Reflections on What I Read in 2008
This year, I read a number of good books and a few that disappointed me. My top ten for the year, in alphabetical order by author:
- Peace by Richard Bausch. For a few months this year, it seemed the best books I read were short ones — novels of less than 200 pages that seemed to have a narrow scope but which, really, had enormous depth. This was one of them. The present tense of the story is simple: three American soldiers during World War I climb a hill in Italy, led by an old man who may be friend or may be an enemy, to scout for enemy troops. They go up the hill and then, some of them, come back down again. Beneath that, however, the book dealt with the price of prejudice and the value of mercy.
- The March by E.L. Doctorow. Although this novel is a few years old, I hadn’t read it until I heard that Doctorow was coming to town to give a talk and receive an award. It’s about Sherman’s march through the South near the end of the Civil War. There are a number of reasons that it’s an amazing book but perhaps the primary reason arises from Doctorow’s ability to write from so many points of view — a young slave girl who was the product of her mother’s sleeping with the master of the plantation; Sherman; a young Confederate soldier; a previously sheltered Southern woman who becomes a nurse for a Yankee doctor.
- The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III. One of two post-9/11 novels on the list (the other is Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, below.) It’s a compelling story from multiple perspectives – a fictionalized version of one of the terrorists who flew a plane into the World Trade Center, a stripper he encounters, a poor and unfortunate soul who gets over his head in trouble when he makes a foolish mistake at the strip club.
- Matrimony by Joshua Henkin. The novel is a model of efficiency as it covers with amazing care and depth roughly twenty years in his characters’ lives in just a scant more than 300 pages.
- Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. The American madness in Vietnam from several perspectives. If you had doubt that we were still publishing big novels with grand ambition, you should read this.
- The House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey. I’ve read every novel Livesey has written and this one seems her best. Told from four points of view in four sections, it gives us an ever-deepening understanding of an event that closes out the first section.
- Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles. Another small book — 180 pages — the novel is, on the surface, a letter of complaint the narrator writes to the airline while he waits, stranded in Chicago’s O’Hare airport while he’s trying to get to his estranged daughter’s commitment ceremony. In the midst of the complaint, however, the narrator goes through his entire life — every messy, failed year of it.
- Last Night at the Lobster by Stuart O’Nan. Another seemingly small, quiet book — but riveting. It centers on the last night a Red Lobster Restaurant will be open and centers on the manager who tries to cope with a major storm, a lost love, finding a Christmas present for the mother of his child, and a workforce who doesn’t see the point in doing anything.
- Netherland by Joseph O’Neill. The book is deceptively quiet — especially for a novel that deals with the post-9/11 world–and who would have thought that a novel with cricket at its center (and cricket in the US at that) could be so riveting.
- Final Salute by Jim Sheeler. The one work of non-fiction on my list. The book centers on the soldiers whose job it is to inform next-of-kin that a loved one died in battle. I read it for personal reasons — after my son had come home from a year in Iraq and I had spent nearly every day of those 365 expecting someone like the figures in Sheeler’s book to knock on my door. You can’t read this book without crying.
Posted by
at
17:07:32
