We continue with an explanation of why we picked the books we picked for the 2011 Best Books of the Year list.
#90 – Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller
There’s no question that Alexandra Fuller is a wonderful memoirist. Her first book Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is a vivid portrayal of her white family’s life in Rhodesia while the pillars of colonialism were crumbling around them. Fuller pulls no punches when it comes to describing her family—their racism, their alcoholism, their humor, and bravery—and despite all this, or because of it, it’s her family that shines most. She is similarly candid in Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness— only instead of telling the story from the her own point of view, her Scottish-born mother, Nicola, takes center stage. Fuller remains personal and unvarnished in her observations. And if you liked the first book, you’ll probably like this one as well. If you haven’t read the first book, you might even like it a little more.
#89 – The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
Donald Ray Pollock is the real deal. In a world of literature filled with MFA-trained authors (ok… he has one, too, but stick with me), Donald Ray Pollock’s bio hearkens back to the days of hard-earned experience being the best training for a writer. To prove this, here are the first three sentences of the bio listed on his website: “Donald Ray Pollock was born in 1954 and grew up in southern Ohio, in a holler named Knockemstiff. He dropped out of high school at seventeen to work in a meatpacking plant, and then spent thirty-two years employed in a paper mill in Chillicothe, Ohio. He graduated from the MFA program at Ohio State University in 2009, and still lives in Chillicothe with his wife, Patsy.” His short story collection, published in 2008, was called Knockemstiff and won the 2009 PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship. Devil All the Time is hyper-violent and definitely not for the faint-of-heart. It’s about a soldier returning from WWII, and one of the best descriptions that I’ve seen of Pollock’s work comes from the writer and musician, Josh Ritter: “Pollock’s prose is as sickly beautiful as it is hard-boiled. His scenes have a rare and unsettling ability to make the reader woozy, the ends of the chapters flicking like black horseflies off the page.”
#88 – I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive by Steve Earle
Man Crush alert! I am a card carrying member of the Steve Earle fan club (not officially—and I don’t think they give out cards—but the crush is real), and as it turns out, so are many other people at Amazon. I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive is the long-awaited novel from Earle, following 2011’s release of his beautiful short story collection Doghouse Roses. For those familiar with his music, Steve Earle’s writing will not surprise: it’s about a morphine-addicted doctor living a gritty existence in 60’s San Antonio with the ghost of Hank Williams and a cast of colorful misfits. Amazon editor Jason Kirk describes it as being “told with an equal mix of sympathy and violent detail,” balancing “Catholicism and ‘hoodoo,’ addiction and redemption, brutal reality and magical realism.”
#87 – Embassytown by China Mieville
Mieville is an award-winning science fiction author, known by many as a writer of “New Weird” literature. Embassytown definitely falls into the category of weird—there are aliens that speak a language from two mouths, there is semi-organic architecture, there are characters who lack the capacity to lie—but something about Mieville’s writing is very real. Few authors working today are as consistently inventive as Mieville. And fewer still can produce real awe from readers.
#86 – State of Wonder by Anne Patchett
Ann Patchett, the celebrated author of Bel Canto, was always going to get attention for her new novel. One of Patchett’s great talents, along with being able to craft expressive paragraphs composed of staggeringly eloquent sentences, is the ability to bring disparate details together into one clean narrative line. In Bel Canto it was romance, terror, opera, social comedy, and tragedy, among others. In State of Wonder she faces perhaps a steeper climb. State of Wonder is a member of the rare subgenre of “pharmaceutical thriller”—part mystery, part literary fiction, part science fiction, part Amazon travelogue. Some editors loved this book, with a few detractors (who felt the parts didn’t coalesce into a believable whole); otherwise, it would have ended up higher on the list. There’s no doubt how Jessica Schein felt about it when she wrote her Best of the Month review in June: “a thing of beauty and mystery, much like the Amazon jungle itself.”
