Wrapping Up a Year in Reading

With the year drawing to a close, so too is our Year in Reading series. We at The Millions would like to thank all of those who contributed to the series as well as those who helped us put together such a great group of people to participate.

We'd also like to thank all of our readers for a great year at The Millions - the best ever in terms of visitors, but also in more qualitative respects. We touched on many great books and many great topics and our readers were always there to offer their insights. We hope to make The Millions even more of a "must read" destination in 2008, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, we're going to take a break around here for a couple of days, but, in the spirit of the Year in Reading, we invite all of you to finish this sentence in the comments: "The best book I read all year was..."

- C. Max Magee @ 7:15 PM ~ comments: 33 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Garth Risk Hallberg

Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of A Field Guide to the North American Family: An Illustrated Novella, and is a contributor to The Millions.

...And what a year it was: the manic highs, the crushing lows and no creamy middle to hold them together. In this way, my reading life and my other life seemed to mirror each other in 2007, as I suppose they do every year. As a reader, I try not to pick up a book unless there's a good chance I'm going to like it, but as an aspiring critic, I felt obliged to slog through a number of bad novels. And so my reading list for 2007 lacked balance. It's easy to draw a line between the wheat and the chaff, but harder to say which of the two dozen or so books I loved were my favorites, so grateful was I for their mere existence.

If pressed, I would have to say that my absolute greatest reading experience of the year was Howard's End by E.M. Forster. Zadie Smith inspired me to read this book, and I can't believe I waited this long. Forster's style seems to me the perfect expression of democratic freedom. It allows "the passion" and "the prose" equal representation on the page, and seeks the common ground between them. Forster's ironies, in writing about the Schlegel family, are of the warmest variety. I wish I could write like him.

A close runner-up was Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives. It's been years since I reacted this viscerally to a novel, as you'll see if you read my review.

Rounding out my top three was Helen De Witt's first novel, The Last Samurai. Published in 2000 and then more or less forgotten about, The Last Samurai introduced me to one of my favorite characters of the year, a child prodigy named Ludo. Ludo's gifts are ethical as much as they are intellectual, and I loved De Witt's rigorous adherence to her own peculiar instincts; her refusal to craft a "shapely" novel in the M.F.A. style.

Other favorite classics included Balzac's Lost Illusions and Fielding's Tom Jones - each the expression of a sui generis authorial temperament - and Anne Carson's odd and arresting translation of the fragmentary lyrics of Sappho. Every year, I try to read at least one long, modernist novel from my beloved Wiemar period; in 2007, Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers reminded me why. And from the American canon, I was smitten with Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (essay) and Joseph Heller's Something Happened (review).

Three books by short-story writers whom I'd nominate for inclusion in the American canon: Excitability: Selected Stories by Diane Williams, Sylvia by Leonard Michaels (review), and Transactions in a Foreign Currency by Deborah Eisenberg, one of my favorite contemporary writers.

Of the many (too many) new English-language novels I read, the best were Tom McCarthy's stunningly original Remainder, Mark Binelli's thoroughly entertaining Sacco & Vanzetti Must Die, Thomas Pynchon's stunningly original, thoroughly entertaining, but unfocused Against the Day (review), Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (review), and Don DeLillo's Falling Man. This last book seemed to me unfairly written off upon its release. I taught an excerpt from it to undergraduates, and for me, DeLillo's defamiliarized account of September 11 and its aftermath deepened with each rereading.

The best book of journalism I read this year was Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower (review). And my two favorite new translations were Gregoire Brouillier's memoir, The Mystery Guest (review), and Tatyana Tolstaya's novel, The Slynx (review).

Thanks for reading, everybody. See you in '08!

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- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 10:07 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Charlie Wilson's Secret Proxy War

Charlie Wilson's War, the movie, is set to open nationwide on Friday. A recent screening in Manhattan was about two-thirds full, and the response when the lights came up was tepid applause. It's not a bad movie, basically Tom Hanks wearing suspenders, grab-assing with Julia Roberts, and drinking a lot of scotch. It also features trademark Aaron Sorkin screenwriting: dense, snappy dialogue a la "West Wing" and A Few Good Men (Sorkin also has a new Broadway offering, The Farnsworth Invention), and direction by Mike Nichols (Primary Colors). Philip Seymour Hoffman rounds out the cast, and he does his usual fine turn as Gust Avrokotos, a CIA agent with a chip on his shoulder. It is a film based on actual events, events chronicled in George Crile's book, subtitled "The Extraordinary Story of how the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times."

Charlie Wilson's War, the book, takes a lot longer than the movie to absorb, but it is worth the time. It's an amazing story that just about does justice to that rambling subtitle. In addition to being a sensational tale of political maneuvering, high-power high jinks, and clandestine operations, Crile's reporting provokes deep thoughts about how the Cold War was ended and how legislative government really functions in America. Crile hints that Wilson, the Democratic Congressman from Texas, hard drinker, notorious philanderer, "Good Time Charlie," as he was called, may have had a hand in saving the world from the Soviets. As a member of the all-powerful House Appropriations Committee, Wilson wrangled millions of Federal dollars for the CIA to support the Islamic tribal guerrilla factions within Afghanistan that battled the Red Army, which occupied Kabul in late 1979, throughout the 1980s. Guns, mortars, mines, rocket launchers: things that jihadists need to kill Commies.

"Afghanistan was the largest and most successful covert operation ever mounted by the CIA," writes Crile. The partnership between Wilson, the congressman, and Avrakotos, head of the CIA's South Asian Operations Bureau, made it happen. The degree to which the Red Army's defeat in Afghanistan, culminating in complete withdrawal in 1989, influenced the subsequent raising of the iron curtain, collapse of the U.S.S.R., and end of the Cold War, is a matter for debate. Wilson recognized that there was one place in the world, Afghanistan, where the U.S. had an opportunity to have a hand in the killing of Soviet soldiers. After seeing the refugee camps in Pakistan, and meeting with numerous mujahideen, Wilson came to view them as freedom fighters, and he championed their cause.

But inspiring as Charlie Wilson's story is, let's face it: it's frightening to think that an obscure congressman could have such awesome power to dictate American foreign policy. Did Wilson and Avrakotos break laws in the course of directing the most successful covert operation ever mounted by the CIA? Crile writes the following:

At a time when [Nicaraguan] Contras could not get a dime from Congress, Charlie Wilson had managed to turn the CIA's cautious bleeding campaign in Afghanistan into a half-billion-dollars-a-year operation that dwarfed any prior agency effort. For all practical purposes Wilson had hijacked U.S. foreign policy and was busy transforming it into the first direct winner-take-all contest with the Soviet Union... He was now engaged in the kind of sensitive diplomacy that is technically illegal for anyone other than the White House to conduct: Cutting arms deals with the defense minister of Egypt; commissioning Israel to design weapons for the CIA; negotiating all manner of extraordinarily controversial matters with the all important U.S. ally general Zia [ul-Haq, president of Pakistan].

Whether or not his actions were legal, it would seem that Wilson was motivated by patriotic ideals, to aid victims of tyrannical aggression and hurt the U.S.'s great Red enemy. But part of what makes this such a jaw dropping story is that Wilson was able to accomplish what he did - and get away with it.

Honest though his motives were, Wilson's actions had unforeseen consequences, a fact that was brought home to him on September 11, 2001. All of the hijackers who hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon had spent time training in Afghanistan. I shuddered when I read this sentence:

For anyone trying to make sense of this new enemy, it would seem relevant that for over a decade in the 1980s and early 1990s, the U.S. government sponsored the largest and most successful jihad in modern history; that the CIA secretly armed and trained several hundred thousand fundamentalist warriors to fight against our common Soviet enemy; and that many of those who now targeted America were veterans of that earlier CIA sponsored jihad.

Especially when considered in light of the intelligence failures that predicated the 9/11 attacks, the CIA emerges from the Charlie Wilson saga with their usual black eye, despite the Afghan war with Soviets being supposedly the Agency's finest moment. It is a perverse glory that comes with winning a "proxy" war. It would seem a rather ignoble pursuit.

- Noah Deutsch @ 12:31 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Robert Englund

Actor Robert Englund is best known for his portrayal of Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street series. He currently resides in Laguna Beach, California with his wife Nancy and his dog Lola.

Robert Englund's Best Books of 2007 (in no particular order):

• The Maytrees by Annie Dillard
• Acts of Faith by Phillip Caputo
• The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford
• Falling Man by Don DeLillo
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
• And... my favorite discovery of the year: Lorrie Moore's Birds of America: Stories

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- Editor @ 12:10 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Dan Kois

Dan Kois edits Vulture, New York magazine's arts and culture blog.

Like many people who work in publishing, feed off of publishing, or report on publishing, I'm constantly reading months or even years ahead. So my 2007 reading experience was unlike that of many of your correspondents; rarely could I find time to dip into the past. When I did, it was to re-read works that had given me great pleasure: the funny and sad novels of Tom Drury, for a profile I still swear to God I will eventually write; Harry Potter and His Dark Materials, in preparation for the final volume of the former and the film of the latter. I read comics systematically and comprehensively this year for the first time, and loved dozens and dozens of them, sometimes feeling like a reading cheater in my ability to rip through an entire satisfying story in an hour or less. But the best book I read all this year is a book that isn't even coming out until next year: Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith, a thriller set in the darkest days of Stalinist Russia, one of the finest intersections of historical setting and propulsive plot I've read in a long time. It's a book that transcends the serial killer genre and becomes a difficult, complicated work of art in its own right.

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- C. Max Magee @ 9:17 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Eli Gottlieb

Eli Gottlieb's The Boy Who Went Away won the prestigious Rome Prize and the 1998 McKitterick Prize from the British Society of Authors. It also received extraordinary notices and was a New York Times Notable book. Eli Gottlieb's latest novel, Now You See Him, will be published on January 22, 2008. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Once every few years, usually when I'm beginning a new book, I reread one or two of Saul Bellow's novels to prime the pump. This year it was Humboldt's Gift, the last great work in the high Belovian style. It's a book which has always spoken to my "inner prompter" to use Bellow's own phrase for the mysterious faculty within us that allows us, as writers, to "speak". The novel, appropriately enough, was dictated and then transcribed, a process which accounts for the rather jaunty sprawl of its construction. It's a big, loose, episodic thing, guyed entirely by the high-wire act of its prose, which has the innovation - surely that of a late style - of running adjectives together in way that leaves a painterly blur in the reader's mind. So Lake Michigan has "limp silk fresh lilac drowning water," and a woman is "roused, florid, fragrant, large".

The book is based on Bellow's close friendship with Delmore Schwartz, the fizzled literary comet of the 1940s, who wrote a perfect book of poems at age 24, lost his mind not long thereafter, and eventually died in a Times Square flophouse hotel, convinced that his wife had left him for Nelson Rockefeller. Schwartz's longtime shrink was a friend of our family, and I once found myself sitting in the home of the shrink's widow, looking at the written results of Schwartz's Rohrschach tests. They stated he was manic depressive, implied a repressed homosexuality, adverted to a probable alcohol problem, and concluded with a chilling definition of the poetic temperament. "It is probable," read the diagnosis, "that the mania has infected his higher reason." Ouch.

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- Editor @ 12:13 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Brian Morton

Brian Morton's novels include Starting Out in the Evening and Breakable You.

A few things I loved this year:

Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Her humor can remind you of Ring Lardner; her fondness for Southern grotesques can remind you of Flannery O'Connor; and her mordant reflections on the difficulty of love can remind you of Proust - but really, there was nobody like her, ever. More than fifty years old, this short novel is the liveliest thing I've read in years. If the world of MFA programs moved O'Connor off the pedestal and replaced her with McCullers, it would be a good thing for the future of American literature.

It might seem superfluous to add another word of praise for Zadie Smith's On Beauty, except that it's impossible to praise her enough for how well she listens. Who else, for example, pays such close attention to the way we never, ever finish our sentences? "'Man, why you gotta be all...I just ahks a question, that's all, and you gotta be all...' Here Levi provided an inconclusive mime that gave no idea of the missing word."

Fade to Blonde, by Max Phillips, is a brilliant homage to (and parody of) the noir tradition. Raymond Chandler said something to the effect that his Philip Marlowe novels were primarily experiments with language; you could say something similar about Fade To Blonde. I've never met Philips, but, having heard a rumor that he's not writing anymore, I want to address him directly: You are a fantastic writer, man! Keep going!

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- Editor @ 8:41 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: David Gutowski

David Gutowski runs the popular music and culture blog Largehearted Boy.

As I get ready to move, I have been packing away the books I have read this year. A bit obsessive about my reading, I keep separate shelves for my blog's 52 Books, 52 Weeks and Book Notes projects, along with a shelf for everything else I have squeezed into the year. Gathering my yearly input has given me a rare insight into how amazing this year's books have been for me, especially Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.

I keep a "to read" list on my laptop, right now it features over a hundred books, ordered by interest. The Omnivore's Dilemma had been on the list for over a year, ever since my friends started recommending the book to me, always with the wide eyes of recently converted zealots. My wife jokes that my personal mantra is, "I'm skeptical," but with so many people whose opinions I respect behind the book, I decided to give it a chance (and slotted it between the literary fiction and graphic novels that make up the majority of my yearly reading).

The Omnivore's Dilemma is the rare book which changed the way I live. Michael Pollan gave me new insight into the true cost of the food we eat. Last year I read Jay Weinstein's The Ethical Gourmet and reconsidered my diet with regard to ecological concerns, but Pollan takes the argument to another plane altogether. As he follows the food chain of industrial, organic, and even foraged foods, he delves into the government's involvement in our diets and the perils facing family farms with graceful prose and strong arguments. Like a good novel, I read the book in one sitting, transfixed by the personal story Michael Pollan shared as well as the national and global ramifications of our diet.

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- Editor @ 12:23 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Marshall N. Klimasewiski

Marshall N. Klimasewiski has two books, both published by W. W. Norton. The Cottagers, a novel, came out in 2006, and Tyrants, short stories, will be published in February. He teaches at Washington University in Saint Louis.

I had the pleasure of hanging out with some ambitious and vivacious books in 2007 that I thought were splendid - All Aunt Hagar's Children, The Looming Tower, The House of Mirth - but I'd rather talk about a relatively shy, delicate creature that crawled into my brain and has been quietly expanding there ever since. Peter Ho Davies' The Welsh Girl is set at the end of World War II in a village (not quaint, not kooky, not grotesque either) in Wales where a German P. O. W. camp is hastily constructed and filled. For me, it was one of those thoroughly engrossing, exquisite "small" novels which vividly render an isolated environment and a small cast and yet are somehow constantly aware of the massive and, in this case, terrible history past the reach of the pub and the flock. It's a book that feels best read under a small circle of lamplight in a dark room, and it knows it: "confinement" is a word important to it, and both a ship in a bottle and a slate tunnel are featured beautifully. I do love a novel that takes full advantage of the intimacy of the art form, and how unlikely that such a book could so powerfully address the value and wages of nationalism.

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- Editor @ 1:46 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Jess Row

Jess Row's first book, The Train to Lo Wu, a collection of short stories set in Hong Kong, was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemignway Award. In 2007 he was named a Best Young American Novelist by Granta. He is currently at work on a new collection of stories and a novel set in Laos during the Vietnam War.

I'd be lying if I didn't say that my favorite books read in 2007 were Little Dorrit and Daniel Deronda. But almost as much fun as the novels themselves were the copious endnotes (in the Penguin and Modern Library editions, respectively). I wonder: in a hundred years, will any novels from our era get the same treatment? And if so, what will the endnotes "say?"

Other favorites: David Means' The Secret Goldfish; Cees Nooteboom, Lost Paradise; Leonard Michaels, The Collected Stories; Nathan Englander, The Ministry of Special Cases; Nadine Gordimer, Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black; Han Shaogong, A Dictionary of Maqiao. I was also introduced this year to the anthropologist and cultural theorist Michael Taussig, whose Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses was probably the book I carried around the longest (and still haven't finished).

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- Editor @ 7:36 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Bookdwarf

Bookdwarf, who is neither a book nor a dwarf, is the Head Buyer for the independent Harvard Book Store and an inveterate hoarder of galleys and first editions. Her reading interests run across all genres and styles, but her favorites include Haruki Murakami, George Eliot, and Alexander Dumas.

I feel like I've said "This is the best book I've read this year" a lot in 2007. What a great year for books. There are a few new ones as well as a few older ones on my list. First, I'll get George Eliot's Middlemarch out of the way. It's simply one of the best books I've ever read. I expect to read this again in a few years and still feel the same, it's that good. It's the kind of book where you're not certain you can make it past the first 100 pages, but what a treat if you do!

I loved Danielle Trussoni's Falling Through the Earth, listed as one of the Top Ten Books of 2006 by the New York Times. A spare memoir about her father's experiences as a tunnel rat in Vietnam. She seemed to have gotten post traumatic stress syndrome from the war as well.

Shalom Auslander wrote another brilliant memoir, Foreskin's Lament. Dark, scathing, and funny, he writes about his Orthodox Jewish upbringing with a passion I usually reserve for politics.

With regard to new fiction, I loved many books this year, but two standouts were Yannick Murphy's Signed, Mata Hari and Benjamin Percy's Refresh, Refresh. These might be two of the best books you haven't read yet.

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- Editor @ 8:03 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Ted Heller

Ted Heller is the author of two novels, Slab Rat and Funnymen, and is senior writer at Nickelodeon Magazine.

I work during the daytime and write my own books (and watch way too much sports) at night, so I don't read as much as I should. However, once in a while I do get a chance to read.

The best book I read this year was Seven Ages of Paris by the historian Alistair Horne. A thousand years in the life of a city in 400 pages... it was tres magnifique and was so good that I then read his wonderful and poignant The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 I also read and enjoyed American Prometheus, the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. It was thorough and terrific but just not quite as funny as the section of my masterpiece Funnymen which takes place in Los Alamos while the A-bomb is being invented.

I also read and liked Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan. It had me laughing aloud and, at times, envious. It fell apart a bit toward the very end but I liked it and recommend it to anyone who needs a guffaw or two. I will certainly read whatever he comes up with next.

I also began re-rereading the early short stories of Hemingway. You know something? He wasn't bad.

I hope to work a lot less and read a lot more next year.

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- Editor @ 7:55 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Sam Sacks

Sam Sacks is an editor at the online arts and literature review Open Letters Monthly

Although there was a lot of good stuff this year (from Mailer's grandiose A Castle in the Forest to Sydney Landon Plum's humble nature monograph Solitary Goose), one year can never compete with two millennia of classics, and my most important reading experience came from the gravid Penguin paperback edition of Black Lamb and Gray Falcon by Rebecca West. I read this amazing book in stages over the course of months, like an exhausting and transformative migratory journey. It's a dense, digressive travelogue interspersed with history, philosophy, current events (those of the doomed patchwork country of Yugoslavia in the 1930s and the increasingly militarized nations that bordered it), and flamboyant, fictionalized dialogue that's virtually Shakespearean in its beauty. West is obsessed with her subject, and her obsession infects the book with a sense of euphoria and high tragedy that provide something memorable on nearly every page.

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- Editor @ 12:48 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Yannick Murphy

Yannick Murphy's latest novel is Signed, Mata Hari, published this November by Little, Brown & Co. She is also the author of Here They Come, The Sea of Trees, Stories in Another Language, the forthcoming In a Bear's Eye, and Ahwoooooooo! a children's book. More information about Yannick Murphy’s writing can be found at www.yannickmurphy.com

My mind isn't screaming after the first sentence, that's when I know a book is going to be a good one. If the first sentence isn't predictable and I wish I had written it myself, that's also how I know. Then, if I feel scared, it's a sure sign the book is a good one. I'm scared to keep reading because all of the sentences are good and I know I'm going to have to start writing better if I even want to come close to being as great as that writer is. And, really, I'm always in a fight against laziness and I don't want to have to work so hard at being a great writer and so then I become mad at the writer because they've ruined the perfectly comfortable zombie state I was in, and now this, now beautiful sentences that engage me and overwhelm me and challenge me. Finally, if I'm reading and I can't help but keep reading because the sentences keep pushing me headlong into their rhythms and glottal stops and playfulness so that I'm so far into the book that I then say, "Oh, my god, what's going to happen next?" then I also know it's a good book. After that I forget all about the mechanics of individual sentences because they become part of the entire deep and complicated event of the story. That is what happened when I read the novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy, I stopped analyzing and criticizing and I gave in and it was delicious and I became wholly entertained. It's what always happens when I read his work.

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- Editor @ 7:15 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Liz Moore

Liz Moore graduated from Barnard College in 2005. Her first novel, The Words of Every Song, centers on a fictional record company in New York City and the lives of a broad set of characters connected to it. A musician herself, Moore has performed at many of New York's institutions. She released her first album, Backyards, now available on iTunes and CDBaby, in September. Her websites are www.lizmooremusic.com and www.myspace.com/lizmooremusic.

I quit my full-time job and started an MFA program this year, which has given me the opportunity to both read a lot of great stuff and berate myself daily for not being as literate as my classmates.

Nevertheless, here are some books I have read and enjoyed this year: Ishiguro's Remains of the Day; Goodnight Sisters, selected columns by Irish journalist Nell McCafferty; and, because quitting my job has caused me to take up babysitting, quite an assortment of children's books. My favorite are the Fancy Nancy series and every Barbie book ever written, mainly because some of them include photographs of actual plastic Barbie dolls stiffly pursuing various leisure activities, such as tennis and baking, and I cannot emphasize enough how incredibly weird and awesome this looks.

I also re-read Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. These are my desert-island books: I could read them monthly, I think, and still come up with new visions and versions of his beautifully imagined characters and their intertwined lives.

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- Editor @ 8:13 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Roy Kesey

Roy Kesey's fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared in more than sixty magazines, including McSweeney's, The Georgia Review and The Iowa Review, and in several anthologies including The Future Dictionary of America, New Sudden Fiction, The Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology and Best American Short Stories. He's the author of a novella called Nothing in the World and a collection of short stories called All Over.

I've been reading a lot of history and historiography lately, and a lot of the books are magnificent, but the coolest by some stretch was Carlo Ginzburg's History, Rhetoric and Proof. Does that, from its title, sound like a fun book? Perhaps not so much. But it is joyously smart and fast and important. Ginzburg makes you feel like your brain is as big as his is, which is a very nice feeling indeed.

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- Editor @ 1:00 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: David Leavitt

David Leavitt is the author of several novels and short stories, most recently, The Indian Clerk. He is a recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and was recently named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library. David Leavitt divides his time between Tuscany and Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches at the University of Florida.

Don't be deceived by the cover of Pierre Bayard's How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read. Despite appearances, this extraordinary book is, in fact, an eloquent meditation on the act and art of reading dressed up as a sort of etiquette guide to Parisian parties. (Apparently at Parisian parties, as opposed to American parties, people talk about books and take for granted in one another a more than basic knowledge of books.) As his starting point, Bayard considers novels by Balzac, Musil, Eco and Greene that he knows intimately, whether he's read them or not, and explores the role that not reading plays in each of them.

Also well worth pursuing: Bayard's earlier Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? which proposes an alternative solution to Agatha Christie's famous murder mystery.

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- Editor @ 7:12 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Shaking the Tree: Lit-Blogs Wrestle With Denis Johnson

In the back of the winter issue of n+1, you'll find both a revised version of the defense of literary weblogs I posted here last spring and a response from Marco Roth. It speaks well of the magazine that it would publish dissent as well as invite it (which is also, of course, a hallmark of the "lit-blog.") And, as I'm still doing my best to puzzle out some of the pros and cons of this new and evolving medium, I thought I might call your attention to an object lesson: the debate over B.R. Myers' review, in The Atlantic Monthly, of Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke.

It's often a blessing that comment-thread controversies blow over without getting wider notice. Ideas that seem vital one week may seem irrelevant the next. But in my view, the conversation developing around Myers and Johnson - at Rake's Progress, at The Beiderbecke Affair, and now at Ed's place - illustrates some of the positive critical capacities of the medium.

That conversation began in the kind of intemperate name-calling n+1 might deride - "B.R. Myers is Satan"; "Who's the Wanker?" - but it has broadened to encompass a number of substantial controversies - the responsibilities of the reviewer; the state of American fiction; politics and the English language. And it has helped me better understand Denis Johnson's prose style.

When I read, and enjoyed, Tree of Smoke in June, I felt that its style was both an asset and a liability. Certainly, Johnson is an unusual stylist. And yet, when the first reviews and blurbs began to appear, I was surprised at how little attention was paid to his diction and syntax. "Prose of amazing power and stylishness," Philip Roth said, without bothering to explain how or why. Jim Lewis' piece in The New York Times Book Review amounted to a bizarre kind of abdication. Only John Jeremiah Sullivan, writing in Harper's, engaged with Johnson at the level of the sentence.

In my own review (which I'm embarrassed to note also references n+1; this is turning into a bad habit), I attempted to account for what I felt was Johnson's wide margin of error. "Though there are passages and even pages through which I itched to run my workshopper's pencil," I wrote, "I would trade a dozen finely calibrated domestic comedies for a single chapter of Tree of Smoke.

[Johnson's] sentences and dialogue, flirting with the poetic, violate the canons of understatement. Like the sentences of D.H. Lawrence, they seem to depend on the supernatural for inspiration. They may not always find it, but they are alive to the possibilities of language.

To his credit, B.R. Myers, too, would pay attention to Johnson's sentences. Regrettably, he would pay little attention to anything else (the context in which those sentences appear, for example). His review does make a couple of copy-editorial catches: Would Buddhists think of their own icons as "bric-a-brac?" Can "someone standing in [...] a noisy place hear even his heartbeat, let alone his pulse?" In never moving beyond fastidiousness, though, Myers' Atlantic review takes on the flavor of agenda-driven cherry-picking. It attempts to persuade us, by fiat, that a sentence such as the novel's first - "Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed." - is bad.

Critiques of Myers' motivations and methods are abundant elsewhere; I won't rehearse them here. But I wanted to point out what lit-blogs managed to do with that last sentence, which hadn't been done elsewhere. In an anonymous comment at The Beiderbecke Affair (anonymous because overheated and not fully thought through), I wrote:

I like the way that pluperfect "had," strategically ungrammatical, sets us up to expect something to happen in the imperfect. Something has happened, the sentence tells us. Yes, Kennedy has died, but something else...something, presumably, more personal. Thus does the book announce (quietly) its aspirations to be something more than the settled history Myers - a myopic literalist - seems to wish it was.

Then a commenter named Alan (who disagreed with some of my bloviations), suggested,

This is quite right. Kennedy died at 1 PM US Central Time, which would have been 1 AM in Vietnam. So the sentence "Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed" is not actually trying to say that Kennedy died (perfect tense) at that time. That wouldn't make sense. What the sentence is doing is evoking the experience of a character who is awoken in the middle of the night in Vietnam to the news that Kennedy HAD BEEN killed. This narrative immersion in a character's point of view can also be seen in the following passage...

Alan's comment is, I think, a small but meaningful exemplar of the critical capacities of an interactive medium, and of what close-reading actually does. Were this a seminar (which, at its best, the comment-thread approximates), the instructor might be saying, "Yes. Yes!" Rather than dismiss an unusual sentence, Alan moves from a puzzle over its meaning (centered on the verb tense) to an intuition (we've been thrown, without comment, deep into a character's point of view) that illuminates an important part of the formal architecture of the whole work.

One wants only to add that a serious literary essay has at least two possible registers of persuasion. It can persuade those who haven't read the book, and then it can persuade those who have. I often feel that Myers is addressing himself almost exclusively to an audience that hasn't read the work under review, and that his aim is to convince them not to bother. Like Myers, I've been disappointed by Annie Proulx and Rick Moody in the past. But, having read them, I'm troubled by the gap between my experience of their work and the experience of their work Myers constructs. A good-faith critic should aim to write an essay that can be revisited after one has read the work and that will not then seem to collapse into flatulence. I admire this about James Wood. His essays are attempts to understand, rather than attempts to seem in-the-know, and they challenge me even when I disagree with them. In this way, he, too, offers a model of what literary discourse on the web can be. On the other hand, the valuable lit-blog conversation about Tree of Smoke seems to have arisen despite, rather than because of, the merits of B.R. Myers' remarks in print.

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A Year in Reading: Edward Champion

Edward Champion's work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Philly Inquirer, Newsday, as well as more disreputable publications. He blogs at Return of the Reluctant and podcasts at The Bat Segundo Show.

I'm reserving my hosannas for this year's lit for another place, another time, another Bizarro universe, another silly excuse to rip off my clothes, dive into the almighty ocean, and shout ("Holy shit, it's freezing!") the ten names of the ten greatest books to the heavens and presumably Xenu himself. There was one writer I rediscovered this year after a ten year absence, a guy who knocked my socks off, a man who I understand was passed up for a special National Book Award because he was considered too experimental, too out there, too not right for the vox populi. Never mind that his instinctive perversion of carnal and literary conventions is exactly the apposite kick in the ass the American public needs right now and exactly the kind of subversive thrust that can galvanize today's young writers.

That man is John Barth, who, at 77, is indeed still alive and still writing and may face a Gilbert Sorrentino-style shutout in his last years if we're not careful. You'll even find one of his tales, "Toga Party," in this year's Best American Short Stories. And this story of anxiety and distress and growing older demonstrates that the old guy still has it.

But if you need convincing in novel form, start with his first three books, all of which I reread this year. The Floating Opera and The End of the Road were each written in three months, amazingly during the same year. Each volume is a glorious decimation of Puritanical values, whether they be sex, psychiatry, the legal system, or even the manner in which one obtains employment. But the piece de resistance is Barth's third book, his masterpiece, The Sot-Weed Factor, a picaresque 17th century monster that befuddled and delighted even the great Darby M. Dixon III! Not only is this book an immensely entertaining satire of a real-life Maryland poet named Ebeneezer Cooke, but it features lengthy explanations on arcane historical topics, perfectly fabricated notebooks that rethink the John Smith-Pocahantas relationship, and a sustained examination on how absolutist ideologies are inextricable thorns in the grand American rose. This is a book that a capsule post cannot do justice to. That it is not uttered in the same breath as Gravity's Rainbow or The Recognitions or Gormenghast is a sure sign that literary standards have fallen.

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A Year in Reading: Scott Esposito

Scott Esposito is the editor of The Quarterly Conversation and the host of the literary blog Conversational Reading. His writing on books has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chattahoochee Review, and the Rain Taxi Review of
Books, among others.

I'm a big advocate of the test of time - often I'm favorably impressed by a book right when I finish, but in the ensuing weeks and months, when I have a chance to look back through a book and see how it ages in my mind, many books that I once thought were good begin to lose their luster. So, in order that you can attach the proper grains of salt to each pick, I'm going to do my favorites for 2007 in the order in which I read them.

Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital, the third book I read, reads like a grand old mannered novel that got stuck with a 21st-century premise: there's a new Biblical Flood, and all that survives is a children's hospital. The story unfolds as the staff and the tiny patients figure out what God has in store for them. If this sounds overly religious and fantastic, it isn't - Adrian builds amazingly realistic characters while telling a tale that, although it certainly includes elements of fantasy, should satisfy any devoted realist. Adrian's an amazing talent, and for more info, read my review of this book.

A couple books later I read what might be my very favorite novel of the past few years: Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec. This novel simply describes the rooms in a Paris apartment building, but in these descriptions Perec ranges all over the world, telling all kinds of amazing, intricately crafted stories. The whole book is too complex and well-built to ever do justice to in a small paragraph like this - so, please, just read it.

At number 15 is The Savage Detectives, another book composed of discreet, story-type units. This book is generally agreed to be Roberto Bolano's masterpiece (either that or the never-completed 2666), and in it Bolano simply traces the lives of two poet-youths as they and their forgotten generation age. Though the book is innovative and stylistically challenging, it still delivers realistic characters and deep emotion.

About ten down we come to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and the first book of Proust, both of which I won't bother to write about as readers probably know about them already, and then at 28 Raymond Queneau's Witch Grass, a wonderful, playful book that one might legitimately say is about "nothing." Some have said that this is Queneau's gloss, in novel form, of Descartes' "I think, therefore I am," but regardless of how you interpret it, this is a plain old joyful read, as Queneau's prose is continually fresh and entertaining. In my blog, I wrote a little about it.

At 36 is Austen's Sense and Sensibility, which made me wish I had read her earlier; Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence follows at 37. Then we get onto some works of criticism: Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, in which he lays out his famous theory of myths and tries to pin down the basic kinds of stories people tell. Though this book is sometimes dense, there's a lot here, and it certainly changed the way I looked at narratives. A little after that I read Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction, in which he looks at how works of fiction are built. As erudite as this book is, it's highly readable; Booth meant this as the definitive book on rhetoric in fiction, and though he tried to bite off more than he (or probably anyone) could chew, this is about as good an attempt as you're going to get.

After that I dipped into a little Spanish, reading Cesar Aira's How I Became a Nun and Enrique Vila-Matas's Bartleby & Co. The Aira is a subversively funny work about a little boy (or is it girl?) who has a completely crazy experience when his father takes him out for his first taste of ice cream; the Vila-Matas is an un-novel that is composed entirely of footnotes to a book never written about writers who stopped writing. It's a very clever book that transcends mere cleverness, and for more about Vila-Matas, whom I think is an amazing writer, have a look at my essay on him.

After that there was Iris Murdoch's masterful The Sea, the Sea, which I blogged about. In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin, the unforgettable Tristram Shandy, Alex Ross's fine overview of 20th-century classical music, The Rest Is Noise, George Eliot's Middlemarch (which I can't recommend highly enough), and, most recently, the Renaissance work of 100 stories, The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio.

Though the last was written in the 14th century and may seem a little old and musty, I hope people give it a look. These stories are clinics in how to compose a short work of fiction, and reading them compared to something written by a more contemporary author is as refreshing as listing to a Bach sonata after taking in a symphony by Shostakovich. Moreover, these are just plain fun - Boccaccio's swipes at the church make you realize that people always have, and always will, have axes to grind with politicians and those in power, and his stories are bawdy enough to make you laugh out loud at his boldness.

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A Year in Reading: Sara Ivry

Sara Ivry is a senior editor at www.nextbook.org, where she hosts a weekly podcast on books, culture and ideas.

I'd never read anything by the British writer Howard Jacobson until this year, when I picked up Kalooki Nights to prepare for an interview. Hilarious, shocking, provocative, it relishes in the breadth of Jewish postwar experience (Orthodoxy, assimilation, paranoia, Nazi fetishism, who's trying to pass) through the eyes of one Maxie Glickman, an occasionally louche cartoonist from Manchester who marries only women with umlauts in their names (Chlöe, Zöe, et al.) and whose childhood friend has gassed his parents, but that hardly makes the man a villain! Pardon that far too simple description; what makes this novel a knock-out is its maturity and richness of story infused with both compassion and yuks about, for instance, misreading the silent "k" in knish or a teenager's ruse to feed his date biryanis so she gets hot under the collar and needs someone to blow on her.

At the urging of a friend I rented Infamous in July and then decided, finally, to read In Cold Blood when I went a week later to semi-rural Connecticut to visit my folks. At dinner I'd tell them about the book's latest developments, about the Clutters' horrible deaths in Kansas, about Perry Smith's tragic childhood that almost seemed to excuse his crime. Then, one day that week, I picked up the newspaper and read about three brutal murders, a mother and her daughters, in a town not too far away by two men who'd met in a halfway house. What seemed in In Cold Blood like an account of random violence in an altogether different time and place was made current, and my mother suggested I stop reading Capote's book, since we had been reminded with a jolt how close by brutality lurks. Despite how grim the news was, I couldn't put the book down. Even though I knew how it ended, I wanted to read Capote's telling of how it ended, and made sure every night that all doors and windows were locked tight.

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A Year in Reading: Richard Lange

Richard Lange is the author of the critically acclaimed collection of stories Dead Boys. He lives in Los Angeles. Read more about him at www.richlange.com

My favorite book of the year was Fat City, by Leonard Gardner. It's a novel about a couple of small-time boxers in Stockton, CA in the late '50s. We follow these fighters as they train in ratty gyms, drink in skid row bars, chase women they don't love, and work through their hangovers in dusty onion fields. Gardener finds harsh beauty in the bleakness and constructs sad poems out of broken dreams. These men want so much and get so little, and all of a sudden, BAM, you're sitting there trying to read with tears in your eyes.

Another book I liked was Winter's Bone, by Daniel Woodrell. Sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly's dad has jumped bail on a meth charge, and it's up to Ree to care for her two younger brothers and overmedicated mom. Her quest to track down her father before the bond company snatches the family's house puts her in conflict with an unsavory branch of her extended clan and leads to some harrowing scrapes. You'll shiver during Woodrell's descriptions of the icy Ozarks, flinch at the sudden violence and come to love the indomitable Ree. It's a simple tale made momentous by Woodrell's quiet insistence that these poor folks and their hardscrabble lives deserve our respectful attention.

I have to put in an Elmore Leonard, too, The Switch, from 1978. A kidnapping plot spins out of control in a shaky moral landscape where everybody's guilty of something. I'm a fool for Leonard's casual yet tightly controlled style and peerless dialogue. There's also a lot of humor here, as he skewers the '70s suburban country club lifestyle and makes sure that all the bad guys (and girls) get what's coming to them.

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A Year in Reading: Elif Batuman

Elif Batuman's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, and n+1. She recently completed a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Stanford, and is the recipient of a 2007 Rona Jaffe Writers' Foundation award. You can learn more about Elif by visiting her blog or her website.

I spent the first 9 months of 2007 finishing a dissertation in comparative literature, which really cut into my reading. By the end of the dissertation, you're not really reading anymore, just re-reading and watching TV (or at least this was my experience). The notable exception for me was the Autobiography of St. Ignatius of Loyola, which I read for the first time in February. I was amazed to discover that, as a young man, Ignatius dreamed of imitating Amadís of Gaul - the same knight errant later imitated by Don Quijote. Ignatius's conversion then takes the form of switching exemplars, from Amadis to Jesus. What a rich and well-executed premise!

While researching the dissertation, I also came across an enormously entertaining diet book: What Would Jesus Eat?: The Ultimate Program for Eating Well, Feeling Great, and Living Longer, by Don Colbert. Colbert instructs the modern-day reader how to eat like Christ, basing his advice now on textual evidence ("I believe that fish and bread were two of the main foods in His diet"), now on historical data ("In the time of Jesus, the Sea of Galilee, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Jordan river were major sources of fish"), and sometimes on what appears to be intuition ("Jesus very likely consumed extra virgin olive oil on a daily basis"). A companion volume, The What Would Jesus Eat Cookbook, includes recipes ranging from "frozen banana salad" and "Asian coleslaw," to "milk and honey bread" and "matzoh balls with olive sauce."

From my 2007 extracurricular reading, the stand-outs are, for surprisingness, Roberto Bolano's Savage Detectives, and, for enjoyableness, two "graphic novels": Alison Bechdel's exciting and formally inventive memoir, Fun Home ("fun" is short for "funeral"), and Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds (a missing-person/love-story hybrid - one of my favorite genres - set in modern day Israel).

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A Year in Reading: Joshilyn Jackson

Joshilyn Jackson, a native of the Deep South, is an award-winning writer and a mother of two. She is the author of Gods in Alabama and Between, Georgia, both #1 Book Sense picks. Her next book, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, will be available in March, 2008. Jackson lives with her husband and children outside of Atlanta. Read more about her at her website http://www.joshilynjackson.com.

A Thin Difference by Frank Turner Hollon: Hollon has been one of my favorite writers ever since I read The God File. This one turns the legal thriller on its ear, and it may now be my favorite of his. It is not a comfortable book, but it's gripping and surprising and I couldn't put it down.

The Crazy School by Cornelia Read: This is Read's second book to feature Madeline Dare, the hard-times debutante and accidental sleuth from A Field of Darkness. I loved the first book in the series so much I had to scam an ARC of this latest. Read hasn't lost her unique voice and wicked sense of humor. I unabashedly loved it. It comes out in January, which gives you just enough time to read the first one and be ready for it.

The Used World by Haven Kimmel: At this point, I think I would pay to read Haven Kimmel's grocery list. In hardback. I become so involved in the lives of the three main characters that I could hardly bear to close the back cover.

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A Year in Reading: Bret Anthony Johnston

Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer, both from Random House. Currently, he is the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard University and can be reached on the web at www.bretanthonyjohnston.com.

I know this is heresy, but I'm going to recommend a book that was published this year. (If it helps, the story itself is centuries old.) Of all the books I've read this year, regardless of publication date, genre, or form, The Adventures of Amir Hamza is the best. What's more, I haven't even finished it yet.

But it's so, so good. Kind of like a thinking man's, adults-only, Islamic Harry Potter. (The original Urdu text, born out of oral narratives that had been circulated for hundreds of years, appeared in the late 19th century, but English translations have always been censored.) Amir Hamza was the prophet Muhammad's uncle and he got into all kinds of cool trouble. Hamza's soulmate is the daughter of the Persian emperor, but there's a chasm of conflict keeping them apart - Frodo had it easy - and so the book follows, in utterly readable and downright addictive prose, Hamza's struggle to return to her. Did I mention that he rides a winged demon-steed? That his posse consists of a wickedly cool wizard (thinking man's Gandolf) and a funny trickster partner (thinking man's Sancho Panza)? That he has to fight an honest-to-God demon? That his sons turn against him? That, in service of getting back to his one true love, he seduces a good many women? It's a terrifically good and captivating story, bawdy and violent and occasionally poignant and often funny, and it reads just as well as a long odyssey as it does individual short stories. Speaking of, I need to get back to the book: We're just about to rout Muhlil Sagsar and Malik Ajrook!

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A Year in Reading: Bonny Wolf

Bonny Wolf is the author of Talking with My Mouth Full: Crab Cakes, Bundt Cakes and Other Kitchen Stories (St Martins, 2006), the host of Kitchen Window, NPR's food podcast; a commentator for NPR's Weekend Edition; and a food columnist for The Washington Post. More information is available at www.bonnywolf.com.

Julia Child and Judith Jones both went to Paris for the first time in 1948, beginning a journey that changed their lives and the way Americans cook.

"It's quite possible that we passed Judith and Evan (her husband) on the street, or that we stood next to each other at a cocktail party, for we were leading parallel lives," Child writes in her memoir My Life in France. "But we never met in Paris."

They didn't learn of each other until the summer of 1959 when a huge manuscript on French cooking by Child, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle landed on Jones' desk at Knopf where she was an editor.

"I was bouleversee, as the French say - knocked out," Jones writes in her memoir The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food. "This was the book I'd been searching for."

My Life in France was published in 2006, two years after Child's death at age 91. Her grandnephew, Alex Prud'homme, put together the story of her formative time in France from conversations with her, letters, notes and photographs, many taken by her husband Paul.

The two memoirs make a lovely couple. Together, a clear picture emerges of the somewhat appalling food scene in the U.S. after World War II and how much these two women - after a few years in Paris - effected change.

Their voices are different: Jones is reserved and private while Child is exuberant and forthright. Their stories, however, are similar. Both grew up in homes with hired cooks and were educated at eastern women's colleges (Smith for Child, Bennington for Jones). Both married older men who they considered soulmates and neither couple had children. Both women fell in love with France and its food, and both believed home cooking could be excellent.

Jones went on to bring out books by many important food writers including Claudia Roden, Marcella Hazan, Edna Lewis and Marion Cunningham. She was also the editor of literary figures such as John Updike and Anne Tyler.

Her publishing career began when she pulled from the reject pile Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. All of this is part of the story told in The Tenth Muse. (The 19th-century French gourmet Brillat-Savarin called food the 10th muse.)

Julia Child, of course, went on to become Julia Child. My Life in France is a wonderful window through which to look at how she went from, in her words, "a six-foot-two-inch ... rather loud and unserious Californian" to the meticulous cook who taught Americans how to cook like the French.

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A Year in Reading: Rosecrans Baldwin

Rosecrans Baldwin is a founding editor of The Morning News, where he writes the Letters from Paris column. His stories have elsewhere appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, and on NPR's "All Things Considered." He and his wife live in France.

I moved to France this year, and for a few months I tried to read or reread mostly French authors - Zola, Flaubert, David Sedaris, and Colette. I love Colette. Two years ago on a trip to Santa Fe I read one of her "Cheri" novels and was surprised by how much of a soap opera she packed in a very slim volume, and so I picked up The Pure and the Impure with high hopes. All were met. Sort of a series of interviews about love and sex, it's swift but persuasive.

Moving abroad, I've also been pushed (by the pickings at the neighborhood bookstore) to discover new detectives. Sweden's Hakan Nesser writes the Inspector Van Veeteren mysteries. Borkmann's Point turned out to be a plodding, enjoyable procedural, with an ending I didn't see coming, even if my wife predicted it by halfway through - but she's always doing that, while I'm the one at the movie theater flabbergasted when the hacksaw turns up in the butler's room.

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A Year in Reading: Rudolph Delson

Rudolph Delson's debut novel, Maynard & Jennica, was published by Houghton Mifflin in September. He lives in Brooklyn and, as he is writing this biographical blurb, he has the flu. It's pretty gross, especially when he coughs. Aside from not dying from the flu and his novel, he can think of no accomplishments worth recounting.

What to read if you find that you hate people? For, like, ecological reasons? You see them in the airport, these people you hate, fat, apocalyptic cults of them, eating Cinnabon buns the size of the Aztec Sun Stone, scooting Stonehenge around in their enormous carry-ons, all of them convinced utterly that their appetites - to go to Mexico or to England, by plane, today, with all six of their children - are reputable appetites. You think to yourself, because you're feeling hateful: "What do any of you give back to the earth - any of you - for all that you consume?"

In such a mood I recommend reading Colin Tudge's book of natural history, The Tree. Tudge recounts the fantastic evolution of the 750 species of fig tree, each one with its own species of wasp to pollinate it; describes how all commercial bananas are sexually sterile, grown from the cloning of suckers; explains "the five hormones by which plants run most of their lives," and the chemistry of wood, and the evolution of flowers in prose as compelling as Gould's and three times more elegant; provides a section, 160 pages long, called "All the Trees in the World" that makes mention of the tree you climbed at age five. This book made me cry, three or four times, in ... in what? Awe? Sorrow? "A tree might ask, why bother with brains and all the expense and angst that go with them, when you can run your life just as well without?"

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A Year in Reading: Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His highly-anticipated first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was published this year. His debut story collection Drown was also a national bestseller

My favorite books of the year? The Radiance of the King by Camara Laye, which is about the craziest whiteman's journey into the heart of Africa you'll ever read...and that's saying a lot since they're all pretty crazy; and The Arrival by Shaun Tan - no one has written (or drawn) a better book about immigration, about the hope and fear and love that drives it - no one. In a period where a nation of immigrants has decided that immigration is evil, Tan's is the kind of book that reminds us that nothing could be farther from the truth.

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A Year in Reading: Martha Southgate

Martha Southgate is the author of three novels, most recently, Third Girl From The Left. Her previous novel, The Fall of Rome, was named one of the best books of 2002 by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children and is at work on a new novel. You can find out more about her work at her website www.marthasouthgate.com.

I'm not calling these books the "best" of anything - good literature ain't a horse race. But the following books are the ones that leapt to mind as the most exciting and pleasurable I read in 2007 - the ones I wanted to grab people and tell them about.

The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz: I wrestled a bit with putting this one on because he's getting much respect from all over the place. But it's well-deserved. This book sprawls, it brawls, it doesn't apologize, it enlightens and delights. A welcome return from a major talent.

Halfway House by Katharine Noel: Remember not wanting to put a book down? Sometimes I forget the simple pleasure of a book that is so beautifully crafted, so alive, that I simply can't do anything else until I'm done reading it. This first novel reminded me of what a great feeling that is. I loved it so much that I emailed the author - that's when I know it's love.

Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman: A really, really, really sexy book that is also an impressive work of literature. If you've ever been young and desperate to get your hands on the object of your desire (and lucky enough to find that he or she can't keep his or her hands off of you either), you'll vibe to this love story.

The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter. Full disclosure: I am lucky enough to count Charlie Baxter as a friend, which is how I came by an ARC of this novel, to be published by Pantheon in February 2008. But just 'cause he's my bud doesn't mean I don't know a hell of a book when I read one. Both a meditation on identity and on the nature of love, The Soul Thief is sexy, funny, romantic (without being sentimental) and strange (in the best of ways). It's both a return to Baxter's deepest preoccupations as a writer and an exhilarating departure from them. We already know he's one of our best fiction writers. Don't miss this one when it comes out.

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A Year in Reading: James Hynes

James Hynes is the author of three novels, The Wild Colonial Boy, The Lecturer's Tale, and Kings of Infinite Space, and a book of novellas, Publish and Perish. He's a Michigander, but he's lived in Austin, Texas, since 1995. Hynes adds, "I have a new novel that is, if I'd only get my ass in gear, a month or two away from being finished."

James Hynes' Top Three... No, Top Four Books of 2007