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Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
From a gripping novel about terrorism to the memoir of a cross-country stripteaser, we pick the best -- that is, the most pleasurable -- reading experiences of 2001.
Jan 9, 2002 | Like many other things, our reading life had a big hole in it in 2001. For about two months after Sept. 11, we read nothing but books about Afghanistan, terrorism and the Middle East (our two top recommendations: Ahmed Rashid's still-relevant "Taliban" and Peter Bergen's "Holy War, Inc."). When we snapped out of it in mid-November, we had a lot of catching up to do, which is why this time around Salon's annual book awards are coming out a bit late.
It was a great year for fiction, mostly because of a handful of deep, true, funny and otherwise wonderful books rather than an abundance of pretty darn good ones. Nonfiction, which usually sneaks up and steals our hearts away at the end of the year, offered fewer enthralling page-turners and more substantive fare. Since we've always made it a policy to offer you a 10-best list without spinach -- noble endeavors are welcome but they must be slog-free -- we wound up disqualifying many worthy, important and otherwise influential tomes if we felt they couldn't beguile us through this year's especially unsettled hours of air travel.
The result is, as always, a list of favorites, books we loved even if they seem like long shots for making it onto any future Ivy League syllabi. (Nevertheless, we won't be surprised if some of them do just that.) We had a weakness for books that made us laugh this year -- and who can blame us? -- but also books that wrestled with eternal questions, from the nature of philosophy to relations between the sexes. The best books do some of both, and here is our list of the ones that did it for us.
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FICTION
Austerlitz
By W.G. Sebald
300 pages
Random House
In a year filled to the brim with pointless deaths, the loss of W.G. Sebald in an automobile accident in December seems a cruelly excessive final note. It has become common to describe his much-praised novels as indescribable, but they are actually very much like having hours of the loveliest, most fascinating conversation of your life with a soft-spoken gentlemen met by chance on a train traveling from Vienna to Paris. Only after he gets off at his stop and leaves you to lean back in your seat and contemplate the seemingly aimless wanderings of his talk do the pieces fall into place and you realize he's given you a portrait of a man, his life and, in some miraculous way, the soul of Europe itself. "Austerlitz," which traces the friendship of two men who meet in just such a way, unspools the history of its title character, an art professor of mysterious parentage raised in Britain. That Austerlitz's investigation into the riddle of his past leads him into the darkness at the center of his lost homeland doesn't keep the novel from being suffused with an uncanny and unforgettable light.
Salon's original review | More on W.G. Sebald
Bel Canto
By Ann Patchett
318 pages
HarperCollins
Never underestimate the skill required to execute a perfect entertainment. And don't think that's all Ann Patchett has done in writing "Bel Canto." It's the story of a motley international group -- 57 men plus one woman, an operatic soprano with an incandescent voice -- and the guerrillas who hold them hostage for months in the vice-presidential mansion of an unnamed Latin American nation, and in it Patchett weds a preposterously extravagant plot to her own mordant view of human nature. It shouldn't work, but it does, and the alchemy found in the combination of opera's overblown passions with the kind of sensibility that can't ignore such practical matters as the need for clean underwear gives "Bel Canto" a glimmering tartness. Even the novel's unlikeliest minor characters -- a music-mad priest, a cranky Swiss hostage negotiator, the homebodyish vice president -- breathe. With opera mixed up in the proceedings there has to be love here, and death as well, but the sum of those two elements is heartbreakingly unpredictable to the very end.
The Corrections
By Jonathan Franzen
566 pages
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
The Lamberts sont nous, if by "us" you mean the average American family trying to figure out a way to live honorably in a world of leveraged buyouts, pharmaceutically engineered moods, dot-com scams, mix-and-match lifestyles and sexual identities, and the cult of Christmas. In this saga of a befuddled Midwestern family, Franzen manages to achieve something remarkable and possibly unprecedented: a merciless satirical look at contemporary life that's also fundamentally generous and human. Epic yet intimate, smart but not cold, "The Corrections" is also a piece of mesmerizing prose, virtuosic enough to cause a reader to pause in admiration of a sentence or passage, but never so flashy that you feel the book is slowing down to let the author show off. Sure, we've heard cranky skeptics complain about the publicity surrounding this novel, but aside from a little contretemps with a certain talk show host, the "hype" mostly consists of lots and lots of radiant reviews. Why so many good reviews, the suspicious ask? Um, get over yourselves. The reason why so many people love this book is simple enough: It's terrific.
Salon's original review | An interview with Jonathan Franzen | More on Jonathan Franzen
John Henry Days
By Colson Whitehead
389 pages
Doubleday
John Henry was a late 19th-century folk hero, a hammer-wielding railroad worker of towering strength who challenged a steam drill to a steel-driving race and won. J. Sutter is a hack journalist halfheartedly going for the "junketeering" record by racking up the most consecutive days of scamming free food, drink and other perks. John Henry inspired a legendary ballad. J. gets hired by travel Web sites to write up festivals celebrating commemorative stamps -- in this case, one honoring John Henry. Colson Whitehead's brilliant, restless novel is about what happens when a cynical, opportunistic, media-steeped product of the Information Age gets rubbed up against the mythic dignity of America's past. What does it mean to strive for something bigger than yourself in a world where one of your friends loses his eye to another writer's finger in "a tragic ironic quotes accident"? The fact that both the old-time hero and the present-day freelancer are black only complicates and enriches the novel's wit. Yes, Whitehead writes about race in a way that feels entirely fresh, but then, he writes about everything else that way, too.
Salon's original review | More on Colson Whitehead
Stranger Things Happen
By Kelly Link
266 pages
Small Beer Press
An intrepid young woman described only as the Girl Detective, seeks her long-lost mother by paying a visit to the Underworld. A woman whose boyfriend went out to buy a pack of cigarettes and was last seen getting into the Snow Queen's sleigh embarks on a bloody-minded journey with the intention of dragging him back -- or at least of giving him a piece of her mind. A librarian falls in love with a girl whose parents, between the two of them, have a wooden nose, a wooden leg and a barnful of sinister black dogs. A not very good husband who can't quite remember his wife's name writes her woebegone letters from the deserted seaside hotel he's beginning to suspect might be a waystop on the path to the next world. Besotted newlyweds watch a televised beauty pageant whose contestants seem not entirely human (especially Miss New Jersey, who has horns and a tail). Kelly Link's exquisite stories mix the aggravations and epiphanies of everyday life with the stuff that myths, dreams and nightmares are made of. Some of them are very scary, others are immensely sad, many are funny and all of them are written in prose so flawless you almost forget how much elemental human chaos they contain.
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