Here, then, are ten books I read last year (not that came out, though most of it is of a recent vintage) that I liked. They are almost certainly not an exhaustive best of anything list. Also, I'm still reading stuff now in these last seven days of December, and it's possible that eg Tatyana Tolstoy's diary will totally blow everything else away. One hundred fifty pages in, though, I'm doubting it. These are kind of in order but not really, since each has its own charm.
In most cases, my Goodreads reviews of these books are far more detailed and nuanced than the brief summaries here.
Gelly's Recommended Reading List for 2009
10. City of Thieves, David Benioff and This is Where I Leave You, Jonathan Tropper (tie!)
A tie is a copout, but 10 is a wildly arbitrary number and I couldn't decide between the two. Both are lighthearted and hilarious, making serious subject matter (the siege of Leningrad and Nazi horrors, shiva after the death of a family member) a thorough blast to read through. They're not going to win you any points with your pretentious Roth and Pynchon loving friends, but read them in secret if you have to: both are cinematic, fun, quick, and well-written despite not seeming terribly "deep." If you love both of these, check out Josh Bazell's Beat the Reaper which tells the strange tale of a man turned surgeon who joins the witness protection program after joining the mob to avenge his Auschwitz-survivor grandparents' death. All take the Jewish identity theme and run somewhere better with it than last year's Orange finalist, When We Were Bad.
9. The Engineer of Human Souls, Josef Skvorecky
This is an old Czech book, and like all Czech novels it's about a philandering dissident author trying to find meaning through beauty and art etc. Unlike most Czech novels, the protagonist has left for the greener pastures of teaching literature at a small Canadian college. He shares conspiracy theories with his expat friends about the Czech intelligence service watching him, attempts to implant a love for literature in a class of generally brain-dead students, and spends most of his time reminiscing about his Czech youth, which goes from carefree to vulnerable and tragic during the second world war.
There are so many layers of story here and jumps in time, but Skvorecky manages it seamlessly. It's a beautifully told story.
8. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel
I've read many graphic novels in the last year, but even Maus didn't affect me emotionally as much as the true story of Alison Bechdel's father, whose death the college-aged Alison grieves as she learns more about the secret double life he led. She conveys his love of literature and troubled relationship with his family sensitively and compellingly.
7. Into the Beautiful North, Luis Alberto Urrea
An amazing story of a road trip from Sinaloa to Illinois and back again, Into the Beautiful North follows protagonist Nayeli's attempt to recruit young men to come back to Mexico to live in her romantically-frustrated village. She takes her two best girlfriends and gay boss Tacho (ironically the only young man left in town) with her, hoping to find and bring back her emigrant father along the way. The novel manages to keep a light tone without shying from addressing poverty, border violence, and the exploitation of Mexicans immigrating to the US.
6. The Lost City of Z, David Grann
The Lost City of Z is the only nonfiction book I'm including here, and it definitely stood out from any potential competition. (2008 seems to have been my year of great nonfiction - Traffic, Fruit Hunters, and A Bottle of Rum were all lovely...2009 seems to have been all about the short story novel!) Grann sets out to understand and explain the disappearance of Amazon explorer Sir Percy Fawcett, while attempting to determine whether the famed lost civilization Fawcett disappeared trying to find really existed. The book's biggest flaw is that it stops, leaving the reader wanting to know much more about what happened to Fawcett. It is, however, a riveting retelling of an old mystery.
5. The White King, György Dragomán
One of those rare attempts at the short story as novel genre that gets it right, The White King follows Djata, a preteen boy growing up in a totalitarian Eastern European country that sounds an awful lot like Ceausescu's Romania, through various episodes of his schoolboy's life while in the background he struggles to find out what has happened to his father, who has been removed from the family home as a political prisoner. Dragomán successfully portrays the absurdity of a society where every aspect of life is tightly controlled by higher authorities; the stories reminded me simultaneously of both Viktor Pelevin and Lord of the Flies.
4. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
This year's Booker winner can't be described without the word "ambitious," something the author and the protagonist Thomas Cromwell share in abundance. One of the most detailed historical novels I've read, Wolf Hall is fictionalized but kept carefully in line with the historical record; Mantel mostly fills in the gaps to create rich inner lives for all of her characters. There have been many stories told about the court of Henry VIII, but the riveting Wolf Hall reaches a depth that I haven't seen elsewhere.
3. Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
Another big prize winner! I am rarely in strong agreement with the Pulitzer committee, but the titular Olive and her little Maine town are rendered so vividly that I can't imagine a more worthy winner (even though I was cheering for finalist Plague of Doves out of all the things I read last year). Olive is not all that likable as a protagonist. Picture me in about forty years: cranky, frumpy, and disappointed in the world, and you've pretty much got her. I've always found the more complex and less sympathetic characters the most interesting, though, and Strout's short story collection, woven together around the town's inhabitants with every other story featuring Olive, creates an admirably multidimensional narrator while exploring the unavoidable lonely indignities of growing old.
2. The Crow Road, Iain Banks
This is another oldie-but-goodie, although The Crow Road has only recently been published in the United States. Other than some unfamiliar Scottish vocabulary ("moroculous"), I can't imagine why. It's a complex and wonderful novel. We meet narrator Prentice McHoan at the funeral of his grandmother after he's spent the last few years of his life being a mostly decent-hearted but generally self-absorbed shiftless prat. In the course of the book he is thoroughly pummeled until he appears to have lost everything, and then he loses more. From these depths he manages to emerge as a somewhat decent person, solving an old family mystery yet realizing that some things are best left buried.
1. 2666, Roberto Bolaño
I had mixed feelings while reading 2666, its nine hundred pages was at times a bit of a slog, and all of the loose threads made it seem to somehow converge upon brilliance while leaving it a hair's width out of reach. It's hard not to wonder what its final form would have been had Bolaño lived to see its publication, and I became skeptical halfway through reading the novel when someone found an apparently previously missing extra section of the book! Still, I'm convinced the loose threads add something. And strangely, it is the kind of book that is still riveting even when an entire major section has apparently gone missing. After all, we're shown the futility of solving some of the mysteries when no one acts on them. The writing is so flowing, and there were a hundred little subplots in which I lost myself enjoying. It's the kind of novel that makes you want to start making charts and lists and taking out atlases and plotting out who was where when and what exactly happened, but border city Mexico is not portrayed as the kind of place where objective truth really matters. Instead we are infused with the flavor of a place.
