My 10 Favorite Books of 2015

     I read forty-nine books in the recently departed 2015. Here’s thirty-nine of them (in no particular order):

     A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY by Jorge Luis Borges

     THE MEANING OF NIGHT by Michael Cox

     OPERATION SHYLOCK by Philip Roth

     AMERICAN GODS by Neil Gaiman

     THE SANDMAN OVERTURES by Neil Gaiman & co.

     FREE COUNTRY: A TALE OF THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE by Neil Gaiman & co.

     STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND by Robert Heinlein

     NINE HUNDRED GRANDMOTHERS by R.A. Lafferty

     THE HABIT OF LOVING by Doris Lessing

     VANITY FAIR by William Makepeace Thackeray

     THE END OF ETERNITY by Isaac Asimov

     SECOND FOUNDATION by Isaac Asimov

     THE NEW TSAR: THE RISE AND REIGN OF VLADIMIR PUTIN by Steven Lee Myers

     MEMOIRS OF AN ANTI-SEMITE by Gregor von Rezzori

     THE SHAWL by Cynthia Ozick

     DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH by Robert Silverberg

     THE GOON LIBRARY, VOL. 1 by Eric Powell

     THE GOON LIBRARY, VOL. 2 by Eric Powell

     RAISE HIGH THE ROOFBEAM, CARPENTERS & SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION by J.D. Salinger

     LAFAYETTE IN THE SOMEWHAT UNITED STATES by Sarah Vowell

     PERFIDIA by James Ellroy

     MOON PALACE by Paul Auster

     THE NEW DEAL by Jonathan Case

     HARLOT’S GHOST by Norman Mailer

     GHOST STORY by Jim Butcher

     TEMPEST-TOST by Robertson Davies

     LADY KILLER by Joelle Jones & Jamie Rich

     CLAUDIUS THE GOD by Robert Graves

     LUCKY JIM by Kingsley Amis

     AMERICAN LION by Jon Meacham

     FRANKENSTEIN UNDERGROUND by Mike Mignola

     MY NAME IS RED by Orhan Pamuk

     THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: CENTURY by Alan Moore & co.

     NEONOMICON by Alan Moore & co.

     THE BEAST THAT SHOUTED LOVE AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD by Harlan Ellison

     THE JAPANESE LOVER by Isabel Allende

     THE BAD-ASS LIBRARIANS OF TIMBUKTU by Joshua Hammer

     ABSOLUTE MONARCHS by John Julius Norwich

     THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE by Douglas Adams

     THE GONE-AWAY WORLD by Nick Harkaway

     That’s an accomplished list, but as wonderful as some of those books are they couldn’t make my top ten for the year. Those ten books will stay with me forever, each one deserving of far more attention and analysis than I’ve given them in this post. But I need to write about them, however briefly, and attempt to convey some fraction of my respect and love for them. Hopefully I inspire some of you to check them out.

10) THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE (Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle, 1974)

     It’s too recently published to count as Golden Age science fiction, but THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE does what Golden Age sci-fi does at it’s best: masturbate your imagination while turning your head to the world that exists around you and making you cough. Read my original not-a-review here.

9) TRACKS (Louise Erdrich, 1988)

     There’s a tragedy that seems tethered to even the most accomplished novel by a writer who writes about their minority: too many white people assume that the book is not for them. They tragically limit the writer’s audience, and they tragically deprive themselves of a marvelous reading experience. In TRACKS, Louise Erdrich does what any good writer should do. She uses specificity to speak to the entire world about all of us. The Anishinaabe at the heart of this multi-family, multi-generational saga could be anyone in America torn between the traditions of the past and a modernity of anonymity, their resentment of a hegemony that has destroyed their identity and the urge to accept it as their only way out of financial and spiritual destitution. Louise Erdrich writes with poetic empathy and gallows humor about a specific group of people with particular circumstances. But she recognizes the universality of their fears and desires. She brings out the dispossessed in every reader, broadening the fraternity of humankind. She doesn’t tell us to empathize with The Other. She shows us that we are The Other, that there is no other. There’s only Us.

8) NONSENSE NOVELS (Stephen Leacock, 1911)

     Today’s culturally astute prize irony more than they even know. Beating the drums to postmodern originality, they are ignorant of how none of the culture they hold aloft is particularly original. Stephen Leacock was doing everything they value a century ago. In NONSENSE NOVELS the Canadian satirist skewers Sherlock Holmes, Gothic romance, the various pulp genres of Lovecraftian horror, Howardian fantasy, the nascent hardboiled fiction, and more. He emulates them with the stylistic perfection and thematic acuity of a keen-eared impressionist. He pulls the dangling threads that betray those stories’ disconnection from reality, and he fills the gaps with an inspired silliness that today’s absurdists wish they could conjure. Nothing is wholly original. Everything is built on a foundation. Modern satirists and comic writers would benefit from reading Stephen Leacock and learning how far they are from originality.

7) INVISIBLE MAN (Ralph Ellison, 1952)

     You can say a lot about Ralph Ellison’s indelible novel about the black American experience. You can talk about its unflinching honesty in regards to black-white relations, class distinctions within black communities, self-image as informed by these relations, and so much more. The book is a deep vein of literary gold seemingly without end. But what I keep returning to is Eliison’s command of language, his note-perfect selection of words, the rhythmic punch of his sentences, how there seems to be no fat in a story of such deeply felt anguish that it dares the writer to run away with himself. In a story that is all about what we see and don’t see, INVISIBLE MAN’s writing is clear and sharp as honed crystal and simultaneously dreamlike and hallucinatory. It conjures an unreal world that is painfully, poisonously real. Ralph Ellison succeeds at one of the hardest things a writer can do. He takes the ephemeral symbolism of speech and crafts from it an edifice of tangible thought and emotion that only a blind man could miss.

6) WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN? (Budd Schulberg, 1941)

     Budd Schulberg knew Hollywood. A career screenwriter who wrote, among other movies, ON THE WATERFRONT, he made the industry the focus of his first novel. WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN? tears at the town’s scabs with as much force and fury as Nathanael West mustered in DAY OF THE LOCUST. Sammy Glick, the novel’s enfant terrible social climber, is as despicable a character as you’re likely to find in fiction. But Schulberg assumes the voice of Al Manheim, the journalist who Sammy passes, then seduces into following him to Hollywood. The dignity of truth can’t compete with the riches of fantasy. But the novel is not just about Hollywood. It’s about American avarice, about why the United States fell into its Great Depression. It’s about the men who destroy everyone in their path to make themselves Midas. But unlike the mythological king who turned his loved ones into gold at his touch, the modern Midas is only interested in touching himself.

5) THE HIGH WINDOW (Raymond Chandler, 1942)

     THE HIGH WINDOW is dynamite. No, I’m not angling for a blurb on the cover. It’s entirely appropriate to call a story “dynamite” when it carries the force of an explosion. Raymond Chandler’s third Philip Marlowe novel always feels combustible. His prose is as strong as his protagonist and as volatile as the motley assortment of scumbags and ne’er-do-wells that surrounds our hero. Every new paragraph, every exchange of dialogue is weighted with the wages of fear and the spark of sin. You’re on a rollercoaster, never at ease but too excited to feel the tension. Chandler’s style was two-fisted fluidity, a ballet of pugilism witnessed through a blood-red third eye. You can feel the unstable elements jostling between the lines. You know that the whole thing could blow up any second, and you know you’ll get burned. But who cares? This is what great reading is all about.

4) EXIT GHOST (Philip Roth, 2007)

     I love Philip Roth, but historically I’ve had a hard time tolerating Nathan Zuckerman. Roth’s surrogate has always struck me as being enamored with his own voice to the detriment of the story. Even in AMERICAN PASTORAL and THE HUMAN STAIN Zuckerman fills multiple pages with some of the richest, most provocative sentences you’ve ever read, none of which say anything that the first sentence doesn’t. But Zuckerman’s curtain call, EXIT GHOST, proved to be an exhilarating anomaly about an old man desperately fleeing his imminent mortality. Roth doesn’t allow his aging surrogate the satisfaction of lyrical bloviation. His sentences are as melodically rousing as ever, but they’re fewer and leaner, each laid like a single brick to form an awesome cathedral. As a result Zuckerman conveys a power and urgency he’s never previously managed. Death is on Zuckerman’s (and Roth’s) heels, and every struggle, whether preserving the legacy of the hero of his youth or clutching at an unattainable erotic fantasy, is charged with crucial immediacy. Philip Roth is the bravest writer America has ever produced. How brave of him to address the twilight without smoke and mirrors, without any obfuscation, and force himself to stand against a stark landscape as no one but himself?

3) THE MOTHER TONGUE (Bill Bryson, 1990)

     Bryson can and does write about anything and everything, but he’s rarely brought out the thrill of discovery with as much palpable electricity as he does in his examination of the English language. He not only traces the history of the tongue from its Indo-European root to the present day (well, to the book’s publication in 1990). He analyzes its popularity and finds that its versatility, its evolution as a bastardized and bastardizing sponge, has made it uniquely qualified to assume the role of Common Tongue. The book is a high: intellectually dizzying and often laughter-inducing. Whether explaining the disparate pronunciations of everyday words by next-door neighbors or tracing the origins of obscenities, Bryson’s breezy but exhaustive scholarship regularly reduces you to giggles. The man has made a career of practicing an everyman’s intellectualism, precise and rigorous but infectiously fun. Bryson’s work breaks his subject free of the shackles of humorless pedantry and returns it to us as the language of the people, a language without rules, of boundless possibilities and endless opportunities.

2) BLEEDING EDGE (Thomas Pynchon, 2013)

     Some people have relegated Pynchon to solitary confinement over the hill. You. Are. So. Off. The elder statesman has summoned forth a spell that reveals the lacunae at the heart of today’s national character as no younger writer could. A younger writer would lack the wisdom, the sight, and the sense of humor to show us what Pynchon sees. Read my not-a-review here. 

1) AS I LAY DYING (William Faulkner, 1930)

     AS I LAY DYING may be The Great American Novel. Read my not-a-review here.

MY 20 FAVORITE WRITERS #10-1

10) George R.R. Martin

            I’ve only read one work of George R.R. Martin’s, a work that isn’t even complete. But having read just the first four books of his mammoth undertaking of epic fantasy, A Song of Ice and Fire, I’m prepared to say that Martin is one of the most accomplished fiction writers on the planet. With his ongoing saga, he has out-Tolkiened the man himself. Not only has he fashioned a world with a history and culture vast and complex as Middle-Earth’s, but Martin’s characters and sense of story structure are infinitely superior to Tolkien’s. This is who you read if you want your fantasy to be adult in every sense of the word.

            Start with: A Game of Thrones, 1996

            Then try: A Clash of Kings, 1998

9) James Ellroy

            If the English language has an intrinsic gender, James Ellroy has ensured that it is a male. The Demon Dog uses words like they’re jabs and hooks, sentences like head-butts, paragraphs that are swift kicks in the cajones, and characters that move with the animalistic single-mindedness of a pack of wolves. He throws these ingredients into a heady brew and what he serves up are stories of crime and redemption that explode in a mushroom-shaped plume in the sky over White Sands. Even if his style is so bare-knuckled it turns you off, you can’t deny it: Ellroy has balls!

            Start with: L.A. Confidential, 1990

            Then try: The Black Dahlia, 1987

8) Raymond Chandler

            Chandler wrote almost exclusively about his most famous creation, archetypical private eye Philip Marlowe. Chandler wrote in style that is now synonymous with hard-boiled fiction in general. But read a little closer and his artistry becomes easy to identify. Chandler brought a poetry to his lean and mean prose that cut right to the bone of the existential conundrum of human life, what makes people live as darkly as they do and what makes a decent man like Marlowe stand eyeball-to-eyeball against the darkness and refuse the turn away from it. But that will only occur to you after you’ve absorbed the dynamite story Chandler laid out for you.

            Start with: The Big Sleep, 1939

            Then try: The Lady in the Lake, 1943

7) David Mitchell

            I grow green with envy whenever I meet someone who is experiencing the work of David Mitchell for the first time. Born in Britain but having lived and traveled wide and far around the globe, his writing reflects his status as a genuine citizen of the world. A postmodernist in the best sense of the word Mitchell blends and twists genres and styles with stunning alacrity. But despite his prosaic pyrotechnics, Mitchell never forgets that his first job is to tell a story. With indelible characters and ingenious plotting he does this better than most writers twenty years his senior.

            Start with: Cloud Atlas, 2004

            Then try: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, 2010

6) H.P. Lovecraft

            Bottom line: H.P. Lovecraft was the greatest short story writer who ever lived. Every practitioner and fan of horror and suspense, whether they want to admit it or not, owes their undying allegiance to Lovecraft’s legacy. Yes, the more of him you read you recognize the archetypes he returned to time and again. Yes, he expressed certain socio-political views we find hard to stomach today. But the man understood fear, where it comes from and how to tap into a reader’s. In his relatively brief career, Lovecraft wrote stories that not only can turn the night dark and stormy eighty years later, but keep you reading them over and over.

            Start with: “The Call of Cthulu”, 1926

            Then try: “The Colour Out of Space”, 1927

5) William Shakespeare

            Yes, I read Shakespeare for fun. And so can you! I understand that the poetry is daunting at first. But if you can find your own Rosetta Stone into the text, his stories and characters are as enthralling and comprehensible as anybody’s. Shakespeare shared the point of view of the common man. He possibly did more to destroy the concept of the Divine Right of Kings than anyone by showing just how fallible and human the divine can be. Use that as your entryway into the plays and, I assure you, you will find stories that are more rich, colorful, daring, and entertaining than ninety-nine percent of anything else you could pull of the shelves.

            Start with: Macbeth, 1606

            Then try: Othello, 1603

4) Thomas Pynchon

            He’s one of the most divisive writers in the history of literature, truly love-him-or-hate-him. Check out Amazon’s reviews if you don’t believe me. The vehement dismissal is understandable. Pynchon is discursive, difficult, vague, and he breaks every rule you learn in Writing 101. And yet, I absolute love him. Like Philip K. Dick, Pynchon broke through with the emergence of the counterculture due, in large part, to his liberal depictions of recreational drug use and his embrace of the intrinsic incomprehensibility of the world around us. But Pynchon takes it a step further and frees the writer – and reader – with adherence to a deceptively simple maxim: in a world where the rules are unknowable, maybe there are no rules.

            Start with: Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973

            Then try: Mason & Dixon, 1997

3) Alan Moore

            Try reading Alan Moore, a man committed to practicing the craft and realizing the magic of sequential art, and tell me he is not every bit complex, intellectual, and entertaining as any novelist you could read. Like a mad seamstress he weaves together seemingly unrelated threads of both narrative and theme until you are looking at a tapestry, one that is immediately pleasing but requires distance and deep thought before it can be fully appreciated. Possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of a wide array of interests that have nothing to do with costumed crime-fighting, Alan Moore uses the comics medium as the perfect vehicle to tell any story his frighteningly fertile imagination can conjure.

            Start with: Batman – The Killing Joke, 1988

            Then try: Watchmen, 1987

2) Isaac Asimov

            The depth and breadth of Asimov’s interests and respective acumen is staggering. He is the only writer to have at least one book represented in, save one, each section of the Dewey Decimal System. Whether writing his iconic science fiction, hard science, or history, Asimov wrote in a clear and simple voice that sucks you in and makes even the most esoteric minutiae palatable to any reader. All that minutiae makes the worlds he brings to life, be they hundreds of years in the past or many millennia in the future, completely believable and totally absorbing. He was an honest-to-science genius who never lost sight of the joy of learning, a joy he never neglected to instill in his readers.

            Start with: I, Robot, 1950

            Then try; The Caves of Steel, 1951

1) Kurt Vonnegut

            I don’t know how to start explaining why Kurt Vonnegut is the greatest. His writing is so simple and straightforward, he makes it look too easy. Which, of course, means it’s deceptively difficult to pull off. And he pulled it off in masterpiece after masterpiece. I consider even his less celebrated novels, like Slapstick and Galapagos, to be masterpieces. Vonnegut was heartbreaking, funny, whimsical, suspenseful, and silly; and you never knew which side he was going to show with each turn of the page. But it was his empathy with people and his understanding of the slings and arrows of an average life that keeps him resonant with each successive generation of readers. Read him when you’re feeling down. You’ll feel he wrote the book only for you. Kurt Vonnegut once said that he considered Mark Twain to be “an American saint.” I would say the same of Kurt Vonnegut.

            Start with: Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969

            Then try: Deadeye Dick, 1982