My reading took me to many different places this year, but it began and ended in France.
Luc Sante’s The Other Paris. The more our major cities shift from places of community and society towards havens for whimsy and capital, the more I want to live in Sante’s cities. He’s a historian of anarchy and disorder, a writer whose prose shines when it’s exploring the dirtiest of places. The Paris that explodes with life on these pages is neither chic nor intellectual — it’s scrappy, ornery, and dangerous, but it’s also a place of intimacy and wild possibility. That’s also a fine description of his writing.
Gayl Jones’s Corregidora. The story of Ursa Corregidora, a hard-living Kentucky blues singer, went directly into my central nervous system. Jones is a conjurer, and her techniques include stream-of-consciousness, collective memory, and some of the best dialogue I’ve read in ages. The themes of this book — how sexual, racial, and historical trauma are passed down in ways we keep reliving — have only gotten more relevant since it was published in 1975.
Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. There are so few “extreme adventure” books written by women and people of color that I always devour any I can find. Shepherd was devoted to climbing the Cairngorms, a mountain range in Scotland, but the point of this short, bracing novel is not the summit — it’s the climb at different times of the year and of life. Shepherd strikes a wonderful balance between the scientific details (Arctic-era plants) and the spiritual, sensual joys of spending one’s life engaged with the natural world.
Michael S. Harper’s Nightmare Begins Responsibility. Harper was a beloved teacher, poet, and friend who passed away this year. I reread his work with great sadness at his passing and wonder at his existence:
you are your last breath;
you are your first scream:
you are; you are.
(From “Primal Therapy”)
Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft. They say history is written by the conquerors, but Boullosa has other ideas. Texas reconsiders the U.S. annexation of Texas through the eyes of the conquered — a sprawling cast that includes Mexican elites, peasants of all nationalities, drunks, Austrian immigrants, and runaway slaves. The story is told as a series of impressions, the way gossip passes through a small town. The result is something bizarre, comedic, fantastical, and unsettling — kind of how history feels when you’re forced to live through it.
Robert Walser’s Looking at Pictures. Walser is such a singular writer that I picked up this book with trepidation — how would he write about art, a subject about which he knew little? Of course he wrote about art the way he wrote about everything — turning it inside out in that lovely, broken mind of his, giving alternative histories to paintings and telling heartbreaking stories about their creators that feel more real than the truth. I read this book in one setting, and my feelings went from frustration to relaxation to grief to buoyancy to, finally, jubilation.
Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World. Herrera wrote a very short book — it’s only 107 pages — and he makes it clear from the first sentence that he’s not going to waste a minute of your time. World starts out as a hell-raising thriller — a young Mexican woman is crossing the U.S. border to look for her brother, carrying a message from the criminal underworld. That would be more than enough to keep my attention, especially since Herrera always picks the best details and his writing never slows down. But the story is so much more than that. More than halfway through, it shifts, almost imperceptibly, into a dark, surprising allegory about the border, immigration, and what it means to live as an immigrant. The result is something as ancient as it is contemporary.
Eliot Weinberger’s The Ghosts of Birds. Over the course of several books, Weinberger has been writing a “serial essay” on the largest themes imaginable — the facts of our lives, as told by many civilizations over the centuries of our existence. I am not sure what to tell you about Weinberger’s work except that his erudition is astonishing, his prose is like a midsummer plunge into a brisk lake, and his literary essays are a deeply spiritual experience for the reader.
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays. I may never finish this book from cover to cover, but I love to return to it again and again. Montaigne’s writing was both personal and expansive — an example of how you can use your unique sensibility to make any subject immediate to another mind. It’s also comforting, in these dark political times, to observe a precise thinker in a previous century wrestle with topics like the fall of empire and the vanity of men. Some things never change.
More from A Year in Reading 2016
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I am very bad at reading books at the right time — if a book is freshly published and sitting face out on a shelf, there is little to no chance that I will read it within the year. I buy it, of course (gotta support the authors and the local bookstores) and then I put it on the stack and make it wait its turn. This year was no exception — most of my favorite reads were either galleys of books that will come out in 2013 or older books that finally made it to the top of the bedside tower. The galleys were books that I blurbed or books that my friends wrote (or both), so perhaps it’s a bit gauche to name them here, but I will anyway. Early 2013 is going to be off the chain: Stuart Nadler’s epic American slam-dunk of a novel, Wise Men; Ariel Djanikian’s scientifically terrifying post-apocalyptic novel The Office of Mercy; Jessica Francis Kane’s crystalline and beautiful new story collection, This Close; Jennifer Gilmore’s achingly sad and moving novel about adoption, The Mothers. And that’s just the first few months of next year.
Then there were the books that everyone else had already read and loved: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, which made me swoon over descriptions of baseball, which I otherwise find excruciatingly boring; Tana French’s In the Woods, which made me want to read her entire catalog in a single sitting; Ann Patchett’s The Magician’s Assistant, which made me want to levitate; Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, which made me think twice about petting feral cats in Brooklyn.
I actually like waiting to read books, because then the hoopla has hooped down the street and the buzz has stopped buzzing and it’s just you and the page in front of you, and then the page after that. Still, even I am occasionally immune to my own rules, and accidentally read a book immediately after purchasing it. This year, I gulped down Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Maggie Shipstead’s Seating Arrangements, and Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins. Each one was precise, skilled, quick-witted, and warm-hearted. Well worth the price of (hardcover) admission and all of the (richly deserved) accolades. Sometimes all that buzz is there for a reason.
The Art of Fielding is inexplicably mediocre. How I got snookered into reading it just goes to show how brilliant the people in marketing can be sometimes. Anyone who drops that book as one of their favorites has ensured that I will never ever read a book they have written, because if they think that is the best American literature has to offer, their credibility is close to nil. And looking at the rest of her choices, Emma Straub seems to be a big fan of Comfort Fiction. I assume that’s what she writes too.
@ Hubert: I thought The Art of Fielding was mediocre as well (though I’m not sure about “inexplicably” so), but your comment seems a pretty irrational way to judge someone else’s work. Considering Straub and Harbach both live in Brooklyn, this may just be a bit of back-scratching and nothing more.
to Hubert Hubert:
or, perhaps, the fact that so many people see something in a book that you don’t suggests there are things you are missing or don’t respond to. To reject a writer’s book because that writer likes a book you didn’t assumes that you are a perfect reader and the writer in question can only appreciate books written like the ones she writes.
i only bother to post this because i am so tired of this kind of aggressive “My posts are better than your book” posts, especially ones predicated on meaningless self-indicting drivel such as the phrase “inexplicably mediocre.”
And sure those books by Paula Fox, Ann Patchett and Tana French sit easily together in a single genre called, with a sneer, “Comfort Fiction.” If there is anyone comfortably satisfied with themselves here, it’s . . . .
If this is a case of “back-scratching” it’s all the more worthy of our scorn.
Capybara – your suggestion that a large group of people seeing something in the book is somehow correlative to the quality of the work is so nonsensical I won’t even bother to mention the obviously ridiculous conclusions to be drawn from that statement.
Hi Emma, I envie you your job reading many books and then writing about them.
Anyway, how could I get you to do a preview on my new novel coming out next spring, or maybe summer.
Johanna van Zanten
Emma likes the book she likes. You like the books you like. The end. And Emma ain’t no backscratcher. She is a reader!
Edan – If that’s the case why don’t you guys go ahead and disable the comments function on the site. She likes what she likes, you like what you like, I like what I like, the end. Apparently no need for comments.
Drew,
That was exactly Edan’s point, no way about it. Edan’s point wasn’t to brush off two people who feel the need to crash in and post unproductive, cynical comments that themselves were denying the openness of taste. It couldn’t have been that, could it?
Edan pushed back against the baseless accusation that Straub discussed liking a book simply because she was hoping a favor in return, which itself was prompted by the rude accusation that Straub must be a terrible writer if she liked a book that Hubert Sorrentino didn’t like. A lot of wonderful dialouge to preserve there.
Dear Christopher Sorrentino and other sock puppet commenters: Don’t you have better things to do with your time, like write novels or mediocre books about DEATH WISH or something? Oh wait…
Emma: Thanks for sharing your list.
The Magician’s Assistant is wonderful.
Man, I’m getting major douche chills from some of these comments, and awesome chills from others. I think we all know who I mean. GO EMMA!!!
Edward, what makes you think that is Christopher Sorrentino posting? Why would he call himself Hubert?
(Great list, Emma! Beautiful Ruins is on my list, too.)
Yes, Emma likes the books she likes…91% of them just happen to be written by Americans and a disproportionate number are written by white graduates of MFA factories.
Jack indicated that judging a writer by their taste in literature is “irrational,” and I disagree–I think it’s perfectly reasonable to avoid writers with such narrow interests that are confined to the incestuous MFA community. Why should I expect their work to be any different?
The Art of Fielding is one of the great recent examples of logrolling in the publishing business.
Well, I never knew so many of the books I enjoy were considered ‘comfort fiction.’ There are so many books that appeal to me here, that means i MUST be going to like Emma Straub’s book? And she MUST be going to like mine. Because i write comfort fiction too. Oh, but no, that won’t happen because I’m not American and I don’t have an MFA. Too bad.