We asked some of our contributors for their favorite books they read this year. (Most listed new books, but a few picked older favorites.) The first installment was published last week.
Teju Cole:
The most startling book I read this year was Sonali Deraniyagala’s “Wave,” a personal account of the 2004 tsunami and its aftermath. I reviewed it on Page-Turner in March, and still can’t stop thinking about it.
Jeremy Scahill’s “Dirty Wars” was a courageous and exhaustive examination of the way a number of clandestine campaigns—full of crimes, coverups, and assassinations—became the United States’s main strategy for combating terrorism. It’s about drones, but also, more profoundly, about what our government does on our behalf, without our consent, and arguably to our disadvantage.
And I found Elisa Gabbert’s “The Self Unstable” a wonderful surprise. It was the most intelligent and most intriguing thing I’ve read in a while, moving between lyric poetry, aphorism, and memoir, and with thoughts worth stealing on just about every page.
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Junot Díaz:
Hilton Als’s “White Girls” is without question my read of the year. Sentence by sentence, this is a book that is wiser than its years, which inspires awe, both in its delirious lyricism and its bone-breaking precision. In its pages, Michael Jackson, Eminem, and Truman Capote turn and turn and in their gyres reveal us all.
Ruth Franklin:
In terms of sheer reading pleasure, my favorite book this year was “& Sons,” David Gilbert’s big, intelligent, richly textured novel about fathers, sons, friendship, and legacies, which I was shocked not to see on everyone’s top-ten list. The patriarch, A. N. Dyer, is a revered novelist of blueblooded New York—something like Philip Roth, if he were a WASP. As his health deteriorates, attention focusses on “Ampersand,” the book that made him famous and which, decades after its publication, everyone still wants a piece of. From Dyer’s slacker sons to a J. Crew-wearing young seductress, every member of Gilbert’s cast of characters is perfectly drawn. And he pulls off the impossible trick of embedding a novel within a novel without making the fictional book sound better than the one in your hands. Gilbert is confident enough in his creation that he actually makes his novel’s epigraph a passage by A. N. Dyer. Even better, he gets away with it.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Books on the environment often get overlooked on end-of-the-year lists. Three that I’d recommend from 2013 (O.K., one is really from 2014) are:
“Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America,” by Jon Mooallem. Mooallem takes a quirky, funny-sad look at the spectacular lengths Americans will go to to save endangered species, even as the general prognosis for wildlife (such as it is) becomes grimmer and grimmer.
“Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist,” by Bill McKibben. This quasi-memoir weaves the story of Kirk Webster, a Vermont beekeeper trying to make a living at a dying art, into McKibben’s own experiences. Over the past few years, McKibben has emerged as the leading global-warming activist in the United States, but he remains at heart a writer, and the book reflects this. It offers a fascinating glimpse into what it means to try to build a movement in real time.
“Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming,” by McKenzie Funk. I am jumping the gun a bit on this book, which will come out in a few weeks. Funk’s take on global-warming profiteering is as entertaining as it is disturbing.
Ben Lerner:
“The Gorgeous Nothings,” by Emily Dickinson (preface by Susan Howe; edited by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner). This exquisitely produced book—lovingly curated by Bervin and Werner—allows you to encounter Emily Dickinson’s “envelope poems” in full-color facsimile for the first time. It’s an experience suspended between reading and looking, of toggling between those two modes of perception, and it thoroughly refreshes both. There is also a short preface by Susan Howe—whose pioneering writing on Dickinson (see her “My Emily Dickinson,” for starters) taught us to appreciate, among other things, Dickinson’s work as dramatizing the interplay of the visual and verbal. Howe’s own poetry, I should mention, brilliantly explores the seam between seeing and reading, and some of her recent work will be included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial—to my knowledge the first time she’s been presented as a visual artist. Let me also sneak in a recommendation here for Howe’s collaborations with the Brooklyn-based musician David Grubbs, which will heighten and confuse your sense of hearing just as Dickinson and Howe forever change one’s sense of text and image.
“People on Sunday” by Geoffrey G. O’Brien. I guess I should acknowledge that Geoffrey G. O’Brien and I argue over every line of each other’s poetry, and so I feel like I’ve been reading “People on Sunday,” his latest and, to my mind, his best book, for the past few years. These are poems that bring to bear the full resources of English prosody on our insane political present while also maintaining a position of wonder before the material world. Sometimes the effect is elegiac, making us feel the distance between the dream of the poem and our society of the spectacle. But at other times the effect is electric, as these poems allow us to experience poetic meter as a live alternative to the empty measure of price.
“White Out,” by Michael Clune. Like Clune, I grew up with those “This is your brain on drugs” P.S.A.s—the ones with the frying eggs. Well, if you’ve ever wanted to know what an exceptional critical mind looks like on drugs, read “White Out.” This book is full of enduring insights about time, literature, and memory; it is also a hilarious and scandalous and frightening chronicle of full-blown heroin addiction (and graduate school!). This might be the best book about drugs since “Les Paradis Artificiels.”
D. T. Max:
The year is coming to a close, and I still haven’t read Knausgaard. Worse, I look over my shelves and find that most of the books that I thought gave me a huge thrill this year weren’t from this year. Chief among them are Adam Johnson’s incomparable “The Orphan Master’s Son” and Sheila Heti’s maddeningly alluring “How Should a Person Be?” (How happy? How flirtatious? How what?) I’m still talking about Johnson and Heti, both from 2012.
I did read one 2013 novel I completely loved. It’s Pamela Erens’s “The Virgins.” I’d never heard of her before, but this is her second work of fiction and it manages to make new-seeming some familiar territory. Aviva Rossner and Seung Jung are lovers at a prep school whose tragic relationship is narrated by a jealous but perceptive narrator, Bruce Bennett-Jones. Prep-school fictions tend toward the nostalgic; this one, though set in the late seventies, feels up to date, reversing a lot of storied conventions, among them the trope of WASP—as opposed to Asian or Jewish—primacy. It’s drenched in sexual urges and sexual jealousies, the way sex confers a halo on teen-agers that only other teen-agers can see. Here’s a passage I underlined for some unknown later purpose:
I always read a lot of biographies, sometimes three or four at the same time. There is no other form that so reliably gives value and lends itself so well to the stop-and-start reading I like. This year I was most into the form-fiddlers, such as Sarah Bakewell’s “How to Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer” and Pico Iyer’s lovely tri-ography, “The Man Within My Head,” an exploration of his own life, that of his father, and Graham Greene’s. Also, Karen Green’s “Bough Down,” a lovely, hurting meditation with collage art; she was the wife of the late David Foster Wallace.
Joseph Ellis’s “Revolutionary Summer” came out this year to many huzzahs, but what I read instead was his 1997 biography of Thomas Jefferson, “American Sphinx.” Jefferson was on my mind with Tea Party politics in the news. It turned out—how addled can a person be?—I’d finished this superb book before. I could tell from the dog-eared pages in my copy. What’s curious is that the first time I read it, maybe ten years ago, I came away admiring its subject enormously. He wrote the Declaration of Independence, and, like most writers, I overestimate the importance of our guild’s skills. This time, the third U.S. President seemed to me—between his waffling on the slavery question and his unrealistic idées fixes on decentralized government—a deeply unclear thinker, at best a face man for the new republic, someone only the French would admire.
