Once Black Friday hits, the best books of the year lists start emerging like cicadas. I’m tempted to write something about their sudden, overwhelming numbers and the piercing noise these lists create, and how they both fascinate and repulse me (as real cicadas do), but the truth is I really like best of the year lists. Having read my fair share of books through the year, I find BOTY lists endlessly fascinating and rarely repulsive (only when they show a narrow point of view do I get a little queasy). Often, I’m just as interested in what people decide to leave off as what they put on. And far be it for me to deride best of the year lists when I helped to put together Amazon’s Best Books of the Year list this November.
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The New York Times put out its Ten best book of 2011. If that doesn’t quench your appetite for literary direction, take a look at their list of 100 notable books of 2011.
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Diane Keaton’s memoir Then, Again was reviewed this Sunday. For the record, it was an Amazon Best Book of the Year. The review in the Times says in part, “Fifteen years ago, Keaton adopted her first of two children, just as her mother, Dorothy Deanne Keaton Hall, with whom she’d been exceptionally close, was struggling to put together sentences, fading from Alzheimer’s. ‘After a lifetime of avoiding intimacy,’ she writes, ‘suddenly I got intimate in a big way.’ Dorothy Hall had been a prolific diary keeper: on the outside, she was a married homemaking mother of four, but within her private journals she revealed herself as a woman with an intense internal life who ached through hidden periods of depression. When Dorothy died in 2008, Diane started using her mother’s diaries as a springboard to her own autobiographical journey. And so we have this book, rich and ruminative, provocatively honest, jumbled and jittery and textured.”
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Francine Prose reviews the new book by the curmudgeonly Robert Hughes. Love him or hate him, he tends to know his subjects. According to Prose, “What gives Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History its freshness are Hughes’s prodigious energies, his enthusiasms, the barb of his scorn and, above all, the grace with which he turns a phrase. It’s unusual to find a book at once so jam-packed with information and so wittily written.”
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Finally, here’s a book that caught my attention: Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny . Do you remember the band Chic? Maybe. Do you remember Nile Rogers? I’d say that’s less likely. The Times states, “Although Nile Rodgers makes the grade as a B-list celebrity, he isn’t as famous as the musical record warrants. A longtime co-leader of the so-called disco band Chic, he’s best known for the bass line his partner Bernard Edwards devised for the monster single ‘Good Times,’ which later drove the seminal ‘Rapper’s Delight’ and several lesser records. But many A-listers have capitalized on his talents and quite a few valued his friendship. And as this eventful and engaging autobiography emphasizes, that was how he and Edwards planned it. Chic cultivated anonymity. They saw their way to success as an ‘opening act.’” In the interest of brevity, I’ll stop there. But this man’s story, among all the reviews in this Sunday’s review, by far stood out as the most unique and colorful.
- The LA Times has its own best of the year list here.
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One of the nice things about books that come out this late in the year is that they’re often released with few expectations. There are big commercial releases, too, but December has always been the time to release more esoteric, and often more interesting if less-selling, books. The LA Times seemed obsessed with these smaller stories this week (or else I was just on the lookout for them). The musician, Ry Cooder gets a review from David L. Ulin. His book is Los Angeles Stories, and it came out in October, but I hadn’t heard of it until now. It’s a collection of stories that, if you’re familiar with his music, is about normal, working class people, maybe with a little nostalgia drifting in. The stories all take place between 1940 and 1958, in a Los Angeles that is disappearing, and Ulin tells us, “What Cooder’s getting at, that elusive “it,” is the authenticity of old Los Angeles, a “nothing place,” and yet one with its own history and style. This is what he has built his work around these last several years, and what he continues to want to explore, the handmade world of people who “aren’t fancy talkers and thinkers. They don’t ride any wave. They’re just there. But if you go to any of those little houses, they’ll tell you some stories. People will tell you the most amazing things.”
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The often ascerbic writer James Wolcott has a book out called Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York. The review refers to him as “takedown artist extraordinaire” and a man whose byline “sends shivers of schadenfreude up the spines of fellow writers — at least when he’s writing about someone else.” Then it poses a question: “How did Wolcott, a college dropout from Maryland with a pedigree about as fancy as a can of tuna fish, grow into the figure that he is today, a corpulent eminence who gobbles the zeitgeist like a pop cultural Dr. Johnson, digesting it for us into a stream of acerbic wit and peppery common sense that is still one of the reliable highs of high-end journalism?” You’ll have to read his memoir to find out.
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The New York Review of Books doesn’t seem driven to provide us with a Best-of list. But they do have some good reviews, including further elucidation on why you should read the new book by Robert Hughes. In describing his first visit to the city that would become his subject, the NYROB tells us “The young student of architecture, as it turned out, had a gift for writing as well as a ravenous, penetrating eye (and some other ravenous appetites as well). Though he gained in sophistication, he never lost his initial Australian brashness, and that is why, in the end, Robert Hughes, author and critic, has such an original, persuasive take on the Eternal City. As he says at the very end of Rome: ‘For all its glories, and for all the legacy it left in art, thought, and politics, Greek civilization did perish. That of Rome is still somewhat with us.’ And the reasons for Rome’s staying power, he argues, have to do with the city’s eternal embrace of crassness, as intrinsic to Roman grandeur as majesty, beauty, and spiritual transcendence.” Could he be the next Gibbon? He probably thinks so. And he might be right.
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Claire Messud has a wonderful review of Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table that discusses how in his work “predictable boundaries are always in question: Is this poetry or prose? Fact or fiction? Real or imaginary? He writes from the space where memory, history, the dreamed, and the imagined converge, even while remaining respectful of the unknowable interstices between character, author, and reader.” A beautiful review for a beautiful book.
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The wise and instructive Alan Cheuse provides a list of his Top 5 fiction picks.
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The Guardian has a piece on Siddartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which coincidentally just won the Guardian First Book award.
- New York Magazine has a list of recommended books.
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Bookbeast found a new way to spin the year-end list with books you might have missed but shouldn’t.
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Jane Austen just can’t keep herself out of the news.
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If there’s anyone out there who hasn’t read the Steve Jobs biography, here’s one more reason to do so.
