Anyone who considers himself a reader will probably tell you that they still don’t read as much they would like. I count myself a member of this not-so-rarified air. I’d like to read a book a week. It seems a tangible, realistic, and obtainable goal. Unfortunately, I usually fall short of this goal. Now, mind you, partially this isn’t entirely my fault. When your regiment of reading includes multiple novels hovering around 500 pages and you’re carefully picking your way through Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics—whose individual volumes average around 700 small-printed pages of ridiculously thick meaning, you’re bound to fall short in the book-a-week front.
Still, I think I read a fair amount.
While I don’t have a list to back it up, I’d estimate I read about 40 books last year. Of these, they were split fairly evenly between fiction and non-fiction. Most of my non-fiction selections were of the theological or philosophical variety, but not totally. I did enjoy books by Barbara Kingsolver on growing her own food and Sara Marcus on the Riot Grrrl movement of the 90’s. (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Girls to the Front respectively)
Of the 20 or so novels I read in 2010 only a handful were published this year. So, I’m hardly an expert on the best of the bunch from twenty-ten. Still, I do consider myself a reader. And, I’d like to believe I have discriminating taste. So, with that caveat, here are some newish books that I enjoyed in 2010:
Jacob de Zoet arrives in 1799 to Nagasaki Harbor on a five-year stint as a clerk with the Dutch East Indies Company hoping to earn enough money to return home and marry Anna. Instead he meets a mysterious Japanese mid-wife with a disfigured face, duplicitous translators, rogue colleagues, warring shoguns, and a changing Europe.
At it's core, this is book of collisions--cultures, religions, values, classes, genders, economic systems, etc.. But it’s more than that. It's a character study of one idealist full of scrupulous morals, values, and ideals facing a life in a world where those values are not shared and are in fact spit upon. Mitchell is able to create a multi-dimensional world that moves beyond the black and white and creates dilemmas and conflicts that are brutally honest in their reality. Good is never strictly good and bad is never strictly bad. Just like today's philosophical marketplace there is a spectrum of options and mores that we all must navigate. De Zoet is certainly a fine guide in this regard.
Thousand Autumns also deserves mention because it introduced me to the wonderful David Mitchell who has quickly become my favorite living author. I finished the dazzling and mind-bending Cloud Atlas over the holiday and now I’m enjoying his life of a 13-year old boy in 1982 England Black Swan Green.
Freedom
You’ve probably heard of this book. It made the cover of Time magazine before its print. When’s the last time a book that didn’t feature vampires or a teenage wizard did that?
You’ve probably heard of this book. It made the cover of Time magazine before its print. When’s the last time a book that didn’t feature vampires or a teenage wizard did that?
If you haven’t heard it Freedom, you might be familiar with his tour de force The Corrections. Freedom has many similarities with that work. Both cover an enormous amount of time. Both deal with families in crisis, existential and otherwise. Both deal with the disconnect between a Midwestern locale and an east coast worldview. Both are full of characters pre-disposed to destroying the people closest to them.
But the similarities end there. Putting it bluntly, there wasn’t a single character in the Corrections that liked. I found them petty, mean-spirited, sad and spiteful people. In Freedom, the Berglands often embodied many of those same qualities but came off as much more likeable. I found myself rooting for them, which made their pain, follies, and failures all the more difficult to watch unfold. One never wants to see a friend self-destruct and be destroyed.
Further, I found the writing to be even better. Like the Corrections, Freedom is an equal opportunity critique on American culture where no one is left standing. The left, the right, the Christians, the atheists, the punks, and the suburbanites all look equally bad. Anyway you slice it we’re all consumers waiting to devour our next kill. But this time, Franzen writes with a warmth and humor that makes the pill easier to swallow. I’m a Christian, NPR-listening, leftist-leaning, indie rock kid. Let’s just say none of those identities look good here. But rather than being mean-spirited Franzen simply props up a mirror and allows us to see all our idiosyncrasies in unflinching details.
Pre-hyped extensively, it would be hard for Freedom to live up to its early buzz. But it exceeded and more.
Super Sad True Love Story
There is more than the slightest bit of irony posting a blog review of this super, sad, and hopefully not true love story on Facebook. Still, onward I go.
There is more than the slightest bit of irony posting a blog review of this super, sad, and hopefully not true love story on Facebook. Still, onward I go.
Set in a near dystopian future eerily similar to a Brave New World, the United States is crumbling. Swallowed by foreign debt and an obsessive addiction to fame, fashion, and sex, the populace is mostly a functionally illiterate mass of libido. Rather than communicate, “friends” troll together with their faces pressed to their i-pad like devices, updating statuses, tweeting, and rating people in personality and “desirability” (or a much more profane term).
The book follows the affable Lenny, keeper of perhaps the world’s last diary, and his romance with the anorexic Eunice. What happens isn’t quite as important as the world Gary Shteyngart describes. For this bibliophile, the future Shteygard describes is terrifying. Harnessing the ghosts of Douglas Adams, he writes with a satirical humor and an absurdist wit that keeps the book from collapsing into doomsday prophecies or morose navel-gazing. Instead it’s a chipper, if not perverse, delight that hopefully is no more than a fanciful romp into a future that is in no way coming.
This book is worth it just for his description of “onion skin” jeans alone.
I’ve already written about this book before, so I’ll keep it short: this book destroyed me.
Like many of the best plots, it’s deceptively simple: it’s the mostly autobiographical love story of Enrique and Margaret. It alternates between their fast and furious meeting and courtship and the last few weeks of Maragret’s life as she wastes away from cancer.
I’ve never experienced the horrors and sadness Yglesias faced. I’d like to believe he put into words the universal feeling of emptiness and loss and the total inadequacy of expressing to the person you’ve shared your life with, just who they are to you. This is a tear jerker in the most real of worlds—the one we live and walk.
This isn’t fiction, but it’s my list so you’ll have to deal with it.
Chabon wrote the memoir Manhood for Amateurs based off one undisputable hypothesis: the standard being a good father is set abysmally low.
Manhood is written for people like me. It’s a book for Dads who are finding their way in a new landscape of parenthood. It’s a book for Dads who want to be involved. Who like their kids. Who don’t believe that parenting is the responsibility of the mother.
Manhood isn’t a how-to. It isn’t a tome. It isn’t a revolutionary siren call. It’s one man’s reflection on what it means to be an involved, active, and responsible parent. Chabon does this with humor, heartbreak, insight and poise. I’m thankful there are books like this being written.
