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a year in books
Time to supply some actual content, besides complaints.
The Guardian article about what various authors enjoyed reading this year caused me to think back about my own year in books.
Highlights included:
Ben Marcus' Notable American Women, which simultaneously manages to be a book-length experiment in syntax, a mass of inventive false histories, and an eerie, moving coming-of-age story set in a fantastic world. Riddled with masculine anxiety and heaped to the brim with cultural wreckage.
Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist. Like other books that see the true New York, this postmodern noir thriller feels like it's set in both a science-fictional future and a dusty, rotting past. The book has a verbal style that's unmatched by anything else I read this year, but it also manages to sustain an irreducible political core.
Short-story-wise, I've been enjoying the masterful, dense pieces in James Salter's Dusk, and the giddy, hyperreal American everyday depicted in Lorrie Moore's Birds of America. (Caveat: I haven't finished either of these books. I tend to pace myself when reading a short story collection that I really enjoy.)
I also enjoyed some genre classics that I only got around to reading this year: Interview With the Vampire and *ahem* The Two Towers.
Was there anything in particular that you enjoyed reading this year? |
Friday, December 13, 2002
12:42 PM
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