I had two reading goals in 2021. One was to beat my total of 100 books read from last year, which I did by a single book. The other, which I made halfway through the year, was to seek out and "fill in" the countries from which I have never read a book. Thanks to this new resolution, I added eight new countries to my lifetime total: Mauritius, Jordan, Bosnia, Cambodia, Kenya, Uruguay, Sudan, and Togo. That means I read books from 23 countries this year, and from 55 countries in my lifetime. I'm sure this is one goal that will take a while, and I'm looking forward to doing even better next year.
I had a couple other fun small reading projects this year: in January, I focused on indigenous American and Canadian literature, a project that mostly led me to revisit some authors I've really loved, like Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, and James Welch, whose novel Winter in the Blood was one of my favorite surprises of the year. I'm already planning on doing it again--maybe this time I'll give it a snappy name like "Indijanuary." Still workshopping that. In April, I read a bunch of Australian literature, including my much-loved Patrick White, and a bunch of weird new stuff by writers like Thea Astley, Elizabeth Jolley, and Jack Cox. I don't know if I'll do that again or not, but I enjoyed taking a literary tour "down under."
One thing I've discovered is that literature really is inexhaustible. Instead of getting shorter, my to-read list seems to get longer with every new book or author. As I've pushed my yearly count up to 100 over the past few years--a feat I achieved partly by avoiding Netflix, and partly by the strange fortune of working from home during a global pandemic--the sense that I've read so little of what's out there only becomes more potent. And it also means that compiling a top ten, or even a top twenty, has become more and more difficult.
But looking over the books I read this year, it seems to me that 2021 has been as strong as any year since Brent and I started this stupid project way back in the flip-phone era. 2022 comes with a clean slate, and I can't wait to get started again.
Happy new year!
STATS:
Books read: 101
Men: 48
Women: 53
Non-fiction: 12
Short story collections: 4
Countries: 23, 8 of which were new
Honorable Mentions 2021:
The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah
The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist
No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore
Stream System by Gerald Murnane
A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
Blindness by Jose Saramago
Top Ten 2021:
10. Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez - It's pretty rare for me to put a non-fiction book in my top ten, but that's how much Barry Lopez's book about the Arctic resonated with me. There's probably no one else in the world who could write about the Arctic like Lopez did, drawing on his experience both as an Arctic researcher and a fiction writer. The result is a book that is both sensitive about the ways in which the Arctic is unique--its strange ways of reckoning time, the small but tightly-knit lives of its people and animals--but also richly observed and written. Arctic Dreams is a book about how people imagine the Arctic, and why they are drawn to it, but Lopez's vivid landscapes serve to reproduce that feeling of fascination in the mind of the reader as well.
9. The Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy - I sort of avoided reading this book because I assumed that Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado was lightning in a bottle: a book whose voice was so pitch-perfect it couldn't be replicated. The Old Man and Me isn't The Dud Avocado; its protagonist is calculating and clever, rather than an ingenue, but the qualities that made that other book so great are also here. It's a testament to Dundy's skill that the protagonist, "Honey Flood"--a fake name--is so sympathetic even though she comes awfully close to seducing, then killing, the aged writer she believes has made away with her inheritance. That it manages to have a sweet and satisfying resolution is perhaps even more amazing.
8. The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner - Of all the novels I read about nuns this year--yes, there were three--this one is far and away the best. Religious principles like avocation, chastity, and divine mystery are all sort of sidelined by Townsend Warner's novel about a century in the life of a single convent in the British countryside in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Corner That Held Them is about economics and its consequences. Divine inspiration can wait; the convent must extract its tithes, pay its bills, get the spire built, and keep the lights on. Even nuns have bureaucracy, as evidenced by the novel's enormous cast, who drift in an out of the life of the convent over its entire course. Townsend Warner's vision of religious life is essentially Marxist; though many of the nuns feel called, time and again, to serve in more meaningful ways, the life of the convent itself can only be explained economically.
7. The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake by Breece D'J Pancake - "I like to hold little stones that lived so long ago," says the narrator of Pancake's story "Trilobites," about the title fossils. One of the best sentences I've read this year. It speaks to the soul of the stories of Pancake, a native West Virginian whose entire literary output, before his suicide, is collected in this book. They are clear-eyed about the sourness of poverty and ecological destruction that have defined life in West Virginia for a better part of the century, but they know these things must be balanced against the deep roots of West Virginians, and the long brave lives of their communities. These stories are enigmatic and subtle, and like coal, much of what makes them so valuable lies a little beneath the surface. I'm glad I was able to read these stories while in West Virginia. Few stylists match their environment so well.
6. Winter in the Blood by James Welch - "I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon," writes the narrator of Welch's novel about a Blackfoot man bumming around the towns in and outside the reservation in Montana. I was surprised by how different this novel was from the historical fiction of Welch's Fools Crow; what Winter in the Blood reminded me of most was the transcendental aimlessness of Denis Johnson's angelic junkies. What amazed me most about the novel, I think, is that it shares a general outlook with some of the most classic 20th century Native American novels, like Ceremony and House Made of Dawn, the belief that returning to, and reconciling with, indigenous communities can serve as an antidote to the destabilizing effects of modernity, but in a style that avoids some of the sentimentality and cant that such a belief can attract.
5. The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli - One thing I don't think I fully appreciated before reading widely is how many different kinds of absurdism there are. I've certainly never read a book like The Story of My Teeth, about a Mexican auctioneer named Highway. Highway thinks of auctioneering as a kind of storytelling, in which the orbit of the story around truth might get more and more oblique (see the conic sections that provide the chapters with titles). The Story of My Teeth, too, is a novel with a strangely elliptic relationship to the truth: it's written about, and with the collaboration of, workers at a juice factory in suburban Mexico City. The result is a novel that, in perhaps the realest way, shows tremendous respect and regard for working-class people. It's hard to think of a finer expression of the belief that literature is for all people than this strange and silly book.
4. The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson - Denis Johnson once told his editor, "I’m not trying to be Graham Greene. I think I actually am Graham Greene." Once you see the connection, it's hard to miss it in Johnson's The Laughing Monsters, which is his The Heart of the Matter, a book about a cynical and sour old Western spy up to nasty tricks in colonized Africa. Like Tree of Smoke, The Laughing Monsters reveals the hollowness at the heart of geopolitics and espionage, depicting it as a world of loyalties that shift so constantly they can barely be said to exist at all, and one in which national interests and personal interests get so muddled up they collide and evaporate like antiparticles. The Congolese (or possibly Ugandan?) spy Michael Adriko is one of Johnson's great characters, a seductive charmer who suckers his old friend into explosive and violent situations.
3. Harrow by Joy Williams - More like Despair Williams, am I right? Harrow is, perhaps, the first great climate change novel, because Williams understands that the epochal change the climate crisis will bring demands new forms. To describe the novel is already to describe something feverish and bizarre: a young woman, once believed by her mother to have returned from the dead, takes shelter with a group of elderly eco-terrorists in a crumbling motel. The final section of the novel is narrated by a 12-year old judge. And yet, that description fails to capture how exceedingly strange the novel is. It operates on a new and unfamiliar logic, as one suspects the world to come might also operate. The vision of the future it provides isn't pretty: a world bereft of animals, "mangled into chalk," in which human beings have decided not to change their ways but to become increasingly resentful of the natural world. What Williams understands is that the most frightening thing about climate change is not the end of the world, but that it will go on.
2. The Dying Grass by William T. Vollmann - Vollmann's book about the Nez Perce War of the late 19th century is the fifth in his seven-book series about conflict between European settlers and Native Americans. (Sometimes I feel about these books like others do about George R. R. Martin: I hope he hurries up and finishes them before some terrible misfortune. In Vollmann's case, maybe death by carpal tunnel.) It's maybe not the best (I really love The Rifles) but it's close, and it's the biggest, seven hundred pages and hundreds of characters: All War, no Peace. I loved Vollmann's sensitive and thoughtful portrayals of both "Uh Oh" Howard, the pious but misguided general who pursued the Nez Perce all over the west, and Chief Joseph, the generous and little-respected man white Americans mistakenly believed to be the Nez Perce's leader. In some way, The Dying Grass is as much a novel about a doomed world as Harrow; the Nez Perce, despite their brilliant retreat, never believe they will see their homelands again, and they fight bitterly about how to go on when all is already lost. The strange poem- or code-like form of the novel is brilliant, but never ostentatious, and allows Vollmann to use an even wider lens than usual.
1. The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante - OK, there's something about this choice that's a little like The Two Towers winning the Oscar: does it deserve it on its own merits, or is the award meant to honor the achievement of the whole series? Truthfully, the "Neapolitan" novels are a remarkable achievement when taken as a whole. What amazes me about them is how faithfully render each individual character, and then those characters, as real human beings do, keep surprising us. There is something in them that replicates the way in which we are always learning more about other people, and somehow the ways they surprise us turn out to show their character best of all. It has become trendy recently to say that the novels are social realism in the Tolstoy or Dickens mode (I have said this myself), and that's true, but I think it's possible to let the pendulum swing too far: as novels of intense individual-level psychological study, they are unparalleled. But The Story of the Lost Child deserves the #1 slot in its own right because, like the characters themselves, it has plenty of surprises. The way the Solara mafioso plotline is unceremoniously shuffled out of the novel's interest is startlingly brave, and the way the entire series is upended by a single terrible moment--alluded to in the title--is like nothing I've ever read. It's just a masterpiece. It's the best book I read this year.
No comments:
Post a Comment