Christopher's Top Ten of 2018

Is it possible?  Is it top ten time already?

I had two resolutions this year: I wanted to read 75 books in total, and for half of those to be by women.  (I stole this second resolution from Brent.)  The 75 turned out not to be so hard--making the commitment is half the effort, I think, and it certainly helps that I don't have any kids.  In fact, I had enough time left over at the end of the year to read that great big brick of English-language lit, Ulysses.

Making half of those women turned out to be even harder.  I would say more of my favorite authors are women than men--Muriel Spark, Alice Munro, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Marilynne Robinson are probably all in my top five--but like most people I end up reading more books by men than women.  My strategy was to alternate, to the best of my ability, women and men, but what I found was that I depleted my shelf of women long before I depleted it of men.  I ended up at the Strand many times this year because I had run out of books by women, while I still had a big stack of men's books left to go.

But in the end the resolution turned out to be worth it.  Without making myself do it, who knows if I would have read Jean Stafford's The Mountain Lion, or Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room, or Mavis Gallant's terrific collection of stories?  I'm completely sure I never would have read the first of those Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante, which I had been avoiding.  My reading life was much richer this year for having done it, and not just because it exposed to me to a wider variety of voices: I think women are better writers, on average.

That sounds like a performatively woke thing to say, I know.  I don't say it to burnish my feminist ally cred.  But I think it's true: it's quite easy to hear, as a man, nothing but male voices.  It's why men have such trouble writing convincing portraits of women.  But women must be more awake to the multiplicity of voices in the world, because they have to be fluent in their own private voice as well as the voice of the male world.  That's pretty reductive, I think, but I think you can see evidence of it in The Mars Room, A Visit From the Goon Squad, The Mountain Lion, and in Gallant's stories: all stories which weave multiple voices and perspectives together, male and female, with skill.

Anyway, I'm claiming victory on this one: If you count Emily Wilson's translation of Homers's Odyssey as half written by a man and half written by a woman, I read 37.5 books by each.  I think it's a good habit to have, and I'm going to try to keep it going.  Here's my top ten, with some honorable mentions, from a year of reading.

Honorable Mentions 2018:

The Aunt's Story by Patrick White
Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler
The Comforters by Muriel Spark
The End of the World by Mavis Gallant
A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
How the Light Gets In by Pat Schneider
July's People by Nadine Gordimer
Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig
Miguel Street by V. S. Naipaul
Ulysses by James Joyce

Top Ten 2018:

10. Warlock by Oakley Hall - Up until like 30 seconds ago, I put Ulysses in this spot.  But it's hard for me to tell if I'm responding to Ulysses the book or the idea of Ulysses, with all its cultural baggage and heft.  I'm not sure how to balance out the parts of it that seemed astoundingly brilliant with the parts that seemed tedious.  So I switched it for Oakley Hall's Warlock, a book of narrow ambitions that does what it does with perfection.  All the pieces of Warlock are recognizable from other Westerns--the conflicted sheriff, the sympathetic rustler, the challenge of establishing law in the lawless West--but few combine them in such a gripping and compelling way.

9. Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munro - Munro's The Beggar Maid, with its overarching narrative, closer resembles her best work, The Lives of Girls and Women.  But I liked this collection, which contains some of Munro's stranger, more experimental work even better.  Published in 1974, its big theme is the disorienting feeling of generational change--these stories are obsessed with "hippies"--but they're structurally novel and layered with modernist tricks that make them sneakily avant-garde.  Munro gets knocked for her domesticity, but deep down she's got a radical heart, both artistically and socially, as the standout story "Material" suggests.

8. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante - Of course, Munro's not the only woman whose work is much darker and nastier than they're given credit for. Who knew that Ferrante's uberpopular novel was so savage?  It's a testament to female friendships, yes, but those are darker and nastier than they're given credit for too.  My Brilliant Friend is really about psychological trauma, violence, and the way they are produced by poverty and social unrest.  It does an especially good job of capturing the fear and anxiety of childhood, and while I'm excited to read the rest of these, I'll miss that aspect of the book as Elena and Lina grow up.

7. Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker - What's it like to be an identical twin?  According to Baker, who had identical twin children, it does strange and violent things to your own sense of self.  The weird, knotty Cassandra at the Wedding is about a woman whose identical twin's impending marriage leaves her feeling as if she's lost a part of herself.  Baker's account of Cassandra's attempted suicide is one of those bravura passages of writing that is going to stay with me for years and years.

6. The Last Gentleman by Walker Percy - Walker Percy is like Patrick White in that sometimes I can't decide if his writing his brilliant or terrible.  It sure is audacious, and strange, even as it seems to be invested in some of the most banal banalities of Southern life: college football, golf, cheerleading, etc., etc.  The hero of The Last Gentleman, Will Barrett, returns to his home in the South from New York by way of his attachment to a family seeking treatment for their critically ill son, before launching him out into New Mexico.  Percy's heroes always have the South in their bones, even as they became increasingly estranged from it.  Georg Lukacs calls that feeling "transcendental homelessness," and few authors talk about it as well as Percy.

5. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald - The synopsis of H is for Hawk--a woman turns to falconry to help her process the sudden death of her father--doesn't capture the complexity of this memoir, which is by turns urbane, witty, and desperate.  Macdonald weaves a whole history of falconry in literature and history with her own experiences training a goshawk named Mabel, and never once does it feel anything but honest and sincere.  It's rare to see someone write about themselves so nakedly as Macdonald does here, buoyed by her skill as a poet.

4. Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson - I asked the seniors in my fiction writing elective to read Denis Johnson's story "Out on Bail" for next week.  I hope they like it.  Like all the stories in this collection, it's written from the perspective of a junkie identified only as "Fuckhead," and it's as empathetic as it is filthy, fractured, and bizarre.  For Johnson, capturing the off-kilter understanding of an addict is an act of radical understanding, and these stories continue to light off fireworks in my head for months after reading them.  There's always a book that starts toward the bottom of my top ten list and works its way up in retrospect; this year it's this book.

3. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders - I'm such a snob when it comes to contemporary literature; I hardly read anything new.  I don't trust it.  But I'm grateful to know that books like this are still being written.  Lincoln in the Bardo is stylistically innovative and brutally honest about its big subject, death.  Saunders' version of the afterlife, a limbo-like place filled with comically exaggerated spirits, reminds me of both Beetlejuice and The Good Place in its creativity and scope of vision, but with a powerful sense of the reality of grief and loss.

2. The Rifles by William T. Vollmann - Here's another book that feels like it should just not work, in which Vollmann, working from his own harebrained experiences visiting Inuit communities and isolated nowheres in the Canadian Arctic, fashions himself into a character known only as Captain Subzero, who is also somehow the same character as the ill-fated Arctic explorer John Franklin.  Vollmann's work is always a weird mix of fact, sometimes too much fact, and fiction, but here I think it works tremendously.  The story of the Inuit woman Subzero gets involved with, Reepah, is heart-crushingly sad.  Novels by white writers about indigenous people are always a dicey proposition, but I think Vollmann's writing works because he doesn't absolve himself of guilt or shame.  It's a weird balance, but somehow it works.

1. The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford - I love books that really get how weird it is to be a kid.  The Mountain Lion is one of the best.  It's got something of the grotesquerie and horror of The Man Who Loved Children.  In a nutshell, it's about two kids, Ralph and Molly, who grow apart as Ralph grows closer to his uncle, a rancher in Colorado.  Like his uncle, Ralph wants to hunt and kill a mountain lion that prowls through their property as a way of affirming his manhood, his adulthood.  Molly, trapped in the weird solipsism of adolescence, burns with resentment toward Ralph.  The end of The Mountain Lion is so shocking I had to to close the cover and take a deep breath.  What a tremendous book.

There it is!  Another year "in the books!"  As always, we'd love to have more people join us on this weird wild quest, so if you'd like to join us, shoot me an e-mail at misterchilton at gmail dot com.  Happy new year, everyone!