Besties forever

I am unable to resist best book lists of almost any form so I've been keeping an eye on the usual end of the year productions. I'm not as into it as some others, like the blogger Largehearted Boy, who amasses a giant list of best lists, or the librarian/bloggers at the Williamsburg Public Library, who take all those lists and turn them into one mega-list (though that list is broken into different categories, mostly for fiction). Mostly, I keep an eye out for the lists compiled by the sources I rely on most for book reviews -- The New York Times and Salon (which has separate lists for fiction and nonfiction). But I have to admit this year my favorite list came from Lev Grossman at Time magazine (which also had separate fiction and nonfiction lists). Perhaps it's Grossman's unapologetic appreciation of genre fiction -- which was an awful lot of my fiction reading this year. Or, in a related angle, it's his noticing books that are not the usual suspects -- two graphic novels (The Death-Ray and Hark! A Vagrant!) became Christmas gifts in my house this year after I saw them on the list.

My best list consists of books I read this year, whenever they were published -- though a large number were indeed new this year (one of the many benefits of working at a library is access to advanced review copies and awareness of newly published works). I chose my favorites with flat-out enjoyment as my only criterion, realizing that many factors go into that.

Fiction: A Song of Ice & Fire, books 1-3, George R.R. Martin (That's A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords)

Nonfiction: Rin Tin Tin, Susan Orlean.

Why the George R.R. Martin? As so many others already knew, and millions more of us have discovered since HBO started airing the screen adaptation, this is an amazing world Martin has created, full of compelling characters and apparently endless plot possibilities. I've only read the first three books because 1) I'm waiting for a co-worker to finish Book 3 so we can talk about them as we read them and 2) I don't want to catch up to Martin too soon then become of those disgruntled fans who hates him because he's taking so long writing his next book. Grossman has an excellent explanation for why he chose Martin's latest book, A Dance With Dragons, in this Salon compilation of writers naming their favorite books of the year. In case you don't feel like scrolling through 50 writers, here's the meat of Grossman's case:

As for craft: Yeah, on the level of sentence, you couldn’t stack “A Dance With Dragons” up against Jeffrey Eugenides’ “The Marriage Plot,” or Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child.” But as a plotter, an orchestrator and pacer of narratives that weave around and resonate with each other, Martin leaves them far, far behind. Is that important? Maybe not to the people who give out Pulitzers. But it’s important to me. It’s why “A Dance With Dragons” is the best book I read this year.

If I were to name the best literary nonfiction I read this year, I'd go with Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber, followed by The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta. Outside of those, my top five were all genre: A Surfeit of Guns, by P.F. Chisholm, part of her entertaining Sir Robert Carey series and The Anatomy of Ghosts by Andrew Taylor, another historical crime novel. Honorable mentions to Heartstone by C.J. Sansom, the latest in his keeps-getting-better Matthew Shardlake series (soon to be on screen portrayed by Kenneth Branagh!) and The Rebellion of Jane Clarke, the latest but I hope not the last of Sally Gunning's novels set in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts.

As for nonfiction, I read a lot of good ones this year. Really good books, written by smart people who neither talked down to their readers nor preached to the academic choir. But my favorite came out of journalism: Rin Tin Tin by New Yorker writer Susan Orlean. I'm a dog person for sure, but I am not a big consumer of dog books. I wouldn't even call this a dog book. It's a book about 20th century America, and about how an image can influence a culture. And it's a story about the incredible bond between a lonely man and the puppy he rescued on a World War I battlefield. Many twists and turns, with several side trips into related but separate storylines -- yet Orlean keeps it all together and keeps it moving and coherent. Brilliantly done.

The rest of my top five in nonfiction, in no particular order: Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard (who knew James Garfield was such a good guy? Certainly not me). She-Wolves by Helen Castor, about the women who ruled, or tried to rule England before Mary. The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt, about the rediscovery of On the Nature of Things by Lucretius and how that poem helped usher in the modern world. The Magician's Book by Laura Miller -- my favorite kind of literary writing, where she tells the story of the book and of the book's impact on the culture in general and on her, as a reader, in particular. If you were a Narnia kid, and I was, this book feels like it was written just for you. Honorable mentions to Robert K. Massie's Catherine the Great and Iphigenia in Forest Hills by Janet Malcolm.

With the holiday boost in ereader sales, I expect we will be seeing even more of the essays predicting the death of literature, of reading, of writing, of culture, of life as we know it. Perhaps I am fooling myself, like a newspaper journalist circa 1998, but I don't think so. The modes are changing, the economics are changing and who gets published and what sells may change. But people appear to have a thirst for narrative, for stories in the form of the written word, that is spurring the production of plenty of good (and lots of terrible) books that are now available in all kinds of forms. It's certainly an unnerving time to be a publisher, or an aspiring writer, or, in some ways, a librarian. But as a reader I feel confident that the well is nowhere near running dry. On to 2012!

A friend writes ...

Full disclosure: Diana Abu-Jaber is a friend. This is both very cool -- Diana is a smart, kind, generous person as well as an excellent writer -- and kind of fraught. Because when a friend publishes a book and you think, "Gee I should really read that," there's always that lurking fear: What if I don't like it? I shouldn't have worried. First of all, like I said, Diana's an excellent writer. And Birds of Paradise started getting great notices months before it was published, in trades I keep an eye on (Library Journal and Booklist, the ALA's book review magazine). When it was published, last month, the great reviews hit the streets. So last week, I summoned the courage to read it. And it is great. Really great.

Quick plot synopsis: The Muir family of Coral Gables has fractured. Felice, their younger child, has run away from home at 13 and had only rare, sporadic contact in the five years since. She's survived on the streets of Miami Beach by modeling and forming bonds with other street kids. Their son, Stanley, is semi-estranged, struggling to make a go of his organic market in Homestead. Dad Brian is corporate counsel to a developer that is a prime player in the mid 2000s building boom. The novel's main action takes place in August 2005, just before Hurricane Katrina sweeps across South Florida. Avis is a pastry chef who is in an extended state of shock from losing her daughter and somehow unable to connect with her son, despite their shared love for providing food as a vocation.

The book rotates through the points of view of everyone in the family, though Stanley is mostly offstage until the book's finale. This works very well and somehow everyone is (mostly) sympathetic -- I was a bit fed up with Avis, at times, especially in her treatment of Stanley. But I was still caught up, wanting to know what would happen next.

A couple things I particularly appreciated about this book. 1) The characters are real people, not merely metaphors who stand for some national trait or cardboard cutouts illustrating something about society. This, I realized as I was reading the book, is what irritates me in novels that are often held up as Great Literary Works (Don Delillo, anyone?). 2) She gets South Florida right -- you'd expect that, since she lives here, but it's still a pleasure and a relief since this is an area that so many people write about, many of them with only a glancing knowledge of the place. My favorite line from the book: "Increasingly Brian feels that living in Florida is an act of both rebellion and willful perversity -- like rebuilding a house on the train tracks." 3) Characters of varying ethnicities are real people, not merely foils against whom the Anglos to test out their wild and crazy sides. That's another thing that seems to happen a lot in Great Literary Works, especially by white guys. 4) She uses food in a truly literary way, as an expression of character and individuality, not as some gimmick or plot frame. Diana was a panelist at the first session of the Key West Literary Seminar, way back in January, when our topic was food in literature. She was a hit there -- I hope some of the folks who saw her there are reading (and buying!) the book.

But is it literary?

The Key West Literary Seminar is underway -- we just wrapped up the first session; there's still room in the second session and if you're a literary foodie at all, this is one of those rare opportunities for your passions to combine. One topic that keeps coming up, as it has since we began discussing food as a theme for the Seminar, is the question of literariness (if that's a word). One of my fellow board members, whom I respect a lot and like even more, dislikes it when the writers get off the topic of writing and literature and just start talking about food. I disagree. And here's why:

First of all, there is plenty of talk about writing itself and to be honest, a diet of just that gets to be too much for me, especially since we're dealing with a double session here.

Second, we have gathered some of the smartest, most articulate people in the country who know from food. Why on earth would we NOT want them to talk about this subject, about which they are passionate and knowledgable -- and often quite funny. Not just the known funny people like Calvin Trillin, Roy Blount and Billy Collins, but Julia Reed was a revelation to many of us -- the woman should have her own standup act -- and even an eminence such as Madhur Jaffrey had the auditorium laughing out loud many, many times. Isn't their foodiness the very reason we brought them, along with their proven literary chops? When the subject is "more literary," say a genre like memoir, we don't object when the writers discuss some topic that is the focus of their work, do we? The whole point of the Seminar, to me, is to hear directly from the writers telling stories, about themselves, their own work and about other people, stories that are funny or sad or significant in some way. It's stuff you just wouldn't hear otherwise and it is very different hearing spoken by the writer herself than it is reading on the page.

I may be a bit oversensitive, having come from journalism and feeling like nonfiction generally is considered a literary stepchild compared to the exalted realms of fiction and poetry. And there were a few times when I agreed that the discussion veered a bit too far into the purely topical -- once about America's current crises in obesity and diabetes -- but in most cases that was driven by questions from the audience and I don't see what either the Seminar planners nor the writers can do about that.

So overall -- a rousing success, I must claim on my own behalf and that of the people who did most of the work putting this thing together, namely Miles Frieden and Arlo Haskell. There's still room to sign up for the second session, which I'm excited about -- it's going to be interesting to hear the new voices in the mix, especially the novelists (Kate Christensen, Elizabeth Berg and Nicole Mones) as well as a more historical perspective from Mark Kurlansky. And I'm excited to hear more from Madhur Jaffrey -- she's one of those people you could listen to all day even when she's just describing how to create a simple rice dish.

And here, to whet your appetite, are some of my personal highlights from the first session:

"It took a long time for American writers to feel comfortable admitting that they were actually writing about food."

and,

"It's ironic that, just as people stopped cooking they started reading cookbooks."

-- Ruth Reichl in the opening keynote address

Jonathan Gold said he hates the term "ethnic" when applied to restaurants. "Nobody ever calls French cooking ethnic."

We had Julia Child impressions from at least four the panelists -- the best by far was from Judith Jones; the worst was Roy Blount, Jr.

Diana Abu-Jaber describing the adoption of dishes from different cultures into the American diet, such as hummus with roasted red peppers in the grocery store: "There's fusion and I guess you'd call it confusion."

"The reason there's a taboo against cannibalism is that it must have been a powerful temptation."

-- Jason Epstein, after quoting a chef who says chefs cook for other people "so they don't eat us."

Someone asked Madhur Jaffrey if we should travel to India or if it's been ruined. She replied that India is like an onion with many layers existing together, from medieval to 21st century. "It is a rich, irritating, uplifting experience to go to India," she said. She recommends it.