A Year in Reading: Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward December 5, 2017 | 1 book mentioned
The Half Has Never Been Told is a mighty story. The book chronicles the conditions the enslaved suffered under, and then details how that system of torture was necessary to the very founding of the United States, and how it was instrumental to the modern world we know. Like the best books do, it made me understand the world differently.
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Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University. Ward's latest novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, won the 2017 National Book Award. She is the author of the novels Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award. She is also the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time and the author of the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2016, the American Academy of Arts and Letters selected Ward for the Strauss Living award. She lives in Mississippi with her family.
A Year in Reading: Tom Nissley
Tom Nissley December 17, 2014 | 1 book mentioned 3 4 min read
I did something in 2014 that would throw a wrench into anyone's reading: I bought a bookstore. Selling books, as I wasn't surprised to find, doesn't leave much time for reading them. Also, it meant I became — not for the first time, but never so publicly, on such a daily basis — a professional reader, as many of us are lucky to end up being in one way or another, as teachers or editors or researchers or some other line of work that corrals your attention from the luxury of polymorphous curiosity into something more traditionally productive, in my case trying to keep up with some of the new releases I might be able to share with my customers.
So, early in the year, my reading shifted back from personal to pro, but there were good books on both sides of the divide. And aside from a few favorites (see below), what I find myself remembering as vivid reading experiences are not consistently excellent books like Marilynne Robinson's Lila, Ben Lerner's 10:04, David Markson's Reader's Block, Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, Lawrence Wright's Thirteen Days in September, Tove Jansson's The Summer Book, Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, Edward Hirsch's Gabriel, Brendan Koerner's The Skies Belong to Us, and William Gibson's The Peripheral — all very good books I'd happily put in your hands if you walked into my store — but the more jagged-edged books I might hand you with a caveat.
I remember, with delight, the first half of Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds — "Finally reading Trollope," I told everyone, or, rather, tweeted. "What took me so long to sample this deliciousness?" — before his stamina started to outlast mine. I was delighted too with the first half of Joseph O'Neill's The Dog and the voice he captured, as companionable as Netherland's but more chilling (like P.G. Wodehouse telling a J.G. Ballard story), even if for me that voice never grew into a full book. I admired and enjoyed Farther and Wilder, Blake Bailey's biography of Charles Jackson, but I wondered if his subject was worth his talents until the final third — usually the least interesting in any biography — when Jackson's accumulated troubles, and his belated reckoning with them, made his life profoundly moving. And though Joel Selvin's Here Comes the Night had for me a hole at its center == the interior life of its ostensible subject, unsung record man Bert Berns, remained a cipher — I loved Selvin's hepcat riffs on Berns and his fellow "centurions of pop."
And then there were the books I loved best, all novels, it turns out. The best book I read this year was Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which I hope I don't need to say much about. In Manny Farber terms, it plays a white elephant game rather than a termite one: tackling a major national and personal subject head on and relying on the traditional methods of the novel to do it. It's the kind of book that wins awards, and in this case deservedly so. I also loved Michael Winter's Minister Without Portfolio, a much more termite-ish book after it gets beyond an early Big Event and settles into working out the everyday morality of rural life in a reticent romance I was startled to realize reminded me of Kitty and Levin's in Anna Karenina.
Merritt Tierce's debut, Love Me Back, more or less tore my scalp off. She tells the story of a single mom waitressing her way up the service-industry ladder to a high-end Dallas steakhouse, with disarming amounts of sex and drugs along the way, and strips it of any success — or redemption — story arcs. Desire and discipline and self-destruction are constant forces that ebb and flow and are by no means sated by the story's end. Peter Mountford's The Dismal Science is also about the always underserved topic of work: a high official at the World Bank decides to speak a few truths (which he's not entirely certain are true) and thereby blow up his life. In part I loved it because it captured the culture of Red-Line-to-Shady-Grove D.C. and Maryland I grew up in like no other fiction I've read, and in part because it's the kind of novel where a character walks into a room and you get the feeling that neither he, nor his creator, knows what he is going to do there until he does it. (Right afterwards I read Mountford's previous novel, A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism, a companion to this one, and liked it nearly as much.)
And lastly, the first book I read all year (if the January 2 train ticket still inside is to be believed) is the only one close to Flanagan's in my mind: J.M. Ledgard's Submergence. It's both an excellent book and a jagged one. Its jaggedness — the resistance I felt when reading it, and the thing I feel obligated to warn about when I'm recommending it — is its almost perverse formality. To someone schooled in the hi-lo tendencies of our time, Ledgard's elevated style is a provocation; I'm not sure there's a contraction in the entire book, for instance, aside from a few in dialogue. And the characters in his dual storyline, who connect for a few days at a quietly luxurious hotel on the French coast, have an equal sense of exceptional cultivation. They think of life in terms of centuries: one a mathematician and ocean researcher who, as she prepares to descend to the floor of the Atlantic in a tiny submersible, is confident her name and her discoveries will live for hundreds of years, the other a British spy in Africa whose thoughts, as he is held hostage by Somali jihadists, keep returning to his English forebears and the utopias they imagined half a millennium before.
I find myself wanting to make fun of Submergence, to goof on its gravity (and on Ledgard himself, whose author bio describes him as "a thinker on risk and technology in emerging economies"), but the thing is, I can't. He pulls it off, and earns every bit of profundity he claims. And it's the thinking in centuries that does it: the awareness of the massive scales of biology and history, alongside the poignancy of individual existence. I often don't care about the ends of novels, and I can't tell you what finally happened in many of the ones I love most, but there are some endings that, in the process of tying things up, open up an abyss of meaning that's almost unbearable. This is one of them.
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Tom Nissley | 1 book mentioned 3 4 min read
A Year in Reading: Casey Gerald
Casey Gerald December 14, 2018 | 1 book mentioned 2 min read
These books were important because they helped me better situate myself in certain lineages—or rather, know which lineages I would like to belong to.
Casey Gerald | 1 book mentioned 2 min read
A Year in Reading: Joseph Cassara
Joseph Cassara December 17, 2019 | 1 book mentioned 4 min read
I find solace knowing that books are still here for us, with the quiet, meditative, and introspective experiences they offer.
Joseph Cassara | 1 book mentioned 4 min read
A Year in Reading: Michael Schaub
Michael Schaub December 12, 2012 | 1 book mentioned 6 3 min read
You can go home again. I'm barely living proof. I'm writing this on Thanksgiving, in my childhood home in San Antonio. I drove here from Austin last night, with my partner, Leela, and our three dogs. Downstairs, my mother is peeling potatoes and watching MSNBC. Leela is drinking coffee and making a pie crust. I'm staring at a bookshelf in the room where my brother, Randy, used to sleep — there's Flann O'Brien, John Updike, Stephen Jay Gould. Randy died in 2010. This is my first Thanksgiving at home without him. I'm listening to Alejandro Escovedo sing "Five Hearts Breaking," a song I've had stuck in my head ever since Leela and I crossed Loop 1604, on repeat: "Everything will be all right," he promises, over and over again.
Ever since I came home, I've been thinking of the best novel I read this year, A.M. Homes's stunning May We Be Forgiven. That's not surprising — the book opens and closes with family Thanksgiving dinners, the first one dreadful, the second, triumphant. It's the same family, except that it's not — the protagonist Harold Silver and his niece and nephew are there at both dinners, but not much else looks the same. Harold's wife, brother, and sister-in-law have all gone away. It happens.
In the years since I lost my brother, I've been thinking a lot about the moral force of literature, which didn't mean much to me as a smirking faux-postmodernist teenager, but means everything to me now. May We Be Forgiven is a deeply moral novel, though it's never moralistic. The characters cheat on their spouses; they lie and neglect and even murder. Homes keeps a distance throughout; she's not judgmental, but neither is she naive enough to presume that we won't, or shouldn't, judge one another. One of the book's main characters — in absentia, obviously — is the famously amoral President Richard Nixon, about whom Harold, a historian, is writing a book. Another character is the Internet, which ends up acting as both destroyer and redeemer:
There is a world out there, so new, so random and disassociated that it puts us all in danger. We talk online, we "friend" each other when we don't know who we are really talking to — we fuck strangers. We mistake almost anything for a relationship, a community of sorts, and yet, when we are with our families, in our communities, we are clueless, we short-circuit and immediately dive back into the digitized version — it is easier, because we can be both our truer selves and our fantasy selves all at once, with each carrying equal weight.
You could call that moralizing, of course, but only if you're completely oblivious — only if you're too far gone to realize the difference between liking something and "liking" it. Don't worry if you are; you'd be in good company.
It's an unbearable cliché to say that a book can change your life, and the fact that sometimes it's true, perhaps, doesn't make it any less trite. I don't know whether May We Be Forgiven has changed my life; if it has, it will be years before I realize how, or why. I do know that it's affected me more than any novel I've read in years, and I do know that it's a masterpiece.
And I know that it's courageous, and an unambiguous force for moral good. If you're too young or distant or callow to care about that, don't worry — you will someday, and it'll hurt like hell, and you'll be glad, at some point, that it happened. May We Be Forgiven is a prayer, like the one I learned as a child in Catholic school, and found myself reciting a few years ago, over and over again: "Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace."
I'm not a religious man, except maybe I am. All I know is that I don't know. Whether we're forgiven or not, may we be worthy of our families, the living and the dead, the ones for whom we'd give all we have. May we learn to forgive ourselves. May everything be all right. Amen.
Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
Michael Schaub | 1 book mentioned 6 3 min read
A Year in Reading: Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen December 14, 2015 | 1 book mentioned 2 min read
If most literature is weak coffee, and really good literature is excellent coffee, this book is a series of espresso shots. I'm going to keep talking about this book until someone tells me they've read it.
Viet Thanh Nguyen | 1 book mentioned 2 min read
A Year in Reading: Patricia Engel
Patricia Engel December 16, 2015 | 1 book mentioned
A gorgeous yet utterly terrifying tale of how nature, humanity, and our own obsessions can betray us in the worst ways imaginable. Said to be based on true events, this is a story that I don't think I will ever be able to shake.
Patricia Engel | 1 book mentioned
A Year in Reading: Michelle Huneven
Michelle Huneven December 7, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 2 min read
This was my year of reading alcoholically. I didn't plan it that way. But in book after book, the disease flourished and triumphed, not a recovery in sight.
In Gerard Woodward's remarkable trilogy (August, I'll go to Bed at Noon and A Curious Earth) alcoholism (and some maternal glue sniffing) is not the unacknowledged elephant in the Jones family's living room, it's the unacknowledged elephant rampaging throughout their house and generations, not to mention the homes of near relations, and all the nearby pubs. Woodward's depiction of a middleclass family riddled by unmitigated addiction is horrifying and hilarious, unsentimental and virtually untouched by medical or recovery jargon.
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy surely has one of the most astonishing first chapters in literature: Michael Henchard with his young wife and daughter come to a fair in a small town and decide to have a kind of milk drink. Michael pays extra to have his spiked, and proceeds in short order to get drunk and belligerent and then to sell his wife and child to the highest bidder! Sold! The next morning, the remorseful Henchard takes an oath not to drink for twenty-one years, but even abstinent he is the epitome of the dry drunk white-knuckling his way through life: he's paranoid, self-important, has a terrible need to control; inwardly fragile, outwardly he's a tyrant and a vengeful bully.
Henchard, though tragic, is a mild case compared to Frederick Exley, whose A Fan's Notes is perhaps the first novelistic addiction memoir and remains a masterpiece of the genre. Exley's book is a gorgeously written drunken quagmire; booze—and the New York Giants—are his only allegiances; his sense of entitlement, grandiosity and chronic lying are breathtaking. Incapable of keeping a job, he mooches off family and friends, abandons a wife, lives on his mother's sofa, and rotates in and out of mental institutions. His courses of electric shock and insulin therapies, described in excruciating detail, don't even begin to mitigate his alcoholism or wildly disordered personality. This book gave Exley some measure of what he thought all along was rightfully his: literary stature.
I chased Exley with Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, a slim and almost perfect novel whose alcoholic narrator, Don Birnam, goes on a weekend bender of such epic proportions and degradations, this reader was exhausted a quarter way through. It's a laborious full time job to drink the way Birnam does. He must come up with money—the maid's pay is easy pickings, it's harder to cadge cash from the uptight neighbor, and pawning his brother's heirlooms proves impossible (the pawnshops are closed for Yom Kippur). Birnam also jungle swings between grandiosity and despair, lies continuously, blacks out, passes out, falls down a flight stairs, spends a few hours in the alcoholism ward, breaks everyone's heart. Yet, come Monday morning, he's eager to start the whole cycle again.
It's excessive, I admit, but I capped off this literary binge with Under the Volcano in all its lush, hellbent, whirlybending glory. Lowry—like Exley and Jackson—knew whereof he wrote. But this chronicle of the last days of Geoffrey Firman, a former British consul in Quauhnahac Mexico, is more interior, with a strangely hallucinogenic verisimilitude—the reader at times resides so deeply in the Consul's consciousness, she feels drunk.
Enough! In all these books, alcoholism is the nightmare from which nobody wakes up. It wears a reader down. And incites some year-end gratitude for—knock wood—the tenuous, fleeting gift of a clear mind.
Michelle Huneven | 1 book mentioned 2 min read
A Year in Reading: Robin Sloan
Robin Sloan December 17, 2012 | 1 book mentioned 2 2 min read
A 15-year-old memoir is still the best rendering of our new relationship with code that anyone has produced.
Robin Sloan | 1 book mentioned 2 2 min read