My favorites from 2015

I am too lazy to type out the complete list of books that I read this year, and apparently Goodreads no longer makes a lovely visual that I can paste up here (though I can provide a link to what might be one? You might need to be a member of the site though.). But you don't really want the complete list anyhow, right? You might wish I updated my blog more often (and believe me, I do too. And hopefully, hopefully...) But really, you want the good stuff. So, without further ado, and in no particular order, the 10 books I enjoyed the most in 2015:

Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
David Sedaris recommended this a few years ago -- I think he recommends a book every fall, or whenever he's on book tours? and he has reliably excellent taste, so now I slavishly obey. But even amongst his many excellent picks: oh my god. This book is amazing. A detailed ethnography of a family in the Bronx. Teenage pregnancy, drugs, prisons -- a world we often see sensationalized in salacious tv shows, here related with warmth and complexity and just plain humanity. Everyone should read this book.

My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante
I sort of tormented myself by seeing how long I could hold out before launching into Ferrante's famed series, but in the Spring, I finally succumbed. And loved every minute of it. I'm actually just finishing the second one now -- I decided to savor the series. A riveting story of childhood and friendship, it absolutely lives up to the hype. 

Macnolia, A. Van Jordan
A gorgeous, raw, beautiful collection of poems. There is a narrative running through the book about MacNolia Cox, the first African American to reach the final round of the National Spelling Bee, in 1936, with other poems that resonate with some of the themes articulated interspersed. I dare you to read "The Night Richard Pryor Met Mudbone" and remain unmoved. It's wonderful stuff, and I'm looking forward to reading more of his work.

Mislaid, Nell Zink
I could have sworn that I posted about this (to my horror, it appears that I haven't posted on a single one of my favorites this year. I'll spare you my promises to be better, but know that I'm making them in my head). Particularly interesting in the wake of the Rachel Dolezal scandal and reflections on intersectionality between #blacklivesmatter and the gay rights movement, Nell Zink's story of a white lesbian passing as Black with her daughter in order to escape her gay white husband seems strangely...apolitical. The novel is a comedy first and foremost, and a funny one at that. A bizarre, constantly surprising story that is also a heartfelt, loving exploration of its characters.

18th Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder, by Sarah Tindal Kareem
This is for a highly specialized audience, but I had to include it because I loved it so, so much. A really smart and fascinating account of 18th century fiction that does major work in correcting the long-standing and deeply flawed dichotomy of realism vs. marvelous/romantic fiction. Kareem does an incredible job navigating incredibly dense theories and juxtaposing them with ease and elegance. I wish I had written this book.

Lazarus Project, Aleksandar Hemon
One of the most powerful reckonings with historical trauma that I've ever read (and I've read my share of it). It is tangled, confused, wrenching, and gorgeous.

Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
My Barbara Pym love (which started with a Best Of the Year list!) continues. I also read two really great pieces about Pym this year: one in the New Yorker, and an older one from The Awl. Excellent Women has some flaws, but it's a profound meditation on the life of single women; one that stayed with me long after I'd finished it.

Tales of Desire, Tennessee Williams
Sometimes you want a slice of that steamy, sultry, dangerous heat of the South. If you love young Paul Newman movies (and I do), you'll love this collection.

Almost Never, Daniel Sada
This novel could have been written by Beckett, or Flann O'Brien, but it was written by Daniel Sada and set in Mexico. A rollicking, dry, and utterly hilarious story about a man who is caught between his mother, his lover, his fiancee, and his aunt. So funny, and so ridiculous, and so wonderful.

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
Another one that had been on the to-read shelf for quite awhile, I finally read it because I was weighing in on a round of the Chicago Reader's Greatest Chicago Book tournament. Another one that absolutely lives up to the hype, and more -- this book tells the story of the Great Migration and its lasting effects on the United States. It is an eye-opening and absolutely devastating account of the racism of the 20th century, and a really profound look at African American life. And the writing is so, so good. Read it.


They not only could have been, but actually were contenders: The Good Soldier Svejk, by Jaroslav Hasek; Can't and Won't: Stories, by Lydia Davis; The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen; Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo; Our Souls at Night, by Kent Haruf; Blood Child, by Octavia Butler; The Folded Clock, by Heidi Javits; Against World Literature, by Emily Apter; My Struggle, vl 1, by Karl Knausgaard; A Good Fall, Ha Jin.

Another Country, by James Baldwin

The first third or so of this novel is pure fire. Searing, magnetic prose that loops and dives through the most intimate and unsettling aspects of human experience. I don't know if such intensity could possibly be sustained over the course of hundreds of pages, or if one would want it to. In any case: it isn't. The novel reaches a climax and the latter 2/3 of it is essentially exploring the aftermath. The story becomes somewhat less compelling, and even, it must be admitted, a little tedious. What redeems the novel, and is moreover, actually quite stunning about it, is the breadth of emotional understanding in these somewhat rambling explorations.

People talk about the presumption of white authors writing characters of color, or men trying to persuasively write women, etc* -- well, here is Baldwin thumbing his nose at all of them. The narrator sees deep into the hearts of a diverse cast of characters; male, female, gay, straight, black, white, rich, poor, etc, and seems, impossibly, to understand the millions of subtle ways in which their perspectives are shaped by things that people unlike them simply cannot see, let alone comprehend. It is a dazzling piece of emotional intelligence; a real virtuoso performance. I found myself regretting that the story it was put in the service of was not more meaningful, but on the other hand, maybe that was the point -- that much of life's meaning is simply in this strange constellation of people and relationships that is unique to every individual. Relationships that, even as they shape our lives and interactions, are largely opaque, but also, perhaps, ultimately somewhat mundane, and even uninteresting.


*I am slowly working my way through The Racial Imaginary, a collection of pieces on this topic, and it is really really fascinating and worthwhile.

Palestine, by Joe Sacco

There are a lot of off-putting things about this book. The subject matter, obviously, is no walk in the park, and you can certainly quibble with whether or not it's a balanced account (or what balance means in such contexts); the artwork is borderline unpleasant; and the narrator is frequently awful, openly concerned with his comic first and foremost in ways that frequently seem exploitative or callous, crossing all kinds of moral lines (example: we get three panels showing a guy in a bed; the narrator wants to photograph him and he says no. No mention of whether he agreed to be drawn), and generally seeming like a pretty gross dude.

But he also obviously chose to portray himself that way, and I wonder if he did so precisely to emphasize that any story comes from a particular perspective. Maybe this is one of the book's strengths. It is willing to be unlikable. The narrator is really not the point, but he is unavoidably in the way, and that is part of the point -- that he always will be, and we should be aware of that.

For the most part, the book is a collection of stories from Palestinians, and this seems to be its main goal, really -- an act of witnessing. Towards the very end, it makes some effort to consider the perspective of the average Israeli, and Sacco notes that he himself has come to see Israelis as occupiers and soldiers first and foremost. Again, not redressing bias per se, but actively pointing it out. Overall, the book absolutely attests to the power of the graphic novel as a genre in really incredible ways, and it is a valuable contribution to a larger conversation about Israel and Palestine. I read it because I was wondering if it would be a good addition to two different courses I'm half dreaming of, one on the graphic novel, the other on the idea of war and how it is represented in different cultures and mediums, and I think it would be an excellent choice for both.

Black Mass

I don't know why I did not expect to like Black Mass. I guess I figured it would be a fairly stock gangster film, with a lot of really awful, brutal violence, and a bunch of stock cliches and braggadocio. And there is definitely some intense violence in it (though honestly, by today's standards a few strangulations and some blood splats might seem tame), and in many ways a lot of familiar tropes and ideas -- but somehow, they don't come across as cliche. This is doubtless in part because of the superlative acting, but I think cinematography also has a lot to do with it. The stunningly gorgeous shots are very intelligently framed and carefully chosen in way that creates a powerful sense of intimacy, creating a tremendous sense of emotional depth. To me, the movie was an impressive meditation on the emotional effects of the gangster lifestyle.

Johnny Depp is predictably mesmerizing as Whitey Bulger -- but he functions as a kind of simulacra that the films circles around. He is aloof, mysterious, and terrifying: everything, it seems, will happen exactly as he decides. He seems to have an iron control over his emotions: all of his words, actions, motions and mannerisms appear deliberate and considered, even when they are deeply felt. Part of what makes him so menacing is an unpredictable quality -- one has the sense of a profoundly violent and utterly ruthless rage that is constantly just beneath the surface, and can emerge at any moment. And yet, he also seems fundamentally unknowable -- perhaps because he is hardly human. Thus, the emotional work of the narrative is dispersed across the supporting cast, all of whom struggle to manage the emotions that arise from their contact with him -- fear, horror, anger, sadness, guilt. No one, this movie suggests, is innocent, though no one is entirely villainous either. The brilliance of the cinematography is that you regularly feel that you are witnessing a private moment where a given character struggles with his/her feelings about what is happening in the immediate vicinity. It is these quiet battles that make this film so impressive, and very much worth seeing.

Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg, by Kate Evans

It's always nice to see female intellectuals get some recognition, and I am a sucker for graphic novels about Marxists. I found this one especially pleasant, and found the artwork especially lovely.

Although the book feels unbalanced in various ways -- the pacing is odd; occasional narratorial intrusions are not unwelcome but seem arbitrarily scattered throughout; the tone is sometimes uneven -- at its best moments, you get this wonderfully human sense of Luxemburg's (feisty) personality. I especially loved the various nude scenes, hairy legs and all -- a really excellent example of how graphic novels can portray a woman's body in a way that feels intimate without being objectifying or prurient.


As a biography, it is in many ways a conventional, step-by-step account of the woman's life: the author clearly has no compunctions about zooming past the eventful bits. Although there is a nice moment where Evans steps in to say that she will depart from the convention of defining women's lives through their relationships to men, this doesn't seem like a radically new form of lifewriting . As an intellectual biography, it's slightly disappointing, in that you don't really get a sense of a meaningful connection between biography and thought: you don't really see where her ideas are coming from, or how her life experiences influence them. Indeed, it might not be the most effective introduction to Luxemburg's work -- it's a little hard to get a grasp on her ideas, or more specifically, what her particular innovations or disagreements with others were. But the book does give you a clear sense of her overall beliefs, and -- what is especially nice -- quotes extensively from the woman's own writings.

Overall, a very pleasant, and often quite beautiful (in various ways) book.

Eugenie Grandet, by Honore Balzac

-->Balzac is fascinating to me, in large part, because of the way he brings together two aspects of the 19^th century that I tend to keep separate: high flown melodrama, and the cold, methodical, calculations of finance in an age of burgeoning capitalism. You can see why Lukacs loved him so much: he is basically a one-man Marxist expose, illuminating how the sentimental frolicking of the upper classes is underwritten by money, and more specifically, exploitation, trickery, and other people’s labor. It’s dazzling. So you get these borderline tedious passages of careful accounting, who has how much money per year, in the same narrative voice that brings us the raptured descriptions of the domestic angel and her holy romantic love. Fantastic.

I think, though, that most people love Balzac for his characters, and indeed, they are delightful. Eugenie is not quite as developed as one might wish, but she is more feisty and hard-headed than it would appear at first glance (qualities, of course, that she inherited from her father). The real star is her father, the shrewd, miserly businessman. Surely someone has written a study of the miser in 19^th century letters: they have a quality similar to the obsessive drive of the anorexic, a terrifyingly ascetic existence lived among abstract calculations of profit. And there's the long-suffering mother, the loyal housekeeper, the gossiping neighbors, the selfish fop, the calculating mistress... All the types you hope to see in this kind of stuff, and so much fun.

All the same, one must admit that it is a clumsy novel in some ways, and tends rather towards easy solutions to its problems. The pacing is strangely uneven, dilating on several days and then zooming ahead a few years, and the ending is hurried, almost rudely so. Nonetheless, it is a delight to read (or, in my case, listen to) -- in exactly the way that you expect it to be.  

Innocence, by Penelope Fitzgerald

Oh blog, how I have neglected you... I will be better. I will, I will. Maybe I will even finish the post I started working on months ago detailing the many things wrong with Jupiter Ascending. Ay caramba.

So, apparently the only Penelope Fitzgerald books I've blogged about (or more accurately, mentioned) on here are The Blue Flower and even more briefly, Offshore. But they so won me over that I've been slowly working my way through her catalogue ever since. She is great. There is a wonderfully blunt, abrupt quality to her stories that totally knocks you off balance. Her characters are utterly strange but they never seem like caricatures, and they inspire sympathy even when they are utterly irrational or idiotic (which they frequently are).Her books are poignant yet funny, dark yet cheerful. You really should read them.

That said, Innocence was not as compelling to me. This is most likely because I was in the midst of packing, moving, unpacking, starting a new semester, and generally living an unsettled and somewhat stressful life. I did greatly appreciate the short chapters and brisk pacing of the story, but it also seemed a bit too random, probably because I wasn't able to properly focus on it. Sometimes it happens; you read books at the wrong moment. Sometimes the moment is wrong for any book at all, but the thing is, not reading anything at all just makes me miserable. Who knows, maybe I'll return to this one again someday and reconsider. For now though, I'd say that there are better Fitzgerald books to be enjoyed.