Literary fiction « Books Worth Reading

My Favorite Reads: A Bunch of “Best of” Book Lists

For a while now, I have been maintaining a collection of “best of” book lists, which I wanted to share with you. These lists are divided chronologically and by broad genre, and are composed solely of books that I have read and given 4 or 5 stars. They are hosted at Lists of Best and updated as I read more.

Best pre-20th century literature – Includes poetry, drama, nonfiction and fiction.

Best of the 20th century:

Note: I separated literary fiction from speculative fiction because I think there was a real separation between genre writing and more mainstream writing during this time. While the genres of horror, science fiction and fantasy weren’t invented during this period, they were definitely robustly explored and defined. Also, this keeps the lists from getting way too long.

Best of the 21st century (thus far):

Note: I merged literary, or mainstream, fiction back with speculative fiction deliberately because I think that now the lines between genres are blurring. Clearly, Neil Gaiman and Stephen King are genre writers, but how would you classify Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, David Mitchell or Cormac McCarthy? Better to call it all just fiction, and read it all.

The best of the best – five-star books only.

Happy reading!

Old Favorite: July, July

October 19, 2009 at 2:20 pm | In Books, Reviews | Leave a Comment
Tags: Literary fiction, Tim O'Brien

July, July, Tim O’Brien (2002)

It is July of 2000, and the members of the class of 1969 at Darton Hall College are having their 30-year reunion, one year too late. In this novel we meet several of those not-so-gracefully aging flower children, now shopworn and wondering what their lives were really all about. And as the reunion progresses, we journey back into each one’s life, to other Julys in other years, when important choices were made and paths were taken that could not be reversed.

While the story and its characters are a bit confusing at first, jumping from person to person so it’s difficult to keep straight who is who, who loves who, who is married to whom, that is all intentional, and its meaning comes clear as each person’s story unfolds. Because that’s what memory is like, not a smoothly unfolding continuum but a jumble of moments, the most important moments making up a patchwork of a life. The book feels uneven from time to time, or rushed, or as if some characters get short shrift while others – particularly David, who represents the Vietnam experience – appear far too frequently, but none of that really matters.

Because these perfectly ordinary people are, in the end, completely compelling, and so are their perfectly ordinary lives. Breast cancer, Vietnam flashbacks, jiltings, divorces, affairs, the stupid mistakes we all make and we all can relate to, are lovingly detailed. And these characters, despite their many, very human faults, are our friends, our spouses, ourselves – and all the more endearing for it.

Old Favorite: Tepper Isn’t Going Out

October 16, 2009 at 1:49 pm | In Books, Reviews | Leave a Comment
Tags: Calvin Trillin, Literary fiction

Cover of Tepper Isn't Going Out: A Novel

Tepper Isn’t Going Out, Calvin Trillin (2001)

This is a little novel that actually ends up saying quite a lot – about the city of New York, about the modern idea of celebrity, about the seemingly random connections that give order to a chaotic universe. But mostly it’s about parking.

The main character, Tepper, is a hobbyist parker. He finds a legal spot and squats there, because he actually isn’t going out. This strange habit eventually makes it into the newspapers, turning Tepper into a kind of modern-day guru on the mountaintop. New Yorkers make the journey to his current parking spot to ask his advice on any subject.

Eventually, Tepper’s parking habit entangles him with the mayor of New York, who is obsessed with keeping order (and who is not-so-subtly modeled on pre-9/11 Rudy Giuliani), and so the story gets rolling, culminating in street riots, demonstrations, trials – but all conducted in a very quiet, orderly manner. It’s a subtly humorous book that will make anyone want to go parking, but not go out.

Old Favorite: Mystic River

October 15, 2009 at 1:46 pm | In Books, Reviews | Leave a Comment
Tags: Dennis Lehane, Literary fiction

Image via Wikipedia

Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)

5 stars!

Lehane is a writer who can conjure up powerful, evocative, unusual images in a very succinct way. This gift makes his characters, settings and story ring very true, and that – plus an underlying theme of hopelessness and the bitter taste of life – imbue this novel with power.

The story begins when three boyhood friends – Sean, Jimmy and Dave – are fighting in the street. They are interrupted by a car driving up, and a man who pretends to be a police officer persuades Dave to get into the car. The boy who comes back four days later is no longer Dave but a damaged soul. Fast-forward 25 years, when Jimmy’s daughter is brutally murdered. Sean is the police officer investigating the case, and Dave, for reasons connected to that fateful day when he got in that car, is the prime suspect.

Everything is connected, this book says. The future events of your life completely depend on whether you did or did not get into a car when you were eleven years old. That’s why this story seems so bleak – none of these characters can escape their fates, and eventually Jimmy and Dave stop trying. Only Sean holds out some hope by trying to overcome the cynicism that his job has engendered in him and reunite with his family.

Screeenwriting 101 — Dennis Lehane (gointothestory.com)
Up Front: Dennis Lehane (nytimes.com)

Old Favorite: The Corrections

October 14, 2009 at 12:40 pm | In Books, Reviews | 1 Comment
Tags: Jonathan Franzen, Literary fiction, National Book Award

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The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001)

What I think makes this book amazing is that it is only about a rather ordinary family — a character portrait of a father at the end of his life, his wife and his three adult children. Yet it remains absolutely engrossing from beginning to end. Would we find our own families as fascinating if we were allowed into every nook and cranny of their lives, into their most secret thoughts? Franzen has flayed open each member of the Lambert family and shown us everything with no flinching, from insanity and death and wasted lives to failures of marriages, careers and love affairs—all the messy stuff that gets to the heart of what it means to be human. As Franzen sums it up:

“The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid the price for the privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.”

Despite all that, I wouldn’t say that The Corrections is a downer. It mirrors life in that way, too: sometimes melancholy or depressing, some points of utter despair and other spikes of hope, but mostly just moving on.

#1: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (themillions.com)

Old Favorite: Mr. Phillips

October 13, 2009 at 12:13 pm | In Books, Reviews | 1 Comment
Tags: John Lanchester, Literary fiction

Cover of Mr. Phillips

Mr. Phillips, John Lanchester (2000)

When you boil it down, nothing much happens in this engrossing little novel. It chronicles a day in the life of Mr. Phillips, an accountant who was recently laid off and, afraid to tell his wife about his predicament, spends his days wandering through London. As he moves aimlessly from bus to train, from museum to restaurant to church to bank, and then back home again, he keeps up a constant internal narrative, thinking about his past and the women he’d like to sleep with and the statistical probability of a person dying before he could cash in a winning lottery ticket.

While it doesn’t sound like a very exciting read, the story caught hold of me and kept me enthralled. Mainly, it’s the writing; the words are so precise, and the writing style rolls the reader right along with Mr. Phillips through his day. But it’s also the character of Mr. Phillips himself. At first glance, he is merely an unassuming middle-aged man, the kind of person we see around us every day, but the swirl of thoughts inside his head are a fascinating mix of the mundane and the startling – one minute he’s thinking about sex, the next he’s doing sums in his head. By the end of the book, we have not just traveled around London with Mr. Phillips – we have practically become him.

Old Favorite: The Debt to Pleasure (readmorebooks.wordpress.com)

Old Favorite: The Debt to Pleasure

October 10, 2009 at 1:56 pm | In Books, Reviews | 2 Comments
Tags: John Lanchester, Literary fiction

The Debt to Pleasure, John Lanchester (1996)

5 stars!

This is not a conventional cookbook. Though I should straightaway attach a disclaimer to my disclaimer and say that I have nothing but the highest regard for the traditional collection of recipes, arranged by ingredient under broad, usually geographical categories. One of the charms of the genre is that it places an admirably high premium on accuracy. The omission of a single word or a single instruction can inflict a humiliating fiasco on the unsuspecting home cook. Which of us has not completed a recipe to the letter, only to look down and see, lying unused by the side of the saute pan, a recriminatory pile of chopped onions? One early disaster of my brother’s, making a doomed attempt to impress some hapless love object, was occasioned by the absence of the small word “plucked” — he removed from the oven a roasted but full-fledged pheasant, terrible in its hot sarcophagus of feathers.

The Debt to Pleasure is one of my favorite “dark” novels. Ostensibly a narrative cookbook, this novel quickly metamorphoses into a rambling memoir that jumps, seemingly randomly, from one event to another in the unnamed narrator’s life. Bit by bit, piece by piece, the reader begins to realize that something is very wrong here.

I don’t want to give away any more than that and spoil the fun of unraveling this twisted tale. But I will say that the character of the narrator is one of the most fully realized, completely insane characters I’ve ever encountered in fiction, and in reading the novel, we fully inhabit his strange mind. Indeed, because he is telling us his story, and because he is so full of self-delusions, the only way we can get to the truth is through the little hints he drops, the occasional omissions in his tales, the gradual realization that he is deceiving us and that the other characters see him very differently than he portrays himself.

This book is both a work of genius and loads of fun – subtle, dark and delicious. And if you’re at all interested in food or cooking – as any civilized person must be – there are many interesting rambles on those subjects, as well.

Worth Reading: Property

August 22, 2009 at 12:57 pm | In Books, Reviews | Leave a Comment
Tags: Literary fiction, Valerie Martin

Property, Valerie Martin (2003)

In antebellum Louisiana, the acerbic main character of Martin’s short novel, a Creole woman named Manon Gaudet, hates her life. She despises her husband, who has fathered two children by her house slave, Sarah. She despises Sarah too, who also abhors the husband but who seems to Manon to take advantage of her favored position in the household. She can’t stand the tedium of plantation life. She is whiny, self-absorbed, with few redeeming characteristics, and yet she is fascinating.

Manon despairs of her life ever getting better and constantly rues the choices she has made. Then a slave insurrection does change everything – and yet it changes none of the essential facts of the time and culture Manon lives in.

Property is about the plight of people who are property: literally, in the case of Sarah, and metaphorically, in the case of Manon, who is owned by her husband. The writing is simple and precise; the story is both horrifying and enthralling. This is a unique glimpse into what is now an alien practice: slave-holding.

Valerie Martin (guardian.co.uk)

Monthly Reading: June 2009

July 1, 2009 at 3:21 pm | In Books, Monthly Reading | Leave a Comment
Tags: Arthur C Clarke, Arthur Nersesian, Literary fiction, Margaret Atwood, Science fiction

Cover of Childhood's End

An good month for quality, if not quantity. Click the titles for the review.

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke — science fiction

Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood — literary fiction

Manhattan Loverboy by Arthur Nersesian — literary fiction

My rating scale:

1 star: Abandoned before finishing. Don’t waste your time.
2 stars: Poor. Avoid with extreme prejudice.
3 stars: Average. Read it, have a good time and move on. Or not.
4 stars: Great. Push it on your friends and family.
5 stars: Excellent. Keep it, treasure it, reread it.

Disclaimer: My ratings are very personal and may have little to do with the book’s artistic or commercial merit, or its place in the literary canon. Rather, the rating reflects how the story, characters and writing spoke to me and augmented my understanding of the world.

Here are some other reviews of my favorite books from around the Interwebs:

Blood Meridian reviewed at The AV Club
Ender’s Game reviewed at Shelf Love
The Left Hand of Darkness reviewed at Tor.com
The Thirteen Clocks reviewed at Things Mean a Lot
The Unit reviewed at Shelf Love

Worth Reading: Cat’s Eye

June 13, 2009 at 1:34 pm | In Books, Reviews | Leave a Comment
Tags: Literary fiction, Margaret Atwood

Image via Wikipedia

Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood (1988)

While I am a fan of her more speculative fiction, I’m finding that Margaret Atwood can write about almost anything and make it fascinating. This long mainstream novel is a character study of Elaine, a female artist growing up in Toronto who finds herself riding the wave of early feminism. The narrative moves back and forth from the present, when Elaine has returned to her native city for a showing, to her past, from her early childhood through her first marriage and divorce.

Clearly, the most formative time in Elaine’s life is when as a pre-adolescent girl, she was bullied mercilessly by her friends in the torturous ways that only girls can seem to devise. Ironically, she can’t even remember these events, having blocked the abuse completely, until she is going through her dying mother’s things and discovers some meaningful items from her childhood that bring the memories flooding back. I think all women can relate to what Elaine experienced, and I even found myself cheering out loud when she finally stands up to her tormentors. Still, she never quite gets over it, and that incident will shape her life and her art, even when she doesn’t remember it.

Atwood tells a wonderful coming-of-age story here, while aptly weaving in the history of the feminist movement, especially in art, and drawing parallels between the young bullies and the militant feminists Elaine will later encounter.