As part of our year-end coverage, we’re once again asking this annual question of our staff and readership:
What’s the best non-2018 book you read this year?
Clayton Purdom
Except for the Beastie Boys Book, I didn’t read any books from 2018 in 2018, part of my lifelong inability to find contemporary fiction that I don’t immediately dislike. But I did spend a rapturous couple of weeks reading White Noise by Don DeLillo, which, published in 1985, is about as contemporary as I generally get, bookwise. In some ways, it feels like a product of its era, full of Reagan-era paranoia about consumerism, the failures of intellectualism, and television. I sort of knew all of this, from reputation, before I started it; what I did not know is that it’s also wildly, darkly hilarious, prefiguring the cosmic cuckoldry of A Serious Man and the droll despair of a Wes Anderson protagonist. It’s also really short, which is helpful if you read books at a snail’s pace, and full of marvelously crafted sentences, which is also helpful if you read books at a snail’s pace. It’s stuck with me like nothing else I’ve read in recent memory.
Nick Wanserski
After many years of friends suggesting with increasing exasperation that I check out some China Miéville, I finally picked up Perdido Street Station. The language is so dense and chewy that it took me a long time to finally consume the whole thing. But it was worth it. Few fantasy authors are as capable as Miéville at delivering nuanced and insightful character studies. By the loosest obligation to genre, Perdido would be considered steampunk—the city of New Crobuzon, where the story takes place, is a mottled clockwork of pneumatic tubing (bearing such neighborhood names as Smog Bend and St. Jabber’s Mound) and grotesque multi-species Dickensian social stratification. But Miéville is only interested in genre as a jumping-off point. His world-building is frighteningly elaborate and clever, but it’s only interesting to him inasmuch as how it can be used to explore the lives of the people inhabiting the place. Even the overarching story, of the human scientist Isaac and his kind of secret, kind of forbidden bug-headed artist girlfriend Lin, is just about two people trying to do their jobs.
Caitlin PenzeyMoog
The Orphan Master’s Son was so compelling and beautifully written that I couldn’t stop reading it, and its contents were so horrifying and brutal that I just wanted it to end. Adam Johnson’s tragic love story in modern-day North Korea is both an imaginative, spellbinding epic and one of the most depressing novels I’ve ever enjoyed. I’ve read about North Korea, of course, heard stories about how, seen from South Korea at night, its lights all go out when the government cuts the country’s power, plunging its cities into velvety blackness while Seoul’s lights blaze next door. But to read The Orphan Master’s Son is to live in North Korea for a while, and the absurdity that goes hand in hand with fascist governments is both blackly comic and deeply harrowing in Johnson’s telling, like 1984 meets Brazil meets Charles Dickens.
Laura Adamczyk
“The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out,” the protagonist of Dept. Of Speculation thinks while apartment-hunting in New York. Later a friend tells her, “The invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck.” Then come the bed bugs. It’s a slow, creeping dread that drapes itself over the nameless wife of Jenny Offill’s second novel, a feeling that is at first indistinguishable from her usual state of disquiet. One of the things I liked best about this short novel is how un-novel-like it is, forgoing more familiar modes of characterization or plot development in favor of a perfect distillation of the most usual of stories: a man and a woman meet, fall in love, marry, have a child, and then start to grow apart. Reading it feels like stepping into a quiet room in a loud city—a library, a reading room, anywhere one feels compelled to whisper. For its delicate, precise compression, its perfect marriage of subject and form, it’s the kind of book where I can imagine the author, after having written it, never feeling the need to write another.
Danette Chavez
You know the expression, “Shop your closet”? Lately I’ve been browsing my own bookshelves in both an effort to clear the clutter and read more. If the Borders receipt in the inside flap is to be believed, I purchased Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History Of The Dead years ago and then promptly forgot about it. I finally tucked into it while traveling to and from Mexico last month, and I would like to thank my 2007 self, because in addition to an agreeably slow-burning mystery, Brockmeier offers the most resonant vision of the afterlife that I’ve ever read. Heaven isn’t a place on Earth, and hell doesn’t exist—but the belief that we live on in the memories of our loved ones and friends does. Those recollections and feelings carry over into a plane that’s like something out of the Forgotten Realms, but much more contemporary and with considerably more tedious responsibilities, including working to feed your undead self. I should have read this when I first plunked down the money for it, but the idea of working past our deaths works just as well in 2018, if not more so.
Kelsey J. Waite
I tend to read more poetry than anything, and probably less nonfiction than anything, but this winter I finally took on Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Watching her lay out the history and inner workings of America’s racist criminal justice system was as moving a reading experience as I’ve ever had. Although it was published only eight years ago, Alexander’s argument that mass incarceration functions as a more formidable mutation of Jim Crow has thoroughly altered the way many people think of and talk about the system. Indeed, if you’ve seen Ava DuVernay’s The 13th, you’ve encountered some of Alexander’s ideas. But I highly recommend reading them from the author herself; she makes an unwieldy and difficult topic digestible and compulsively readable while sacrificing neither meticulousness nor emotion.
Alex McLevy
The stories of what goes on behind closed doors have an inherent voyeuristic appeal, whether it’s sexual, political, or—in the case of Desperate Networks, which I finally got around to this year—the frantic struggle for dominance and success among the four American television network as they moved from the ’90s into the 21st century. Bill Carter’s in-depth account of the dealings, developments, and cutthroat business strategies that took place among NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox over roughly a 10-year period is engrossing stuff, especially when it comes to the tenuous role creativity plays in making a TV show a hit or a failure. With special attention to the profound transformation in news during this era and the idiosyncrasies of the talent behind the scenes at each of the networks, the book manages to make what’s happening off-camera far more absorbing than most of the shows Carter references. (Though the unlikely development process around Lost, for example, could constitute a juicy TV show in its own right.) It’s a gripping work of nonfiction, and essential reading for anyone interested in how the TV sausage gets made.
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The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, finally. Shit’s like Catcher In The Rye turned up to eleven.
January of last year I read Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams – a bunch of her short stories. Not every one is a winner, but those that are stick.
Yeah, I’m gonna read more for sure. Not for a bit, though. Bell Jar kinda dropped me in the basement a little too hard. Possibly wasn’t the best choice to hit during the emotional death-zone that is the month of December.
I HIGHLY recommend reading her unabridged journals. They’re simply magnificent. However, be sure you’re in a good frame of mind, because a lot of what she writes is triggering. I could only read so much at a time because she gets dark. My impression from it is that today she’d be diagnosed as bipolar. Her entries go from incredibly upbeat one month, to hopeless and suicidal the next. I don’t mean to scare you though. The writing is superb.
One of my treasures is I have a first edition (second printing) of The Bell Jar, published under Plath’s pseudonym Victoria Lucas.
Damn, is that the one where the cover is a spiral? Very cool.
It’s a bit earlier, and was published only in the UK (along with the earlier, true first edition):
Woaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. First editions, sigh.
I had a chance to buy the true first edition earlier in the year, but it went a bit out of my budget range.
How much is a true first edition? Curious.
There are a couple on ebay for $9500-$10,000, but that’s a bit high, and there have been no sellers. The one I was looking at sold at auction for a bit less, $7000 or so including the buyer’s premium. Either way not cheap, but then again it’s a seminal text in 20th century literature, and received a very, very small print run. Also, it’s notable for being the only edition of the Bell Jar published in Plath’s lifetime, a few weeks before her suicide.Now, if I had the money, they recently auctioned her personal copy of the Bell Jar with her name inside, the date and the address of her last residence. THAT one sold for over a $100,000. I’d pay that in a heartbeat, but I would not live under the same roof with it. That book would be haunted as fuck.
Haunted, yeah. That would be a difficult thing to own, no matter where it was living.
I found it to be a bit of a snooze-fest.
I am nearly finished with The Count of Monte Cristo. Damn it is a long book, I am glad I started it.
love that one! i wrote a stage version of it but alas, it’s never been produced.
The Quiet American by Graham Greene. Well told story of a time (1950s) and place (Vietnam) few Americans know a lot about.
Ugh, such a good book. Graham Greene rules.
I picked up his short fiction and enjoyed it, and The Quiet American is next on my reading list!
Good movie adaptation, too.
I was really happy to see that Amazon finally had Greene books on Kindle. I’d already read TQA, but picked up a bunch of other ones on sale. I recently read The Ministry of Fear, which is a sold ‘entertainment’, though not quite top tier Greene.
Such a great book. The old empire trying to warn the new about the follies of imperialism……and the new not listening.
The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich, which I saw recommended on this site. Really excellent, a valuable contribution to war literature. Had never read a book focused on women at war, especially not Soviet women. Highly interesting discussion of how women were valued in the military by men during the war but were then looked down upon by both men (for being too manly) and women (for ostensibly stealing their men) after the war. Also interesting format – basically an oral history with commentary. I can understand why she won the Nobel.
I’ve talked about it before, but I’ve been reading Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys. It’s a sequel to Lovecraft’s A Shadow Over Innsmouth that reveals that not only were the people of Innsmouth benevolent, but the 1927 arrests resulted in them getting placed in an internment camp where all but two died.Then in 1948 the two survivors are recruited by the FBI to help locate a Russian spy who stole arcane books from Miskatonic University.
I think I read this because you recommended it in a thread! It was awesome, so thanks! Have you read Deep Roots yet?
You’ve read the short story which preceded it I hope?https://www.tor.com/2014/05/14/the-litany-of-earth-ruthanna-emrys/
Wow, that sounds amazing. As in “I am buying the Kindle immediately and will read it as soon as I’m done with my current book” levels of amazing. The last book I finished was Maplecroft, so I’m definitely on an “inspired by Lovecraft” roll, although this seems like a more direct connection. I like Lovecraft but it’s hard to ignore the racism that seeps through and infects most of his writing, so I appreciate things that re-work his mythos or even turn it inside out.
In that case, I would strongly recommend The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle to you. It’s a retelling of The Horror at Red Hook from the point of view of a poor black con artist. It uses Lovecraft’s racism and themes as a device to show what it’s like to feel truly insignificant.
Ok this I have to read.
I am two thirds of the way through Naifeh and Smith’s biography of Jackson Pollock. These guys are incredible writers, and when you read one of their bios, you don’t just get a portrait of the person, but of the times in which you live. Same goes with Pollock, whose life is expertly contextualized in the incredibly complex world of art in the 30s, 40s and 50s. But my goodness what a son of a bitch Pollock was. I love the biography but I’m not sure I can look at his art anymore.
Bios are one of my favorite genres. You get the close characterization I enjoy from novels plus, if the biographers are good, historical and cultural context of the person. You can learn history of the time as well as the person.
I normally don’t like my pop culture works to dither. I prefer novels to be shorter, and movies to top out at 90 minutes. But I make an exception for biographies. The more overwritten the better, and if the footnotes section is long enough to be it’s own book, I know I’m in for a good read.
In non-fiction, Zerozerozero is a very goof account of the cocaine industry, and I highly recommend it. In fiction, probably Horrorstör, which was…fine. I didn’t read much fiction this year. Maybe the only other one I read was Adjustment Day. Do not read Adjustment Day. It was not good.
I’d imagine a lot of people around here have read it, but for anyone who hasn’t, you should definitely read the Illumanitus! trilogy.
My favorite part of that trilogy might be when they repeat the same paragraph three times to describe the US President, the Soviet premier, and another person. (it’s been a couple years)
Yeah for a series written 40+ years ago based on the ramblings in crazy letters to Playboy it’s surprising how much of it still rings true.
I haven’t played the card game based on the books though I’ve been meaning to. One of the fun eccentricities is there’s a variant of the game that encourages you to cheat by like stealing money or misreading dice or stacking the deck. The one issue that’s stopping me from playing it is that it’s 1-3 hours for a kind of board game that I don’t normally enjoy. I play those long, and also heavier, of games regularly, but just not weird pseudo-Cosmic Encounters.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/28/illuminati-deluxe-edition
I’ve been thinking about picking it up for a long time because it is the kind of game my friends and I would play, but the long playtime is definitely a deterrent.
I play that sometimes, but the friend who hosts game nights likes reading up on all the rules so he has an advantage over everyone, and is less inclined to games where we can gang up to stop him from winning and random chance plays a larger role.
Steve Jackson Games. I have Illuminati. The games are gnerally shorter than that I would say.
Something about blowjobs, right?
Loved it, but liked the Schrodinger’s Cat trilogy better.
Definitely can’t blame you there, Schrodinger’s Cat is really good too:)No WifeNo HorseNo Mustache;)
When I read a bit of the first Schrodinger’s Cat book I felt like he was trying to be Vonnegut and it wasn’t really working. That was a long time ago, though.
Hagbard Celine vs Epicene WildebloodLoved the wacky tale of Ulysses, the dismembered member, but Celine had a golden submarine and he defeated the Illuminati.Point goes to Hagbard.
I read Frank Norris’s naturalistic novel about greed, McTeague. Though written in the century before last, it feels more like Elmore Leonard than Charles Dickens, with spare prose that anticipates Hemingway’s. Every character is nasty and offensive in his or her own way, and the plot keeps you wondering which one of these deplorables will come out ahead (spoiler alert: none of them do).
I LOVE McTeague. Just a great novel, and one I’d love to see made into a miniseries (which was kind of what Von Stroheim had in mind with his mostly lost film adaptation).
I’d watch the hell out of a Netflix McTeague, but I can’t think offhand who I’d want as the title character. Maybe Thomas Haden Church.
Well I’ll tell you…ten to fifteen years ago, Russell Crowe would’ve been PERFECT. But I fear now he’s a bit too old.I’m also a big fan of what I call the “Lawrence of Arabia” strategy, where you cast an unknown up-and-comer in the titular role, and then surround him with A-list supporters. That could work here.
I got tired of waiting around on GRRM and Rothfuss and Lynch. So I started reading Sanderson’s Stormlight series. Pretty good. Feel confident he’s actually going to finish it.
The Power Broker by Robert Caro
I too am reading some old Don Delillo. I’m closing in on the end of Underworld, which is not an ideal book for those of us who read slowly.
Top discovery of 2018: James Crumley’s detective novels. He never really broke through in America, but he evidently used to be “Big in Japan.” Imagine if Hunter S. Thompson wrote high quality crime fiction, and that will give you an idea of Crumley’s awesomeness.
I listened to audiobooks of a bunch of the classics: David Copperfield, Dracula, Orlando, Little Women, Moby Dick, and Vanity Fair. All really enjoyable.
My mom goes on an on about how much she loved listening to the audiobook of Vanity Fair while doing yardwork. I may give it a go.
How did you like Dracula? The first time I read it I was shocked by how funny it was, particularly Van Helsing – seems like the kind of element where the quality of the audiobook/reader would be super important.
I mostly really liked it. The version I listened to had different narrators for each person, with Tim Curry as Van Helsing and Alan Cumming as Seward. I was surprised how little of it Van Helsing actually narrates, as he’s one of the few characters who doesn’t keep a diary.I did have some problems with some of the sloppy plotting in the book. Van Helsing only gets involved because Seward knows him and he’s a good doctor. That he turns out to be the world’s only expert on vampires is a complete coincidence!I also wasn’t sure if Renfield being in Seward’s care was another massive coincidence or some unnecessarily convoluted part of Dracula’s plan.
Fair enough on the plotting (I feel like ‘coincidence’ used to be a much more acceptable plotting device, back when novels intentionally played into narrative tropes/archetypes a bit more). That’s a pretty impressive voice cast!
It’s all massive coincidences. I find it interesting that there isn’t a single version of Dracula, that I’ve seen, that maintains the coincidence of Dracula preying on Jonathan’s fiance’s best friend. It seems it’s one too far for all the film-makers and they just have to have Jonathan mention Whitby or show a picture of the girls or something.
Top 11 books I read in no particular order (this year I tried to read more female authors than previously; my bookshelf was/still is a bit too unbalanced):Grant by Ron Chernow (his biographies are always a good read, and this one helped fill in a Reconstruction era hole in my high school history education (too much focus on Civil War and not enough on the failures afterwards)
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (probably my #1, amazing characterization and interiority without getting into the frustrations of Faulkner and Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness)
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (still as revolutionary reading it now as I would imagine when it first came out; the method of incorporating outright exposition via intelligence reports worked wonders)
At The Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell (Group bios are a great introduction/medium of understanding intellectual periods and philosophic evolutions without requiring extended primary source reading)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diáz (I’m a little less cool on this than the others since it had a lot of toxic incel nerddom that I didn’t really think was addressed well, but the actual style and the plot was great)
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (one of the best American writers writing about the difficulties of being gay or even acknowledging homosexual identity? Yes please)
Notes on A Native Son by James Baldwin (So many great essays in here, from the inherent and constant rage that oppressed people feel to personal anecdotes)
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (Beautiful, passionate, an exploration of a time period and a location that I had no good idea about)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (I actually laughed out loud from this book, which is rare for me. Extremely readable if maybe a bit light on imagery details (only a problem because I don’t have a decent understanding of Regency-era clothing; maybe I should watch the movie/miniseries))
The Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson (Gay coming-of-age retelling of a monster Hercules slew in a short verse novella)
Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity by Robert M Beachy (Illuminating history about the rise of homosexuality (and bisexuality and transgenderism) as an identity in 1870s-1930s Germany, including the positive impact the police had (inadvertently), the ways one homosexual movement helped give rise to further right-wing nationalism, how everything “new” is actually old (the earliest sexologists conceived of gender as a spectrum even then))
I realized recently that I’ve read excepts and listened to the
author (that is a man to lead
revolutions, we were ready to rise up when he was done speaking) but I hadn’t completed Just
Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson. Oof. That
book is great and heartbreaking and beautifully written. Should be required
reading for all Americans.
Books are for fuckin’ losers, but the 2017 comic adaptation of Moby Dick is pretty great.
I assume (the first half of) your sentence is in jest, but your post does remind me of the fallout from reading all of my mother’s classic comics – I enjoyed them tremendously, but they spoiled me for almost every book I had to read in school for the next few years…(Granted, most people already know the basic plots of ‘classic literature’ through cultural osmosis, and knowing the ending doesn’t really detract from the worth of the novels. But a few of them do have surprise twists/deaths/secret spies etc., and I did get pretty annoyed at myself once or twice…)
It’s not. Prose is lame. Adaptations of prose into better formats is inherently good. The only bad Grant Morrison comic is that one issue of Batman that was illustrated prose.
Posts like this make me wish there was a downvote button on Kinja.
OOooooh. I know what I’m reading next
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – I dug it. Great narrative structure.
Listened to Anthony Bourdain read the audiobook of Kitchen Confidential. Bittersweet but really entertaining.
It appears all the pre-2017/2018 books I read this year were by women: Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Yaa Gyasi’s Homecoming, Emma Cline’s The Girls, as well as Cheryl Strayed’s “Dear Sugar” collection Tiny Beautiful Things, Sherry Simpson’s Alaska collection The Way Winter Comes (in advance of a trip), and the first novella in Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy. If I had to pick a favorite, it’d probably be S11.
While not very old, but technically came out in 2017, I read Less by Andrew Sean Greer, 2018 Pulitzer Prize Winner and I havent loved a book this much in a long time. I was consistently laughing out loud and I read it twice in one month with Calypso by David Sederis in the middle. I realized i was missing and would like to reread it so soon after. Ive forced by sister, friends and a Tinder date or two to read it and they all love it and I realized i can talk about this book at length and love seeing what other people think of the themes it presents. Would highly recommendend it, especially if youre a gay man but i dont think thats necessary to enjoy it.
I didn’t do a ton of reading this year, but I tore through Harry Connolly’s Twenty Palaces series (Currently 4 novels and two novellas) in about a week and a half this summer. I don’t know if this is a real genre, but I’d describe them as Hard-Boiled Fantasy. (This may not be a reference that helps anyone, but I hear the books in the voice of Gerald Mohr as Phillip Marlowe).One thing I really appreciate is that Connolly never gets too exlpainy about the magic or the worldbuilding. (IMHO if you systematize magic too much, it’s just technology that runs on eyes-of-newt rather than AAA cells.)
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. Twas worth the read.
Good show, Nick. Mieville is one of the very few fantasy authors I can tolerate. Definitely check out The Scar and Embassytown next. As for me, I took my first foray into Iain Banks’s Culture novels this year with Consider Phlebas, which I enjoyed very much. I’ve often heard it’s not the best place to start with the Culture, but considering how much I liked it, I’m excited about reading the rest of them.
I love Mieville – I need to read The Scar but it’s been 15 years since I read PSS so I should probably read all 900 pages of that monster again first.
I really enjoyed what I’ve read of Banks, but I haven’t done Phelbas yet. I thought Use of Weapons was wonderful but upsetting, and I liked The Player of Games unequivocally.
It’s been a while, but if I recall correctly, you can read The Scar independent of Perdido Street Station, or Iron Council for that matter. There are some small details that carry over, but nothing that’s going to ruin your enjoyment if you don’t remember it. And “wonderful but upsetting” is pretty much exactly how I like my science fiction, so I’ll check out Use of Weapons next!
Yep they all take place in the same world but they’re three distinct stories. You really do want to read Perdido Street Station first though.
I object to your characterization of Mieville as a fantasy author; I think speculative fiction would be a much more appropriate term. Technically “fantasy” has such a broad definition that it can be applied to basically anything but in practice people use it to refer to the medieval stuff like GRRM, Tolkien, Rothfuss, etc.,Some of Mieville’s work can be considered fantasy (ie., the New Crobuzon books) but much of it isn’t. Embassytown for example is pure sci-fi.
I actually hesitated over writing that for a minute, as I strongly dislike exactly the type of fantasy you’re referring to. But in the end the New Crobuzon books are set in an imaginary world, and it’s to Mieville’s great credit that these books succeeded for me in spite of that. I suppose speculative fiction would have been a bit better as a label.For what it’s worth, Embassytown might be my favorite thing he’s written. Maybe.
I agree with every single word of your post. I can’t stand traditional (ie., medieval) fantasy and while Mieville’s work can generally be described as fantasy it’s anything but traditional.
Embassytown is just incredible. It’s the highest of high concepts, but he pulls it off and it’s *so* compelling.However, he’s one of the few authors where it’s strictly love/hate with me. I adore Perdido, The Scar, and Embassytown – but despite three separate tries I’ve never managed to finish Iron Council. Ditto City and the City.
Mieville is a “slipstream” or “weird” author. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slipstream_genre
Kraken is his best book.
if I’m recommending them to others I often suggest starting with “the state of the art” which is short stories…”the player of games” is almost certainly my favourite & I have overwhelming fondness for “excession” but I don’t think there’s a bad iain m. banks book so mostly I’m jealous that they’re new to you…
Just finished The Friends of Eddie Coyle and it fucked my shit up. Highly recommend.
I’ll say A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar. The premise sounds batshit – it’s a hardboiled detective novel set in 1939 London, but the detective (and sometime narrator) is none other than Adolf Hitler, in an alternate history in which the Communists rose to power in Germany in the mid-30s, causing many of the Nazis, including Hitler, to flee to the UK. The title comes from the fact that this whole story is being dreamed up by a Jewish writer of pulp fiction in real-world Auschwitz, which you learn near the beginning of the book. What’s great about it is how many levels it works on: it’s an undermining of the hardboiled detective genre, a potent defamiliarizing of the horrors of the Holocaust, an exploration of Jewish identity and Zionism, a meditation on the power of stories as coping devices, and a warning about xenophobia that feels more relevant now than when it was published four years ago. Plus it’s got a central mystery that’s satisfying even if you manage to ignore all the other stuff going on. And lest one be wary that the whole thing is tasteless, the author’s grandparents were Holocaust victims if I recall correctly.I don’t have that much interest in alternate histories (I found The Man in the High Castle painfully dull, and didn’t really like Jo Walton’s Farthing), but I’d still highly recommend this.
I re-read All Quiet on the Western Front.
Three by Helen Oyeyemi – the novels Mr. Fox and Boy, Snow, Bird (both very loosely inspired by fairy tales) and the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. I guess you would associate her with magical realism but she has a distinct style all her own.
I read Mr Fox recently and liked it a lot. I find the “magical realism” tag a little weird – that term implies to me that the broad structure of the book reflects realist literature, which isn’t true of Mr Fox at all. I’d say it’s more surreal – it reminds me of Lewis Carroll (possibly because I’m currently rereading Sylvie and Bruno).
I read the ARC of her new one, Gingerbread, recently. You’ve got another great read to look forward to next year.
Not really A book but three books in one volume, but I read The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy, and it was fantastic. I had read Blood Meridian and loved it, but it was so harrowing that I had actively avoided reading any more McCarthy. But I was in a used bookstore and saw The Border Trilogy in the Everyman’s Library hardcover at a nice price calling to me, so I bought it on a whim. I started reading it almost immediately and was transfixed. I especially loved the dialogue. He really has an ear for how southern people and people from the country actually talk.
There’s plenty of nastiness in that trilogy but across three books it’s diluted enough that there’s room to breathe. The languid pace really shows off McCarthy’s talent. Blood Meridian is a constant assault, and near the top of my ‘books I loved but may never read again’ list. I’m sorry that the All the Pretty Horses movie didn’t do better because I’d like to see the full trilogy, but marketing it as a forbidden romance probably didn’t do it any favors. It looked like a TNT original rather than part one of an epic.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
What a fucking tool: Clayton…
I read Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point by Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky.Insanely readable. The kids he profiles are fascinating and heartbreaking and awe-inspiring. Yes, there are the odd Heller-esque bureaucratic oddities that plague any operation like that, but you mostly come away with a compassionate look at an institution that is more self-aware than you’d expect, and is continually evolving to churn out graduates of integrity and ability.
Perdido Street Station was such a gut-punch. And, although it’s great, I prefer the city and the city.Because it’s gorgeous and because I did my Master’s on city imagery (well, not ALL of that, but city imagery in Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence.) and stuff sticks with you.
I am currently reading Shadow & Claw by Gene Wolfe and it is fantastic. It is not an easy read, but it has been worth it. I recommend reading a digital copy to easily look up words.
Currently reading Angela’s Ashes.I couldn’t make myself finish White Noise, hated it.
Most of the stuff I read this year was pre-2018, except for a couple of true crime books (Bad Blood and I’ll Be Gone in the Dark). This was also the year I finally started reading China Miéville; my first try was Kraken, which I didn’t much care for, but I read Perdido Street Station next and liked it a lot, although not quite as much as The City and the City. Next I think I’ll read The Scar (I’ve asked for it for Christmas, so we’ll see if I get it), the second New Crobuzon book.This is cheating a little because I listened to it on audio instead of reading it, but my favorite book of 2018 was Michael McDowell’s Blackwater (read by Matt Godfrey), the 6 books that comprise the Caskey family saga. It’s literally the best audio book I’ve ever listened to, in addition to being a great supernatural soap opera. Godfrey is an Alabama native, so he gets the accent right, but tones it down enough to not irritate the delicate sensibilities of Yankees. He also manages to voice women, black characters (uneducated southern ones from the early 20th century) and a gay man without making the renditions cringe-y, something I sometimes struggle with in audio books read by white men.The story is one of those great, multi-generational depictions of a small town—in a strange way it sometimes reminded me of One Hundred Years of Solitude—with the supernatural element being that some of the characters occasionally transform into river monsters and eat some of the townsfolk.
I went through the audiobook of Blackwater this year as well (audible is how I survive my dull ass job) and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was kinda surprised to see it come up in the comment section, I’ve enjoyed pretty much all of the McDowell I’ve read and listened to. Matt Godfrey’s performance was truly fantastic.I think I’m the only person who actually kind of liked Kraken, but I’ll definitely say it’s the weakest Miéville I’ve read.
I didn’t dislike it so much as feel let down that I didn’t totally love it, given that multiple friends have talked Miéville up to me for years now. The next two books I read corrected that, though. (If I’d hated Kraken, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to read more of the same writer.)I discovered McDowell completely by accident a couple of years ago, when Kindle recommended The Elementals to me, based on some cheesy ‘80s pulp horror that I’d read (and didn’t even like). I was intrigued that it took place in parts of coastal Alabama that I know well because my family has a vacation condo on Dauphin Island—with the exception of Beldame itself, all of the locations he mentions are real places. I loved it and since then I’ve slowly been reading all of his books (God bless Valancourt for resurrecting them) and the only ones I have left are Toplin and Wicked Stepmother.
Yeah I was always aware of him in the periphery of my consciousness because I knew he’d written the screenplay for Beetlejuice and I loved that movie as a kid. I was also reminded of him as I became more openly gay while somewhat of a bookworm with an affinity for horror and genre fiction. I’m honestly kind of ashamed it took so long for me to pick up reading his work, it’s really great stuff.
The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt. Thanks, Vulture.
On the subject of mass incarceration in America, I recommend William Stuntz’ posthumously published The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, which I reviewed here earlier this year.
There are two answers for this question that should be correct for every year.1. Infinite Jest- DFW2. Douglas Adams (any of ‘em. Dealer’s choice)
George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo. I was reading it over the course of a road trip to Florida and the way that it discusses grief, loss, and the seemingly impossible challenge of moving forward after personal tragedy was unlike anything I’ve read all year. The only thing I have read that I could see as comparable to its narrative was Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, my personal favorite of his. And this past month, I found out that Saunders is visiting my school in the Spring so hopefully I get a chance to meet him in person.
The Orphan Master’s Son is probably my favorite novel of the last five years. Caitlin is spot-on about how disturbingly immersive the reading experience is. It also should evoke very specific mental images whenever you read about someone there being put into political detention.
It’s not a single book, but I’ve had an ongoing personal project of reading each book in Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer series. This past year I read The Blue Hammer and Find a Victim. The books themselves aren’t long, and read quickly. However, I only read used editions or ones borrowed from the library, so it kind of goes in fits and starts.
I finally got around to reading the Bible. And talk about a preachy book! Everyone’s a sinner. Except for this guy.
Most of what I read is work related, but I really enjoyed these:1. Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta. Dark, YA novel from Australia centered around a mystery.2. Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. Way more philosophical (and better) than the movie (IMO).3. and 4. Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo. Sci-Fi/Fantasy heist book set in alternate Russia.
NICK – welcome to the world of my favorite living author!! I’m so glad you talked about Perdido Street Station. That’s the book that also introduced me to the surreal genius of China Mieville. Quickly now. Go read everything else Mieville has written. Finish the Bas Lag trilogy – read The Scar, and then get your face ripped off by the blinding mad impossible genius of Iron Council. Then read The City & The City. And watch the BBC miniseries of that book that aired earlier this year.I met China Mieville earlier this year – he was in Portland for a memorial tribute to Ursula LeGuin. I lurked by the stage door afterward, met him and had him sign my copy of Iron Council. Nicest guy in the world, even as I was babbling and fanboying all over him. Mieville’s work changed my god damned life, ok? I can’t overstate how much his writing opened my eyes and turned me into a very different writer myself. I was a sci fi writer. Now I’m a weird fiction writer. And Mieville’s got most of the credit/blame for that. Well, and Lovecraft.Everyone else – go read Perdido Street Station. It’s unlike anything you’ve read before.
I probably read more books released this year than I have ever done in a year. After twenty years as a librarian, I finally see what other people see in ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies). I’ve been reading them one after another pretty much since I picked up Circe at Midwinter Conference. As such, I’ve even read at least two 2019 books already.There were exceptions, though. The most interesting was The Black Angels by Maud Hart Lovelace. This August my sister and I gave in to some of our nerdiest impulses and attended a Betsy-Tacy fan convention. It’s a series of childrens and YA books that trace the lives and friendship of girls in Minnesota at the turn of the 20th century, from the age of five through their early twenties and marriages. I knew that the author had written adult books before starting these, but I’d never read them as they are less popular and rare. I picked up two during the tour and read the first one.If you are familiar only with the Betsy-Tacy series, The Black Angels is quite a surprise. Betsy Ray has the most supportive and loving family imaginable despite the fact that she and her sister want to pursue artistic careers, writing and singing respectively, in the 1910s. The Angel family is quite the reverse. The book is really about the cruelty of artists and the artistic drive. It is full of parents sacrificing their children’s happiness either by prioritizing art or rebelling against it. I was constantly amazed the books were written by the same person. My sister wouldn’t finish it, she disliked the characters too much. I loved it. I couldn’t help thinking what a shock it must have been to fans of this kind of work when the author produced a children’s book about a pair of five-year-old girls.
Hello to another Betsy-Tacy fan! My sister and I also adore those books. (I haven’t read any of Maud’s other work.) We almost went to a convention in Mankato a few years ago, but I bailed at the last minute. (To my regret! What was I thinking?)I’ve read each of them many times and they live so vividly in my mind. Do you have a favorite? Although it’s the only one that steps outside of the Deep Valley milieu, I think mine might be Betsy and the Great World. Her sense of adventure combined with powerful homesickness really resonates with me.But of course the stories at home can’t be beat. Making welsh rarebit in front of the fire, cramming for the essay contest, exchanging tradelasts, embroidering pillowcases (or not), getting portraits taken, wearing perfume, holding hands (or not)…I just love that world, and isn’t it the best to share it with a sister??
It is great to share it with a sister. It has always disappointed me that my best friend never got into the books. For a series centered on friendship, it seems wrong that we never bonded over them.If I had to pick a favorite, I would go with Besty In Spite of Herself. I love the Christmas trip to Milwaukee and visiting Tib again. I sympathize with the desire to go on a trip and come back a different person. Probably the biggest reason is that Julia is my favorite character and Betsy In Spite of Herself is probably her best book. I have always wished I had a calling to a career like Julia, and the drive to get there. I admire her so much that I had a picture of Geraldine Farrar on my bedroom wall in her honor when I was a teen.The next convention is in 2022. You should try to go!
Julia’s story is so fascinating. I’m also enamored of her drive to be an opera singer—it makes her seem like a formidable artist in her own right and somewhat unconventional for the time and place. I also get weepy whenever I think about how supportive her family is; how a shoe salesman and his wife pour so much effort (largely unseen, but referred to) into nurturing her talent. And yes, the Christmas trip to Milwaukee is so much fun. I think about it whenever I go to Milwaukee myself. There are SO MANY churches built by German communities.And thank you for the heads up about the convention! My sister’s daughter will be 6 in 2022—that sounds like perfect timing!
Haven’t read Desperate Networks, but this year I finally read The Late Shift and The War for Late Night and enjoyed them a lot, although I wonder why he didn’t just call the 2nd one The Late Shift 2. I mean, how often does something like that happen again?
Alamut by Vladimir Bartol. The translation by Michael Biggins is workmanlike at best, but the story is great and the character of Hasan ibn Sabbah is incredible. By the way, this book provided inspiration to both Assassin’s Creed *and* the Illuminatus! Trilogy.
This year I read The Ground Beneath Her Feet as part of my recently acquired infatuation with Rushdie. Wonderful book, with that quintessentially Rushdie combination of the epic and the personal.Shalimar The Clown, on the other hand…less impressive, let’s say.
I learned this summer that everything I learned in high school history was a lie.
“Mason & Dixon” and “The Sound and the Fury.”Both difficult, in different ways. Both essential/life-changing.
Not counting comics, everything I read was not from this year. Going through my Goodreads, I guess my favorite thing was The Hour of The Star by Clarice Lispector. I also loved Never Let Me Go and A Rage in Harlem.
For some China Mieville, Kraken is his best.
“Nixonland” by Rick Perlstein.
Mieville’s genius is that he the rarest of writers in this day and age because he defies comparison and is truly original. To say his work is ‘Steampunk’ in even the most basic of terms is just lazy.
It’s sad that critics nowadays can’t write a review without using the easy get out of saying “this writer is like that writer.”
I read Oil by Upton Sinclair. It was the inspiration for the brilliant There will be Blood, although the movie only adapts about the first 150 page (out of the books 550 ish pages),and then takes the characters in its own direction. The book is brilliant on its own though and we’ll worth reading. It gets into social criticism and socialist writings and mixes them with great character work. Definitely a worthwhile read.
Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler. The bug in the police station at the end may be the greatest thing I’ve read in crime fiction.
I’ve read some really great ones this yearOf 2018 books I read Bob Woodward’s Fear, Michael Palin’s Erebus: the story of a ship and Fire and Fury.But of older books I read:Bob Woodward’s The Agenda, about the first year of the Clinton administrationBob Woodward’s The Choice, about Bill Clinton’s re-electionOJ Simpson’s If I Did ItAfter Hitler by Michael JonesStar Trek DS9: Time’s EnemyA Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan Rogue Trader by Nick LeesonThe Other Side of the Night: The Carpathia, the Californian and the night the Titanic sank
Blindsight by Peter Watts may be my favorite hard sci-fi novel ever, and one of my favorite sci fi stories of all time. It’s a first contact story that flips familiar concepts from stories like 2001: A Space Oddyssey, or Lovecraftian cosmic horror on their proverbial heads. It asks interesting questions about what makes humanity special, and tackles the nature of alien life in a speculative way that I almost guarantee you have not encountered before in fiction. Saying any more would spoil too much, but it is absolutely a must read for any fan of heady, intellectual sci fi.
Blindsight is fantastic. It’s one of my favorite SF novels. The difficulty (or impossibility) of communication with a truly alien lifeform is a theme I always enjoy. If you haven’t read them, check out Watts’s Rifters trilogy as well. They’re a bit different thematically, but share the same relentless bleakness.
I have, and I love Watt’s total cynicism (you might even say nihilism), as well as his incredibly detailed world building, and use of well researched science to set up interesting speculative technology. I am not sure there are many other authors quite like him in that regard, the only one who comes to mind is Neal Stephenson. To me, what makes Blindsight so frightening is that Watts turns Lovecraft’s idiom about the oldest and most intense fear being fear of the unknown around completely. The *more* you come to learn about the aliens in Blindsight, the more terrifying the implications become, as opposed to the other way around, which is way more common in SF fiction.
So it’s not a book I read for the first time or anything, but I just finished rereading the Hobbit, and it still makes me angry how much they botched the films. The book is a lively, zippy adventure yarn with a little bit of darkness and a somewhat sad ending to provide some contrast. How did they get turned into such bloated, dour, grim slogs? Why were all the fun scenes, like Beorn slowly meeting the Company, cut out while needless LOTR table-setting and terrible romantic subplots shoehorned in? I should just move on, but ugh, what a hatchet job.
I guess it’s cheating on the premise as I quite often re-read all of them, one way or another, as a familiar brand of escapism…but all of Terry Pratchett’s stuff & in particular Good Omens…& the Hitchhiker’s Guide “trilogy”…less frequently re-read options that seemed timely this last year did also include “The Daughter of Time” by Josephine Tey & “The Man who was Thursday” by G.K. Chesterton…& now I have a hankering to re-visit the Louis de Bernieres books that culminate in “Senor Vivo & the Coca Lord”…
Personal recommendations this year go to:The Oddysey as remarkably translated by Emily Wilson, which knocks all previous translations and their incorrigibly stuffy diction into a cocked hat
The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics, Kenan Malik’s grand journey through the development of morality across the globe, which uses various landmarks of world literature as framing devices to discuss that region’s ideas about good and evil
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin’s tale of an ambiguous utopia, which I should have read years ago but was inspired to tackle this summer for no particular reason at all, certainly nothing having to do with current events in global politics, oh goodness me no, and
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, which I should have cracked by tomorrow and which is creeping me out something awful