You may have noticed some sporadic book blogging over the last year, due to a short-lived resolution to write 10 minutes a day. Well, my 10 minutes and me are back, though some of the snippets below are repeated from recent posts. Unlike some years, this is a ranked list.
- Annie Ernaux: The Years. Easily tops the list. I've seen it called a collective narrative as it tells a generational saga in the second person plural. And in addition to topping this list she won the Nobel Prize last year.
- Joseph Mitchell: Up in the Old Hotel. Of the books this comprises, McSorley's Wonderful Saloon and Bottom of the Harbor would have made the list on their own, with Joe Gould's Secret a contender. He sees so much others missed, from the old men sleeping in the warmth of McSorley's to calypso singers to a vibrant Roma community to all manner of water people.
- Philip Lopate, ed.: The Contemporary American Essay. Many great discoveries, and a few misses. A few standouts include Vivian Gornick's "Letter from Greenwich Village" and Hilton Als "I Am the Happiness of this World."
- Mick Herron: Slow Horses. Revitalizes (or re-revitalizes) the espionage genre (again). You'd think the fall of the Soviet Union would have been the death knell, but you don't really need the Soviets when you've got white nationalists, but you don't even need them when the real enemy is the bureaucratic organization itself.
- John Berryman: Dream Songs. Like Mitchell, it could be split into constituent books. The first 77 rise above the rest, though there are gems throughout. Of 77 Dreamsongs, I wrote "I loved this both for the skeptical approach to the self and occasional stunning bit of pure poetry... [Berryman] struggles in his masks, including the very awkward blackface which nonetheless can produce a beautiful line like [the] "Honey dusk do sprawl" ... [and in] another, transparent, mask "The weather fleured" ... or "O Adlai mine" (disclosing his vote) or the comic and awkward "What wonders is/ she sitting on, over there?""
- Svetlana Alexeyev: Second Hand Time. A different take on a collective narrative, this one in the oral history mode. To paraphrase: "We used to live for a principle; now there's salami in the stores and we're supposed to sell bottled water to one another."
- R.C. Sherif: A Fortnight in September. I stand by my earlier description: "Like a warm bath."
- Hanif Abdurraqib: They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us. Though I don't know much of the early century emo or backpack rap he writes about, this is very fine music writing. One indeliable image is in effect yet another collective narrative, or collective lyric anyway: emerging from the cellular deadzone of a Minnesota artspace, the crowd turns on their phones and learn of Michael Brown's death as a community.
- Harry Crews: A Childhood. This short personal memoir captures a very specific Southern world in which a community is bound by stories. In the memorable final scene, Crews realizes that after leaving for military service he has returned a heretic, cursing the sun.
- Helen DeWitt: The Last Samurai. Edges out Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch as the traditionalist big novel of the year.
- Quentin Tarantino: Cinema Speculation. QT is not a good writer. But I love to hear him talk about movies.
Honorable mention should be made of Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea saga, which I reread in its entirety, backwards.
