The Best Books I Read in 2014? Here Are They!

This year, as I do every year, I read some books. I also kept a list of what those books were called so that, as January 1 drew near, I could, as I am now doing even as I write this, compile into list form those books I thought were really just A-1 tops in my opinion. Most such lists tend to focus on the best books that actually came out in 2014, but as always I generally don't read enough new books in a given year to do that, so my lists is made up of the best books I read, whatever their year of publication. However, this time my list includes two novels from 2014. Unprecedented!

Another thing is that this year's list is pretty long. I never limit myself to ten choices, but I generally top out at about fifteen or so. For whatever reason, maybe because I read more books this year than I normally do, I had a hard time paring it down. I decided to just go with it. That being said, I did leave out one or two books that I liked about as well as one or two I did include, partly to keep things manageable, and partly because while I genuinely enjoyed the hell out of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, for example, I think you all have probably already heard about that one by now.

One more thing before we begin...well, two more things. The first thing is that this year, two non-fiction titles made my list, which I don't believe has happened before. Make of that what you will. The other thing is that, as always most of this list isn't really ranked until you get to the top two or three, at which point you might notice that my very favorite books of the year all share a specific theme, or subject. Of that you are also invited to make what you will.

And so!

Seven Footprints to Satan by A. Merritt - Probably best known for Creep, Shadow!, his final novel from 1934, this novel, Merritt's fourth from 1927, is remembered more for the 1929 film adaptation directed by Benjamin Christensen, who also made Haxan ("best known" and "remembered" being relative terms here, unfortunately). Anyway, the novel is, as they say, a hoot: a towering, ominous, hedonistic figure claiming to be Satan forces the men and women he kidnaps to play a game of chance that will win them immortality and endless pleasure, or doom them to death and/or horrific torture. One man and one woman decide to fight back. Seven Footprints to Satan is absurd in exactly the right way, which is to say that it's absurd but I found it impossible to laugh at it. I was too gripped by suspense, and by the wish that all classic pulp fiction was this propulsive. And it earns bonus points, of a sort, by being only occasionally racist...

Harriet Said... by Beryl Bainbridge - When I do these lists, I like to find especially good or interesting or strange cover images for the books in question, and I would mark the above pictured cover for Beryl Bainbridge's first (or is it third? This is a somewhat confusing question) novel as "strange." Also "misleading," implying as it does that this novel has sleazily hitched itself to a sleazy misunderstanding of Nabokov's Lolita. Harriet Said... is not that, however. It's based on the same true crime story that inspired Peter Jackson's film Heavenly Creatures, though Bainbridge's inspiration was of a much more general sort. In her novel, two adolescent girls on vacation attract a fair amount of male attention, and they find themselves drawn to one particular man. Their intentions towards this man are appalling, but what Bainbridge, who tells the story from the point of view of the girls, never states but which we understand anyway, is that the man's intentions towards the girls aren't any better. The fact that everyone's intentions are thwarted for something even worse is to be expected, and Bainbridge lays the path towards that end with events that are deceptively matter-of-fact and written with a casual precision that lends to the story the air of the everyday that must always precede such terrible crimes in real life.

North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud - I first heard about Ballingrud when I came across his short story "The Monsters of Heaven" in editor Ellen Datlow's horror anthology Inferno. I read that story, and loved it (and wrote about it here), but I didn't get around to reading Ballingrud's story collection that contains it until, oh, about a week ago. Over about the past year or so, I've gathered that North American Lake Monsters is something of a favorite among serious contemporary genre writers -- I keep seeing it praised by the respectable likes of Jeff VanDermeer and Laird Barron and so forth -- and it's not hard to see why. If I had to compare what Ballingrud is doing here to anything, I'd have to say his fiction is akin to to work of Larry Brown or Daniel Woodrell, but with monsters. See "The Monsters of Heaven," for instance, or more directly the title story, or best of all his werewolf tale "Wild Acre," which uses genuine werewolf horror as the backbone for a story about a man on the cusp of economic ruin, and does all this while still treating the werewolf element seriously. I admit that I don't love every story here -- I didn't love the non-genre "S.S." or "The Way Station," his curious take on the ghost story -- but pretty much everything else is a success, including "Sunbleached," a pretty terrific, even somewhat traditional, vampire story, and "The Good Husband," the last story, and the one that arguably packs the collection's strongest emotional kick in the teeth.

Joe by Larry Brown - Speaking of Larry Brown, the release of David Gordon Green's film version of Brown's 1991 novel Joe spurred me to finally pick that book up, as preparation, I told myself, for Green's movie, admiring that filmmaker as I do. Well, Green's adaptation suffered for my decision, as hoping for anybody's film to match up to Brown's extraordinary novel is hoping for too much.  The story, about a violent, drunken, but fundamentally decent man named Joe taking into his protection a teenage boy whose poverty-stricken family is headed by a patriarch of endless vileness, is the kind of thing that people sometimes call mythic, which I think in this context means that it is, in the hands of a writer as stunningly gifted as Larry Brown, deeply satisfying. Brown's prose is gorgeous in the way that makes me demand to know how language so apparently simple can be put together so that what is being depicted and thereby communicated reaches down to your bones. What I'm trying to tell you is that this a good book and you should read it.

The Land Breakers by John Ehle - Reviewed here.

King of the Hill by A. E. Hotchner - I talk a little bit about Hotchner and his memoir of his childhood spent with a younger brother, loving mother, and shady, infuriating father during the Great Depression in this post, which is mostly about Steven Soderbergh and his film adaptation. You can get the gist from that, but to repeat one point I make there, what makes Hotchner's King of the Hill so terrific is that it's not written as though by a grown man looking back, but rather as a young boy living it as it happens. It's very difficult when putting these lists together to go back and find suitable passages from these books, some of which I read almost a year ago, to quote, but here's one I easily found from King of the Hill; easily, because it's one of my favorites:

...[N]ine times out of ten [my mother] asked me if I had to put that dirty thing on my head. That dirty thing happened to be the best old Feltie in the neighborhood. My father called it a skullcap. I found this really great fedora in the trash can in the park, and cut out the crown and cut designs in it, and I had some really nifty buttons stuck all over it, especially this one of Mr. Herbert Hoover smiling, which, believe me, was some rare button.

People Live Still in Cashtown Corners by Tony Burgess - Canadian author Tony Burgess is kind of a horror writer, though he might not be considered one because he's pretty clearly not beholden to the restrictions of formula that too many writers, and readers, consider the genre's defining characteristics. His best-known book would have to be 1998's Pontypool Changes Everything, his insane, undefinable sort-of-episodic novel about a sort-of zombie virus that spreads through language. That book (which made my 2009 list) was successfully turned into a film, if you can imagine such a thing, called simply Pontypool, by Burgess and director Bruce McDonald -- they succeeded, I believe, by being extremely free with the adaptation. Supposedly the two are re-teaming to adapt People Live Still in Cashtown Corners, his 2010 novel about a mass murderer named Bob Clark, who kills as a means of understanding. To try and summarize the book's perverse psychology would be too difficult, but perhaps this passage, following the first murder, will give you some sense of it:

We enter into battles without understanding the terms of our survival and when we do survive, when we do what is necessary, when we pull up strong, then all the rest, this cost, this remainder of my life, is only lessened because we did so much more than all the others. We stood while God hammered the sky and we never stopped walking while chainsaws milked our legs and we did something very wrong and awful, but at least it cleared the air. It lifts those that come after. It was us we offered up and no one will ever know this but us.

Or perhaps this:

My mind isn't snapped or anything. I'm not particularly afraid of what I've done even though I do know that now, whatever happens, at some point down the road I'm going to have to listen to someone tell me what I've done.

And if you think Burgess is (figuratively) sacrificing innocent lives so that he can more easily sympathize with their killer, you're mistaken.

Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye - This slim volume of linked short stories is Kiesbye's second book, after his novella Next Door Lived a Girl, which I haven't read but which I'm damn well going to now. Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone is set in Germany, at a time that is mostly undefined, though by the end the reader has an idea. The characters are all children, and almost every story ends with, or at some point involves, something appalling being done by one or more of them. Is it all just slaughter, the senseless cruelty of children? In a way, which sort of explains what's happening. I've seen many descriptions of this book that compare it to various other things, with varying degrees of accuracy and absurdity, but the comparison I've seen that gives the best idea of what you'll be dealing with if you pick up Kiesbye's eerie novel is the one that calls it a cross between the Brothers Grimm and Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon. As a metaphor for what I'll bet you've guessed it's a metaphor for, Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone is fascinating.

The Year of the Angry Rabbit by Russell Braddon - In 1972, Janet Leigh, Rory Calhoun, DeForest Kelley and others appeared in a film called Night of the Lepus which, as I remember it, is about giant mutant rabbits who kill people. THE END. That film was based on a 1964 novel by an Australian writer named Russell Braddon, who by that time had made a name for himself by writing a memoir about his four years as a POW in Singapore during World War II, two other books of non-fiction chronicling the heroism of British spy Nancy Wake, and a few other novels. Nowadays, The Year of the Angry Rabbit is his most famous work of fiction, and it's struggling to be remembered as a thing separate from the ridiculous movie, which took the killer rabbit idea and that's all. Braddon's novel skates by what is inherently laughable about the idea by, in fact, being a satire in the mold of, and I'm not kidding, Dr. Strangelove. I'm not going to claim The Year of the Angry Rabbit is as great as Kubrick's film, but it's a fascinatingly strange story about the power to dominate all other nations suddenly falling into the lap of Australia's Prime Minister, who seeks world peace via threats of total destruction. It's a singular, and singularly weird book that is now hard to find, and it deserves a better legacy than Night of the Lepus.

There is a Happy Land by Keith Waterhouse - Waterhouse is one of those writers who will always be defined by one book. In this case, that book is Billy Liar, which -- and don't think I haven't noticed that this is sort of a theme in this post -- became a famous film in 1963, directed by John Schlesinger. But Waterhouse wrote a bunch of novels, and this one, his first, is well worth tracking down (as it's been reprinted by Valancourt Books, that should be easy enough to do). There is a Happy Land is one of those realist one-thing-after-another novels about childhood that British writers of a certain era wrote with such apparent ease and skill. About a young boy who lives in a public housing estate, and the end of his closest friendship, as well as what's going on with the strange, obviously crazy -- obvious to the adult reader anyway -- bike-riding adult who seems most comfortable around children, There is a Happy Land is both funny in its close observations of childhood, and the odd logic of children's minds, and eventually tragic and sad for those very same reasons. It's really wonderful, and it's one of those books that comes together to the fullness of its power in its final pages.

Angels by Denis Johnson - I read, I think, seven novels by Denis Johnson this year. I loved most of them, and choosing one among the best of those -- Train Dreams, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, Nobody Move, Angels -- was a difficult prospect that I chose to simplify by choosing the one I read most recently. This is nevertheless not an arbitrary choice. Angels was published in 1983 and is Johnson's first novel. It is infuriating that a first novel can be this good. It's a novel that I shouldn't summarize, beyond saying that it's about a woman named Jamie who takes her two young daughters and leaves her husband, and who, on the bus to Hershey, PA meets an ex-sailor and current drunk and petty criminal named Bill Houston who Jamie is lost enough to find romantic. You know this won't turn out great, but where it goes is impossible, I think, to guess. In fact, it does recall certain films, though if I named them I might as well tell you how it ends. But while that journey is partly what reading this novel is all about, there's obviously much more to it. The thing about Angels is that late in the novel, Johnson describes something that he could not have possibly experienced, and that I could not have possibly experienced, but which Johnson's prose illuminates and imagines in a way that is gorgeously terrifying, and feels impossibly, exactly right. It's the kind of writing that humbles you.

Consumed by David Cronenberg - Reviewed here, though I'd like to add that my sense is that not enough people are reading this, and of those who are reading it, not enough are liking it. This is a terrific book. Being a fan of Cronenberg's films may be a necessary first step, but with that accomplished the rest should be clear sailing. Get on this one, you pricks!

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm - My appreciation for Janet Malcolm's extremely controversial examination of journalism and what she believes is inherently unethical about it, has little to do with the potential guilt or innocence of Jeffrey MacDonald, the doctor and Green Beret convicted of murdering his wife and children in 1979. I don't know if he did it or not, and solving that mystery (if that's even what it is) isn't what interests Malcolm either. She examines journalistic ethics through the lens of Fatal Vision, writer Joe McGinniss's true crime bestseller about the case published in 1983. In The Journalist and the Murderer, McGinniss comes off as hideously mercenary in how he dealt with his subjects, but if Malcolm were only interested in writing a hit piece I doubt it would be on this list (although who am I kidding, it might be anyway). Malcolm isn't even interested in taking down journalism. What interested her, and for her troubles she became something of a pariah among her colleagues, was questioning not just the occupation itself, but the received wisdom that a journalist is virtuous by dint of being a journalist. And Malcolm, a journalist, doesn't spare herself. She is ruthless in a way that few people are willing to be about who they are and what they do.

Red Shift by Alan Garner - A science fiction novel unlike any other I've ever read, Alan Garner's 1973 masterpiece tells three stories from three different centuries: one about deserters from an ancient Roman army; one about a man desperately trying to defend his village and those he loves during the English Civil War; and another, set in 1973, about a teenage couple in love, and how the boy is potentially going to fall apart when the girl leaves for London. Geographically, the stories take place on top of each other, and so, in a way, in Garner's way, are happening simultaneously. This reminds me of many things, including the ancient Roman source of Arthur Machen's nevertheless very British horror story "The White People."  Red Shift isn't horror, but it is brutal -- the violence of centuries past is depicted by Garner is something that was as natural as one animal killing another for food -- and though a science fiction tone is achieved through a kind of psychological time travel, it's the spirits of the dead that live on in the rocks and soil that form the guts of this highly unusual novel.

In Hazard by Richard Hughes - Hughes wrote one of my all-time favorite novels, A High Wind in Jamaica from 1929. I read that book several years ago, and it took me quite a while to read anything else by Hughes, and I'm not really sure why. But now that I have I can say that In Hazard, Hughes's second novel, from 1938, utterly failed to disappoint. The novel, about a cargo steamer caught in an ungodly hurricane, is written with the same sardonic eye for human frailty, heroism, cowardice, and tragedy that you'd expect from him. In this brief novel, Hughes sketches a large handful of characters with a deftness you simply don't see now, and tosses them into a seemingly unwinnable situation. Then he stands back like God and watches to see how they make out. That in doing so Hughes somehow finds room  -- this book is only about 120 pages long -- to appear to be racist before revealing itself to be exactly not that, while also telling the story of the making of a Chinese Communist, while also...well, that's enough out of me. Hughes wrote very few books, he was notoriously slow, but the two I've read so far are unlike anything else I can think of.

Nosferatu by Jim Shepard - Reviewed (eventually) here.

Loving by Henry Green - This novel from 1945 is set on a country estate in Ireland during World War II.  When the elderly head butler dies, a servant named Raunce, who seemingly looks out primarily for himself, is promoted. Over the course of Henry Green's masterpiece, an item will be stolen, the servants will be left alone on the estate for a time, two of them will fall in love. Meals will be prepared and served, drinks will be drunk. Servants will leave. People will speculate about what this war will mean for Ireland. What a lifetime of reading fiction has conditioned you to expect from such a novel will not be fulfilled. Loving is a gentle novel while being anything but soft -- it's about as clear-eyed about life as it's lived, at least by these people in this house, as any writer has managed before or since. In his interview with The Paris Review, Henry Green famously described the conception of Loving this way: 

I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks, and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: "Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers." I saw the book in a flash.

So there you go.

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns - A novel about a plague of violent madness long before writers thought they were being original by spinning off that concept from the zombie subgenre (oh how weary I become), Barbara Comyns' bizarre, funny, and unnerving 1955 novel about how one family fails (I'm simplifying) to bravely face the devastation of their village is about as damning a look at humanity in crisis as I've ever read. Not that it's ostentatiously "about" that -- let's just say that Comyns, who, what with this and The Vet's Daughter, which I read a couple of years ago, I'm beginning to think was a genius, is dubious about a few things. Can you imagine such a novel being written now in which the primary parental figure within the story's central family is not only not heroic, but a heroic character isn't introduced to take their place? In addition to that, if you want to pin down Who Was Changed and Who was Dead, it's a novel about death in which daily death is sort of gotten used to:

During the afternoon Ives went to Grandmother Willoweed, who was sunning herself in a basket chair on the top path.

"Baker's dead, ma'm," he shouted down her trumpet, "and Mrs. Fig's got the madness or else it's the D.T.'s, and the little old peacock's dead too; we haven't got one now. But my ducks is alright," and he turned away towards the river to make sure this was still so.

The Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson - Jackson will be remembered only for this novel. Even those who seek to not let us forget that this was a novel, and not just an Oscar-winning film from Billy Wilder, seem content to let this and a handful of short stories stand for Jackson's life and career, and let the other novels and stories disappear. My plan is to read all of Jackson's fiction -- there's not a ton of it, just two story collections and four novels -- and in addition to The Lost Weekend I've also read his second novel, The Fall of Valor, which I liked. But fair's fair: it's not The Lost Weekend, which is simply the greatest novel about alcoholism I've ever read. It's not just that -- I feel like it's the best novel about alcoholism that it's possible to write.  As Don Birman promises sobriety to himself and others time and again, only to collapse into a river of booze each time, it's possible for the reader to find himself alternately hoping that Birman either be refused that next drink, or to be offered all the booze he desires. No writer has ever made the horror experienced by a drunk both when he gets his drink and the horror experienced when he can't as palpable, immediate, and terrifying as Jackson does. It's a merciless and deeply frightening novel.

The Tunnel by William H. Gass - Well, what can anyone say about this? Though Gass has written significant books following its publication in 1995, The Tunnel is genuinely, literally, the life's work of one man. Several decades in the writing, The Tunnel is possibly the most difficult novel I've ever read, and for a while it felt like reading it was going to be my own life's work. The idea behind this novel is that it is, all 600-some pages of it, ostensibly the introduction to the narrator's massive scholarly work Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany. That narrator, the author, is William Frederick Kohler, and in trying to introduce this major book, he ends up telling, in a manner of speaking, his life story, a story that includes his decision to dig a tunnel in the basement of his home, a project he has taken up at the same time as the writing of this "introduction." Which is a mad, sometimes gorgeous, sometimes utterly opaque, swirl of Midwest childhood lived in the early part of the 20th century with a mean father and a drunk, depressed mother, who dies from a hemorrhage in her throat, her blood draining back into her body "like a sink." Strange sexual encounters mix with Kohler's insistence (though he's not proud of it) that he took part in Kristallnacht...but would he have been old enough? And these then mix with an examination of the other professors in the history department where Kohler is tenured, his hatred of them, his envy of them, mixed again with memories of eating ice cream and car accidents he witnessed as a child, mixed again with a consideration of the assassination in 1938 of Nazi Ernst vom Rath by Polish refugee and Jew Herschel Grynszpan, leading finally to a final fifty pages that are among the saddest and most beautiful I have ever read. In its own way, The Tunnel contains the whole of the 20th Century.

The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski - I realize that there is some controversy surrounding Kosinski and The Painted Bird, having to do with accusations of plagiarism. At one time I knew a bit more about the specifics, but I've forgotten all of it now. The controversy is not something I now dismiss, if the accusations are fair, but I'll re-investigate all that at another time. For now, I can only consider the novel, published in 1965, about a young boy, possibly Jewish, possibly a Gypsy, sent away by his parents because they believed he would have a better chance of surviving the holocaust sweeping over the country on his own than with them. And so off he goes, suffering or witnessing one atrocity after another, as the novel becomes a living, breathing, walking, seeing Hieronymus Bosch painting, even though it remains words on a page. It's literary minimalism put to the use of the grotesque and horrible, which is never-ending, or seems as if it will be. But this novel is about a real horror that we know did end, and even here, even in this most terrible novel, there is before the horror, just a little, and there is the horror, and there is after the horror. Just a little, but it's there, on the other side.

The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis - While thinking about these last three novels in this best-of list, of which Gass's The Tunnel was the first and now The Zone of Interest, Martin Amis's 2014 declaration that the literary world dismisses him at their own peril, is the last, I do have to ask myself which of them I truly think is the "best." Such a stupid question is answered reasonably with "It doesn't matter." If The Tunnel is the most unapproachably (in a sense) impressive, and The Painted Bird is the most awe-inspiringly painful, Amis's novel is the most entertaining while being simultaneously the one novel I read this year that most regularly took my breath away: I've heard The Zone of Interest described as "an office comedy about Auschwitz." Which it sort of is, I guess, at least for a while. The novel tells the story of life in Auschwitz from the point of view of a, let's say, skeptical Nazi named Golo Thomsen (he's Bormann's nephew!); a true believer Nazi commandant named Paul Doll, who is married to Hannah Doll, who hates her husband and whom Thomsen loves; and Szmul, the Jewish Sonderkommando, who worked with the Nazis in the camps and as a result enjoyed certain benefits; those Jews who occupied Primo Levi's "grey zone." But oh no, a love triangle? Is Amis trivializing the Holocaust? No, because the idea behind The Zone of Interest is to show what such things looked like against this backdrop. It's similar to Cabaret in this sense. And yes, it's funny, though over the years Martin Amis's idea of a comic novel differs from pretty much everyone else's: he's funny because he can't not be, because humor is his mode, his style. And it's not a matter of "laughing so that you don't scream" -- it's not that simple. You laugh while you scream. But it's also not that simple. Here's how Amis writes now -- here's what's funny to him now...or here's what's "funny" to him now -- this, from Szmul, reflecting on the life of the Sonderkommando:

It would infinitesimally console me, I think, if I could persuade myself that there is companionship -- that there is human communion, or at least respectful fellow-feeling, in the bunkroom above the disused crematory.

A very great many words are spoken, certainly, and our exchanges are always earnest, articulate, and moral.

'Either you go mad in the first ten minutes,' it is often said, 'or you get used to it.' You could argue that those who get used to it do in fact go mad. And there is another possible outcome: you don't go mad and you don't get used to it.

The Best Books I Read in 2012

Oh...it's you. So I guess you want to know about the seventeen best books I read in 2012, is that it? The absolute nerve of you. I don't, I can't even, how do you...okay fine. Here it is, below, the list. As always, while I do actually include on this list one novel that was published in 2012, most of these books were published whenever the fuck, and I just happened to read them over the past twelve months. Convention is no mistress of mine. Plus, there's really not much going on here by way of ranking, until you get to the last couple, which are close to being tied as my favorite novel of the year. Anyway, this is shaping up to take me a while (you'll no doubt breeze right through) so I'd best get started.

The Brave by Gregory McDonald - This one is something of a grower, or perhaps a sticker. Before the almost verbatimly-named Pixar film, this title, about a young, illiterate, impoverished American Indian man who decides to provide for his family by agreeing to be murdered in a snuff film, was possibly best known, and even then just barely, as the basis for the notoriously hooted-at film directed by Johnny Depp (his only such effort so far) back in 1997. That film is indeed something of a howling mess, but the novel, written by Fletch author McDonald, ultimately has, while imperfect, the force of a clawhammer to the kneecap, or perhaps the skull, or more than likely one, then the other. McDonald makes the mistake of painting the world around Rafael, his hero, and his homeless community as one full of unspeakably vile people, but I'll be damned if that strategy -- born of a very palpable anger -- doesn't manage to place Rafael in the middle of a silently shrieking vortex that the reader is powerless to escape. Most of the novel chronicles Rafael's experiences after agreeing to be murdered and accepting from McCarthy, the "filmmaker," a meager down payment. It ends with an occasion of unstated uncertainty, and one of the most hideous and unbearable and pathetically funny final pages I have ever read.

Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis - Amis is one of my favorite writers, but this is the first of his novels I've read since 2003's Yellow Dog. Explaining why (it's not because I didn't like the mostly disliked Yellow Dog) would take too long and bore you too thoroughly, but I was determined to jump back on the train with this new one because I thought the plot -- about Asbo, one of Amis's long string of frighteningly stupid British thugs, winning a massive lottery jackpot -- seemed like a good opportunity for Amis to crank up his particular style of nastily erudite, even smug, humor, and I was right. This is one of his most casually entertaining novels in years, blunt in its satire, open about its sleaziness, occasionally moving, and once or twice something close to spooky. If this is minor Amis, then okay, I'll take it.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill - I was inspired to finally read this classic ghost story by the then-pending release of the new film version starring Daniel Radcliffe. Long-time fans of Hill's book were not best pleased with that movie, but apart from some reservations I thought it wasn't half bad. However, apart from my inclination to bask in Hill's brand of very precisely eerie prose, the novel boasts an ending that, while the film doesn't entirely discard it, it is nevertheless shied away from. The Brave isn't the only grower on this list -- when I finished reading The Woman in Black I thought it was perfectly good, and I admired its final paragraphs, particularly the last two lines, but as I've gotten some distance from that reading experience I've come to believe that those two lines, and especially the novel's final word, is about as perfect and horrible a capper as you're likely to find in a story like this. Chillingly brilliant.

A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin - Perhaps you've heard of this one. I somehow doubt that I can add a great deal to the discussion about, or the phenomenon of, this now-massively successful fantasy series, not least because I've only read the first two books, this volume being the one that kicked it all off (in 1996!). But suffice it to say, where I am now in the whole deal, it's quite easy to understand why this all started happening for and to Martin, a rather interesting writer of horror and science fiction before one day being struck by the idea to meld J. R. R. Tolkien with The War of the Roses (the history thing, not the Danny DeVito thing). These books are long, and Martin has a ton of information to dump on you, but he knows, at least back then he did, exactly how to write it, with a clarity that is just lightly touched with bits here and there of antiquary. His world is massive, and his characters are very specific. The tragedy of this first novel is both enormous and, in its way, very quiet. The blood and thunder is mostly on the edge. This first novel is roughly 800 pages of something overwhelming just busting to get loose. I know that as the series goes on, past book three, a lot of people began to feel let down by Martin's sprawl, but I find it very hard to not feel confident, and anyway, at the very least, to appreciate the astonishingly ambitious task he's set for himself.

The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hadayet - I wrote about this novel very briefly in this throwaway post earlier in the year, when I hadn't even finished reading it. So I don't even really know why I just linked to it now, but anyway Hadayet's most famous work is the kind of thing that people should be reserving the phrase "fever dream" to describe, instead of pasting it to something Fight Club that just acts like it's crazy. The Blind Owl really is, though, morbidly so. It's a novel about a man who has quite possibly committed murder -- but who really knows for sure? -- and whose mind and life has transformed into a phantasmagoria as a result. Hadayet's life ended in a suicide. In The Blind Owl he writes that "it is death that beckons us from the depths of life." Most other fiction seems pitifully fraudulent in comparison.

The Man With the Black Feather by Gaston Leroux - Next to The Blind Owl, this novel by the author of The Phantom of the Opera is possibly the strangest novel I read all year. Something of a spiritual thriller about Theophastus Longuet, "the timidest man in Paris," who one day discovers that he harbors within himself the thieving, murderous spirit of Cartouche, the famous French criminal. He and his loved ones struggle to keep his kind soul from being lost to the monster Cartouche, and for a while Leroux's story follows a fairly conventional narrative. But along the way, Leroux first makes room to insert a little self-contained locked-room mystery (a favorite form of his) before plunging two characters into Paris's Catacombs, a move that turns out to be thrillingly unconcerned with ordinary payoffs or plot satisfactions. Meanwhile, I've learned from Tim Lucas that the novel also exists in another form, the one Leroux reportedly preferred, that bears the less interesting title The Double Life, but which, according to Tim, expands on the Catacombs sequence to jaw-dropping effect. I'm gonna read that version too, one day.

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith - I wrote about this pretty extensively here. You can go read that, if you'd like.

Julius Winsome by Gerard Donovan - Worryingly, er, winsome title aside, this 2006 novel is a both heartbreaking and hard-edged story about a hermit who lives in a cabin in the woods with his dog. One day, the dog is shot and killed, and Winsome, hunting rifle at the ready, decides to take revenge on whoever did it. "Whoever" being the key word here, because Winsome is cracked not just by despair and grief, but also by having existed mostly outside the rest of the world for years. So when he finds a hunter in his woods near where his dog was killed, he will mortally wound the man and then try to find out if he might be the culprit. This is a brutal, deeply disturbing, and splendidly written novel of revenge with which it is easy to sympathize but impossible to ever justify. It goes beyond that, though, to create a man whose simple life it might be easy to envy, but Donovan sketches out the damage it can do, taking its toll like a kind of second, and simultaneous, aging.

The Black House by Paul Theroux - It's been a little while since I've read this one, another classical ghost story set in England, and more than most of these books it's not exactly fresh in my mind, but in essence it's about a quite off-puttingly arrogant academic who, with his wife, moves to a quiet rural English village, where he dislikes and is disliked by the locals in about equal measure. Shades of both Straw Dogs and The Wicker Man, perhaps, but it's not really much like either. It's a fascinating book whose horror element is slow to take shape, and even slower to assert itself -- when it does, it's of a decidedly sexual nature -- but once it's all over and the exquisitely tragic implications are clear, the unnatural seems to have seeped into the lives of the characters in the most natural way. It's a supernatural horror story with the sting of the inevitable.

Fowlers End by Gerald Kersh - Fowlers End is about Daniel Laverock, the ugliest man in England, getting a job at a movie theater. Along the way, it provides a very blackly comic look at alcoholism, terrorism, amorality, immorality, intellect and its absence, cruelty, self-deception, and suffering. It's very, very funny. Kersh (proclaimed by Harlan Ellison to be his favorite writer and this Kersh's best book) is an odd duck who I've thus far, through my only meager reading of his work, been unable to really pin down, but there's an undeniable genius at work here, especially in the character of Sam Yudenow, the theater manager, and possessor of most of the books amorality. Great big long stretches of Fowlers End is given over to his long, delusional, barely-educated Cockney rants. On page two, Yudenow offers up what might function as something of a life philosophy, or maybe a wisely defeatist approach to existence: "You need edyacation in show biz. You'd be surprised the idears you pick up reading. Only don't put on no airs. You'd be surprised what they'd do to you rahnd Fowlers End if you put on airs."

Plunder Squad by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) - I continue to be fascinated by the weird structuring Westlake loved to play around with in his Parker novels. For instance, in this one a couple of characters last seen in The Green Eagle Score reappear, not because Plunder Squad has anything to do with that earlier novel, but because they're a couple of guys Parker wants for this story's central heist. But Westlake's done that before. No, the really unusual thing here is the return of yet another character from The Sour Lemon Score, a loose end of sorts, and the way Westlake approaches this material is so ingeniously off-hand that it doesn't even count as a subplot. That aspect of Plunder Squad is dealt with as if it carried no more significance than Parker's stealing of a car to use on the job. Which, to Parker, it doesn't. Once more easily brutal in its violence, this is also the Parker novel that made me finally realize that one of the keys to the whole series is that Westlake allows, or forces, the reader to share Parker's very low opinion of his victims. That is to say, of us.

"Remember You're a One-Ball!" by Quentin S. Crisp - I talked about this bizarre novel a little bit in this post about Crisp's novella "Ynys-y-Plag," and in all honesty it's hard to know, in the space I'm providing myself here, what else I can add. But I don't think I mentioned that at it's heart, this novel is about the sometimes, for some, unbearable cruelty of childhood, which in this case is exaggerated to a grotesque horror parable of sorts, or experiment, or conspiracy theory, and how that cruelty can transform a child into a hopelessly unhappy adult. It's about a schoolteacher who takes a job at a school where he learns that child abuse of an especially horrifying sort is not just institutionalized, but the grease that keeps the wheels turning. And I'm not even sure that's right. I am sure that it's a terrible oversimplification of Crisp's indescribable first novel. I don't know what it is, exactly. That is a recommendation.

The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns - Speaking of cruelty and child abuse, this very slender novel is soaking in it, too. Thinking back on the book now, it's very unhappy title character strikes me as not at all dissimilar to the heroine of Elizabeth Jane Howard's short story "Mr. Wrong," which I wrote about here, one of the major differences being one of genre. Which is not meant to imply that The Vet's Daughter is some piece of kitchen-sink realism -- it is, in fact, quite strange, even fantastical, though in this case that element doesn't manifest itself as supernatural horror, but as pure fantasy. It's just that the outcome is horrific. It's about a terrible father and his terrible lack of heart and the terrible ways this affects his daughter. I believe that's the novel in a nutshell. It's short, otherworldly, great, and painful. In other news, I should probably try to lighten up.

Kramer's War by Derek Robinson - Well, at least this one's funny. Robinson is the author of one of my all-time favorite novels, the magnificent World War II comic epic Piece of Cake; that novel, like a lot of Robinson's novels, chronicles some aspect of the lives of British fighter pilots (either World War II or World War I), but Kramer's War puts his airman -- an American bombardier named Earl Kramer -- on the ground, after he crash lands on the British island of Jersey, which is the one portion of WWII England that has been occupied by the Germans. Kramer embarks on a haphazard mission of sabotage across the island, but that's just part of the story. A good chunk of the book is given over to the lives of those who have lived their whole lives on the island, and who have existed under Nazi occupation for several years. Robinson casts his typically jaundiced eye on, among many other things, Kramer's sabotage, and while he never sneers at Kramer, and he seems to even like him, the true hero of the book is Daniel de Wilde, the man who has the responsibility of maintaining order and lawfulness in Jersey without ever selling his soul to the Germans. Kramer makes it quite clear how impossible de Wilde's job is, and he's in full, or nearly full, support of the desire for one's resistance in this situation to be much more aggressive. And as is typical of Robinson, being the hero doesn't do anybody a damn bit of good. If good comes in and sweeps away the bad, it will probably sweep away some of the good with it.

The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin - Boy I read a lot of books by British people this year! Good God! So this is another one of those, best known now as the source for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1949 film starring David Farrar. That's a fine film, but there are a couple of crucial differences: this is a novel about a civil service/research and development official in England, whose specialty, with his team, is inventing and testing various explosive devices (it's a good deal more complicated than that, but moving on), and it's quite witheringly cynical, but Balchin's cynicism poured itself into a novel published in 1943 -- in other words, right in the middle of the shit. More to the point, the Powell and Pressburger movie significantly alters the ending, draining it of all despair. Balchin was very inventive when it came to unhappy endings, and the ending of The Small Back Room is unhappy in such an unexpected way that the gut punch it delivered really kind of doubled me over, metaphorically speaking. A hint of what I'm talking about is in that front cover shown above. Also, Nigel Balchin was a key figure in the invention of the Kit Kat bar.

A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In by Magnus Mills - David Foster Wallace once wrote that people often misunderstood how funny Franz Kafka was, and that the fact that Kafka rarely generated any laughs from his readers didn't disprove this thesis. I'm able to take his point (obviously, Wallace elucidates further) while still finding the actual laughter actually generated by the Kafkaesque fiction of Magnus Mills to be entirely welcome. Another British novelist, Mills's career kicked off with a wonderfully black working-class novel about accidental death called The Restraint of Beasts. This was nominated for a Booker Prize, and was talked up, from the other side of a door, by Thomas Pynchon. The result was that for the span of his first five novels, Mills was an "international writer." For one reason or another, this has since ended, and Mills no longer has an American publisher. Part of it might have to do with the sense, voiced by some, that Mills was hammering on the blue-collar-job milieu a bit too relentlessly, but it unquestionably has more to do with the fact that Mills's novels are very strange and nobody buys them. Besides, the aforementioned sense ignores the strain of non-fantastical fantasy that regularly appears and even takes over whole novels, from Three to See the King, his third, and Explorers of the New Century, his fifth, a novel that very nearly isn't ambivalent about its fantasy elements, but finally is. I'm describing this badly. Anyhow, his most recent novel, A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In might well be his masterpiece. And, to add some clarity to all this, Mills's version of fantasy here is to create a kingdom called Greater Fallowfields, where the rulers are politically useless, but, in their station as cultural and scientific guardians, totally ignorant, so that when, near the beginning of the novel, all the political positions of our main characters -- Postmaster, Comptroller of the Admiralty, Principal Composer of the Imperial Court, and so on -- are reshuffled, the first task of the newly appointed Astronomer is to figure out how the big telescope works. Further, Greater Fallowfields is a kingdom where political and cultural stature brings you not one ounce of privilege, so that the money that is paid only to these cabinet members -- not that no one else in the kingdom is paid, just that only these cabinet members get paid in this particular coin -- can't purchase a goddamn thing. It's like trying to spend Disney Dollars outside of Disneyworld, except you are in Disneyworld. Except it's not any fun to be there. There's more going on, and there's some of that political allegory going on here, but it's the kind of allegory where the real world thing that is being allegorized is a grown man throwing up his hands and saying "Fuck it."

The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley - Once again, I wrote a little bit about this novel here, where I said: "[The Go-Between is] one of the finest novels of any kind I've read this year. It's about a twelve-year-old boy, whose middle-aged self is narrating the events, and the summer he spent at the impressive country home among the family of one of his school friends, falls in love with his friend's older sister, who, along with her lover, use the boy as a pawn/messenger to facilitate their affair. This is ultimately disastrous, and while the sister (who is engaged to a viscount) and her lover (a farmer who lives nearby) do have a great deal of affection for the boy, but they're also selfish and a bit stupid. As is the boy, seeing as he's twelve. Anyway, it's a wonderful, suspenseful, funny, devastating novel, superbly controlled and about as sharp about childhood emotions, and childhood in general, as anything I've read outside of Dickens." I do not hesitate to stand by that. It's one of those novels you sometimes read that makes you want to do nothing more with your life than read, one book after another, until it's lights out. Not a bad way to go.

Best Books of 2011, Which Were Read By Me

Oh, hello. I haven't been around much lately, and for that I apologize. It is my hope -- though I will stop short of calling it a resolution -- that next year will find me in higher spirits and in the throes of a mighty creativity, which will exalt this blog into the cosmos, in the sense that I will write more and hopefully some of it will be pretty good. Right now, though, that's all beside the point. The one post that has pulled me away from my slouching inactivity is my annual list of the best books that I read in 2011. Please note the distinction: these are not necessarily the best books published in 2011, but rather the best books that I read. I don't read much new fiction in a given year, because I mean Ready Player One?? Like I don't get enough '80s nostalgia dogshit on a daily basis that now I have to go read a whole book about it? Also, to the best of my knowledge, Ready Player One is the only book to come out this year, so I was sort of handcuffed. But, as the saying goes, anyway. Enough of that. On to the list! Which, once again, is in no particular order until you get maybe into the top three or so. Everything prior to that is viewed by me on a more or less equal plane of quality. Roughly. Mainly, I don't want to do the work of ranking too much of this, because I think that's boring, to do, if not to read. But I'd rather not be bored than be bored, so there it is. Regardless, you can safely regard the book in my #1 spot as my favorite book of the year. The Sour Lemon Score by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) - It was between this and The Black Ice Score, a slightly curious entry into Westlake's (writing as Stark) series of Parker novels. Black Ice has one of the iciest bits of violence Westlake ever wrote, and the time spent on it, and what it reveals about those who perpetrate the violence, is somehow all the more effective as Parker is nowhere to be seen at the time, and the killers are one-offs, present in that book, and that book only. But The Sour Lemon Score almost has that tone throughout. Sour Lemon is almost absurdist, as it finds Parker driving up and down the Eastern seaboard again and again, tracking one-time accomplice, turned violent betrayer, George Uhl, as well as the money Uhl stole from Parker (who stole it himself, of course, but whatever). Parker has been nastier in other novels, and there are mildly worrying signs of a softening to the character (I'm told the next four books in the series, starting with Deadly Edge, return to some awfully dark territory), but The Sour Lemon Score remains entirely satisfying, with some beautiful sketchwork of the secondary characters, not just Uhl -- who's an awful, awful man -- but Matt Rosenstein, who, at least as far as I've read, must be the most evil man in the series. The chapter devoted to him and his psychology is a masterpiece, and the novel ends with a great stinger of a last line. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells - – I wrote about this book in October for my “The Kind of Face You Slash” series, and I think I’ll let that stand as is. But I have to admit, and with some amount of chagrin, how surprised I was by the richness of this slender little novel. What I wanted was animal men wrecking shit, and I got that, but I was concerned about Wells’s tendency towards loony-bird social philosophy. That’s there, too, except not so loony-bird. The whole thing is pretty brilliant. Gilligan's Wake by Tom Carson - This is a book you have to read to understand. This probably goes without saying, because so is Hop on Pop, but to describe Gilligan's Wake in flat terms is to do it an injustice. The idea is, basically, the history of the second half of the 20th century, starting at about World War II, as told through the eyes of characters from Gilligan's Island. I know, but wait. The amazing thing about the book is that Carson can place the Skipper, John F. Kennedy, and McHale from McHale's Navy in the same scene -- all of them being PT boat captains during the war -- and make you say "Sure, why not?" This integration of the historical and the very lowest of our modern culture is done with very few winks. It's a very funny book (and occasionally very disturbing: the chapter about the Professor is a grotesque, pansexual -- which doesn't even cover it -- paranoid nightmare), but it's not mocking. Or maybe it's more accurate to say there's no snark. Carson can throw in anything, from Sinatra to Bettie Page to Roy Cohn to Daisy Buchanan to Un Chien Andalou to pornography to Mary-Ann having an affair with Jean-Luc Godard, and somehow make it all play. This is the sort of novel that gets called "rollicking," and for good reason, but the tenderness is almost alarming. Your heart goes out to Lovie. How is that even possible? Ask Tom Carson, because I don't know. Now's where I have to offer up the whole "in the interest of full disclosure" deal. I know, and am friends with, Tom Carson. I did consider leaving Gilligan's Wake off this list because of that. But I'm not getting paid for this, and so I believe that all I'm required to do in cases like this is acknowledge the fact. Otherwise, I can praise whatever I want to praise, as long as I do so sincerely. I am being very sincere. The Cook by Harry Kressing - This is another one I wrote about this past October, and I think there's very little I can add to that. Suffice it to say, The Cook, possibly the only novel ever written by "Harry Kressing", depending on who that name is a pseudonym for, was the great find of this year's "The Kind of Face You Slash" posts. Weird, precise, disturbing, funny, and totally original, it's a novel you have to hunt for, as prices for used copies can run pretty steep. Some publisher who specializes in these kinds of forgotten classics, like Europa or NYRB, should jump all over this. It's a great book. The Black Mass of Brother Springer by Charles Willeford - This early Willeford novel is, like so many of his books, not a crime novel, until it is. Sam Springer is, when we meet him, a writer, a published novelist, who fails to capitalize on that minor success. Since writing, in and of itself, means nothing to him, he takes whatever money-making scheme sounds good to him, such as that of a preacher of a black Southern church. And then things sort of spiral out of control, because when it comes to morality, Springer just doesn't seem to get it. The novel could be considered comic in a general sense, but you get to a point where Springer's disinterest in the wellfare of others becomes horrifying. The fact that the full consequences of some of his actions are never known cements the feeling that you are completely in Springer's head. The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki - Yet a third novel that I did, in fact, write about earlier in the year, in this case in conjunction with the Criterion DVD release of Kon Ichikawa's film adaptation. A quietly devastating portrait of a family being dragged slowly away from their roots in Japanese tradition. Sam the Cat and Other Stories by Matthew Klam - Klam's collection of short fiction made a bit of a splash back in 2000; curiously, and unfortunately, he's published no books since. A short story here and there, but no collections, and this is a real shame. Sam the Cat is everything that contemporary American fiction is often claimed to be, but rarely is, which is funny, honest, painful, and, within the realm of actual, day-to-day life, imaginative. The title story is a hilarious first-person account of a guy who is stopped dead by the fact that he mistakes an effeminate man for an attractive woman. His fumbling, bizarre attempts to make contact with this man are so awkward that you sort of curl up into yourself -- the suspense of the impending humor is an interesting effect, I think, and hard to pull off on the page, but Klam does it over and over. Port Mungo by Patrick McGrath - Looked at broadly, Patrick McGrath's novels could be seen as a bit repetitive -- they pretty much all focus on a man or woman, a first person narrator, who tells a story about other people, family or friends or associates, often soaked in some sort of Gothic, but somehow still reined in, sleaze. Sex, murder, and the like. And the narrator, you come to learn, is not to be trusted. But McGrath does this so well so often that to complain about this will only get you a hearty "Oh why don't you just shut up" from yours truly. I haven't read Martha Peake, generally considered his weakest novel, and for my money Trauma, his most recent effort, is his one major stumble. But at his best, Asylum, Dr. Haggard's Disease, Spider and Port Mungo are all brilliant and chilling. Port Mungo takes place, in part, in a sweaty, swampy Central American port village, a change-up from McGrath's favored towering New York City and green English countrysides, but the reader, the appalled observer, still bears witness to the horror selfishness can inflict. Here, incest, booze, and criminal neglect reduces a putatively fine artist to something less than a bug, one under glass as befits McGrath's clinical, even Cronenbergian (those two were, and are, a good match) style. Swag by Elmore Leonard - Looking back on my past “Books of the Year” posts, a practice meant to remind myself what I’m supposed to do, I noticed that Elmore Leonard has yet to make any of my lists. This despite the fact that I consider myself a fan, and I read at least a couple of his books every year. Well, bad Elmore Leonard books exist (Touch and Maximum Bob) and there’s a whole lot that’s middlin’. Now is probably not the time to break down Leonard’s strengths and weaknesses, so I’ll let it stand that I think he’s a very fine writer who nevertheless frustrates me with some regularity. Even so, every fifth book or so that I read tends to strike me as some kind of masterpiece, and this year Swag knocked me out. Most Leonard novels are relatively simple in their core idea – in this case, the story focuses on two no-goodniks who find, within each other, the inspiration to commit various robberies. One of the men turns out to be a bit reckless, while the other, Stick, sort of just wants enough money to take it easy. He’s like a laid-back, non-violent, humane Parker, in fact. But violence arrives whether he likes it or not, and the tension of Swag comes from watching Stick, the smart one, try and remove himself from this horrid tangle of deadly stupidity he’s gotten himself into. It’s a great story, filled with choice writing and Leonard’s wonderful dialogue. It’s also interesting, and hugely refreshing, in the way it upends the standard cops and robbers narrative. Since Stick’s a good guy, basically, it should follow that the cop hunting him should be a prick (this is the case only in stories where the criminal is the focus, and a nice person). That’s how these things are done! Not so here, where the cop is simply a good cop with a job to do, one that we, as the law-abiding public would wish him to do regardless of how likable Stick is. All of which leads up to probably the best ending of Leonard’s long career. A Meaningful Life by L. J. Davis- It just occurred to me that L. J. Davis's A Meaningful Life bears some similarity to the novels of Charles Willeford, in that it's a very funny novel, of a fairly despairing sort, until the point where it isn't anymore. Well, depending who you ask. There's a certain point late in the novel where the laughter catches pretty securely in one's throat, although I'm aware of one or two people who managed to force it out anyway. Regardless, this story of a man, no prize himself, caught in a hopeless marriage and stuck in a hopeless job, seeks salvation through the purchase and renovation of a Brooklyn brownstone. The place is a money pit, though, and shit hits the fan with some force. Then the fan explodes, and the blades go whizzing towards you. Brilliant, and brilliantly dark. Davis passed away earlier this year, with very little in the way of respectful notification the author of a book this good deserves. Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov - This early Nabokov novel is the first book I read in 2011. It was a good start. Nabokov's writing is beyond reproach -- he is, as far as I can tell, the greatest writer of prose in the 20th Century. In English, I mean, even though it was his second language, and he translated, or co-translated, all of his early Russian-language works, of which this is one. So I kind of think, fuck that guy. Reading Nabokov can frustrate me to the point of hopelessness, but he's too magnificent to stay angry at for long. Laughter in the Dark finds Nabokov in his gleefully black, almost genre-tinted mode. It begins: Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; he was not loved; and his life ended in disaster. A fair summation. Nabokov's writing is such that even a novel so packed with disaster can be read joyously. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - I read fewer books in 2011 than any year in recent memory. David Foster Wallace's massive, rat-crusher of a novel is the reason why. I read it for a long time, and struggled more than once with its amazingly dense digressions on science, pharmacology, tennis, Quebec, assassins, death, mental illness, and pleasure at any cost. But Wallace's fierce intelligence, wicked humor, and intense, all-encompassing humanity (considered phony by some bullshit idiot losers) make Infinite Jest a reading experience like no other. It's a testament to something-or-other, or an indicator of same, that the moment where Infinite Jest lifted up to the level of genius was the ending. The peculiar focus, by which I mean the, for lack of another word, anecdote Wallace chose to close this 1,100 page behemoth, is so bizarre and grotesque and obliquely enlightening, that I was just floored. Among many other things, ending this book this way took enormous guts and self-confidence. Plus, early on, there's this: My silent response to the expectant silence begins to affect the air of the room, the bits of dust and sportcoat-lint stirred around by the AC's vents dancing jaggedly in the slanted plane of windowlight, the air over the table like the sparkling space just above a fresh-poured seltzer. I live for that kind of writing. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell - This, my favorite novel of the year, comes from an unexpected source. A couple of years ago, I read Mitchell's novel Ghostwritten, and I sort of kind of hated it. It struck me as the work of a smug, self-satisfied kid, the kind who would think that simply telling many stories in one novel, alternating characters and globe-trotting with the settings and whatnot, is in and of itself a pretty big deal, never mind the contents of those stories, or the actual writing. I was about set to turn my back on David Mitchell, but rave reviews and curiosity led me to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and it's a goddamn barn-burner. What I love about it, or the first thing I love about it, is that it's a good old-fashioned novel, in the classical sense (well, modern classical sense). It's a historical novel that explores the weird, even counter-intuitive, relationship, mainly through trade, between Denmark and Japan in the late 18th century. Jacob de Zoet is the reader's surrogate for this almost surreal clash, and Mitchell fills him out, as well as the various other Danish and, especially, Japanese characters with such fluidity that it's quite easy to love the heroes, and absolutely fucking despise the villains. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a grand old story, one that gripped me early -- it's exciting, funny, moving, disturbing, sweet, sad, and everything else you could want. Mitchell's greatest achievement here is how his plot goes bonkers so quietly -- it reaches levels of almost pulp, even grindhouse, hysteria, without ever being hysterical. It's monumental and wonderful and everyone should read it. Anyway, happy New Year, all you sons'a bitches!