Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood is a supreme literary stunt: a short “novel” composed only of questions, each of which seems to implicate the reader in a narrative conspiracy as serious and absurd as his or her own life. Ultimately, Powell’s little book can be seen word-machine designed to induce unprecedented states of interior monologue, or narrative drug.
A Year in Reading: Jonathan Lethem
A Year in Reading: Paul Goldberg
The margins of my copy of The Art of the Deal are heavily annotated with exclamation marks, all manner of expletives, even miniature drawings. Here is something one can use in daily life: “I like to think big. I always have. To me it’s very simple: if you are going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big.”
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A Year in Reading: Pete Lit’s List
At the end of the year lots of newspapers and media outlets release “best of the year” lists. It’s nice to have a record of the year’s literary highlights, but the lists do not represent the experience of any real readers. Sure, we may read handful of brand new books each year, but these are likely to be outweighed by older books – books that we are finally getting around to or books that we have just discovered, books two years old and books 200 years old. All these books taken together represent a year in reading, and as a counterpoint to all of those “best of” lists, I’ve asked authors, bloggers and readers to send along the best of from their year in reading.For today, I asked Pete from Pete Lit to share with us the best books he read this year and he sent back a nice list. Chicagoans may notice that Chicagoans are well-represented here. Says Pete:My top choice is An Unfinished Season by Ward Just. The writing is just beautiful, and Just wonderfully evokes a bygone Chicago era.Runners-Up:William Trevor, A Bit on the SideJoe Sacco, PalestineAlex Kotlowitz, There Are No Children HereHonorable Mention:Stuart Dybek, I Sailed With MagellanKirby Gann, Our Napoleon in RagsIan McEwan, SaturdayDavy Rothbart, The Lone Surfer of Montana, KansasNick Hornby, The Polysyllabic SpreeJohn McNally, The Book of Ralph
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A Year in Reading: Janet Potter
I took Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan on my summer vacation, and nothing will ever be the same.
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A Year in Reading: Dana Goodyear
Tender Morsels argues for language and its salvific possibilities, and explores the relationship between trauma and the imagination, between sex and fantasy.
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A Year in Reading: Lincoln Michel
These authors remind me that you can truly do anything in fiction as long as you have the willingness to let your eye look at whatever it wants to gaze upon, no matter how bizarre.
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A Year in Reading: Sara Ivry
Sara Ivry is a senior editor at www.nextbook.org, where she hosts a weekly podcast on books, culture and ideas.I’d never read anything by the British writer Howard Jacobson until this year, when I picked up Kalooki Nights to prepare for an interview. Hilarious, shocking, provocative, it relishes in the breadth of Jewish postwar experience (Orthodoxy, assimilation, paranoia, Nazi fetishism, who’s trying to pass) through the eyes of one Maxie Glickman, an occasionally louche cartoonist from Manchester who marries only women with umlauts in their names (Chlöe, Zöe, et al.) and whose childhood friend has gassed his parents, but that hardly makes the man a villain! Pardon that far too simple description; what makes this novel a knock-out is its maturity and richness of story infused with both compassion and yuks about, for instance, misreading the silent “k” in knish or a teenager’s ruse to feed his date biryanis so she gets hot under the collar and needs someone to blow on her.At the urging of a friend I rented Infamous in July and then decided, finally, to read In Cold Blood when I went a week later to semi-rural Connecticut to visit my folks. At dinner I’d tell them about the book’s latest developments, about the Clutters’ horrible deaths in Kansas, about Perry Smith’s tragic childhood that almost seemed to excuse his crime. Then, one day that week, I picked up the newspaper and read about three brutal murders, a mother and her daughters, in a town not too far away by two men who’d met in a halfway house. What seemed in In Cold Blood like an account of random violence in an altogether different time and place was made current, and my mother suggested I stop reading Capote’s book, since we had been reminded with a jolt how close by brutality lurks. Despite how grim the news was, I couldn’t put the book down. Even though I knew how it ended, I wanted to read Capote’s telling of how it ended, and made sure every night that all doors and windows were locked tight.More from A Year in Reading 2007
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A Year in Reading: Alexander Theroux
I select this book as my chosen book for 2010 for its simple and accommodating solid truth.
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