“I refer to largesse in thought”
Books. A year. Best books of the year. A mug, a game. Benjamin Schwarz predictably plumps for biographies & Alice Munro, while Amazon readers appear to be, in Adam Smith’s words, “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become . . . not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.”
My own “books of the year” were written between two & four hundred years before the present twelvemonth. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, George Herbert’s The Temple, Nick Laird’s On Purpose, & Marx’s Capital were the books that meant the most to me in 2009. But in the spirit of the season, I offer some plums among the few books published this year that I managed to read, if only in part (leaving aside those I reviewed for various periodicals). The purpose of this enterprise is simply to encourage you, the reader, to suggest your own titles, that I might add more books I won’t have time to read to my Christmas list.
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
The most innovative seating. Nothing short of miraculous. Let go of worry. Found: Captain of His Destiny. Reality isn’t captured by hidden camera. It’s all in the crust. This is so far out of my job description it’s not even funny. There’s no rerun when you’re living in the now.
Dexter Filkins, The Forever War
Filkins’s harrowing book, out in paperback this year, earns its obligatory comparisons with Michael Herr’s Dispatches, which means that The Forever War is the best book about war since the best book about war since The Iliad. “‘I’m sorry,’ Sergeant Schrumpf said, shaking his head. ‘But the chick was in the way.’”
Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before
From late 2008, this coffee-table-sized slab is a (barely) portable holodeck containing the best photography of the last thirty years: Djikstra, Wall, Demand, Gursky, Struth, Sugimoto, Höfer. It has words, too, & they’re by Michael Fried, so I imagine they’re worth reading, but I couldn’t tell you what any of them are.
Mark Johnston, Saving God: Religion after Idolatry
If any intellectual phenomenon is as greasily infuriating as the fascistic antics of the Christian right, it’s the Neanderthal atheism of such subluminaries as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, & Sam Harris, each of whom knocks down Santa Claus & purports to have refuted centuries of theological argument. Johnston is hitting for the majors here, brushing Dawkins & Co. aside in order to argue for a conception of God & religion outside “the supernatural cosmologies of the Near East,” within the framework of naturalism, through which salvation is possible even as the notion of an afterlife is seen to be idolatrous. A companion volume, Surviving Death, is due next year.
David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp
When I was a teenager, I fell for Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli’s Batman: Year One like Pepé le Pew for a paint-striped pussy. Miller spent the next twenty years making garbage, while Mazzucchelli apparently dug himself a hole & hunkered down, only to pop up with the most complex & elegant comic book of the decade. Pick up this modernism-haunted comedy of remarriage along with The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics (ed. Art Spiegelman & Francoise Mouly), & you’ll have a fine sense of the possibilities of the medium.
Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip
Lisa Robertson is like Wikipedia, except with night-vision goggles & “a Spontaneous Horizontal Restaurant.” If I want to know how bubbles are formed, I will turn to her. I will not necessarily learn anything about glycerin, but I will discover something about my heart & its twin, my cuckold-heart, my heart-in-pink-suspenders. Also Robertson’s books are the most exciting objects within a hundred-mile radius.
Nick Laird? Really?
I should admit I haven’t read the recent book, only “To a Fault,” which I thought was pretty run-of-the-mill.
On Purpose takes it to a different level. It’s more melancholic, counterpointing the elegance which can become bland, or run-of-the-mill as you say.
Hmm. I’ll have to see if the library’s got it.
I take it the Adam Smith quote is something of a joke. But why does the discussion of what people read so often have to start off on this note of snobbery & disdain? It turns me off immediately, so that I no longer care what you like to read.
A little sad to see, looking over my reading diary, how little I read this year outside of what my dissertation demanded. And almost none of it from 2009, though that has as much to do with my grad-school penury as anything. That big Marcus/Sollors book came to our household as a gift, and has pretty consistently beat out The New Yorker for the lunchtime reading slot. The writing can be very good, and even when it’s not, you get to learn something. Wish I had it around the house as a kid instead of the World Book Encyclopedia I used to while away my days on the farm with.
I’ve been meaning to work up a post on my friend Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, out now from Wave, which is mightily impressive. I liked Susan Wheeler’s Assorted as much as you and AM did. Forrest Gander’s As a Friend is slight and good and, thanks to the unnarrated back-story, a bit of a trip.
I haven’t read Filkins yet, but plan to. Instead, and prompted by the terrific Hurt Locker, I’ve been dipping in and out of Chris Hedges’s War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a thoughtful book whose solemnity is both bane and boon. A much better war book I read this year–not at all solemn–is an old one: E.E. Cummings’s Enormous Room.
What else? I liked Netherland, admired the skill of it, but I also thought Ben Kunkel’s complaints in the LRB were pretty spot-on. Finally got around to True Grit and Bouvard and Pecuchet and in each case wondered why in the world I waited so long.
Thanks for the tip on the Johnston and Fried. M. Robinson’s essays (in The Death of Adam) are another good antidote to the New Atheist noise. I’d read Fried on Wall in some journal or other, but didn’t know he’d put together a big pretty book to go with it. Good to hear.
Well, now, Henry, if you’d read the Smith in question, you’d know he’s not being snobbish at all, but denouncing the conditions that lead to such ignorance. I don’t see how regretting that people read Dan Brown & Glenn Beck is snobbish, either: it simply is a regrettable fact, objectively.
Bobby, co-sign on the Hedges collection & Robinson’s essays. I’ll check out some of the other stuff you mention.
Also—Mary Gaitskill’s entry on Mailer: worst piece of writing to appear anywhere this year? I say this as a big admirer of Gaitskill’s stories.
Michael, I’m glad you are the proud possessor of that piece of additional knowledge. But Smith’s attitude is irrelevant; it’s your application of the quote that bothered me.
It’s funny how our superior knowledge of “regrettable conditions” gives us permission to call masses of people stupid & ignorant. What a valuable bit of convenience that is, for all right-thinking determinists.
Questioner : “What do you fear most?”
Gandhi : “The cold hearts of the educated citizens.”
No, a consideration of my application of the quote is incomplete without a consideration of the context.
I take it that it is yr view that there are no regrettable conditions we might have knowledge of, & that there are no masses of people who are stupid & ignorant. You are obviously more clear-thinking than I.
I see, Michael. Now that I know more about the context of Smith’s words, I’m better able to appreciate that masses of people are not only stupid & ignorant (based on the evidence of what they buy at Amazon books) but deserving of pity, since they are the blind victims of regrettable conditions (by which I suppose - though I might be wrong - you & Smith mean market forces).
Swift was a fine satirist, too, I hear (I don’t know his work that well, either) - he certainly saw ignorance & stupidity all around. & he wrote to attack it as best he could, I gather. I don’t know if he had an explanation for it - the stupidity - other than that it was simply a fact of the human condition, of human nature.
I’m glad to learn, though, that a thin strata of highly-educated readers, such as yourself, not only recognize human ignorance & stupidity where’er it occurs, but comprehend the regrettable conditions which create it. It’s the bright & wise people of that sector - & the refined & little-known works of literature they read - that offer real hope for mankind.
I’m glad you’ve seen the light.
Looking up from Lagado, yes, there’s a fine radiance around the Island of Laputa.
I recommend _Out of My Skin_ by John Haskell. (FSG paperback original, 2009)
Weird L.A. novel full of unusual meditations on movies, the city, writing, and Steve Martin.
The eighteen best books I read this year so far in no particular order were:
Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side
C.S. Lewis, English Literature of the Sixteenth Century
Frank King, Walt and Skeezix, volumes 1-3
Hoa Nguyen, Kiss a Bomb Tattoo
Eugene Marten, In the Blind
Aase Berg, tr. Johannes Goransson, With Deer
Barton Gellman, Angler: The Dick Cheney Vice Presidency
Susan Wheeler, Assorted Poems
Aaron Fagan, Garage
Wiktor Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
Michael Sonenscher, The Hatters of Eighteenth Century France
Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Anthony Madrid, The 580 Strophes
Dara Wier, Selected Poems
Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial
A.J. Arberry, trans., Poems of al-Mutanabbi
A.J. Arberry, The Seven Odes
Anthony will be pleased you liked his book! I’ll let him know.
A big second on Anthony Madrid’s 580 Strophes. I received the book, and then a couple weeks ago Anthony sent me the whole, big manuscript from which the lovely chapbook is taken.
Some publisher is going to be very smart and write to him for it. It’s one of the most exciting works of poetry I’ve seen in a long time.
Third!
“Oh, we must go to school for Swift, for Swift says there’s no helping
Hating your neighbor, but you have to be a help to him nonetheless.”
- Anthony Madrid
(courtesy John Latta, who reads these obscure little-known books for me)
I’m withholding judgment until Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘The Way of the Tarot’ is (finally) released in English in 2010.
Not to beat a dead horse, but I have been 100 pages away from finishing ‘The Savage Detectives’ for about three months. Quelle snooze. I’ve been encouraged, however, to have higher hopes for ‘2666.’
I bought 2666 when the three-volume pb came out. It is sitting in pristine condition on my shelf. Rose read it, tho, & loved it.
I have been trying for days to decide whether to buy the new Stephen King or wait a year for the pb.
I’m kind of interested in the Sarah Palin book, too.
I just read an interview w/ Harold Bloom in Vice magazine. WTF?
Harold Bloom in Vice is on my list for the most generically coherent event of the year.
It looks like the release date for Jodorowsky’s ‘Tarot’’s been pushed up to either November 18th or 25th. Stay tuned for my one-item best books inventory.