brown author of Walking Man
- Pablo De Santis author of The Paris Enigma
- Hugo Hamilton author of Disguise
- Joshua Furst author of The Sabotage Cafe
- Kevin Hartnett of The Millions
- Roland Kelts author of Japanamerica
- Nikil Saval assistant editor at n+1
- The Year in Reading Recap
- Bonus Links: A Year in Reading 2007, 2006, 2005
