This year has absolutely soared by. I'm not quite done reading yet, but I hit my target of 72, Christmas is coming up, and I've been asked what my favorites of the year are, so it's time for my annual year-end list.
- 23 / 72 were written in 2013. I've been more current this year than ever. Next year I'm going to tackle some big doorstop classics (namely Moby Dick, Ulysses, and The Recognitions) which might slow me down, but I think I did a solid job at keeping up with the 2013 hype.
- 34 / 72 were fiction. Almost exactly half. I tend to gravitate towards non-fiction, but I found a lot of excellent fiction this year by keeping up with the New York Times Books section, as well as blogs like The Millions and Bookslut.
- 11 / 72 were written by women. I don't have a quota system or anything, and a lot of the genres I read like sci-fi aren't exactly packed with female writers, so that explains the low number. However, a full quarter of my favorites this year were written by women, so I guess women tend to overperform their numbers for me.
Anyway, here's the 10 best fiction and nonfiction books I've read so far this year. Alphabetical order as usual because I hate numerical rankings. However, if you read only one, which you shouldn't, my favorite fiction was either Pessoa or Munro, while the best non-fiction was either Reisner or Ross.
Fiction:
Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl. If you're looking for a good post-apocalyptic science fiction novel with a solid backing premise, an interesting world, a riveting plot, and well-drawn characters, this novel deserves all of the awards it won. It tackles things like fears over genetic modification, colonialism, and the loss of social cohesion, and it ends on the right ambiguously promising note that makes you want a sequel while still being satisfying on its own.
Thomas Bernhard - Extinction. The narrated life story of an unpleasant man who receives word that his brother and parents have just been killed in an accident, it will at first seem like the guy simply never shuts up. But even if not all of this stuff is worth saying, it's worth reading, because even if this guy isn't exactly likable, I think he's more like us than we might like to admit, and the final effect of this word-torrent is both a renewed appreciation for the pleasures of escape that human contact gives us, and a healthy capacity for amusement at how silly our own negative thoughts can be, no matter how recurrent or compelling.
Joseph Conrad - Nostromo. Joseph Conrad writes another insightful novel, this time about a fictional South American country and a silver mine that corrupts both locals and foreigners, even the supposedly invincible eponymous hero. The way his characters all deal with the challenges caused by the mine are riveting, and his portrayal of the country's government and "resource curse"-crippled institutions could have come right out of a history book.
Jennifer Egan - A Visit From the Goon Squad. This book's unusual half-novel, half-short story collection format is perfect for delivering the book's points about what it takes to achieve (or not achieve) adulthood and contentment, the blur of drugs and sex and music both evocative and precise to each character, and the humor perfectly pitched to deliver the pathos of everyone's losses and changes over the years. You experience the fragility of memory and the effects of the passage of time on life in a different way than you would have with a more conventionally structured novel.
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Dispossessed. Le Guin packed so many interesting topics into this novel - language, gender, sexuality, anarchism, socialism, science, academic freedom - that it would probably take several more books to fully explore all the subtleties of her presentation, but she worked all of her philosophizing so smoothly into the narrative that it never feels like pontificating. It's a great demonstration of how much more palatable that kind of political philosophy can be when tucked into a novel, and the book manages to both cover a lot of ground thematically while still also being the affecting story of a man on an alien world trying to get back to his wife and family.
Zachary Mason - The Lost Books of the Odyssey. A great collection of short stories that play with various aspects of the greatest adventure story of all time. If you've read any of Borges' fictions, you'll find a lot that's familiar in terms of how cerebral yet playful Mason is with all the elements of the hero's wanderings, and you'll be impressed with how well he brings out all the brave, clever, cowardly, loyal, duplicitous, and melancholy qualities of Odysseus.
Alice Munro - Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Munro just won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature, and I'm happy to report that this is a wonderful collection of short stories that shows Munro as being in the first rank of fiction writers and makes for a great introduction to her work. Fully discussing each of the nine stories in here would take as long or longer than just reading the stories themselves, but they are all basically flawless - full of well-drawn characters, realistic yet compelling drama, and acute psychological insight. Her writing style is also notable, being so naturalistic, subtle, and skillful that her presence is barely even perceptible, yet I frequently found myself reading for a while, pausing to think, and then going back a page or two to marvel at how much she was able to pack into her sentences without the Heavy Hand of the Author showing.
Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet. This is a tremendous work, as difficult to describe as it is impossible to forget. Page after page of a seemingly infinitely self-annihilating prose poetry, this is a "factless autobiography" of a bookkeeper who engages in some of the most simultaneously lucid and hallucinatory flights of reasoning I've ever come across. In Bernardo Soares, Pessoa has created one of the most vivid and alive characters that I think it's possible to within the confines of a single novel, especially when the character doesn't actually do much of anything, and in fact regards action with both contempt and indifference. Full of Deep Thoughts, trivial banalities, and everything in between.
Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge. Yet another "weird detective story", Bleeding Edge is also by far the most "normal" book he's ever written, meaning it contains the fewest goofy songs, ludicrous Dickensian names, drug-addled digressions, or egregiously stupid/brilliant puns, though all of those elements definitely appear. I won't call it "mature", since he's been ahead of the game ever since his very first book, but this exploration of the intersection between 9/11 and the dotcom boom is his first novel to seem like it was written by a father, someone with real roots in the ordinary quotidian life of school days, sleepovers, and the rest of the thankless but necessary work done by any ordinary parent.
José Saramago - The History of the Siege of Lisbon. A Portugese proofreader's impulsive decision to insert a single erroneous word into the manuscript of a book he's proofing changes his life profoundly as he finds love, changes from being a lonely, cowardly shut-in, and begins writing an alternate history of the Reconquista of Portugal from the Moors. Saramago makes a lot of interesting points about the nature of truth in history, and his unusual style of dialogue somehow makes the book flow even better.
Non-Fiction:
Gregory Clark - A Farewell to Alms. An ambitious alternative to the ever-influential Guns Germs & Steel: an overview of the logic of the nearly economically static Malthusian trap that every society in the world inhabited until approximately 1800, an explanation of the math behind the Industrial Revolution which allowed a select group of societies to escape that trap, and finally, a cursory look at why many of the poorer nations of the world currently struggle to escape their own Malthusian shackles. His "reverse Idiocracy" thesis of consistent selection pressures leading to increased entrepreneurialism is intriguing, to say the least.
R.R. Palmer - Twelve Who Ruled. The French Revolution is one of the most interesting periods in history, and this is an excellent biography of the dozen men who made up the Committee of Public Safety during the fateful year 1793, when the country seemed about to collapse either from anarchy or foreign invasion. Palmer does a lot to illuminate and contextualize the actions of often-maligned men like Robespierre, and his vivid writing really brings the period to life. There's a lot of thought-provoking analysis and direct quotations from the historical figures themselves that will really enrich your understanding of the time.
Jeffrey Pilcher - Planet Taco. The only thing that people like more than eating food is talking about food, and this history of the development of Mexican food offers plenty to talk about. It covers the story of what I consider to be one of the best cuisines in the world, from its various origins in pre-Colombian Mexico, through its struggles to gain respect in the 19th century, and up to the present day as it has been globalized and reinterpreted both by Mexicans and by other cultures. It also offers up plenty of interesting analysis of the politics of food that will have you thinking about different cuisines in new ways.
Marc Reisner - Cadillac Desert. Fresh water is one of the most fundamental resources of civilization, yet tens of millions of Americans live in parts of the country that have barely any of it at all. Though a book written in the 80s is obviously somewhat dated, its basic insights on how fundamentally suspect the decision to locate a huge chunk of society in some of the most forbidding terrain in the world haven't changed at all. It has a wealth of history on the settlement and development of the American West, and a lot of great points on how fragile our way of life really is.
Alex Ross - The Rest Is Noise. Almost certainly the greatest book ever written about classical music in the 20th century, and definitely one of the best books written about music, period. Ross is able to discuss an incredible number of artists, their works, their influences, and general social and intellectual currents over the decades in a dense but extremely readable volume. You don't have to already have a PhD in music theory to understand his discussions of the meanings and structures behind some of the 20th century's masterworks, but you'll come away much more informed about music, be it classical, contemporary, or whatever after you're done.
Tom Standage - The Writing On the Wall. Countless people use social media every day to keep relationships going that would be vastly more difficult without them, and if most communication seems trivial, perhaps the real answer is that people are often trivial. The ultimate moral is familiar, that communications technologies are ultimately what we make of them, and can be used for good or evil depending on how they're structured and who the gatekeepers are. This history of social media from the Sumerians to the present shows that human nature is endlessly entertaining no matter which century you're in or what medium you're viewing it with.
Richard Stites - Revolutionary Dreams. If you are interested in Russian literature, science fiction, Marxism, or Russian history, then this is a must-read, one of those far-ranging critical studies that intelligently sums up a vast field while still giving you plenty of other works to chase down afterwards. It's a history of utopian thought in pre-revolutionary Russia, a discussion of practical problems the revolutionaries faced in building a new society, an overview of many now-forgotten writers and social movements, and a sad chronicle of literary censorship as the revolution began silencing dissidents and hardening into Stalinism.
Barbara Tuchman - A Distant Mirror. Tuchman's greatest skill is narrative - it's very difficult to think of historians with comparable talents to make what could have been a blurry smear of snore/war/gore in the 14th century into a clear, comprehensible, and fascinating history. Like many people, this period in history was kind of a morass to me, so it was welcome to have her organize this chaos of plague, war, recession, famine, brigandage, despotism, religious strife, and squabbling nobility into something not only memorable but instructive. While I wish she would have done more connection between the events of this time and those of the present day, this still stands as an excellent introduction to the period. Besides, figuring out parallels for yourself is half the fun.
Elijah Wald - How The Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll. There's a lot of very interesting discussion of trends in music composition, recording, consumption, and evolution in here, and its core thesis - that the watershed moment in the mid-Sixties when The Beatles and their contemporaries transformed the music industry had downsides as well as upsides - is well-argued and very thought-provoking. There are numerous objections you could raise to this idea (e.g. what about hip hop?), but I think Wald is onto something when he says that James Brown's "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" is in its own way just as revolutionary as most of what The Beatles put out, and that the world has lost something when genres like funk, soul, R&B, and so forth are artistically segregated from whiter, artier genres.
