Best Books of 2012

We asked some of our contributors for their favorite books from 2012. (In the interests of eclecticism, they could list up to three.) Here’s what they said.

Ann Beattie

“The Constant Heart,” by Craig Nova: One of our most original, brilliant, disturbing writers, who’s so fierce he’ll take on anything. Here—dark energy: of love, of the cosmos, and of the interrelationship between the two. Nova challenges the reader, writes passages as beautiful as some of James Salter’s, is always upping the ante, and is always himself. There’s a great interview with him about this book by Michael Silverblatt, of KCRW.

Thomas Beller

“Major/Minor,” by Alba Arikha: Published in the U.K. The daughter of a well-known figurative artist / Holocaust survivor / close friend to Samuel Beckett recalls her childhood in Paris and Israel. If I were still doing Open City Books, I would have picked this to publish in America. Someone should.

“We Are Taking Only What We Need,” by Stephanie Powell Watts: Stories set in an African-American community in rural North Carolina, told in a voice that is cheeky, urbane, and playful. Lorrie Moore meets Eudora Welty.

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Dan Chiasson

“Dictionary of American Regional English, Volume V, SL-Z”: If you want to play ring-a-levio or pom pom pullaway with a schnickelfritz, you need this book.

“Fear Of Music,” by Jonathan Lethem: A great, idiosyncratic take on the overlooked third album by Talking Heads, “Fear of Music,” a record that, even in this fallen era of playlists, will now never die.

“Bewilderment,” by David Ferry: Ferry is eighty-eight; when he won the National Book Award for this book, he called it a “preposterous pre-posthumous” honor. Yeats wrote that old age seemed “tied” to him “as to a dog’s tail”; for Ferry, being “inside this old man’s body” is like being “the insides of a lobster.”

Teju Cole

The new novel I liked best this year was Katie Kitamura’s “Gone to the Forest.” This is a story of how the submerged violence among “civilized” men requires little excuse to surface. Startling, written in clean, understated prose, the better to frighten.

My favorite book of poetry was Frederick Seidel’s “Nice Weather,” a typically devil-may-care collection, full of malice, eros, grief, and the boldest rhymes outside of hip-hop. Compared to Seidel, most other poets just seem to be playing it safe.

David Alan Harvey’s book of Rio de Janeiro photos, “(based on a true story),” set a new standard for the photo book. Extraordinary photography and book design from one of the best in game.

Jeremy Denk

Matthew Guerrieri’s “The First Four Notes” and Geoff Dyer’s “Zona.” Two impossible and ridiculous acts of sustained attention: the first earnest, the second (pretending to be?) cynical. Can you really squeeze a book out of the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony? Guerrieri shows us how, dashing back and forth from the terse notes to all the meaning-baggage that’s been heaped on them. It’s a formidable act of intelligent scholarship and imaginative connection-making. Meanwhile, Geoff Dyer, who loves to be irritating, narrates an un-narratable Tarkovsky film to us, start to finish. He keeps reminding us how preposterous this premise is. It’s like a really lazy version of Roland Barthes’s “S/Z,” with the narrator being a brilliant twit-cum-film-nut after two pints in a seedy pub.

I would be no kind of music geek at all if I didn’t mention Charles Rosen’s latest brilliant collection of essays, “Freedom and the Arts.” Whenever I read Rosen’s work, I think of all the dim space in my brain that is occupied irreparably by old “Brady Bunch” episodes and the sexual politics of “Three’s Company”; in Rosen’s brain these areas are occupied by Montaigne, the complete works of Congreve, rival translations of Rimbaud, etc. etc. He bestrides culture. He is rarely shy about the broad assertion, or about the perfect poison insult, delivered with a smile. He wonders (marvellously) why the “New Grove Dictionary of Opera” has no entry on “Singing.” The editor defends himself: the “New Grove Dictionary of Music” has no article on “Music.” To which Rosen responds: “I am told that committing the first crime makes the next ones easier.”

David Ferry’s “Bewilderment” and Montale’s “Poetic Notebooks,” now released in English translation. Ferry intertwines Classical translations with original poems, making profound connections between past and present. I've always loved Ferry’s translations of Horace’s Odes, and my favorite is in here: the one about the joys and dangers of drink, with “the Sithonian drinkers / who think they tell right from wrong by squinting along / The disappearing line libidinous desire / Draws on the wet bartop.” Taken together, these two books comprise an intense dose of late-life melancholy; Montale is despair on steroids. Makes an excellent Christmas gift.

Malcolm Gladwell

I loved Mischa Hiller’s “Shake Off.” I picked it up entirely by accident. I’d never heard of Hiller before, and the book absolutely blew me away. The only thriller this year that even came close was Chris Pavone’s “The Expats,” but Hiller’s novel has the benefit of mining every trope of the thriller genre while being absolutely original at the same time. I will read anything by Hiller from now on.

David Grann

I spent most of 2012 catching up on the books I meant to read in 2011. I did read Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity,” which I thought was a remarkable work of immersion reporting, and as evocatively written as a novel. And I read the fourth volume of Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, “The Passage of Power,” which, along with the previous three volumes, and the final one still to come, will mark one of the great literary achievements of our time.

Rebecca Mead

Most of the books I read this year were published between 1850 and 1920 (many thanks to Abe and Google Books). But among books issued in 2012, I greatly admired “Portrait of a Novel,” Michael Gorra’s intimate and engaging life of Henry James told through the story of the inspiration, composition, and publication of “The Portrait of a Lady.” And, of course, I also read**“Bring Up the Bodies,”** which makes me glad and awed to be living in the age of Hilary Mantel.

Maile Meloy

“Brothers,” by George Howe Colt, is part memoir, part exhaustively researched biography of famous brothers and how they drove each other, loved each other, fought, drove each other crazy, and supported each other through craziness. It’s about the Marx brothers, the Kelloggs, the van Goghs, the Thoreaus, John Wilkes Booth’s family, and almost any other fraternal set you can think of. While I was reading it, someone telling me about his own brother said, “It’s the most unprocessed relationship in my life.” Colt, with three brothers, seems to have done his share of processing, and the book is insightful and harrowing and funny and stacked with stories.

Louis Menand

The best new book I read last year, in fact the best new book I’ve read in many years, is Jorie Graham’s “Place,” which is a book of poems, but which need not be approached as such. It can be approached as a book by a person who has something to say, and, since she happens to be a poet, says it in poetry—in the same way that Lucretius and Dante had something to say, and also said it in poetry. What Lucretius and Dante had to say was: “This is how the universe is, and, given that, this is what life, human life, your life, really is.” Except that Graham is not interested in the universe, which is a vertiginous abstraction; she’s interested in the planet whose air we breathe and on whose roads we walk. That’s her “place.” She’s also not interested in the way things have been and forever will be; she’s interested in the way things are now, in this lifetime, at this moment. Ecologically, it feels to her like a late moment. The thought-experiment version of her book would be something like: if our species were wiped out tomorrow and there was no human future on earth, if it should turn out that today really is the last day, what would human life seem like, what meaning could it possibly have, looking back? If you’re interested in imagining, from this point of view, what it means to be alive today on a minute chunk (but our minute chunk) of the solar system, read “Place.” You will read it more than once.

Evan Osnos

“India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India,” by Akash Kapur: This takes, wisely, a humble approach: instead of trying to encapsulate the entirety of India’s changes, it follows a few lives along the idiosyncratic ways they develop. For people who savored Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers.”

“Tombstone,” by Yang Jisheng: This investigation into China’s famine is an archeological dig into the roots of modern Chinese authoritarianism and moral crisis. It helps to explain the layers of famine-themed fiction by Mo Yan, the 2012 Nobel Laureate, and other contemporary Chinese writers.

“Lenin’s Kisses,” by Yan Lianke: Yan, one of China’s most successful writers, is still gaining attention abroad, but this story of a village that decides to buy Lenin’s corpse is Yan at the peak of his absurdist powers. He writes in the spirit of the dissident writer Vladimir Voinovich, who observed that “reality and satire are the same.”

Judith Thurman

I was laid up for ten weeks this summer, and couldn’t leave the house, so I had that perverse luxury, for which I used to envy patrician invalids of the nineteenth century, of lying on my divan, with the shades drawn, and a book. I rarely have the chance to read fiction, so I caught up on the American novel: James Salter, Rudolph Wurlitzer; Stefan Merrill Block; Nicole Krauss, among others. I grazed in the Library of America’s two volumes of reportage from the Second World War. I reread Nabokov and Catullus (the latter in Peter Green’s bilingual edition. My vocabulary of dirty words, in Latin, has been greatly enlarged.)

Many of these volumes were published before 2012. Three standouts from this year are:

Jonathan Galassi’s “Left-handed,” a collection of poems. My standard for poetry is this: the maximum abbreviation with the minimum loss of meaning. Galassi writes about love with an almost reckless freedom of feeling, chastened by an arduous purity of style. The language clears your head, but the emotion produces a high. I doled the book out to myself, like an invalid’s dose of eau-de-vie, one page at a time.

Benjamin Taylor’s “Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay.” You will find it, somewhat misplaced, in the “travel-writing” section of your local bookstore (if you still have one.) It is a work of voluptuous erudition; a meditation on place and displacement; a paean to the chance encounter—a worldly adventure story, in other words. I found it transporting.

Edna O’Brien’s “Country Girl: A Memoir.” We who are born women know that you must suffer to be beautiful, O.K., but that’s the least of it. You must suffer to become yourself, and it doesn’t get easier. I took heart from “Country Girl,” both as the self-portrait of a great prose stylist, and an exemplary female survivor.

Alec Wilkinson

One of my favorite books this year was a piece of autobiographical writing called “A Choreographic Mind,” by the dancer Susan Rethorst. Writing well can result from many things—an engagement with a subject so intimate that the writer gets out of his or her own way, a desire to tell a story without flourishes that distract from its import, a straightforwardness of manner; a mind for handling levels of complexity simultaneously; a dispatch from a gifted thinker, one whose ideas are brilliant but who also finds the words to convey them artfully—there aren’t really any boundaries I know of. A gift in one art doesn’t necessarily transfer to another, and artists who can describe their private decisions and motivations and the meanings they are trying to get at are rare. Rethorst has a talent for self-examination and candor in the absence of romanticizing. Choreography to her is a monk’s work—patient, obscure, and elusive. She conveys the complicated states of feeling and intention that go into her gestures and themes. She has a close attention and from the stream of events that pass selects those that exemplify her ideas.

It is difficult, at least I find it difficult, to understand another person’s thinking. I don’t mean point of view, that’s easy enough. I mean imaginatively to inhabit another person’s being in such a way that for a moment we might feel we have enlarged ourselves. When I was younger, I liked taking LSD, because it did this. At least I thought it did this, except I see now that what it really did was expand my interior world, in a way that overwhelmed, even costumed, the ordinary world. Books are one of the few places where we can slow down all the wearying and intrusive distractions—the exasperations, anxieties, and conflicted ambitions—of social life and penetrate another existence. If that existence is well described, this can be an exalted form of impersonation. Rethorst so clearly described the immensely receptive manner in which she apprehends the world that I felt I had a privileged view of the mechanics and procedures of an ardent life.

Illustration by Laurent Cilluffo.