So Many Books. So Little Time
It’s a comic strip that I have been carrying around for probably forty years. Pitiful, isn’t it? Not the comic strip. Me! Or more specifically, the excuses I create for not writing are pitiful. It all came back to me as I looked at the selections for best books of 2019. About the time I first got that cartoon strip, two of the writers on the book lists were born. (Both in 1979 oddly enough.)
This novel, by writer Ben Lerner, made five of the seven sources I checked for best books. As you can see, it made the New York Times 10 Best Books list. Add to that The Washington Post, the Atlantic, The Week and Literary Hub.
The Washington Post called it “a svelte big novel.”
The posting of the Harper’s Review on Literary Hub calls it, “thoroughly, intimidatingly brilliant and absolutely contemporary.”
And the New York Times says Lerner’s writing “arsenal has always included a composer’s feel for orchestration, a ventriloquist’s vocal range and a fine ethnographic attunement.” Yeesh!
Topping the non-fiction list of ‘bests’ were two works, including this one by Sarah M. Brown. It made it to four of my seven sources, but also won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. And, get this, it is a debut work. Yeesh, again. The other non-fiction work to make four of the seven sources was Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe: “A true story of murder and memory in Northern Ireland.”
Here’s an interesting twist: One of the most talked-about non-fiction works of 2019 was She Said by New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. It documents many of the issues that led to the #MeToo movement. Yet it did not make the New York Times list of best books. It did though make the list of best books by The Atlantic.
The non-fiction work, Say Nothing, also made it to The Atlantic’s list, along with the novel, The Topeka School. Three other non-fiction works made it to the Atlantic’s list: Music, A Subversive History, which is pretty self explanatory; In The Dream House, an account of an abusive relationship, and Meander, Spiral, Explode which explains “the geometry of literature.” Maybe I should get the last one to help with my writing. Nah, it’ll just be another excuse not to write.
The list compiled by The Atlantic appears to be a more diverse recording of the fiction of our time. I say that, in part, because it had the only book of “lyrics” on its best book list — Wrote for Luck by Shaun Ryder; one of the few books of short stories — Lot by Bryan Washington; and Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett (Yet another debut!). But even more interesting is that its list contained the only works by foreign writers: The Old Drift, by Zambian Mamwali Serpel, and EEG by Croatian Dasa Drndic.
The Week magazine compiled its list of the best nonfiction and best fiction works of the year. It compiled its list from a series of sources. In the nonfiction category, Say Nothing, The Yellow House and In The Dream House make its list. To that add:
— Know My Name, by Chanel Miller who is “the young woman, formerly anonymous, who in 2015 was raped outside a Stanford University frat party by a star freshman swimmer.”
— Underland in which travelogue writer Robert MacFarlane “wanders the world visiting caves, underground labs, and various other subterranean sites to explore that little-seen world.”
On the fiction side of the ledger, The Week ‘s list includes The Topeka School, but add to that Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi, which also made the best book of The Atlantic and Publishers’ Weekly; Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, which also made The Atlantic list as well as the New York Times’ list; and The Nickel Boys, by Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead, and which also made the list of the Literary Hub.
Part of the reason for going through such a list is to find books you may not have heard about but which you might want to get. In that category is the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Saigon-born poet Ocean Vuong who takes on the character of a Vietnamese-American boy writing to his mother. The Los Angeles Times article, cited in The Week review, calls it “a book of sustained beauty and lyricism” while The Washington Post which also cited it, called it a “poignant and lyrical work of self discovery.”
Just as The Week did, the Literary Hub did a double list of non-fiction and fiction works. On the fiction side of the ledger, the Literary Hub also had The Nickel Boys, The Topeka School and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. To that, add two of the more unusual selections:
— Black Leopard Red Wolf by Marlon James and described as a “literary Marvel comics (with) characters who will take their place in the pantheon of memorable and fantastical superheroes.”
— Exhalation, by Ted Chiang, who is described as one of “a handful of living science fiction writers have attained godlike status.”
Black Leopard Red Wolf also made The Washington Post’s list while Exhalation also made The New York Times’ list. Here’s the full list —
In the non-fiction list by the Literary Hub, In The Dream House, Underland, Know My Name and The Yellow House were cited. Add to that another book which I will be adding to my “need to read” list: Our Man, Richard Holbroke and the End of the American Century by George Packer. The review was written by famed biographer and former CNN head Walter Isaacson who says “it not only revitalizes but in some ways reinvents the art of journalistic biography.” Interesting footnote, that despite Isaacson’s praise, this too did not make The New York Times list even though the review cited by the Literary Hub actually appeared in the Times Book Review section.
So, back to my original point. Well, first, about the headline. That famous quote comes from Frank Zappa. Who knew? I didn’t. Secondly, the point about the pitiful failure on my part.
I take heart from this book. You’ve probably heard about it. It’s not just a New York Times’ bestseller. It is the times #1 bestseller. It has sold more than four million copies in the U.S. alone and is being made into a movie. And the best part — the writer, Delia Owens, is 70 years old. This was her first novel. Okay, okay, she also wrote three bestselling nonfiction books too. Heck, maybe that’s the lesson I needed to learn. Try my hand at nonfiction. After all I was a reporter for years. Yeah, maybe.
Here are the links to the list of Best Books of 2019 not already provided:
