It's that time of year

I'm a sucker for those year-end best books lists. Sometimes they make me mad; often they make me feel like I need to broaden my reading horizons. I decided to come up with my own best-of-the-year list and conducted a highly unscientific poll among readers of my acquaintance. Here are the results (in my poll, it doesn't have to be a book published this year; just read this year): My best reads of the year came down to one work of fiction and one work of nonfiction. The novel was Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, winner of last year's Man Booker. I had a feeling I'd love it -- I had read and greatly admired Mantel's historical novel about the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, and I am of course, obsessed with all things Tudor. So when I heard she'd written a novel about Thomas Cromwell, I figured she had written it just for me.

The work of nonfiction is Cleopatra, the new biography by Stacy Schiff. If you think you know the facts about this woman's remarkable life, think again. Schiff does a wonderful job rescuing Cleopatra from the millenium-long trashing of her reputation, conducted by men who 1) never knew her and 2) had very strong motives to portray her as an evil seductress. A great read even if you're not all that into ancient Roman or Egyptian history.

Here are the results from my unscientific sampling:

Connie, newspaper books editor: "The best book I read all year was Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom.' Yes, I know it is popular to bash this book, or say there were too many white people in it, or that it was "unrealistic" or that the characters were unlikable (what, you want to read about boring people???) But I loved it unreservedly. I could not put it down, and I loved every minute I was reading it. And aside from being funny and insightful and brilliant, it also reflects my entirely cynical worldview: we are hopelessly doomed, not just as a species, but from ever doing anything truly selfless!

"My second favorite was Jennifer Egan's 'A Visit from the Goon Squad,' which is ostensibly about the shifting music industry but really about a lot more. Clever, funny and hopefully not TOO prescient..."

Arlo, poet and literary seminar media director: "I also liked Egan's "A Visit from the Goon Squad," a novel-in-stories filled with brilliant off-to-the-side-insights into relationships between friends and lovers and clear-headed commentary on the time we're living in. The PowerPoint chapter is a special treat. 

"I finally finished Richard Ford's masterful Frank Bascombe trilogy-- I'd been putting off 'The Lay of the Land' ever since it came out however many years back because I didn't want to live in a world without more Bascombe to look forward to. It's probably the sloppiest of the the three ("The Sportswriter" and "Independence Day" are the others), but I couldn't be sure that didn't make it the best.

Oh, and Charlie Smith's 'Three Delays' just plain knocked me down."

Bob, bookbinder and bookstore manager: "Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence."

My mom: "The book I'm reading right now is easily my best of the year: Daniel Patrick Moynihan: a Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary, by Steven R. Weisman, published in 2010.

"You should read it to understand a lot of things about America in the 20th century.  Moynihan had a unique perspective and personal history. The Senate  is a much poorer place without him (and Teddy)."

A check-outable feast

There's just a month to go before the next Key West Literary Seminar and just in time, we at the Key West Library have received a shipment of books by writers appearing at the Seminar. This year's subject is The Hungry Muse: Food in Literature and the offerings are indeed appetizing. (It's not, by the way, the much-feared "cookbook seminar" and it's not just straight-up food writing, either -- our panelists will include novelists and poets and historians as well as some of the finest food writers in the nation.) We already had a bunch of books by these writers in our collection but the new ones are most welcome, including Eating by Jason Epstein, Ratio by Michael Ruhlman and At Home with Madhur Jaffrey. Jaffrey, by the way, will be at both sessions, as will be Calvin Trillin, Roy Blount, Jr., and Billy Collins. If you're interested in attending, there are still spots left in the second session -- and if you're in Key West, don't forget the Sunday afternoon panels and readings are always free and open to the public. Bon appetit!

And if you're wondering what's up with the slide show below -- well, I'm not much of a cook, to be honest. Given a couple free hours I will invariably spend my time reading instead of shopping for and preparing food. But these are some recent culinary creations of mine worth note -- the Swedish family recipe cake I made for our Stieg Larsson Book Bites session at the library, two pies I made for Thanksgiving (the inevitable pumpkin and the always popular apple-cranberry-raisin from the Fanny Farmer Cookbook), a batch of liebkuchen from another family recipe (and my favorite Christmas treat of the many, many kinds of cookies my grandmother used to make every year) and a cocktail, a Pisco guava punch prepared at the long-distance direction of Embury Cocktails impresario and New York Times-certified cocktail expert Jason Rowan. And all of them turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself. Recipes available on request.

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The girl who finally got around to reading Stieg Larsson

It's taken me years to get around to reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the international bestseller by the late Stieg Larsson. There are a few reasons for this. For one, it's a pretty big book. For another, it was reputed to be an addictive page-turner and I'm wary of taking those on without a good chunk of free time ahead of me. Third, I'm always wary of massively hyped bestselling books, especially genre thrillers. I'm still getting over having read Angels & Demons and I still want those four hours of my life back. And finally, I knew the tragic backstory -- that Larsson died of a heart attack, at 50, before the books were published -- and without a will, leading to a so-far-unresolved conflict between his father and brother, who inherited his unexpectedly valuable estate, and his longtime partner, with whom he lived for decades. Ugh. BUT. I do like Swedish crime novels -- my favorite so far is Kjell Eriksson's "Princess of Burundi" -- and these had gotten well reviewed enough that I thought it was safe to give them a try. Plus, Larsson is the subject of our Book Bites book club at the library this month. And I had a couple days of post-Fantasy Fest downtime. So I figured now was the time.

I actually had started this book once or twice before. It was one of the first that I bought when my husband got me a Kindle. But I had bounced off the beginning section and figured it wasn't the right time. This time, I stuck it out and by 30 pages in (a guesstimate, actually, since the Kindle doesn't give you a page number) I was hooked. The writing is nothing spectacular and I suspect the translation was clumsy at times -- either too literal or veering between British and American English -- but the plot and characters are so strong that it didn't matter.

Several friends have said they had trouble with the Swedish names, both for people or places. I don't speak or read Swedish but I am of Swedish descent, on both sides of my family including two grandparents who were raised there, and the names didn't faze me at all, except sometimes making me feel inadequate when I wasn't 100 percent sure on pronunciation. Oddly, since I have never been to Sweden, I had strong visual images of the island and guest cottage where a lot of the book's action takes place -- I guess I've seen enough photographs of the place, plus watched the BBC's excellent adaptations of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels. And the characters, especially the hero, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, and heroine, hacker/investigator Lisbeth Salander, were very strong. And the coffee! They're always drinking coffee. At all hours, at every meal and meeting. I was craving it even more than usual. That, and a liverwurst sandwich on rye.

And I appreciated Larsson's prescient and sensible attitude toward the financial industry, both the much-hyped billionaires who make their fortunes off what are, essentially, shell games instead of old fashioned industries where they made stuff -- and the financial journalists who hype them. Larsson goes out of his way several times to unfavorably compare financial reporting to the more skeptical treatment given other kinds of crime stories or political figures. And he's absolutely right.

There was yet another reason I had put off reading Larsson -- I had heard the books were incredibly violent, specifically violent towards women. The original title of this novel, in Swedish, was Men Who Hate Women. And it definitely featured some sadistic psychopaths who have it in for women but ... I didn't feel like Larsson was celebrating the violence or getting off on it in the way you sometimes do with thrillers. He, like his hero, was a lefty investigative journalist and is decidedly on the side of the underdog -- specifically Salander, who is both a victim of violence and adept at fighting back and protecting herself. And I appreciated that he provided plausible reasons that she would not seek help from the authorities, thus liberating her from the situation of the Too Stupid To Live romance novel heroine who is always getting herself into idiotic trouble for no good reason.

So I definitely plan on reading the rest of the trilogy -- even though several reliable sources have already told me the first is the strongest of the three. I just don't want to start the next one ... until I have another free day or two ahead of me.

Win a free book! Plus some thoughts on vampire lit

I tried to resist the vampire lit thing. I really did. I have successfully avoided reading a word by Stephenie Meyers. I haven't even seen any of the movies. Then True Blood came out. Curse you, Alan Ball! I was hooked. So hooked I read the first of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels, on which the series is based. It was a fun read -- very different in tone and even in plot from the series but still, I quit reading after the first book because I didn't want to spoil plot points from the show.

Over the summer, lured by Salon's first online reading club, I read The Passage, Justin Cronin's big (in many ways) dystopian page-turner. The vampires in that are in no way sexy -- they're predators, infected with a virus in ... wait for it ... a military experiment GONE HORRIBLY WRONG. No tuxes or seductions for these vampires -- they're just the enemy for the few remnant regular humans left in North America. It's a good book, and I'll definitely be reading the next installment.

So after Cronin's dark dystopia I was ready for the lighter side of vampire lit -- and along came Key West's own Meg Cabot with Insatiable. I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't previously read anything by Cabot, who is an extremely nice and generous person. So I figured this was my chance to start making up for that.

And I enjoyed it thoroughly. Insatiable is a bit of an homage to Bram Stoker's Dracula, with a heroine named Mina Harper who has a brother named Jonathan (and a dog named Jack Bauer). It's a bit of a romp, something of a romance and a great send-up both of pop culture (besides Jack Bauer, Mina is a scriptwriter for a soap opera) and vampire lit. And it'sfunny. If you like Jennifer Crusie, chances are pretty good you'll like this, too.

When we decided to focus on vampire lit for the October Book Bites book club at the library, we contacted Cabot with some questions about the book. She was extremely generous in her response -- answers to our questions can be found here on the library website -- and in giving us two signed copies of Insatiable.

And if you're in Key West and you're interested in reading the book, here's your chance: Cabot generously donated two signed copies of the book to us. And we're giving them away -- all you have to do is come to the library and fill out a form with your name and contact info. Winners must collect the book from the library -- we can't mail them out. So stop by, and take a chance -- and try out some other vampire lit while you're here. We have a big display up with all kinds of vampire books.

Near and far

Today's Miami Herald has my review of Bill Bryson's new book, At Home. It's an extremely entertaining read and informative, too. It's not a history as scholars would see it, but a review of various areas of private life in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain and America. The book is organized as a tour of Bryson's home in Norfolk, England (thus, the title), and each room serves as a reason to muse about the history of the room and the functions it serves. Though Bryson does venture pretty far afield, it never seems boring or irrelevant.

There were tons of fun facts I couldn't fit into the review. Here, for your cocktail party fodder needs, are a few (but you should still read the book -- this doesn't begin to capture the depth and variety of good stuff within):

* George III ordered a palace at Kew -- that was half built -- made entirely of cast iron except for doors and floorboards "a design that would have given it all the charm and comfort of a cooking pot," Bryson writes. It was pulled down by the king's successor. But I would have liked to have seen it.

* "The Quechuan language in Peru still has a thousand words for different types or conditions of potatoes."

* The Europeans introduced many diseases that came close to wiping out Native American populations -- but they received one in return: syphilis.

* "For a century or so, no table of distinction was without its epergne, but why it was called an epergne no one remotely knows. The word doesn't exist in French. It just seems to have popped into being from nowhere."

* The name Boston Tea Party wasn't applied to the pre-Revolutionary rebellion until 1834.

* Franklin Delano Roosevelt's grandfather made the family fortune in the opium trade.

* Thomas Edison dreamed of filling the world with homes made of concrete.

* At the 1876 Centennial Exhibition most visitors were "far more impressed by an electric pen invented by Thomas Edison" than Alexander Graham Bell's new invention: the telephone.

* In 1726 gynecological medicine was so ridiculous that Mary Toft, an illiterate rabbit breeder from Surrey, "managed to convince medical authorities, including two physicians to the royal household, that she was giving birth to a series of rabbits."

* In the late 19th century people were so afraid of being buried alive that an Association for Prevention of Premature Burial was formed in Britain in 1899, and a corresponding group in America the next year.

* Buttons were so popular when introduced that they were applied all over clothes, even where they don't keep anything closed -- which is why suit jackets, to this day, have a row of buttons down near the cuff. "They have always been purely decorative and have never had a purpose, yet three hundred and fifty years on we continue to attach them as if they are the most earnest necessity."