Being a books editor is a wonderfully curious business. When you love reading and books in the extreme, the job is akin to being the proverbial kid in a candy store with an immense variety of confections at your disposal and only limited time to devour them. You can only consume a small percentage of the seductive items.
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So, what’s a bibliophile to do? Simple: You share the good fortune (and the bad, when a work disappoints) with others. You write about a few and ask others to write on books that are just as promising as the titles you cover. So, it’s worth mentioning a few that I didn’t have time for and our esteemed reviewers did – books destined to make it to my nightstand.
This stack includes Carolyn Chute’s “The School on Heart Content’s Road,” her latest novel to give drama and voice to rural working-class people in Maine; the late Roberto Bolano’s “2666,” a sprawling epic that encompasses everything from the search for a lost novelist to the serial killings of women in the northern Mexican town of Santa Teresa; and Toni Morrison’s “A Mercy,” centering around the life of a young slave girl in 17th-century America.
In nonfiction, Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland” becomes a must-read; so, too, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals by New Yorker writer Jane Mayer.
The books I did have time for and made a major impression are:
1. Steven Millhauser, “Dangerous Laughter” (Alfred A. Knopf)
You marvel at the prose, which has always been true of Millhauser’s writing reaching back to his brilliant first novel, the pseudo-biography “Edwin Mullhouse” (1972), and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the surreal “Martin Dressler” (1996). But his greatest attention has been on the short story and “Dangerous Laughter,” his sixth book of stories, is arguably his most luminous.
2. Marilynn Robinson, “Home” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The life of a preacher’s family in a small Iowa town could make for profound psychological drama in Robinson’s fiction. Robert Boughton, a retired clergyman, is growing frail. His daughter Glory, disillusioned, comes home to care for him; Jack, the prodigal son, arrives too. It’s a polished, pensive novel filled with revelations about them and about family.
3. Russell Shorto, “Descartes’ Bones” (Doubleday)
In a remarkable combination of reporting and criticism, Shorto manages to trace the rise of the contemporary collision between reason and faith back to Descartes’ enduring “Discourse on the Method.” The story, as it moves forward in time, revolves around the fate of Descartes’ skeleton – and the odyssey of his bones becomes a metaphor for evolving thought in Europe and in Western culture.
4. Alberto Manguel, “The Library at Night” (Yale University Press)
Manguel, an Argentine writer now living in France, offers up a personal history of libraries. This is a remarkable history of how humankind has collected thoughts and ideas that matter, from Alexandria to Google.
5. Nam Le, “The Boat” (Alfred A. Knopf)
For a first book of stories, Nam Le displayed uncanny maturity. “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” surely autobiographical, recounts the struggles of a young writer (in grad school in Iowa) to avoid telling ethnic tales, while ultimately embracing the powerful Vietnamese history of his father.
6. Joyce Carol Oates, “Wild Nights!” (Ecco)
The premise of the book is in its subtitle: “Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway.” Each tale, some extravagantly surreal, capture something essential about that writer.
7. Matthew Kneale, “When We Were Romans” (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)
Kneale earned a Whitbread Award for “English Passengers,” his 2000 novel, and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. But “When We Were Romans” hasn’t gotten the wide attention it deserves.
8. Elizabeth McCracken, “An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination” (Little, Brown and Company)
Maybe it’s the superabundance of memoirs that makes them seem self-indulgent just now. But McCracken’s is the only memoir that I had the patience to finish this year. It’s beautifully written, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who has read either of her novels, “The Giant’s House” or “Niagara Falls All Over Again.” And it opened my eyes to the particular kind of grief that surrounds a stillborn baby. As she writes in the opening pages: “This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending.”
9. Jed Perl, “Antoine’s Alphabet” (Alfred A. Knopf)
The “Antoine” is the French rococo painter of the 17th and 18th centuries, Antoine Watteau, famed for painting people reveling in bucolic settings and often in theatrical costume. There is no unanimity about his greatness, but Perl, art critic and historian, is convinced of it.
10. Sarah Vowell, “The Wordy Shipmates” (Riverhead Books)
Anyone who can make the Puritans who colonized Massachusetts this engaging to read about has accomplished something. Vowell’s sharp wit and humor helps. But she also has a gift for narrating history and relating it to the present, evident in earlier books like “Assassination Vacation” but more fully realized in this book.
