Looking back at my books from last year, I was struck by how many white guys I read. Fourteen out of eighteen books I read were by white men. In fact, only one of the authors I read in 2011 was not white (Colson Whitehead).
I’m a firm believer in literature’s ability to cross boundaries of all kinds—ethnic, racial, or national. I think readers of any race can read and enjoy books by authors of any race. But reading work by a writer of a different race or gender exposes us to experiences we couldn’t possibly have ourselves. We can change our opinions over time, but one of the only ways to get a glimpse at the experience of belonging to a different race is to read work written by someone of that race. So I made a conscious effort this year to broaden my horizons.
I usually gravitate towards the maximalist, “hysterical realism” that’s so prevalent on fiction shelves these days, so it is high praise to call Joan Didion’s ultra-minimalist Play It As It Lays one of the books that really caught my attention this year. Her bare prose draws you down into the depths of the main character’s depression in the most masterful way. Didion wrote this novel with the sensibility of a short story; the quality of the book hinges on every single word—nothing is extraneous, and every sentence pulls more weight than the vast majority of books I’ve read.
K. surprised me with a copy of Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner while I was recuperating from a nasty bug. It was not one of the most expertly written books I’ve ever read, but as far as love-letters to cities in the form of novels go, Lerner beautifully evokes Madrid, both in his physical descriptions and the mood of the city, which he captures well.
Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding may be the best book I read all year. If you only read one book from my list, this should be it—end of story.
The biggest surprise of the year was 11/22/63 by Stephen King. For better or for worse, I’m pretty biased against genre fiction of any kind, but the plot—a man discovers a portal to the late ’50s in a diner and goes back to save JFK—really intrigued me for some reason. I don’t have glowing things to say about the prose itself, but there’s a reason King is held in such high regard. I’ve never been gripped by the storyline of a novel more. Making a nearly 900-page novel that spans almost five years into an edge-of-your-seat page-turner is no small feat.
Other honorable mentions from this year include Why Are We in Vietnam? by Norman Mailer, Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon, Great House by Nicole Krauss, and Steven Millhauser’s collection of short stories, We Others.
Here is the complete list of books I read in 2012:
At Home, Bill Bryson
Restless, William Boyd
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald*
The Subterraneans, Jack Kerouac
No-No Boy, John Okada
Why Are We In Vietnam?, Norman Mailer
Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Corregidora, Gayl Jones
Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed
The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick
Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis
Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
What is the What, Dave Eggers
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell
The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach
Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth
Lanark, Alasdair Gray
Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Peter Høeg
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
A Ship Made of Paper, Scott Spencer
Swamplandia!, Karen Russell
The Lola Quartet, Emily St. John Mandel
11/22/63, Stephen King
An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, Brock Clarke
Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon
Great House, Nicole Krauss
Four New Messages, Joshua Cohen
The Prague Cemetery, Umberto Eco
We Others, Steven Millhauser
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
The Best American Short Stories 2012, Tom Perrotta
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon
*re-read
