Top 10 Books of 2011

Of course you are wondering why it’s only a top 10 instead of a top 15 as in previous years. Well, dear reader, it seems that I tend to read less when I stop having annoying neighbors. It’s an unanticipated minor disaster. You see, back in the apartment, when the guy across the landing got into one of his manic furniture-moving moods, I knew I had to leave the place for a few hours. Likewise, when the girl downstairs would experiment with cooking, which often involved cabbage or overcooked soups or both, I knew I had to leave the place for a few hours. Since I was a 2-minute walk from the library, I’d grab whatever book I was reading and spend some time in a comfy chair in the quiet back sections of the building. Since getting my house, the random extra hours of reading have vanished and I haven’t been intentional about replacing them. So I’ve only read 30 books in 2011, and so a top 10 would be the top third of them, which is what I’ve decided to go with. The other interesting thing to note, as I look back over the full list, is that only half a dozen were books of poetry, far less than in previous years. I’m not sure where that came from, but I do think it’s probably correlative to my own output of poems dropping off throughout the past year to barely a dozen. Still, there were some really great books I got to read this year, so let’s get to the list.

title – author – year published

10 – Master and Commander – Patrick O’Brian – 1969.
The Napoleonic Wars are not my period of history, nor are ships and sailing a particular interest. Which probably explains why, when I saw and loved the movie version of Master and Commander in 2004 and decided to read the original novel, it didn’t actually happen for seven years. The book is almost entirely different from the movie, which cherrypicked various events from half a dozen of the 20 novels in the series and made some serious changes to Captain Jack Aubrey. The movie presents he and Stephen Maturin as long-time friends just at the beginning of middle-age, whereas the novel starts with their first meeting as younger men just starting their careers. While Maturin’s character seems much as Paul Bettany played him, a grave and serious-minded scientist and doctor, Aubrey is best described as an ambitious, ballsy, impulsive man, very jolly and outgoing, not much for gravitas but a great one for speechifying, and oh yeah, a womanizer. In other words, an 18th Century version of James Kirk. Still, the interactions between Aubrey and Maturin are much of the draw of the novel, as is the very realized world O’Brian creates around them, which feels quite authentic and has all the naval technicalities and jargon rather perfect. The story is episodic, with the crew here chasing a foreign vessel to plunder, there in port getting refitted, and over there being chased by a larger, more powerful ship, culminating in the crew playing an indirect role in the Battle of Algiceras near the Rock of Gibraltar. I may or may not read further in the Aubrey-Maturin series, but I’m glad I finally got around to dipping my toe into O’Brian’s world, which is so unlike where I usually spend my time.

9 – McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon – Joseph Mitchell – 1943.
Joseph Mitchell wrote of my all-time favorite books, Joe Gould’s Secret, which was made into one of my all-time favorite movies. So I knew I had to visit other works of his, and this collection of long and short pieces for the New York World-Telegram and the New Yorker during the ’30s and early ’40s, provides much of the same human insight and distinct flavor for honest, straightforward reporting which characterized both his writing and himself. Always attracted to the more unstable denizens of the Big Apple, his subjects for portraiture include a bearded lady, the old ticket-taker at a run-down theater, the Gypsies he can find in the city, a homeless traveler who writes extravagant checks to those who help him, and a tribe of Native Americans who were tapped to build many of New York’s bridges because they’re completely unafraid of heights. For all the fascinating characters and strong writing, one of the most intriguing things about the book for me was how poorly Mitchell’s attitude has aged: there simply are no picaresque, charming bums anymore, if ever there were. Underneath it all I suspect Mitchell had a bit of Huck Finn in him, with the back part of his brain always tempted to light out for the territories, and since by the 1930s there was no more frontier (Alaska and Hawaii not yet on the horizon for the U.S.), he took to chronicling the outsiders, the mavericks, the law-avoiders and law-breakers of the city he loved.

8 – The Great Wheel – Paul Mariani – 1997.
The only poetry book of the half-dozen this year to end up on the top 10, Paul Mariani’s poems have appeared on my top lists before, in 2008 with Prime Mover. Here, he uses the familiar Shakespearean trope of the turning of the wheel of fortune to wrestle with the past, his own and collectively America’s as well, giving glimpses of how battles both won and lost resurface and need to be fought again in our private and public lives. At the same time, things we’ve lost come back to us, sometimes a good thing, sometimes not so good. Still, his touch in applying this symbolism is light, knowing that the starkness of the basic idea is enough to carry its own weight without much additional pressure: there are mundane things like round bar stools, naturalism like the sun at noon, to modern machines like the ferris wheel and the classical circles of heaven and hell from Dante.

7 – The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle – J. Glenn Gray – 1959.
Working at Bluebell I get the chance to run across syllabi from all kinds of classes, and this one came from a psychology course a friend was taking. Almost immediately after receiving a PhD in philosophy from Columbia in 1941, Gray was drafted and served in Italy as a counter-intelligence officer, later becoming a philosophy professor at Colorado College. A decade later he published this book, a penetrating, thoughtful mix of distilled interviews and the author’s own experiences, set up as a philosophical exploration of and against war. He explores, through revisiting his war diaries and diaries of other soldiers, what war does to the thought processes and emotions of a soldier, towards himself, towards his fellow troops, towards “the enemy,” towards his family, and towards death. It’s a fine line to walk, trying to balance such rough, sometimes scarring experiences with as objective and philosophical attitude as possible, but Gray does an admirable job much of the time, providing some real insight and real questions for any reader, even one like myself who has seen very few of the realities of war.

6 – A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh – 1934.
Waugh will show up again soon, so the entry for this novel will be brief. A modernist story by turns satirical, sympathetic, and philosophical (as if Waugh were reading Virginia Woolf and Thornton Wilder simultaneously), the novel shifts between tones and themes, the first part being mostly about the breakdown of an aristocratic couple’s marriage through the wife’s affair with a socially ambitious middle-class urbanite. Then the couple’s young son dies unexpectedly, which leads the wife to ask for a divorce. At first willing to grant it, the husband finds her family demanding a settlement so large he’d have to sell his ancestral home (a huge, decrepit stone house in the Gothic style) and so he refuses, instead running away from the problem by joining an expedition to Brazil. The novel’s third section stays with the husband and his ill-fated expedition, where he is eventually held hostage by an insane but polite colonialist, revered as a god/father by a local tribe, whose sole purpose for keeping the husband around is so the latter can read the works of Dickens to him each night. Ostensibly a rumination on the subtleties of savagery within civil society and the aristocracy in particular, the combination of a rather off-the-cuff plot with Waugh’s impeccably precise writing and snarky wit made this a simply fun carnival ride, not so much a roller-coaster as one of those contraptions which swings back and forth until it gains enough momentum to upend its passengers and make a 360 degree turn.

5 – The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards – Whit Stillman – 2000.
I’ve mentioned that in my spate of rewatching some movies this past summer, one which really grabbed me was Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco from 1998, and two years later, Stillman wrote a novelization of the movie, told from the perspective of one of the secondary characters and including some of the scenes which never made it into the screenplay, plus an epilogue reflecting on the characters from years later. Jimmy Steinway is an ad-man in New York in the early 1980s, dangerously close to losing to his job. One of the few reasons he’s kept on staff is because he can get clients into The Club, a 54-esque night spot with a line outside the door and the coolest new disco tunes on the dance floor inside. Though in some ways a stereotypical rich kid/yuppie, Jimmy is not without a degree of observational prowess and has perhaps more than his share of windy pop philosophy. He falls in with a small social group who circle around Alice and Charlotte, two newly minted Hampshire grads who work together at one of the old publishing houses as lowly manuscript readers. There’s Tom, a young environmental lawyer who collects Scrooge McDuck comics; Dan, who works with the girls and spouts socialist ideals but also cuts a mean rug; Holly, the girls’ third roommate who is very nice and very ditzy; Josh, a young criminal lawyer with some emotional demons; and Des, floor manager at The Club and serial womanizer, who feels it’s a caring gesture to break up with girls by pretending to discover that he’s actually gay so he doesn’t hurt their feelings by telling them they’re boring. The novel succeeds as the film succeeds, by painting a world of neurotic young adults trying to figure out love and work and music, but does so in a fresh way by making Jimmy the sole narrator and so events which I already saw dramatized in the film are given from a different perspective. Jimmy gets annoying at times, but that’s part of the charm, a very specifically Stillman sort of charm, which I admit takes a little getting used to.

4 – Democracy in America – Alexis de Tocqueville – 1835 & 1840 – translated by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, 2000.
It’s a huge book, with a huge theme, written by a large-minded man who greatly admired the American Experiment and sought to detail its governmental successes and shortcomings. It took me over a month to get through (a very long time for me to read something), and that coincided with buying my house so it feels like it looms large alongside that other sizeable event. I think I’ll just direct you to my third homeownership post rather than rehash my thoughts here.

3 – Privilege – Ross Douthat – 2005.
It is very, very rare that a book comes along where I want to start a dialogue with the author. Largely that’s because with most of the books I read, the author is already dead – oh well. But among living authors it’s rare, and when I read Privilege, whose subtitle is “Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class,” I seriously considering writing Ross Douthat a long email in response to his first chapter, telling them there was no obligation to continue the conversation, but here were my thoughts, from the perspective of someone educated at an almost-Ivy who now works on staff there, and someone largely in agreement or sympathy with his experiences and opinions about the college experience. If he was interested, I’d respond to further chapters. This plan was in my head for maybe two months; then the house-buying preparations took over, and I never did it. Sitting here thinking about it, the interest is coming back to me. We’ll see. In any case, as you might guess, I felt an affinity with the book, a sense you get when you read something and say in your head “yes, that’s just how it is, and that’s what’s good about it and that’s what’s not.” The intrigues among students and student organizations, with administration, over issues great like religion and small like grades, the hazardous and yet obliquely rewarding social stepping-stones and alumni connections, the default huge ambitions and default huge entitlements, love and sex and whatever elite, neurotic college students do with each other (which is lots of neither), professors by turns fawning and dismissively arrogant, educational ideals conspicuous by their absence. What saves the book from being a raw screed is first, its bemused humor, and second, the reality that this was Douthat’s undergraduate life, not some collection of long-faced statistics or some old Boomer lamenting “kids these days.” His stories ring true because they did happen to him. Undoubtedly it also helps that Douthat and I, were we at the same school, would have overlapped each other for two years, so perhaps I’m kinda squarely in the book’s demographic.

2 – The Plague – Albert Camus – 1947 – translated by Stuart Gilbert, 1948.
Camus has been on my list to read for quite a while, and eventually at one point in the past year I grabbed literally the first book of his I saw on my shelf (not reading an author doesn’t mean I don’t have a half-dozen of their books laying about) and started reading. The Plague is a straightforward story of an infection isolating the Algerian city of Oran in the present-day, revolving around a handful of characters and their reactions as the city and its citizens slowly succumb to turns of disbelief, terror, lawlessness, resignation, and depression. Though Camus was never comfortable with the idea of existentialism, the term describes the novel well, as does “the absurd,” the philosophical sense of which Camus did much to describe and promote. Taking place over the course of a little less than a year, the story describes the epidemic from start to finish, mainly concerning itself with Dr. Bernard Rieux, who pleads with medical authorities to recognize the problem, then slaves away to work on a cure – and eventually to comfort the dying as he can – as the epidemic grows. A few others find themselves drawn to Rieux’s efforts, including a city clerk spending years on writing one perfect sentence, a secretive suicide survivor who flourishes during the plague, a faithful Jesuit priest, a visiting journalist who continually plans to escape from the quarantine to return to his young wife, and a traveler and political activist who doesn’t believe in God but wants to understand if it is possible to be a saint. It’s a powerful cast of characters with a powerful backdrop, not for the weak of mind or stomach. Often I would find myself stopping my reading deliberately to let things that were being said or done sink in over a day or two before going back to the book. More Camus will be in my future.

1 – Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh – 1945.
Here’s our Evelyn again. (By the way, he’s a man and it’s pronounced eve’-linn.) Funny story with Brideshead. I was supposed to read it in college, during my sophomore fall. I had a newly hired English teacher for 20th Century Novel that semester, and like all newly hired English teachers, she was too ambitious with our syllabus, listing nine novels for twelve weeks, most of them thick and all of them complex. We read six and a half – poor Jean Rhys got some very incomplete treatment. Brideshead was to be the final novel and we just never got there, but I’d bought the book and intended to read it someday. It sat on my shelf for about 14 years but I read it this summer, oddly enough finishing the last chapters while sitting on a hillside before an Alison Krauss & Union Station concert (the concert’s setlist is written inside the back flap). Waugh’s prose is perhaps at the height of his powers, though less of the satire he was famous for in his earlier works remains, and what does is almost never overt, but rather a subtle, very dry humor which warms my insides like little else does.

Charles Ryder, a captain in the British Army during World War II, is sent with his regiment to occupy a sprawling English country house called Brideshead. He doesn’t tell his superiors he’s well-acquainted with the house and its former family, the Flytes. Most of the rest of the story takes place in flashback, starting with Ryder’s days at Oxford with Sebastian Flyte, a gregarious and dissolute young man who goes around with a teddy bear called Aloysius. Sebastian introduces Charles to others in the dissolute-and-wealthy set, and eventually brings him to Brideshead, hoping none of his family are there, as he doesn’t want Charles to meet them. Eventually Charles does: there’s delicate and kind Nanny Hawkins, pompous and bland older brother “Bridey,” smart but shrewish sister Julia, and younger sister Cordelia, a charming and naïve girl who, along with Bridey and their gently tyrannical mother, Lady Marchmain, are strict Roman Catholics. Lord Marchmain, who had converted because of his love for his wife, has since abandoned her and lives with a French noblewoman in Venice. As Charles is drawn further into the Flyte family, his relationship with Sebastian strains and eventually he leaves the circles of Brideshead. The book shifts to a number of years later, with Charles having made a minor reputation as a painter, unhappily married to a socially ambitious wife and distant from his young children, when events take him into contact with Flyte family again in surprising ways and again lead him to Brideshead.

It’s a novel which on the surface is one of manners, but from the perspective of an outsider, as the book’s narrator is Charles and stays in his perspective throughout. On a deeper level, Waugh is concerned with the nature of divine grace and its presence or absence in individual lives. There is the nostalgic glow of “old Oxford days” and the beauty of Italy, as well as the ennui of middle-aged life and the tumult of the gentle English countryside turned from pastoral estates and farmland to garrisoned army training zones and stockpiles. In a time of victory gardens and rationing, there is a quite visceral emphasis on food, its quantity and quality and the lush extravagance of being able to call for it and it appears, the easy elegance of dropping many pounds on a night filled with wine and champagne. And the ghastly morning which comes after. Being the Anglophile I am I found the story utterly fascinating, and Waugh’s expertise as a stylist and wordsmith is perhaps unsurpassed in modern English literature. After finishing the book I watched the 11-hour miniseries adaptation from ITV in 1981, which would have appeared on the yearly top 10 for TV except it’s not a TV show. The coincidence was highly amusing when I watched Downton Abbey a few months later; as I said in my review of that show, it’s gotten the highest ratings in Britain for a small-screen period drama since Brideshead in 1981.