I did something in 2014 that would throw a wrench into anyone’s reading: I bought a bookstore. Selling books, as I wasn’t surprised to find, doesn’t leave much time for reading them. Also, it meant I became — not for the first time, but never so publicly, on such a daily basis — a professional reader, as many of us are lucky to end up being in one way or another, as teachers or editors or researchers or some other line of work that corrals your attention from the luxury of polymorphous curiosity into something more traditionally productive, in my case trying to keep up with some of the new releases I might be able to share with my customers.
So, early in the year, my reading shifted back from personal to pro, but there were good books on both sides of the divide. And aside from a few favorites (see below), what I find myself remembering as vivid reading experiences are not consistently excellent books like Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, Ben Lerner’s 10:04, David Markson’s Reader’s Block, Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, Lawrence Wright’s Thirteen Days in September, Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, Edward Hirsch’s Gabriel, Brendan Koerner’s The Skies Belong to Us, and William Gibson’s The Peripheral — all very good books I’d happily put in your hands if you walked into my store — but the more jagged-edged books I might hand you with a caveat.
I remember, with delight, the first half of Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds — “Finally reading Trollope,” I told everyone, or, rather, tweeted. “What took me so long to sample this deliciousness?” — before his stamina started to outlast mine. I was delighted too with the first half of Joseph O’Neill’s The Dog and the voice he captured, as companionable as Netherland’s but more chilling (like P.G. Wodehouse telling a J.G. Ballard story), even if for me that voice never grew into a full book. I admired and enjoyed Farther and Wilder, Blake Bailey’s biography of Charles Jackson, but I wondered if his subject was worth his talents until the final third — usually the least interesting in any biography — when Jackson’s accumulated troubles, and his belated reckoning with them, made his life profoundly moving. And though Joel Selvin’s Here Comes the Night had for me a hole at its center == the interior life of its ostensible subject, unsung record man Bert Berns, remained a cipher — I loved Selvin’s hepcat riffs on Berns and his fellow “centurions of pop.”
And then there were the books I loved best, all novels, it turns out. The best book I read this year was Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which I hope I don’t need to say much about. In Manny Farber terms, it plays a white elephant game rather than a termite one: tackling a major national and personal subject head on and relying on the traditional methods of the novel to do it. It’s the kind of book that wins awards, and in this case deservedly so. I also loved Michael Winter’s Minister Without Portfolio, a much more termite-ish book after it gets beyond an early Big Event and settles into working out the everyday morality of rural life in a reticent romance I was startled to realize reminded me of Kitty and Levin’s in Anna Karenina.
Merritt Tierce’s debut, Love Me Back, more or less tore my scalp off. She tells the story of a single mom waitressing her way up the service-industry ladder to a high-end Dallas steakhouse, with disarming amounts of sex and drugs along the way, and strips it of any success — or redemption — story arcs. Desire and discipline and self-destruction are constant forces that ebb and flow and are by no means sated by the story’s end. Peter Mountford’s The Dismal Science is also about the always underserved topic of work: a high official at the World Bank decides to speak a few truths (which he’s not entirely certain are true) and thereby blow up his life. In part I loved it because it captured the culture of Red-Line-to-Shady-Grove D.C. and Maryland I grew up in like no other fiction I’ve read, and in part because it’s the kind of novel where a character walks into a room and you get the feeling that neither he, nor his creator, knows what he is going to do there until he does it. (Right afterwards I read Mountford’s previous novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, a companion to this one, and liked it nearly as much.)
And lastly, the first book I read all year (if the January 2 train ticket still inside is to be believed) is the only one close to Flanagan’s in my mind: J.M. Ledgard’s Submergence. It’s both an excellent book and a jagged one. Its jaggedness — the resistance I felt when reading it, and the thing I feel obligated to warn about when I’m recommending it — is its almost perverse formality. To someone schooled in the hi-lo tendencies of our time, Ledgard’s elevated style is a provocation; I’m not sure there’s a contraction in the entire book, for instance, aside from a few in dialogue. And the characters in his dual storyline, who connect for a few days at a quietly luxurious hotel on the French coast, have an equal sense of exceptional cultivation. They think of life in terms of centuries: one a mathematician and ocean researcher who, as she prepares to descend to the floor of the Atlantic in a tiny submersible, is confident her name and her discoveries will live for hundreds of years, the other a British spy in Africa whose thoughts, as he is held hostage by Somali jihadists, keep returning to his English forebears and the utopias they imagined half a millennium before.
I find myself wanting to make fun of Submergence, to goof on its gravity (and on Ledgard himself, whose author bio describes him as “a thinker on risk and technology in emerging economies”), but the thing is, I can’t. He pulls it off, and earns every bit of profundity he claims. And it’s the thinking in centuries that does it: the awareness of the massive scales of biology and history, alongside the poignancy of individual existence. I often don’t care about the ends of novels, and I can’t tell you what finally happened in many of the ones I love most, but there are some endings that, in the process of tying things up, open up an abyss of meaning that’s almost unbearable. This is one of them.
More from A Year in Reading 2014
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The good stuff: The Millions’ Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews
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Truman by David McCullough
The best books I’ve read all year have, for the most part, been translations: The Waiting Years by Fumiko Enchi, Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge, Independent People by Halldor Laxness, and The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki. And one non-translation–George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I just can’t narrow it down to one. Oh, I almost forgot–A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kis.
The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave
The best books I read this year were the Europa translations of Elena Ferrantes novels, Rock Island Line by David Rhodes, and The Armies by Evelio Rosero.
Best novel “rediscovered” this year was A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry.
Happy holidays to the Millions contributors, and look forward to reading you in 2010!
American Rust by Philipp Meyer and The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno
Not done with it yet, but Margaret Atwood’s Payback is turning out to be the most interesting book I’ve read this year. The historical, literary, anthropological, sociological, and psychological analysis of debt in essentially every meaning of the word is thought-provoking and ingenious.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell was a close second.
I am new to this blog but yet would like to post my read novels and books which I completed in the year 2009….The latest being John Grisham’s Ford County, I am happy to have ended with a thrilling short story collection…I am not a passionate reader but now with my most of the time getting consumed up on net, i prefer reading ebooks directly online from store like A1Books and purchase physical books rarely. But reading blogs like these has really aroused an interest. I hope to read more of them in the coming year 2010.
Cheers to readers!!!
Machine by Peter Adolphsen
Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherly
Impotent by Matthew Roberson
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.
But The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters deserves a special mention.
The best new book I read this year was either “lowboy” by John Wray or “Chronic City” by Jonathan Lethem.
The best book I read this year was hands down Amy Hempel’s Collected Stories. I haven’t gotten to too many new releases yet but Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor was also a great treat.
The best “new” books (new to me, at least) that I read this year include:
Mariette in Ecstasy — Ron Hansen
The Transit of Venus — Shirley Hazzard
In the Skin of a Lion — Michael Ondaatje
Also, this was the year of James Salter. Why did it take me so long to discover his work? Dusk, Last Night, Light Years, and A Sport and a Pasttime — enthralling books, every one.
Tender Is The Night.
hear, hear, Chad!
Blame by Michelle Huneven. I’m checking out the rest of her work pronto.
Call it Sleep by Henry Roth, definitely the most beautiful novel I’ve read in a long time and one that more people should know about.
Mike, I remember in the 60s when Call it Sleep got rediscovered. Time for another rediscovery.
I want to list my best books but I am away and my book list is in my computer at home. My poor memory frustrates me, maybe this thread will still be going in a few days. Elegance of the Hedgehog, The Housekeeper and the Professor, early Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians and Life and Times of Michael K), rereading Natalia Ginzburg, went on an immigrant short story journey (binge)–Ha Jin, David Bezmozgis, Jumpa Lahiri, Andrei Codrescu, Isaac Rosenfeld and others.
– “Revolutionary Road” by Richard Yates.
– “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” by Haruki Murakami
– “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole
– “The Master and the Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov
– “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy
– “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
“Water for Elephants” by Sara Gruen was the best page turner I read this year.
I alos discovered “I Capture the Castle” by Dodie Smith and thought it was a lovely book.
But my favorite that I read this year, and one that had a great impact on me, was “Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson.
Ugh, it’s impossible to pick just one book in a year in which I discovered Roberto Bolaño, Richard Yates and Hans Fallada.
Best books I read this year
Kurt Vonnegut – “Slaughterhouse V”
George R.R. Martin – “Game of Thrones”
Stephen Fry – “Moab is my Washpot”
“Everything Matters!” by Ron Currie, Jr. Followed closely by “The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet” by Reif Larsen.
I concur on the Henry Roth book, Call It Sleep. I read this in the early 80’s. It is a truly beautiful book. Another book I read about the same time–equally stunning and unforgettable–is Harriette Arnow’s masterpiece The Dollmaker. The Dollmaker is on a list that looks very intriguing–along with one of my favorites of the year (as well as being one of the best books I’ve ever read) Enchi’s The Waiting Years. The list is 500 Great Books by Women. Others included are Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm. Those four alone are pretty high-calibre books. I’m sure the rest are just as wonderful.
“The Elegance of the Hedgehog” by Muriel Barbery.
Favorite book was “The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society” by Mary Ann Shaffer and also, “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett. Both were so good, I wanted to leave parties to go home and read!
The best books I read all year:
— By Night in Chile, para Bolano
— Death in Spring, Rodoreda
— Les Fiancailles de M. Hire, par Simenon
— Henderson the Rain King, by Bellow (a name which should always be capitalized)
— The Kingdom of This World, by Carpentier
Best books I read all year:
two fiction works come to mind:
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
AND Jose Saramago’s Death with Interruptions.
Nonfiction: Richard Wolffe’s book Renegade on the Obama campaign;
Ted Kennedy’s memoir
Javier Marias, Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear
W.G. Sebald, Vertigo
Cesar Aira, Ghosts
Vic Glover, Keeping Heart on Pine Ridge
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice
Max Geert, Europa
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Homer, The Odyssey (Fagles translation)
Mary Beard, The Fires of Vesuvius
Oops, that’s more than one.
One Foot in Eden by Ron Rash
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurtson
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Still Alice by Lisa Genova
Crow Lake by Mary Lawson
Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay, a Canadian writer. Won the ScotiaBank Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious literary award. I’ve also read her novels A Student of Weather and Garbo Laughs. Elizabeth Hay ranks right up there with Alice Munro. Gave a copy of LNOA to a friend for Christmas–she thought the writing was first-rate.
Forgive me everyone. I am starting Best of 2010 because I just finished the most brilliant amazing enthralling book: The Humans who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We survived by Clive Finlayson. I am reeling.
The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Peace by Gene Wolfe
Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
Best Re-Read: The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Two standouts in 2009 — The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters and Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden.