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!

You can (sort of) go home again

I was one of those Narnia kids. I read the books over and over (I was a big re-reader; I also read the Little House series and many others multiple times) -- though I eventually limited myself to once a year, perhaps fearing the effects of over-exposure. I think some of my love for Narnia was in reaction to the Tolkien dominance I felt in the house -- my older sister and cousins were all hard-core Tolkien devotees and those books were big and, in the hardcover boxed set we owned, rather forbidding. Narnia, on the other hand, was welcoming and manageable. And it was mine. My adoration for Narnia did not lead me far into the fantasy genre, or Christianity -- brought up with little exposure to religion, I managed to miss the obvious parallels in the tales until they were pointed out to me later and even then I just accepted them as part of this particular story and not something that was supposed to apply to my life. Eventually I grew up and during adolescence transferred my affections to books intended for adults, like Jane Eyre and the works of Jane Austen. I did read The Lord of the Rings, once, and enjoyed it but never felt the fierce connection to that world that I had to Narnia. I always wondered how Narnia would feel to me as an adult -- especially once my friends started having kids and the kids grew old enough to read the Chronicles or have them read to them. I both envied them and worried that they might have the childhood magic erased. Like pretty much everyone else on the planet, I was drawn back to kid lit by the Harry Potter series and I felt a little reconnected, in a strange way, in reading (and being entranced by) Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, even while understanding it could not, in many ways, be more opposed to Lewis' work. I read and loved The Magicians, Lev Grossman's novel that was widely described as Harry Potter with sex and drugs but obviously owes a lot more to a childhood obsession with Narnia.

So when the movie version of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe came out I got a copy of the book and re-read it and, as I had feared, it felt strangely flat. I was sorry I had done it. Narnia was lost to me -- I still fondly remembered loving the books so intensely, but I felt a little like the characters in the books who, once they reach a certain age, are told they cannot return.

But Narnia, and C.S. Lewis, just will not go away. About a year ago, unexpectedly, one campus of my alma mater was sold off and to become the new home of the start-up C.S. Lewis College. And the movies keep coming, too, most recently the third installment, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. (In a slightly related side note, I am glad to see the movies are appearing in what I believe is the correct sequence, which was the order of publication and the order that my paperback boxed set back in the '70s, rather than the series order now espoused by the Chronicles' publishers, which conforms to the internal chronology of Narnia but makes less sense to me.)

A couple weeks ago I was shelving books in the Children's Room at the library -- always a dangerous occupation -- and came across a copy of Dawn Treader with the familar '70s paperback cover, glued onto one of those hard buckram library bindings. I opened it up and read a few lines and to my own surprise felt drawn in. So I checked it out and brought it home. (If any of my bosses is reading this, I swear don't do a lot of reading while I'm supposed to be shelving books. Really.) I read it and enjoyed it, even while recognizing Lewis' crankiness toward co-education and practical knowledge was a little, well, cranky. But it was also kind of funny. I thought I just might give some other Chronicles a try. I also came across Laura Miller's recent essay in the Wall Street Journal about how the approach of the Narnia films differs significantly from the source material, especially in their emphasis on FAMILY VALUES.

That led me to pull of the shelf a book I have owned since it was published, Miller's The Magician's Book. It's subtitled "A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and Miller, who was one of the founders of Salon, is my favorite literary critic so I knew the chances were pretty good I was going to like it. And I did, though I also did not want to read too far until I had re-read the rest of the Chronicles.

On the day after Christmas, disaster struck. Our beloved dog died of liver failure. She was only 3 1/2 and my husband and I are one of those childless couples who are  devoted to our dog beyond all reason. Plus, she was an outrageously lovable dog, as many of our friends can attest. And it came as a huge shock. So I was in a state. I needed comfort, familiarity, and distraction. At some point, late in the day (I think; those first couple days are actually a little fuzzy), I reached for Narnia. I think it was Prince Caspian, since I decided I needed to return to the correct order and had already gotten the next few books out of the library. And it was a relief -- a tale that offered an escape without challenging my brain. It had been long enough that I had forgotten the details of the story so reading was interesting but as I went along I recognized and remembered the characters and plot points as old friends.

In the week since, I have blown through the rest of the Chronicles and finished Miller's book and yes, it is as excellent as I had expected it to be, both in its appreciation for Lewis' achievement and its clear-eyed view of his flaws. I was a bit shocked in reading The Horse and His Boy to come across the nasty descriptions of the clearly Arab-inspired villainous Calormenes with their turbans and scimitars and swarthy skin and nasty smells of onion and garlic -- not like those virtuous, fair-haired, upstanding (and odorless) Narnians! And of course I thought, oh no, how much of that did I absorb as a kid? Though as Miller points out, for many of us, if Lewis intended the Chronicles as religious treatises we didn't take them that way -- so perhaps the ethnic prejudice also rolled off. She also spends quite a bit of time discussing the differences in approaches and attitudes between Lewis and Tolkien, who were famously friends in Oxford, and the literary sources and inspirations for their respective creations.

So thanks, Narnia -- which means thanks, C.S. Lewis. Even if you didn't succeed in making me a believer as a kid and even if I am disturbed and offended by some of your attitudes as an adult, I appreciate the experience of immersion in literature that you provided for me back then -- and the welcome distraction this week. I'll continue to think fondly of the books, mostly, even if they are also now irrevocably associated with Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell's brilliant Lazy Sunday video (which pops into my head every time I check out one of the Narnia DVDs at the library, usually for someone who's about 8 years old). And thanks, especially, Laura Miller for an intelligent and interesting assessment of Lewis and the power those books in particular and literature in general can have for kids, and for writing about books in an appreciative accessible way for regular people, wresting criticism and literature back from the academics who seem to want to dissect it if not kill it for what reason I don't know. It's like they don't even like books.

By the way, if Narnia is not or never was your cup of tea, a fantasy series for kids that held up even better in a lot of ways -- no religious message or ugly stereotyping! -- was Lloyd Alexander's excellent Chronicles of Prydain. I re-read those a year or two ago and now recommend them wherever I go. And if you are ever in a time of crisis and need literary distraction, I strongly recommend Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, which starts with The Eyre Affair. The first time I read that book I bounced off it but I tried again in my annus horribilis 0f 2005, a year in which I was editor of the local paper, we were coping with relentless successive hurricanes that culminated with Wilma and both my husband and I went through major medical crises. Those books were exactly the right level of distraction and entertainment without taxing my already overtaxed brain and I am eternally grateful to them. And wish Fforde would return to that series already.

Beastly tales

I just reviewed another work of nonfiction for my alma mater, The Miami Herald -- the book is Zoo Story by Thomas French and the review ran yesterday. I liked the book a lot -- it was obviously based on years of reporting, which is the sort of thing that the St. Petersburg Times has been able and willing to do -- and which may be pretty darn scarce on the ground in the future, even at papers owned by nonprofit foundations. The story follows the expansion and consequences of that expansion at Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo, where the CEO pushed for an ambitious new Safari Africa exhibit featuring elephants imported from a game preserve in Swaziland. French makes characters out of some of the zoo's animals, which is dangerous -- my only problem with Mike Capuzzo's otherwise excellent Close to Shore was when he claimed to be inside the shark's head -- but French navigates the perilous territory very well, describing more of what happens to the animals than pretending to know what they're thinking.

The same book is reviewed today by Salon's Laura Miller, one of the best book reviewers in the business. Not that I'm intimidated or anything.