Shelf Lives
Time for the annual round-up. Our designated readers list their favorite books of 2008 (they need not have been published in 2008).
Reader: Me
Early reading: The Old Testament, Nancy Drew
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill. John Updike, Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, many literary luminaries have tried to write the 9/11 novel, and this one outshines them all. A great American novel, by an Irish barrister.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Makes you realize that more than shared colonial histories, more than the diaspora, it is geekiness that binds us.
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith. A policeman hunts down a serial killer in Stalinist Russia, where to say that crime exists is to question the State, and to question the State gets you thrown into the gulag.
Young Stalin by Simon Sebag-Montefiore. Are monsters born or created? Josef Stalin is one fascinating monster.
The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Sure he’s full of himself, and the great financial wipeout of 2008 proves that he’s right.
The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig. In Austria between the two world wars, a postal employee gets a taste of the glamourous life, realizes how bleak her own life is, and decides that something must change. An unexpectedly tough novel by the author of Letter From An Unknown Woman.
The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley. This 1953 novel is the template for Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Cricket also figures in it (see Netherland).
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori. The most charming narrator, the most disturbing thoughts.
Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories by Tobias Wolff. Amazing stories.
How Fiction Works by James Wood. The critic explains why some novels leave you cold and some turn into voices in your head.
Plus:
Bangkok Haunts by John Burdett. With each new novel, Burdett’s Bangkok series gets weirder and wackier. I don’t know how he’s going to top this.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley’s People by John Le Carre. So tense, your muscles are toned for days afterwards.
*****
Reader: Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala
Early reading: Biggles
The Private Patient by PD James. Anything new by PD James is always a pleasure. One of the finest crime writers out there. Thoughtful, intelligent, perceptive and human. Commander Dagliesh, her detective throughout many of her novels, is always an interesting and complex character. Isolated manor in the English countryside, murder, complex cast of characters… you feel like sitting by a fireplace and reading this in one go.
Breath by Tim Winton. I am a big fan of Winton. A young Australian novelist on the cusp of being recognized by the Booker Prize judges. This is a coming of age story in rural Australia that revolves around surfing. His prose is magnificent and lyrical, as always. Haunting story. Wrenches the emotions out of you. His prose verges on poetry.
The White Rock by Hugh Thomson. I picked this up in the airport while visiting Machu Picchu this summer. Wonderful real story of a modern day explorer. Sets out to learn more about the Incas after a round of beer at his local pub in England and ends up becoming an expert on Inca history and archaeology. It is a meditation on exploration, discovery, travel and an entertaining and enlightening history of the Incas. He has a great sense of humor.
The Terror by Dan Simmons. A fat tome, loosely based on the doomed polar expedition led by Sir John Franklin in 1845. If you like arctic adventure laced with gothic horror and the macabre… this is for you. Unusual and heavily laden with esoteric 19th Century sailing details. I found it appealing, despite its length, in that it reaches a higher level of enlightenment towards the end that raises it above the level of the average horror story.
The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson. Fabulous and entertaining Harvard based historian. Traces the history of money and commerce. Always intelligent and enlightening.
When Markets Collide by Mohammed El-Erian. Finance experts do not come any smarter. Slightly heavy going but he does give good suggestions on how to survive this financial turmoil. He ran the Harvard University endowment successfully for a couple of years and it lost 20 % of its value after he left.
The Death of the Banker by Ron Chernow. This light (in terms of volume) work came about from a series of lectures he gave on merchant banking through the ages with an emphasis on the 19th Century. Covers wonderful names like the Warburgs, JP Morgan and the Rothschilds. Elegant, illuminating and entertaining guide to finance over the last two centuries.
Effi Briest by Theodore Fontane. Just started reading this. Good so far. Set in Germany at the time of Bismarck. One of Thomas Mann’s favorite novels. Supposedly a classic.
The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. Thought provoking book on the unpredictability of forecasting. He and Niall Ferguson (see above) feed off each other. He thinks a bit too much of himself but he does have some interesting ideas.
*****
Reader: Din Atienza
Early reading: The comic books section of the old Makati Supermart
To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer. The first book of the Riverworld saga. Everyone who has ever lived on Earth discovers that they’ve been resurrected on the banks of a planet-spanning river, miraculously provided with food. Sir Richard Burton, Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves (the Victorian girl who was the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland), an English-speaking Neanderthal, a WWII Holocaust survivor, and a wise extraterrestrial set off to find the source of the river and the true purpose of Riverworld.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. What if Alaska, not Israel, had become the homeland for the Jews after World War II? In Sitka, where Orthodox gangs (with dreadlocks and knee breeches) roam the streets, Detective Meyer Landsman must solve the murder of a heroin-addled chess prodigy. Told as 40’s noir; explores identity, home and faith.
The Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison. Thoughtful, muscular short stories from a writer who’s won enough Hugos to make a picket fence. Adrift Off the Islets of Langerhans. Basilisk. No clunkers.
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Re-read it, prepping for the movie.
Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 3 (2007) edited by Dean Francis Alfar & Nikki Alfar
Objects in Mind by Sherry Turkle. Essays on science, technology and love; what role do objects play in the creative development of a scientist? Can a favorite toy (bubbles, prisms, sand castles, magnets) lead to a career in science?
The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS by Elizabeth Pisani. An account of the pale underbelly of international AIDS research, “a world of money and votes, a world of medical enquiry and lobbyists, of pharmaceutical manufacturing and environmental activism and religions and political ideologies. … ” She tells of her realization in graduate school that “we could save more lives with good science if we spent less time worrying about publishing the perfect paper and more time lobbying, more time schmoozing the press, more time speaking in the language that voters and politicians understand.”
My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolt Taylor. A neuroanatomist’s blow-by-blow description of her own massive stroke. She observed her own mind completely deteriorate to the point that she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life, within four hours. Now fully recovered, she is an activist for stroke rehabilitation. First learned of it on TED.com, which hosts short videos on Technology, Entertainment and Design.
*****
To be updated. Readers, please pass your papers.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
December 16th, 2008 at 00:34
Early reading: tons and tons of DC and Marvel comic books
Best of ’08:
1) A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion – Stephen Hawking on A. Einstein
2) The Conquest Of Happiness – Bertrand Russell
3) Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass And What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll (does it count if I read it a second time around this year?)
4) Twisted 6 (same as #3)
5) The Varieties of Scientific Experience – Carl Sagan
6) The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins (same as #3)
7) Marvel Civil War – Mark Millar
8) Batman: The Killing Joke – Alan Moore
December 16th, 2008 at 12:04
My highlight of the year in books would be Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End. It’s funny, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s not just an American novel, it mirrors “the office†generation we’re living in now.
Other great reads I had this year: Strange Tribe, a Hemingway family memoir; Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex and Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the last two I read for the first time.
December 16th, 2008 at 12:16
I wanna see the 2008 favorite books of our literati… that is, if they actually read books besides their own.
December 16th, 2008 at 16:55
best read of O8:
1.) The Rule of Four
2.) The Eight
December 16th, 2008 at 19:24
early reading – carlo caparas’ graphic stories
late reading:
1. savage detectives – roberto bolano’s narrative about mexico’s visceral realists is as hilarious as joyce’s pandemonium episode in ulysses. i vowed to read all of this guy’s major works after savage
2. collected stories of eudora welty
3. conduct under fire (john a. glusman) – this book about the fall of the philippines to the japs mentions my hometown many times
4. diary of a bad year (jm coetzee) – not as good as disgrace, but coetzee’s worst writing will still be better than the best of ours
5. the collectd stories of isaac bashevis singer – gimpel the fool is worth the price of this thick book
6. nazi literature in the americas (bolano)
7. unaccustomed earth (jumpa lahiri) – her short stories are like a breath of morning air in the mountains
8. modigliani beyond the myth – a coffee table book
9. great american prose poems (david lehman, ed) – this book is a treasure. found out that margaret attwood can write kickass prose poetry
10. 50 essays, a portable anthology – must read for lover of The Essay
December 16th, 2008 at 20:09
“you feel like sitting by a fireplace and reading this in one go.”
huh? But this is when the AC is set on high, right? Otherwise, don’t make sense.
December 17th, 2008 at 09:25
i don’t usually read scifi but the best book i read this year is a collection of philip dick’s works in the 60s. my favorite is do androids dream of electric sheep.
December 17th, 2008 at 20:32
1. The Wanderer (Le Grand Meaulnes), Alain-Fournier
2. The Professor’s House, Willa Cather
3. A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby
4. Stories and Tales, Stephen Crane
5. Being There, Jerzy Kosinski
6. Great Short Works, Willa Cather
December 22nd, 2008 at 09:44
A Year in Coming-of-Ages
1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Read about it in this blog, read the entire first chapter in The New Yorker, then immediately called the local bookstores for a copy. Had everyone staring at the MRT when I got to “Jesus Christ, I’m a morlock”. T
December 22nd, 2008 at 10:01
A Year in the Coming-of-Ages
1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Read about it in this blog, read the entire first chapter in The New Yorker, then immediately called the local bookstores for a copy. Had everyone staring at the MRT when I got to “Jesus Christ, I’m a morlockâ€. Several months later, the book won the Pulitzer and the paperback is out for far less than I bought it for, dammit. Anyway, gave this book as a Christmas gift to every exchange gift-giving I joined.
2. The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak. Set in Nazi Germany, an orphan girl steals books – one from the infamous book-burning sessions. Loved the kid who painted himself black as a tribute to Jessie Owens in the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin.
3. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Girl in Iran during the revolution and the fall of the Shah.
4. Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. Middle-class girl in prep school who’s painfully aware of everything and anything. Really, growing-up is painful. I don’t know why people bother to look back.