Christopher's Top Ten of 2019

No, it can't be Top Ten time already.  I just wrote one of these last month, didn't I?  Oh, well--I can only assume that next year will go by more slowly.  This year brought some terrific new surprises, including new (to me) authors like Anna Burns, Harriet Doerr, Alistair McLeod, Rachel Cusk, Mary Gaitskill, and Charles Johnson.  And of course, I have to observe that I read more books in a single year (85) than I ever have.  Here's some other important numbers I've been keeping track of:

Books by women: 45/85
Books by people of color: 21/85
Books by non-Americans: 35/85
Non-fiction books: 12/85

I'm pretty happy about my resolution to make at least 50% of my reading books by women; obviously being better about reading authors of color is something I'm going to have to work on, too.  But it's a new year soon, and a clean slate.  For now, here's my reflection on the best books I was fortunate enough to read this year.

Honorable Mentions 2019:

Angels and Insects by A. S. Byatt
The Cross by Sigrid Undset
Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick
House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
The Ice-Shirt by William T. Vollmann
Island by Alistair McLeod
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro
Outline by Rachel Cusk
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

Top Ten 2019:

10. The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe - You know, I feel like I keep reading acclaimed science fiction/fantasy novels and coming away disappointed.  I couldn't get into Ann Leckie or N. K. Jemisin, although I believe genre readers when they say those are standout books in this field.  So The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe--who died earlier this year--really scratched an itch for me.  All the genre hallmarks are here--quests! guilds! citadels!--but they're constantly in flux, being recycled and recombinated, in a way that makes you suspect that something important and mysterious is going on "behind the curtain."  If genre conventions are only important to the extent that they're subverted, The Shadow of the Torturer is the best genre book there is.

9. The Eye of the Storm by Patrick White - This might be White's best novel outside of Voss.  In its central character, a dying old woman, White finds the perfect image for his obsession with the paradox of the material, physical (and often gross!) body and the possibly of spiritual transcendence.  As always, White's books are funnier, grosser, and downright weirder than I remember.

8. Libra by Don DeLillo - It's no mean feat to make the JFK assassination interesting, I think.  The 20th century moves around it like a black hole, a place where conspiracy theories proliferate until they collapse under their own weight.  DeLillo makes Libra worth reading, I think, by embracing the inscrutability of the whole thing: at the center of his novel is Oswald, an idiot and reprobate who barely understands himself, and a series of other bunglers whose collective myopia leads to JFK's death.  There's no big conspiratorial plan, but plenty of little ones, because that's what history is, a collection of small actors in the grip of a big mystery.

7. Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr - This quiet, beautiful novel is one of the big surprises of the year for me.  The setup--a pair of naive Americans move to rural Mexico to reinvigorate an old family mine--suggests a parody about cultural conflict, and while it's true that the Evertons never quite understand the Mexican villagers who become part of their lives or vice versa, the novel is really much more gentle and tragic.  It's husband Richard's incurable and terminal disease that comes to snatch their dreams away, and everyone's attempts to overcome cultural barriers, as doomed to failure as they are, that come to seem sweetly noble.

6. My Antonia by Willa Cather - Funny, Doerr's writing reminds me of nobody else but Willa Cather.  I was so taken by this sweet, charming story of life on the Nebraska plains at the turn of the century, in a way that I never was by Death Comes for the Archbishop, a book I liked considerably.  Few books capture such a sense of place and time as this one, and it takes such a writerly eye to find the interest and magic in a place like Nebraska.  As for Antonia herself, dust-jacket descriptors like "headstrong" and "stubborn" seem so reductive; whatever she is, it's more convincing and real than those words can convey.

5. The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante - Like John, I read the second in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan series this year, although I think I was more persuaded by it than he was.  To me, the appeal of these novels is no mystery: they capture a social moment that few books are able to, and few authors are willing to try.  This book is stronger than the first for me because so many of the characters finally come into stark relief, and knowing who they are, I can see how they fit into the socioeconomic landscape of mid-century Naples.  Elena and Lila's opposite trajectories here--Elena's sudden success and Lila's sudden downfall--are not just an extension of the personal conflict set up by My Brilliant Friend, but an expression of two women struggling against the forces of history.

4. Milkman by Anna Burns - Of all the novels I read this year, this is one of two that made me go: Huh.  I didn't know you could do that.  The funny, cynical, oblique, casual voice of the title character of Milkman, called only "middle sister," is like nothing else I've ever read.  And it's perfect for this story of social repression at the heart of Catholic Northern Ireland during the Troubles.  It's weird and circular way of speaking and thinking is a perfect distillation of how we are often unable, or unwilling, to see our own historical moment clearly.

3. The Collected Stories of Grace Paley - This is the other book that made me react that way.  I've been familiar with a few of Paley's stories for a while because I use them in my fiction writing class, but I didn't realize until reading this collection that they are part of a huge corpus of semi-autobiographical stories that tell a version of Paley's own life.  And yet, things happen here that could never happen in real life: at one point the Paley stand-in, Faith, visits the family living in her old apartment out of curiosity and doesn't leave for months.  The thing I admire most about Paley is that she never seems to agonize over whether a choice is the right one, or if people will get it, she just barrels on, and if people get it, they get it.  If not, that's their problem.  I dream of that kind of bravery!

2. Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers - Let me tell you something.  I was taught--in a manner of speaking--that racism, as a social force, at least, was something we had all woken up from in the 60's, like a very long and bad dream.  The past few years have shown me how naive that was.  And no book--none--has resonated with that newfound feeling of shame and anger than McCullers' Clock Without Hands, a book about how bigotry murders and poisons everything.  I recognize the sad old racist Judge at the heart of this novel everywhere, from the White House to family Christmas, and I wish I could get all of them to read this book, which is like someone trying to smash a mirror in their faces.  This book left me almost literally shaking.

1. Tree of Smoke and Angels by Denis Johnson - OK, I'm cheating.  What are you going to do about it?  I was convinced for most of the year that Tree of Smoke was the novel of the year for me: a sprawling, intelligent, mysterious take on the Vietnam War that one-ups Libra in its conception of the 20th century as mostly mystery and mistake.  And it cemented my belief that Johnson is one of America's most perfect stylists.  But as the year went on and on, I found that it was Angels--a slimmer book, about Arizona, greyhound buses, drug addiction, rape, and the death penalty--that kept coming to my mind again and again.  Like McCullers, Johnson demands we really look at the people we try so hard not to look at.  And I had actually forgotten until this moment that Tree of Smoke is really a prequel to Angels, the story of Bill Houston, whom war has--well, not destroyed, but it sure didn't make him any better.  If Angels is a portrait one man whose life never really mattered for much, Tree of Smoke wonders who exactly decided things would be that way, and why.  These novels' focuses are so different, large and small, political and personal, but together they're the best things I read this year.