We asked some of our contributors for their favorite books they read this year. (Most listed new books, but a few picked older favorites or ones that will come out in the new year.)
I was riveted by Martin Amis’s “The Zone of Interest,” with its daring projection into the mind and “heart” of a character (Paul Doll, the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp) who, like Nabokov’s Kinbote, is a tour de force of crazed self-delusion. I just wish the whole book was in Doll’s voice, with his eruptions of unintentional humor, swathes of bathetic self-pity, and moments of blasé horror: he may have, at one point, killed a small girl prisoner who reaches for his hand, but it’s typical of Amis’s artfully elliptical method that I can’t be sure; I kept wincingly rereading the passage, as if through my fingers, trying to figure out what happened but not wanting to. It felt like a fitting way to spy on historical events that are impossible to look at but that must, nevertheless, always be kept in sight.
**“The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses,” **by Kevin Birmingham, is an engrossing non-fiction account of how Joyce wrote “Ulysses” and how he managed, against near-impossible odds, to get it published. While the book stirs fury against the moralistic government forces arrayed against Joyce’s avant-garde masterpiece, Birmingham’s book also gives rise to uneasy intimations of the invidious forces of self-censorship at work today, forces that arise from publishers’ commercial worries, political correctness, and the hegemony of the campus creative-writing crowd. Reading about Joyce’s courageous battle makes one wonder: Where is today’s dangerous book—our “Ulysses,” “Lolita,” or “Portnoy’s Complaint”?
I guess I was in the mood for anti-heroes this year, because the other novel I can’t stop thinking about is Edith Wharton’s pitiless “The Custom of the Country” and its amazing central character, Undine Spragg. Tracing the ever-upward trajectory of this conscience-free, acquisitive, vain, incurious, and ambitious Midwestern beauty, “Custom,” although published a hundred and one years ago, feels entirely appropriate to the present moment: an anatomy of the kind of blind greed and self-involvement (devoid of all self-knowledge) paraded every night on the more popular of TV’s reality shows. One difference is that, despite everything, Wharton somehow makes us root for, if not exactly like, the unsinkable, unthinkable Undine.
—John Colapinto
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I’ve never been a member of a book club, but last winter I felt I was, when I and just about every writer I know were reading and talking about Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle.” I read the first three volumes in quick succession, largely while crisscrossing England by train while on book tour in March, and the damp scenes outside my window resonated perfectly with the melancholy of the recollected life upon the page. I was thrilled by the way Knausgaard dared to explore the absolutely mundane, while also being unembarrassed about considering the utterly transcendent. While the books are often extremely funny, they are also an exemplary argument for the value of taking oneself, and one’s life, seriously, and I could not be happier that there are still three more volumes to go. I was captivated in a different way by Zia Haider Rahman’s “In the Light of What We Know,” which I’ve been urging on friends since reading it last summer. A novel that is concerned with friendship, geopolitics, math, and science, it’s talky and intellectual, while also unfolding a riveting drama: a deeply satisfying book, all the more impressive for being Rahman’s first. Finally, two books I read this year that aren’t yet published in the U.S., but will be soon: “Outline,” a novel by Rachel Cusk, and “H is for Hawk,” a memoir by Helen Macdonald. In their very different ways, Cusk and Macdonald both admirably resist succumbing to the very British disease of self-deprecation, while also skirting any temptation to present an easily likeable literary persona. I predict that members of my imaginary book club will take up both books with great excitement, and I can’t wait to discuss them.
—Rebecca Mead
The two photo books that moved me most this year were both explorations of absence. “Evidence” (Schilt Publishing), by Diana Matar, is a heartwrenching essay on the artist’s search for her father-in-law, who was abducted by Qaddafi. Rochester, New York, in the wake of Kodak’s decline, is the subject of the poetic, elliptical “Memory City” (Radius Books), by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb.
Glenn Kurtz discovered a family film made by his grandfather in 1938. It includes brief footage of a crowd of Jewish adults and children in a Polish village: a glimpse into a world that would soon be almost totally wiped out. But, as Kurtz shows in “Three Minutes In Poland” (FSG), what little was saved miraculously becomes a guide back into what was lost.
And Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen” (Graywolf Press) was simply the keenest and most necessary of poetry books this year: the right words in the right order, yes, but also a shot in the arm of the body politic.
—Teju Cole
While driving around New England on Thanksgiving weekend, I heard “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” on the car radio and happily remembered the pleasure, this summer, of reading Bob Stanley’s “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé,” which memorably described the song’s opening sound as “a cascade of Pepsi bubbles.” This year, there were only a few new books I proselytized about: Elena Ferrante’s “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay” was one, and “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” was another. (I wrote about it more fully here.) Stanley’s writing amuses and appeals; it’s like pop music on the page. The Everly Brothers “looked the very image of Southern hoodlums” but “had the voices of harmonizing bluebirds.” The skiffle revolution began “when British teens realized that they could make it onto the radio by mastering a broomstick and a kazoo.” Stanley makes well-known bands seem new again and tells stories we haven’t heard—one anecdote contains the line “The pub was closed, but when the villagers saw there was a Beatle at the door they opened it up.” Early this year, I eagerly started reading a long-anticipated book about a band I adore, wanting to learn everything I could, only to discover that the writing jumped around. I abandoned it, disgruntled and sad. “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” is the opposite—Stanley’s writing invites you in and teaches you new things, entertaining you as you rock the night away.
—Sarah Larson
I’ve been living in Rome for the past few months, so this year I disproportionately read books by Italians. Two I’d recommend that, I think, are not already on everyone’s list are “To Each His Own,” by Leonardo Sciascia, and “Confessions of an Italian,” by Ippolito Nievo. Sciascia’s book, from 1966, is a darkly elegant tale of corruption, betrayal, and futility. Nievo’s, written in 1858, is a sprawling story of love, valor, and the Risorgimento. Neither is new, but the first complete version of Nievo’s book in English was published just this year, in a wonderful translation by Frederika Randall.
—Elizabeth Kolbert
I often start reading fiction by ear—I suspect many people do—and it was the voice on the page that drew me into Catherine Lacey’s début novel, “Nobody Is Ever Missing”: incantatory, cool, and unerringly tuned to fresh detail. Lacey writes with a peculiar suppleness entirely her own; her sentences have a way of dancing around common turns and spinning off in strange directions. (“The sky was a good sky color and the air was healthy feeling, and maybe this was the kind of day that reminded all those drivers that days are a finite resource and it’s best to protect the ones you have.”) It’s unusual to find a book at once freewheeling, controlled, and startlingly observant, but this is one.
The more “innovation” becomes a buzz word, the less we know what it’s supposed to mean. I was sort of grateful, then, that Walter Isaacson tried to tackle the matter in his new book, “The Innovators”: a solidly researched, lucidly written account of digital invention, from calculating machines to the collaborative Web. Reading it didn't really answer my question—Isaacson’s attempts to zero in on the essence of “innovation” pile up without especially converging—but the journey is so interesting I was O.K. with the sprawl. Best of all, the book gives due attention to the many female scientists involved, which is more than a lot of the supposed innovators themselves managed.
The end of the year also lends itself to commemoration. When the poet Mark Strand died, last month, a friend of mine cracked open his just-released “Collected Poems,” and we spent some time reading our favorites out loud. They're masterly on their own; in sum, they have a humble generosity. “This countryside / Through which we walk / Is no less beautiful / For only being what it seems,” Strand wrote in an early-sixties poem. “Already we are walking off / As if to say, / We are not here, / We’ve always been away.” He had soft footprints, but they last.
—Nathan Heller
The late Mark Strand gave a new language and a new way of seeing to American poetry. His private vision of the universe—both ironic and mystical—includes a search for something beguiling at the heart of experience and explores a loneliness that feels, to me, American. His authoritative “Collected Poems”—containing more than fifty years of writing—is full of shadow and illumination. For those of us who seek in poetry words and experiences in which our common humanity is felt, this is an indispensable volume.
—Henri Cole
In the casinos of Macau, the narrator of the novel “The Ballad of a Small Player,” by Lawrence Osborne**,** is known as Lord Doyle, a wealthy British aristocrat. But, in truth, he is merely a disgraced lawyer who has come to gamble away money that he fleeced from an elderly client, from what he calls his Inexhaustible Fund. Ill-gotten, the money brings him both shame and pleasure—and he takes a grim joy in giving it away at the card tables. He describes baccarat, his poison of choice, as “a pure game of chance, with no skill involved,” and he prefers it that way: “When you play it you are alone with your fate, and one is not often alone with one's fate.” Like most stories about card players, you can't help but root for the narrator to win, even if he'd rather lose.
Osborne, who is also a journalist and travel writer, captures the unreality of Macau, a city of glass and light, but the book is less about place than it is about the consciousness of the narrator in that place. His previous novel, "The Forgiven," about a British couple who hit a young man with their car while travelling to a lavish party in the Moroccan desert, had the sinister grace of Paul Bowles. This time, Osborne has been compared to Graham Greene, but the novel also owes much to the American novelist James Salter, to whom Osborne pays tribute by referring to gambling, and life, as a "sport and a pastime." Like Salter, Osborne writes with weighty, aphoristic sentences—“I didn't know what was going to happen next, and that is the feeling that every player lives for”—and is interested in superstition, and fate, and all things that are just beyond our control.
—Ian Crouch
Savvy New Yorker readers! You don’t need me to tell you that Gary Shtenyngart’s memoir, “Little Failure,” will leave you with tears streaming down your face from every emotion known to the human heart, or that Haruki Murakami’s new novel, “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage,” is about a billion times better than the title sounds in English. Were Donald Antrim’s “An Emerald Light in the Air” and Ben Lerner’s “10:04” as witty, brilliant, and form-illuminating as admirers of these authors’ earlier work could hope? Yes, they were! Did Jenny Offill’s “Dept. of Speculation” simultaneously live up to the Renata Adler comparisons and create something new? Yes, incredibly, it did! And I know I’m not the only one out there who goes to bed every night praying that Elena Ferrante (“Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay”) and Karl Ove Knausgaard (“My Struggle: Book Three”) will have new serialized novels for us every year, each longer and more hypnotic than the one before, full of things we never knew about writers called Elena and Karl Ove. Lastly, for those of you who are thinking, “But all those books got terrific reviews—tell me something I don’t already know!,” here’s one that flew below the radar: Avi Steinberg’s “The Lost Book of Mormon,” a truly weird and beautiful memoir about an insane-sounding guy who retraces the geographical territory of the “Book of Mormon” in order to prove that it, the “Book of Mormon,” is the Great American Novel. If you need America to be reënchanted for you this year—and, let’s face it, who doesn’t?—pick this one up; you won’t regret it.
—Elif Batuman
It’s been months, but I can’t stop thinking about “The Book of Strange New Things,” by Michael Faber. It’s a humble, drifting, melancholy novel, set in the near future, about a middle-aged Christian named Peter who leaves England to minister to aliens on another planet. From the planet, Oasis, Peter writes home to his wife, Bea, a nurse. Their lives begin to diverge, but not in the ways you’d expect. Peter’s existence as a space missionary turns out to be boring, even sheltered: the gentle, studious aliens learn English, study the Bible (which they call “the book of strange new things”), and build a church. The other human explorers, recruited for their equanimity, do little to enliven Oasis, which is a kind of fertile desert, made entirely of moss. Earth, meanwhile, descends into chaos. Environmental disasters mount, banks collapse, supermarkets close, and civil unrest escalates. In e-mails, Bea explains the worsening situation to Peter, but it all seems unreal to him. Immersed in the suffering of his flock—the aliens also have hard lives—he can barely comprehend the vaster suffering back home. It becomes clear that Earth is dying; Bea’s faith is challenged, and Peter’s trivialized. Their marriage falters.
When I read “The Book of Strange New Things,” I thought of it as a moving novel about the inevitability of suffering and the elusiveness of consolation. (Like “Under the Skin,” a previous book of Faber’s, it transforms a sci-fi setup into a spiritual allegory.) I was also aware of its flaws: it felt reticent, even dispassionate. Then, by chance, I read an interview with Faber, in which he explained its context. He’d always conceived of it as a novel about grief, he said—but then, in the midst of the writing, his wife and editor, Eva, was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer. He wrote parts of the novel in her hospital room; she died in July, three months before it was published. The book, Faber said, is “valedictory, and about saying goodbye to the flesh.” He says it will be his last novel.
How should this change the way you read “The Book of Strange New Things”? I don’t know. But the book has grown heavier and brighter in my mind; it’s become one of those novels I’ll never forget. I plan to reread it, carefully, in the new year.
—Joshua Rothman
Last December in this space, I announced with pride that another year had gone by without my reading Knausgaard. We all know what goes before the fall, and this fall I fell. My book group chose Book Two of his six-volume opus, “My Struggle,” and so there I was in October, propped up in bed with the austere Norwegian. Book Two recounts the frequently humdrum events of the author as he tries to raise three children when what he really wants to do is lock himself in a room and write. The narrative: Love, Anger, Guilt. Repeat. Predictably, as a parent myself, I found His Struggle absorbing, delicate, clever, cannily plotted. And when Karl Ove goes with one of his children to what looks for all the world like Sweden's version of a Music Together class—a mortification to which your humble poster has been subjected—I had to look away. Not since Melville took the El has genius been so humiliated.
I loved Knausgaard, but I didn't go onward to another volume. I think I mistrusted the pleasure he had given me. Instead, I next read Donald Antrim's “The Emerald Light in the Air,” my diet after the binge, my mortification after the ecstasy. These are six or seven lean and sad stories about educated unhappy people, all of which first appeared in this magazine over a great many years. Antrim is less hopeful than Knausgaard, for whom the light keeps breaking through. Here pills keep the characters afloat, and sex seems just another way to advance the madness/sadness. The story, “Pond, with Mud”—in which a man sets out to take his girlfriend's small son to the zoo and instead winds up getting drunk in a train station with the boy's biological father, while the child is propped on a bar stool next to them—just breaks your heart. I now know why Antrim's first few books were set in dystopian never-never worlds: it was to spare us a look in the mirror.
Don't think I've lost my mind when I mention in my next breath Amy Ignatow's wonderful Y.A. “Popularity Papers” series. Life as a suburban pre-teen is really no simpler than life as a middle-aged Norwegian or Brooklynite—certainly no less is as stake. These books are sometimes considered the girls' answer to the “Wimpy Kid” diary series but, in fact, the “Popularity Papers” is vastly richer, the story of two pre-teen girls and the tricky tides of middle school they must navigate, as recorded in their shared journal. Every time my nine-year-old, Flora, chooses Ignatow for joint reading, I'm in heaven. (When she doesn't, I am known to fall into a Knausgaardian snit.) We've read four of the current seven volumes and are waiting to get older for number five, where kissing begins (she says). Ignatow's pacing is wonderful, the characters completely convincing, and the dialogue snug. And unlike in Knausgaard or Antrim, with Ignatow you get pictures.
—D. T. Max
The year’s reading began, for me, with Lydia Davis’s “Can’t and Won’t,” which was published in April but on my mind for months before that. I started reading Davis in 2009, when her “Collected Stories” came out. I had been assigned to review it, and went through the book like an archeologist marking an area for excavation, combing carefully over each story, mapping the points of connection between them until they seemed to form a system so distinctive and complete that when I finally felt I understood Davis and what she was after I felt equally sure I would never be able to communicate it. As sometimes happens, the thing called “voice,” which, in Davis’s case, might more properly be called “mind,” got stuck in my ear, so that I seemed to be thinking through and with her. The situation became overdetermined to the point where I did what everyone who writes, and, in particular, anyone who write about other people’s work, does at some point or other: I buckled.
“Can’t and Won’t” is, naturally, smaller in scope than the “Collected Stories”—easier to chew, though also better to come to after the earlier work. Davis is the same—subtle, finicky, at once rigorous and whimsical—but changed, too. At the heart of the book is Davis’s paradox of writing about the self: she tries to break its hold over her imagination by describing it, even as it grows magnified under her examination. I did end up writing about Davis this time around and have a feeling I didn’t get it entirely right, which turns out to be a relief—a chance to “fail better,” as Beckett, a hero of Davis’s, might put it.
The book of the year is Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen: An American Lyric.” It would have been the book of any year; that it happened to come along this fall, after the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, might give it a prophetic quality were it not for Rankine’s point, amplified through searing accounts of the casual racism she and her friends have endured, that one person’s failure to recognize another as fully human happens, with varying degrees of violence, every day. Rankine, as I wrote when I interviewed her over the summer, is describing a profound failure of seeing, and I thought of “Citizen” when I read, in Darren Wilson’s testimony to the Ferguson Grand Jury, that Brown looked to him, in the moment before he fired his gun, like “a demon.” Rilke stood in front of a headless statue and was undone by its imagined gaze: “for there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.” Rankine writes of people, living and breathing, who can’t escape the scrutiny of others and yet go unrecognized in the ways that matter. “Citizen” asks us to change the way we look; we have to believe that that might lead to changing the way we live.
—Alexandra Schwartz