The inevitable end-of-year best list

My list of best books I read this year is composed of books that were published this year, at least in fiction. That's not usually the case, but I think it's part of the deal with working at a library (and getting ever-increasing access to advanced review copies, both in print and digitally).

Fiction:

This year for me, fictionally, was all about the sequels. Like everyone else I adored Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize-winning follow-up to her Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall. If you can't get enough of the Tudor era, having a fine novelist at the top of her form inhabit that era -- from a previously underrepresented viewpoint, that of Henry VIII's minister Thomas Cromwell -- is literary nirvana.

Also in Tudor-land but with a contemporary, and paranormal, perspective was Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness, sequel to her blockbuster A Discovery of Witches. In this book, the protagonists travel back to the time of Elizabeth I in search of answers about their history, their destiny and the powers of academic scholar and reluctant witch Diana Bishop. The best shorthand description I can come up with for these books is Harry Potter for Grownups.

I also loved Crucible of Gold, the seventh entry in Naomi Novik's Temeraire series Napoleonic Wars -- with dragons! No honestly, it's awesome -- of course thanks to George R.R. Martin and HBO dragons have a little more cultural cache than when I first started raving about this series. To be perfectly honest, the last couple entries weren't as engaging as the first three, but I was invested enough in the series to keep going and I'm so glad I did.  The newest book is definitely back on track. Here's hoping she keeps going with this story as long as Patrick O'Brian did with his Aubrey-Maturin series.

Nonfiction:

I'm going to go with the collected works of Rick Geary, who does historical true crime in graphic format under the rubric A Treasury of Victorian Murder and A Treasure of 20th Century Murder. I read a bunch of them this year and I can't pick a favorite. They're all fantastic.

I also loved Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer, his memoir/meditation on not really getting down to writing a critical study of D.H. Lawrence, though the book does include many interesting considerations of Lawrence as Dyer checks out various Lawrence hangouts. Dyer will be here for the Key West Literary Seminar next month (both sessions!) and I am simultaneously dying to hear him in person and terrified to hear what he'll have to say about Key West. He is hysterically, viciously funny on the less appealing characteristics of various tourist towns he visits in Out of Sheer Rage so I'm guessing we'll be in for it from him, sooner or later.

Honorable mentions:

People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry -- Contemporary true crime done extremely well, with nuance and compassion. Blessedly free of sensationalism and righteousness.

Live By Night by Dennis Lehane -- Another sequel of sorts, a follow up to The Given Day and even better, in my opinion. Set in Boston and Tampa during Prohibition. Fans of Boardwalk Empire should check it out.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn -- The bestseller that keeps on going -- and for good reason. I gulped this one down in just a couple sittings.

The Twelve by Justin Cronin -- Yes, yet another sequel, this one to the post-viral-vampire-apocalyptic The Passage. He jumps around in time and wields a huge cast of characters and you manage to stay with him. As with Mantel and Harkness, I'm now trying not to count the days until the final installment in the trilogy.

I can't get enough of end-of-the year best lists. If you're like me you can't do better than this source, a blog by Large-hearted Boy. In the individual list category, I loved this one. And I appreciate the large-mindedness of NPR in their different categories. They even acknowledge that smart people read romance!

Time to get reading some Writers on Writers

I love this time of year for a few reasons. Holiday decorations in Key West are fun and appear to be getting more fun every year. I love the best of the year book lists that come out around now, to compare my own reading and to get ideas for books I might have missed. And I love the annual library display of books by writers appearing at the upcoming Key West Literary Seminar.  The theme this time is Writers on Writers and the works encompass straight-up biography, meditative memoir and novels with real writers as fictional characters. Lots more detail, including the writers appearing and the schedules for both sessions, is available on the Seminar website. You can still register! The books by this year's authors include some serious -- as in long and demanding attention -- books. But don't let that discourage you. While you may not be up for wading through a magisterial Literary Biography, especially during the distractions of the holiday season, there are plenty of other books that you may find surprisingly entertaining, as well as edifying.

We've just put up a display of books by Seminar writers at the Key West Library so if you're in town stop by and check it out (the display is in the Reference Department, turned over the summer into a more open reading room if you haven't been in recently).

As usual, I haven't read every single writer who will be appearing at the Seminar. But I have read enough to make some recommendations, especially for those who might feel apprehensive about this year's theme. My top choice is one of my all-time favorite nonfiction books: Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose. I love this book so much I've bought it, given it to a friend, then bought myself another copy because I had to know it was available. We have it in the library, both in hard copy and as an ebook. Rose, a part-time Key West resident, writes about the marriages of five Victorian writers (or four marriages and one long-term cohabitation, that of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes). It's got the satisfactions of high-toned literary gossip -- most of these matches were, in some way, disastrous -- but also offers the chance to reflect on what it means for personal, domestic life when one partner is an artist, as well as the dynamics between men and women, both between individuals and within a context very different from our own.

The most difficult title to categorize but one of the best books I read this year is Geoff Dyer's memoir/meditation on D.H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage. It's funny. It's thought-provoking. It's comforting, if you're prone to procrastination. I wrote a whole blog post about it a few months ago. It's very difficult to describe but it's intelligent and entertaining. And you should be able to read it a whole lot faster than I did, assuming you're not moving house after 14 years of accumulating stuff.

Some other nonfiction titles I can wholeheartedly recommend: Jane's Fame by Claire Harman -- if you're a fan of Jane Austen on print and screen, this is an interesting examination of why her five novels have retained such a high profile in our cultural lives. New Ways to Kill Your Mother by Colm Toibin, an essay collection about writers and their families. Especially insightful about Irish writers, not surprisingly, though the last couple sections on James Baldwin are masterful. Judith Thurman's biographies of Colette and Isak Dinesen are interesting and extremely readable (there's a reason she's a staff writer for The New  Yorker). Her essays on artists and writers are collected in Cleopatra's Nose. As someone who grew up in and around Amherst, I'm always interested to hear more about Emily Dickinson so I can't wait to see Lyndall Gordon, author of Lives Like Loaded Guns (yes, that's a Dickinson biography), as well as biographies of Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and Charlotte Bronte.

I'm looking forward to the discussions about writing about writers in fiction and there's a great selection there, too: Flannery O'Connor (A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano), Sylvia Plath (Wintering by Kate Moses), Stephen Crane (Hotel de Dream by Edmund White), Edith Wharton (The Age of Desire by Jennie Fields). Jay Parini, who will be at the Seminar has written novels about Leo Tolstoy (The Last Station) and Herman Melville (The Passages of H.M.).

Outside of a dog

I was pretty sure I was going to like Dennis Lehane's new book, Live By Night, when I read this line on page 36, referring to a gangster who had strangled a guy:

"It had been over opium, a woman, or a German shorthaired pointer; to this day Joe had only heard rumors."

You just don't get that many GSP references in fiction.

Fortunately, by the time I reached the end of the book I had lots of other reasons to like it. You can read them in my review that ran in today's Miami Herald.

Awesome German shorthaired pointer photograph by Mark Hedden, shot yesterday at Wahoo Key.

Hype, lived up to

As I rapidly approach what can only be called middle age (gulp), I do not think I am becoming more conservative in my personal or political views. If anything, I'm heading in the opposite direction. I am, however, developing a serious contrarian streak, which means if some book or movie is nearly universally praised by the people and media outlets to which I pay attention, a strong inner resistance kicks in. Which is why I haven't seen Brokeback Mountain, or The Artist. And why I haven't read Jonathan Franzen, or Ann Patchett. I would probably enjoy or be enlightened by them if I did. I just don't want to succumb to my own self-constructed framework of cultural peer pressure. Yeah, I know. That doesn't make any sense.

Fortunately, I had other reasons to take a look at Gillian Flynn's latest novel, Gone Girl, which is accomplishing that rare trifecta of critical acclaim, genre respect and bestseller status. I read her first novel, Sharp Objects, because a friend recommended it and because she was a writer for Entertainment Weekly, a magazine I like lot. Sharp Objects kept me up very late reading it, the very definition of a page-turner, even though its genre (thriller) isn't my usual thing.

Gone Girl, as you may have read in several other places, has the same page-turning quality but Flynn has gotten better, fiendish in her plotting and almost unbearably smart in her characterizations. The unbearable-ness comes from the points of view of the characters themselves, especially Nick Dunne, who is suspected of doing away with his wife, Amy, after she disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary. Nick's real-time first-person account is interspersed with entries from Amy's diary from the previous seven years, tracking their relationship from giddy courtship to cool New York City couple (with a lovely brownstone in, where else, Brooklyn) to their current less cool and unhappy post-recession residence in Nick's hometown of Carthage, Missouri.

Any plot spoilers would negate a lot of the reason to read this book so I'm going to stop here. All I'll say is I'm glad I had good reason to overcome my contrarian impulses and give this book a read. Especially if you like psychological suspense and even if that isn't your usual thing, it's worth it.

Bone Island Bike Blog (scofflaw edition)

It's a book blog, sure, but it's my blog so if I've got something to say on another subject I might as well say it here. And I've got something to say about bikes. This is a true story. Recently, on a Thursday, I was riding home from the library for lunch and got stopped by a Key West police officer at the corner of Grinnell and Virginia streets. Yes, I had rolled a four-way stop sign (more on that later). He was kind enough to give me a warning rather than a ticket but I did get a talking to and he ran my license, which is annoying (you don't have to have a driver's license to ride a bike, right?).

On the same day, on my way home after work, I was riding down Eliza Street when a (different) Key West police officer pulled out in front of me on Georgia Street. At that intersection, I did not have a stop sign. And he did. Fortunately I have learned to ride defensively in these parts so I didn't hit him.

This was an almost unbelievable real-life demonstration of exactly what makes so many of us who rely on bikes as our primary transportation on this island so very angry about the official attituide toward cyclists. It seems we are the problem and efforts to improve the safety of cycling target us, rather than recognizing the real dangers we face daily.

Since that Thursday, I have also seen: a Key West police car roll a stop sign into traffic at the corner of Amelia and Simonton, and a gray SUV come extremely close to hitting a cyclist who was proceeding, with the green light, on United across White Street. The SUV was turning left, and had to lock up the brakes so hard that there was a loud screech and the car actually jumped a bit. No cops in evidence for that one.

I am, of course, in favor of the enforcement of traffic laws, including laws governing cyclists, especially the ones that endanger the cyclists themselves as well as other cyclists, pedestrians and drivers (running stop lights, going the wrong way on one-way streets, riding at night without lights, etc.). I will say that rolling a stop sign seems like a strange place to focus enforcement. My approach to the far-too-plentiful four-way stops in this town is to proceed cautiously and make sure no other traffic is approaching. That's what I did the day I got pulled over. That's what I've seen Key West police officers on bicycles do at the corner of Olivia and Windsor. That's what Randy Cohen, the ethicist, does according to this column in today's New York Times.

Yes, I realize that rolling a four-way stop is not obeying the letter of the law. But there are plenty of laws in the cyclist-car universe that are enforced flexibly or, as far as I can tell, never. For instance there's the state law (F.S. 316.083, LOOK IT UP), which requires cars to stay at least three feet from bicycles when passing them. As far as I know, that law is never enforced. For obvious reasons -- it's inconvenient for cars in our small town with narrow streets.

You know what else is inconvenient? Sitting in traffic on Flagler or South Roosevelt while three years of road construction unfurls on North Roosevelt. You know what would make that situation easier? If everyone who was able was riding a bike instead of a car. I truly wish our police chief, mayor, commissioners and new city manager would just give it a try -- just a week or so, try conducting their lives on two wheels instead of four. They might discover why some of us like it so much -- the freedom and pleasure of seeing the town at the pace and level of a human rather than a machine. And they might learn about some of the hazards we face, from hostile drivers to giant potholes. And these days, they may well get where they're going a whole lot faster and find parking a lot easier (and cheaper).