The best fiction of 2009
Sex, ghosts and infant monkeys featured in the finest storytelling of the year
By Laura Miller
Dec. 09, 2009 |
All best-books lists are pretty subjective, none more so than a list of the year's best fiction. For example, I probably experienced the most unadulterated readerly bliss this year while buried in the pages of Lev Grossman's "The Magicians," but then the quirky theme of Grossman's novel -- how a child steeped in literary fantasy like the Chronicles of Narnia comes to terms with the ambiguous nature of adulthood -- is virtually the same as that of my own nonfiction book. They even have almost the same title! And the author is a good friend. If that's not too many caveats for you, dear reader, then you can consider this a strong recommendation.
The truth is, there's enough great fiction out there that it makes sense to reach for a certain breadth, balance and variety. This year's Booker Prize short list was so good, it's tempting to simply reproduce it, but an all-Brit list would be as cockeyed as, say, an all-male one. In the end, we've kept the Booker crowd down to just two. Hillary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" was neck and neck with A.S. Byatt's "The Children's Book," but a shade more celebrated, which tipped the balance in favor of Dame Antonia.
Behind all the more ephemeral trends -- vampires, Swedish mysteries, etc. -- most readers still seek the same thing in great fiction: a sojourn, however brief, into another world and into the hearts and minds of the people who inhabit it. Here's our list of five books that made that happen in 2009.
"The Children's Book" by A.S. Byatt
This ravishing epic of the Edwardian era traces the lives of several interlocking families, at the center of which is Olive Wellwood, who is based on the great children's novelist E. Nesbit. The novel begins with an idyllic amateur production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the English countryside and winds through a series of often disturbing revelations about the participants. Their shared obsessions include fairy tales, the Arts and Crafts movement, social utopias and sex, but perhaps the most striking of all Byatt's themes is the drive to create and how it shapes (some would say distorts) the personalities of those possessed by it; nobody writes better about this than she does. This a classic Byatt fusion of fact and uncannily luscious imagery, mixed in the ideal proportions: not too hot, not too cold -- just right.
"Await Your Reply: A Novel" by Dan Chaon
This elegant page-turner begins with three seemingly disconnected characters -- a man in search of his long-lost twin, a high school girl getting the hell out of Pompey, Ohio, and a college student succumbing to the criminality he believes is in his blood -- all fleeing across forgotten stretches of the American heartland. Its theme is identity and the theft thereof, but also our national dream of jettisoning our old selves and becoming someone new. Chaon is that rare novelist who can combine intricate, suspenseful plotting with fully realized characters and unfussily lovely prose, but his great achievement here is the tenderness with which he explores the enigma at the center of the novel: What does it really mean to have a self, and what do you have left if you're foolish enough to throw it away?
"Chronic City" by Jonathan Lethem
A great New York novel should aim for the universal by way of the parochial. The Manhattanites in Lethem's near-future/alternative-now metropolis experience all the crises and travails of 21st-century life in a slightly more concentrated form. (It takes a novelist of exceptional talent and nerve to make you believe that matters of moment can hang on the outcome of an eBay auction.) A former child star coasting on his fading fame, a brilliant but terminally eccentric rock critic, a sarcastic ghostwriter and an activist turned municipal bureaucrat stumble through a city riddled with unreliable rumors, insufficiently explained disasters, dilettante millionaires, imperious celebrities and other signs and wonders. What they -- what all of us -- yearn for in a world full of engineered appearances and emotions is the truly beautiful and the truly moving. Can they find it, and will they even recognize it when they do? On this you can count: "Chronic City" is the
real thing.
READ SALON'S INTERVIEW
"Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories" by Lydia Millet
This collection begins with a short story about Madonna going on a grouse hunt, which might sound like an inauspicious start for a book whose theme is loss on an epochal scale. Guess again: With immense confidence, Millet takes a motley assortment of famous or pseudo-famous figures -- Thomas Edison, David Hasselhoff, the zoologist from "Born Free," a Sharon Stone impersonator -- and gives each a transformative encounter with an (often imperiled) animal. The result, a cumulative effect formed by all the stories in the collection, draws illuminating connections and comparisons between the trivial and the eternal. Millet's vision is startling, as often tragic as it is hilarious (and she can be very, very funny), but always shot through with the mystery of existence, a gift we can barely manage to appreciate even as we carelessly steal it from the rest of the earth's denizens. "Love in Infant Monkeys" is a slyly and unsentimentally profound exploration of
what human beings can (but very seldom do) learn from our fellow creatures.
"The Little Stranger" by Sarah Waters
Waters takes one of narrative literature's most venerable genres -- the ghost story -- into fresh territory. Haunted houses usually stand as metaphors for misbegotten psychosexual situations. In "The Little Stranger," Waters masterfully redeploys the gothic tale to address the great theme of the British novel: class. During the lean years after World War II, a rural physician ingratiates himself into the remnants of a local "old family" as they rattle around their decrepit but still beautiful mansion. In time, eerie manifestations of some indistinct yet malevolent force begin to torment the house's aristocratic residents. What -- or, rather, who -- is causing the strange noises and mysterious stains? At once innovative and genuinely creepy, "The Little Stranger" is an astonishing performance, right down to its devastating final sentence.
What was the best book of the year?
Hornby, Blume, Lamott, Diaz, Kidder, Sittenfeld and others share their 2009 favorites
By Jed Lipinski
Dec. 11, 2009 |
Nick Hornby, the author of "Juliet, Naked"
Jess Walter is one of your country's most interesting younger novelists, and one of my favourite contemporary writers. And his latest book, "The Financial Lives of the Poets," seems to me to contain most things that one can reasonably expect from a good novel: It's wise, moving, very funny and timely, dealing as it does with economic calamity and how that whole mess impacts our lives and relationships and souls. Oh, and it's a joy to read, too — a sine qua non, given the darkness of the times, both within the book's pages and out here in the world.
Judy Blume, children's book author, most recently of "Soupy Saturdays With the Pain and the Great One"
What I look for, what I always hope for, especially when I pick up a first novel, is an original voice. In Nicola Keegan's "Swimming" I found not only the most original voice I've read in a long time, but a fantastic story of one girl's journey from splashing infant to Olympic champion. But it's not really about those gold medals. It's about a life, it's about a family — and what a family! Not that any of it is what you expect. That's the thing about this book. It's never what you expect. You know how the best fiction plunges you deep into another world? I would happily have stayed in Pip's world.
Come to think of it, it's time for me to read "Swimming" again. And no, Nicola Keegan was never an Olympic swimmer. But she sure fooled me. Kind of the way Wally Lamb fooled me in his first book, "She's Come Undone." I was convinced when I finished it that Wally was a woman. Had to be a woman. If you enjoy books and movies that make you work, you won't be disappointed. And you'll come away wanting to know everything you can about Nicola Keegan, especially when we can read her next book.
Anne Lamott, author of "Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith"
One book I loved this year was "What I Thought I Knew" by Alice Eve Cohen, a memoir of an impossible and misdiagnosed pregnancy by a mother (already in her 40s) with a much younger man, and the ultimate knowledge that the fetus had Major Issues. It is just lovely, everything we love in a book -- profound, honest, hilarious, humane, surprising. It's the book I foisted on everyone.
Matthew Klam, author of "Sam the Cat: And Other Stories"
"Lowboy," by John Wray, is a really tight thriller and love story told in short scenes about a 16-year-old boy who believes that in 10 hours global warming will destroy the world unless he (and only he) does what he believes he must do to stop it. It's an amazing view of city life as seen through the eyes and the wanderings of a schizophrenic young man with a history of violence, off his medications and hiding out in the sewers and subway tunnels of New York. In "Lowboy," Wray is so deeply living inside his work that it hums and shivers, echoes and drips with authentic believable and gorgeously wrought dialogue and scenes. Wray etches his details and inhabits all nature of humanity with ghostly power and can surely see up his characters' noses, can see the geography of their tongues. This is a sometimes light, sometimes horrifying, pitch-perfect and lovingly rendered thing.
Junot Diaz, author of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"
Here's a I book I fought hard for during the National Book Award judging, but to no avail: Chloe Aridjis' "Book of Clouds." A hypnotic first novel about a young Mexican gal in Berlin who stumbles into friendship with an eccentric historian and the madness that ensues. This book has the power of dreams and still hasn't left me.
Lydia Millet, author of "Love in Infant Monkeys"
Robert Olmstead is one of the most sublime novelists we have. His work is under-recognized, I suspect, because his subject matter — Western and violent and horsey and manly — shares some ground with the better-known and highly talented Cormac McCarthy, and possibly there isn’t enough room in the culture for both of them to be famous at the same time. But to my mind Olmstead is the even greater artist and the more compassionate of the two writers; his style is more restrained, his language more perfect.
"Far Bright Star" tells the story of some brothers on horseback and some people who die — its set in 1916 during the search for Pancho Villa, and the plot has to do with revenge and is full of death and solitude. I’m purposefully vague here because in the end I didn’t much care about the details of the story, though in fact the narrative was well-crafted in its rhythms and suspenses. Rather I was repeatedly startled and taken in by the raptures and ecstasy of the prose, its philosophical qualities, its space and imagination and sculptural beauty and terrible sadness.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of "The Thing Around Your Neck"
I deeply admired the talent, ambition and courage it must have taken to write "Zeitoun." Dave Eggers has appropriated — in the best possible sense — the story a Syrian-American family’s experience of Hurricane Katrina. His writing is spare and precise, with respect for both the reader and the story, and underlying the narrative is a wonderful sense of outrage made all the more powerful because of how light his touch is.
Juan Cole, author of "Engaging the Muslim World"
My pick for 2009 is Barry Eisler's "Fault Line." Eisler has reinvented the spy thriller for the 21st century. His fast-paced plots and action sequences are not slowed down by his careful exploration of moral ambiguity and the space he gives his characters to develop. His Iranian female lead is smart, frighteningly competent and creamily gorgeous. His tough-guy protagonist, Ben Treven, can take down Russian mafiosi in a nanosecond but can’t escape the legacy of family tragedy. Treven lives the contradictions of our time -- the fight against terrorism and the outrage against torture, the need for ruthlessness and the perdurance of American values, the patriotic commitment and disillusionment at the betrayals of our leaders. Eisler’s ability to write both as an intelligence insider and a perceptive social critic allows him to create a gripping and believable universe in which you would just remain if only the book wouldn’t end.
Colum McCann, author of "Let the Great World Spin" and winner of this year's National Book Award for fiction
It's impossible to pick an absolute favorite -- there are so many -- but one book that I think deserves a very loud shout-out is "The Book of Night Women" by the young Jamaican novelist Marlon James. It's a slave narrative, a story of rebellion, beautifully written, brave, smart, incisive and, yes, even funny. James has been called "a Jamaican Diaz" -- it's a nice phrase, and it also happens to be true.
Laura Lippman, author of "Hardly Knew Her"
By this point in my reading life, I have two mantras: "Surprise me" and "Have a take and don't suck." Jim Rome coined the latter, but the former is the result of more than a decade as a crime novelist. I'm a hard reader to surprise. I'm not talking about traditional plot twists, but something almost indefinable, a resolution at once true and earned, yet not entirely expected. In Jess Walter's fifth novel, "The Financial Lives of the Poets," he sets up a hilarious situation -- former reporter/would-be Internet entrepreneur decides to become a pot dealer to forestall his family's financial crisis -- and brings it to a ruefully understated ending. Bonus: A succinct and, yes, poetic description of what's happened to newsrooms over the past few years. It actually reminded me why I loved being a newspaper reporter, once upon a time.
Amy Sohn, author of "Prospect Park West"
Sparer than some of his other books, fast-paced and full of heart, Nick Hornby's "Juliet, Naked" centers on the relationship between Annie, an emotionally adrift English woman of 39 -- and the reclusive Bob Dylanesque musician Tucker Crowe, who her boyfriend has idolized for years. The proscriptive fan boy is a Hornby archetype ("High Fidelity"), but here he shows the darker side of this personality: zealous narrow-mindedness and a total lack of generosity.
The real triumph, though, is the protagonist, Annie. Hornby has always been good at writing women, but Annie is his richest female character to date -- a woman of childbearing age (just) who wakes up one day and realizes that 15 years have passed without her getting anything she wants. There's also a hilariously inept shrink and a perfectly pitched 6-year-old boy. This book, combined with Hornby's screenplay for "An Education," which focuses on a 16-year-old schoolgirl in early-'60s London, work well together as a dual portrait of lost women at different stages of life.
Sean Wilsey, co-author of "State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America" and author of "Oh the Glory of It All"
I'm not always a fan of the memoir. But "The Kids Are All Right" reinvents the genre. It's a choral book, with the point of view shifting between four siblings -- Amanda, Liz, Dan and Diana Welch -- who recount, and disagree about, the disintegration of their family. After their father's sudden death in a car crash comes their mother's slow death from cancer, and then the narrative explodes into pure bedlam: children on their own! The setting is suburban New York and Manhattan, and the time is the '80s, in all their forgotten glory -- no clichés, just detail after detail that eerily reconjured my own childhood in cars, TV, music, products, as I'd long since forgotten it. This is a memoir that always feels alive and true, and one that exists for no other reason than that the story needed to be told.
Maud Newton , books blogger
My favorite book published this year was also one of the most disillusioning. R. Crumb's "Book of Genesis" combines the fire-and-brimstone flavor of Jack Chick's fundamentalist tracts with peerless artistry and painstaking attention to historical detail and produces a straightforward but incredibly immersive retelling of the first book of the Old Testament. "The Bible doesn't need to be satirised," Crumb has said. "It's already so crazy." In relying on Robert Alter's (very thoughtful) translation, though, Crumb casts doubt on my longtime admiration for Eve, who in some renderings chose to eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree because the serpent convinced her that it was "desired to make one wise."
Contemplating this rationale for a Bible as Literature class years ago, I concluded that God excoriated Eve more roundly and punished her more severely than he did Adam not because she was more wicked, but because she represented an actual threat. Seeking knowledge, she chose to eat the fruit, whereas Adam ate passively and only because she handed the fruit to him and had tried it first. Adam would never of his own accord betray or compete with God the way Satan had. Eve, on the other hand, aspired to be godlike. Crumb's rendering of my hero doesn't support this reading, however; he ascribes her actions to the temptations of the serpent and emphasizes only that the fruit was pleasing to the eye.
Tracy Kidder, author of "Strength in What Remains"
I think my favorite book of 2009 is Alice Munro's new collection of stories, "Too Much Happiness: Stories." I've long admired her writing. I think she's one of the best writers alive. I'm not sure there's much more to say.
Dave Cullen, author of "Columbine"
I loved the idea of "Sum: 40 Tales From the Afterlives," but did I actually want to slog through 40 of them? How many novel conceptions of the afterlife are there -- wouldn’t this be about 35 too many? No, actually. David Eagleman has got a million of them.
Eagleman did his undergrad in literature and his Ph.D. in neuroscience. He runs a brain lab by day and writes fiction at night. It shows. His provocative little vignettes play like brainstorms between alien hemispheres: playful, intriguing and full of emotional surprises as well as ideas. When his over-specific gods in charge of spoons, bacteria and chewing gum look down at our traffic jams and find comfort in our disarray but also our desire to reach out to find comfort through a cellphone ... there is tenderness here, and perception, too.
The conceit is different, but the effect kept summoning up the delightful "Wearing Dad's Head." No one has ever reminded me of Barry Yourgrau before. I never thought they would.
I’m still making my way through Jeannette Walls’ "Half Broke Horses," loving every sentence of it. I felt Texas from page one, and Texans, who I couldn’t wait to know better. Her style recalls, lovingly, the late great working-class short-story teller Lucia Berlin. I’m taken, particularly, by Walls’ ability to write children: not book children, or film kids -- actual mini humans with the complexities of their parents, and even less predictable.
Geoff Dyer, author of "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi"
It’s been a great year for fiction and nonfiction alike, but for sheer page-turning excitement, knowledge-gained per page turned, and sustained admiration for what the writer was doing, I will go for Richard Holmes' magnificent "Age of Wonder." I should have added, as well, that it’s an incredibly original idea: a biographical relay in which the baton of scientific exploration is passed from Joseph Banks in Tahiti in 1769, to William Herschel and his sister at their telescopes, to Humphry Davy in his lab (yeah, I know, I didn’t have any particular interest in this stuff either) and beyond. Set against a blazing firmament in which the great stars of the Romantic movement are plainly visible, it’s a flat-out masterpiece of historical and biographical narrative.
Curtis Sittenfeld, author of "American Wife"
The book I'm obsessed with right now is "Tinsel: A Search for America's Christmas Present" by Hank Stuever. Stuever is a Washington Post reporter who spent the 2006 Christmas season following three people in Frisco, Texas, a wealthy suburb of Dallas: One is a single mom who's very involved in her megachurch, one is the guy who lives in a house that's decked out with a billion Christmas lights (and it turns out he's more tech geek than Christmas diehard), and one is a simultaneously savvy and un-self-aware woman who decorates other people's McMansions for the holidays.
Stuever, who is something of a Christmas cynic, spent months with these people, and he shows them in all their glorious, complicated humanity. I love this book so much that I've literally bought seven copies (so far) to give as gifts, which is to say I've broken the personal record I set in the mid-'80s for giving the same present to the maximum number of people -- back then, all the members of my family were recipients of identical reindeer ornaments made out of clothespins. I like to think my taste has improved in the last 25 years.
The best books of the decade
A tribute to the fact and fiction we wouldn't stop talking about in the 2000s
By Laura Miller
Dec. 10, 2009 |
We'll spare you the overly ambitious sweeping statements. This has been a rocky decade, to say the least, and as many writers showed us just after the Sept. 11 attacks, we often can't formulate our best thoughts about traumatic events until much, much later. If anything, looking back over the past 10 years of Salon's books coverage, what's most striking is the durability of fiction and memoir; the novels and autobiographies we were talking about in 2000 still feel important today, while the bloom tends to fade faster from the nonfiction of the moment.
For that reason, the nonfiction on this list steers away from the most avidly trend-setting treatises (Malcolm Gladwell, we're looking at you!) in favor of definitive accounts of current events, penetrating histories and explorations of perennial human concerns. As for fiction, the most exciting thing to emerge in the 2000s has been the integration of genre elements into literary fiction: You no longer have to choose between good writing and good storytelling. But if the preceding two decades have seen the dismantling of the tyranny of rigorous realism, there are still masters (like Mary Gaitskill) working in that vein, and following it into rich new territory. The following lists are presented in chronological order.
FICTION
"The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" by Michael Chabon
Two nice, mid-20th-century Jewish boys go to work in the nascent comic book industry, where the dreams and nightmares of the real world manifest themselves in the extravagant guise of entertainment for children. This buoyant tragicomic adventure story remains one of the most persuasive and gorgeously written depictions (and vindications) of the way popular culture transfigures our lived experience to become the modern-day equivalent of myth and folklore.
"The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen
The Lambert clan tries 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 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.
"John Henry Days" by Colson Whitehead
A hack journalist gets hired by a travel Web site to write up a festival celebrating the folk hero John Henry. This brilliant, restless novel is about what happens when a cynical, opportunistic, media-steeped product of the Information Age collides with the mythic dignity of America's past. The fact that both the hero and the freelancer are black only complicates and enriches this novel's wit.
"The Fortress of Solitude" by Jonathan Lethem
A boy named Dylan comes of age in a bohemian household as one of the few white kids in 1970s Brooklyn. To the smooth and sinewy beat of the era's soul soundtrack, this is a bruised paean to the author's hometown, a meditation on American boyhood and a cautionary tale about the folly of trying to escape your past.
"Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell" by Susanna Clarke
Capacious, digressive, amply footnoted and very original, this is a classic historical novel -- only the history it's based on is (almost) entirely fantastic. Set in the early 19th century, it describes a Britain where magic was once a fairly common practice and is still the subject of serious scholarly study. With Austenian elegance and glorious imagery, Clarke describes the professional rivalry between the two eponymous master magicians; the result is nothing less than pure sorcery.
"Magic for Beginners" by Kelly Link
It's almost impossible to choose between this collection and Link's galvanizing 2001 debut, "Stranger Things Happen." Her exquisite stories mix the aggravations and epiphanies of everyday life with the stuff that legends, dreams and nightmares are made of, from pop culture to fairy tales. Some of these pieces 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.
"Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kath, a seemingly ordinary British girl, goes to a special boarding school where she and her friends are groomed for a special fate while enjoying and suffering the loves and betrayals that come to young people everywhere. This odd, heartbreaking novel unfurls age-old conundrums about what it means to be a person; about the grievous sin of treating anyone, however unexceptional, as the means to an end; and about the unfathomable future that awaits each and every one of us.
"Veronica" by Mary Gaitskill
A model with a fluorescent, dirty past winds up as a nobody with hepatitis who cleans offices for cash and dwells on her memories of an unlikely friendship with an older woman who died of AIDS. There's nothing feel-good about "Veronica," but this novel is so alive, so streaked with colors and spiked with sharp edges, that reading it is almost a tactile experience. It's a perfect, slicing portrait of a sad, once-beautiful woman who doesn't want -- or deserve -- our pity, but who ultimately earns our compassion.
"On Beauty" by Zadie Smith
Conservative black Brits of Caribbean descent move in down the street from a leftish, mixed-race family in an East Coast college town. In Smith's hands the classic fodder of academic satire becomes miraculously endearing and sympathetic, a tale of two families that explodes with vitality, curiosity, enthusiasm and love for human beings and the perplexing situations they get into.
"Person of Interest" by Susan Choi
In this Hitchcockian tale, an undistinguished Midwestern math professor finds himself the object of rumors and suspicion when a more celebrated colleague is killed by a mail bomber. A nuanced consideration of what it means to fit in, and of what we owe to the people around us, "A Person of Interest" eschews obvious answers. At once a tragedy of character and a tale of suspense, this novel is a seamless integration of the political and the personal, beautifully written and impeccably unsentimental.
NONFICTION
"A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" by Dave Eggers
Even if you haven't read Eggers' memoir about raising his younger brother after the deaths of their parents, you've felt its effect. An entire literary generation fell under the spell of Eggers' playful, ingenious, self-reflective style (and that was only the beginning of a brilliant career as an author, editor, teacher, collaborator and all-around impresario). Often mischaracterized as merely "ironic," that voice found a fresh, exhilarating way to approach life's devastating truths without succumbing to knee-jerk pathos or solemnity.
"The Battle for God" by Karen Armstrong
A year before Muslim extremists brutally invaded the awareness of every Westerner, Armstrong, a former nun, published this essential, lucid consideration of the fundamentalist mind-set and its roots. During a decade when the conversation about religion has degenerated into pointless duels between screeching polemicists, she has brought a measured, open-minded wisdom to questions of faith and its place in the modern world.
"Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" by Barbara Ehrenreich
At the suggestion of an editor, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich attempted to live for two years on the wages of the average unskilled American worker. She worked as a waitress, maid and Wal-Mart clerk, shacking up in dives and dining on fast food, in an effort to find out how America's working poor make it. Her answer: A lot of them don't. If her efforts to suggest remedies are often rebuffed by her own subjects, her visceral dispatches from the ragged fringe of the American dream remain indispensable.
"The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq" by George Packer
A political liberal covering the Iraq war for the New Yorker, Packer initially supported the invasion as a way to rid the world of a bloody dictator but later came to view it as a wasted opportunity. The result of his reporting is among the most measured, thoughtful and self-examining of the many books on the conflict, taking in not only the theorists who justified it, but also inexperienced soldiers, frustrated reformers, the worried and grieving home front and ordinary Iraqis. Anyone looking for a better, deeper, broader understanding of the war will find it here.
"The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11" by Lawrence Wright
Six years after Sept. 11, Wright produced the definitive account of the terrorist attacks and how they happened, from the fanatics who conceived and orchestrated the plot to the intelligence agencies that failed to anticipate and thwart it. He developed an expertise on the subject so deep that in time those same agencies tried to utilize him as a source and even tapped his phones. Yet for all the knowledge that went into "The Looming Tower," it reads as sleekly and compellingly as a top-notch thriller.
"The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals" by Michael Pollan
Inexhaustibly inventive and imaginative, Pollan jazzes up what could have been a dreary jeremiad about the "industrial food chain" by inviting us to view the modern American diet as the triumph of a South American grass that can currently be found in every processed food: King Corn. From the scientist who transformed the world by synthesizing nitrogen fertilizer to a calculation of just how much oil goes into "making" one conventionally raised steer (about a barrel), there's an observation to blow your mind on nearly every page of this hugely influential exploration of what we eat.
"Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" by Alison Bechdel
This graphic memoir is an investigation of Bechdel's childhood, spent in the ornate Victorian house that her father obsessively restored and maintained. After she came out of the closet to her parents at 19, her mom delivered a return whammy: Bechdel's father had a lifelong history of affairs with men, including teenage boys. Not long after, he died under ambiguous circumstances. Bechdel's years of drawing a serial comic strip have honed her ability to convey oceans of feeling in a single image, and the feelings are never simple; "Fun Home" shimmers with regret, compassion, annoyance, frustration, pity and love.
"The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman
How would the earth be changed if the human race simply and suddenly vanished? Weisman uses this startlingly elementary question and its fascinating answer to suggest just how artificial our grip on the planet has become. Within days, subway tunnels would flood and collapse, subdivisions would be shattered by frozen pipes and devoured by mold and termites. For some reason, this doomsday scenario is more thrilling than depressing; it beguiles us into doing what often seems beyond our power -- picturing a much healthier planet and considering a less drastic way to get there.
"Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood" by Mark Harris
Film critic Harris takes the five nominees for the best picture Oscar of 1967, and uses them, and the stories behind them, as lenses to examine the tectonic changes that were taking place in the movie industry and American society as a whole. "Bonnie and Clyde," for example, embodied the birth of a hip new internationalism, and "The Graduate" spoke for youth culture and its romantic discontents. This is criticism at its best, well- and widely informed, with an enlightening fact, anecdote and insight on virtually every page.
"The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective" by Kate Summerscale
Part true-crime narrative, part cultural history, Summerscale's exploration of a notorious case of child-murder in 1860 is above all an inquiry into our culture's lasting and seemingly all-pervasive fascination with detectives and detective stories. Her hero is one of the very first investigators at the newly formed Scotland Yard, who inspired such writers as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Summerscale uses the mystery to crack open not only the allure of the detective as a fictional diviner of guilt and innocence, but also the curious details and ugly truths about everyday family life concealed behind the most respectable facades.
