Page Turners: 2008

Taking my cues from The Millions' A Year In Reading, The Guardian's favorites, and Jessica of The Written Nerd, I took a more free-form approach to this year's "best of books" post. Reading is so organic, and I don't sit around with tons of ARCs looking for the best book of the year. Instead, like most people, my favorite books of the year depend on whatever path my reading might have taken, a path that isn't confined to books from this year. These are the ten best books I came across on that path.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
Just perfect. The type of book I will pass on to my children, and to my children's children. Jansson wrote this after the death of her mother, and the spooky, loving sentiment of every story, into which she poured the fullness of her emotion over the loss of her mother, left me absolutely breathless.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
My thoughts on this book in high school: poor, bored Emma Bovary! My thoughts this year: oh, that idiot woman! What more does she need from life? More people should pick up Madame Bovary if they haven't since high school. It's always interesting to see how our adult perspective changes things, and I'm sure that at sixteen I had no clue what was going on in that carriage ride through Rouen.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Bovary was only one in a slew of books I read this year that seemed to center around some sort of personal emotional breakdown involving infidelity or centering around a disfunctional family. Along with Dubin's Lives, these two books composed the male mid-to-late-life crisis portion of my disfunctional reading. The difference with these two was nothing to do with the plot, but rather their impeccable writing, writing that compelled me to read and savor every thought spilt onto the page. My exuberance over Revolutionary Road, however, made me recommend it too quickly to people who weren't exactly in the mood for the most depressing book on earth.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño
This book seems to be on everyone's top list this year, but it would only be cliche to include it on my own list if I didn't think it was amazing, and trust me, it's every bit as amazing as the reviews claim. I never made it through The Savage Detectives, and very nearly didn't make it through this one ("The Part About The Crimes" was nearly impossible to read on the subway, and I wasn't sure at that point if the book was headed somewhere I wanted to go), but the push was worth it. This novel covers the material of fifty novels, and filled my head with stories and images beyond that which I'd ever hoped for even in one year's reading.

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
To Siberia by Per Petterson
Of the few other new fiction titles I managed to read this year, these were my two favorites. Netherland for the best representation I've seen of post-9/11 New York, and To Siberia for Petterson's ability to make a sprawlingly epic tale fit into a single day's read.

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan
Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 2 edited by Lee Gutkind
I usually manage to squeeze in a couple of good non-fiction titles a year. Dad recommended Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, a spectacular oral history of the Dust Bowl, and through Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 2, I discovered the magical world of creative nonfiction, where the type of writing most of us do on these here blogs doesn't seem nearly as bizarre and useless.

Silta zeme by Inga Žolude
Finally, I'm still in the middle of the Latvian novel Silta zeme, but it belongs on this list for its stellar prose, and for the fact that I hope it gets translated sooner rather than later.

And, in case you're a completist, following is a list of all the other books I read this year. Keep in mind that I don't finish books I'm not enjoying, so all of these are more or less recommended (refer to my Goodreads page for ratings/reviews).

Armstrong, Heather, ed. - Things I Learned About My Dad (in therapy)
Auster, Paul - New York Trilogy
Barker, Nicola - Wide Open
Barnes, Julian - Flaubert's Parrot
Bioy Casares, Aldolfo - The Invention of Morel
Bolaño, Roberto - By Night In Chile
Brown, Sarah, ed. - Cringe
Chabon, Michael - The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Didion, Joan - The Last Thing He Wanted
Doyle, Roddy - The Deportees and Other Stories
Duncan, Lois - Stranger With My Face
Eugenides, Jeffrey, ed. - My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead
Ferris, Joshua - Then We Came To The End
Fry, Stephen - Revenge
Greer, Andrew Sean - The Confessions of Max Tivoli
Hemingway, Ernest - For Whom The Bell Tolls (in progress)
Jackson, Shirley - The Lottery, Adventures of the Demon Lover
Jackson, Shirley - The Bird's Nest
Johnson, B.S. - The Unfortunates
Larsson, Stieg - The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Mailer, Norman - Miami and the Siege of Chicago
Malamud, Bernard - Dubin's Lives
Moore, Alan - Watchmen
Pea, Enrico - Moscardino
Safran Foer, Jonathan - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Silverstein, Shel - A Light In The Attic
Smith, Tom Rob - Child 44
Synge, J.M. - The Aran Islands
Tomine, Adrian - Summer Blonde
Weisman, Alan - The World Without Us

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