I write this the day after Thanksgiving. According to my records, I’ve read 52 books this year—and there’s still a month left! Forgive my nerdy pride, but this is an all-time high for me, a writer-mother of three who is also addicted to word games and screens of all sizes. Looking back at my favorite books of the year, I’m reminded how much I love to read. Books comfort me, and entertain me, and they’re also my key to a deep and vivid life.
Here’s what I loved—
Twenty years after my friend Molly recommended Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, I finally took her advice. I read it in a week while at Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, a retreat I try to go to at least once a year to write and recharge—spiritually, artistically, intellectually. Stegner’s classic inspired me more than any other book this year. The novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971, is narrated by a retired professor of history, Lyman Ward. He’s living in his grandparents’ home in Grass Valley, California, suffering from bone disease, one leg amputated. He’s writing the history of his grandparents: their marriage, his grandmother’s art and writing, and his grandfather’s mining career. Most of the novel is dedicated to their experiences out west with Lyman interrupting and interpreting, and reminding you of the storytelling’s artifice. Lyman himself feels like an artifice and it made me curious about the stretching of—and nearly, but not quite, breaking—a fictional conceit. What makes this book such an enduring classic is the writing. My god, the writing! Stegner compares an old lady’s spotted hand to a tortilla. A tired mother describes her eyes as “two holes burned in a blanket.” We get this line, “she felt the mountains breathe in her face their ancient, frightening cold.” There is this sentence of perfect alliteration and assonance: “The dropped dung of the horses smoked in the road.”
Reading Angle of Repose on the porch at Dorland, and then copying passages into my diary, I was happier than I’ve ever been.
I read and loved another big, famous book this year: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, which was a master class in good old fashioned storytelling. This book has such terrific opening chapter lines, which announce the world with authority: “Lorena had stopped expecting ever to be surprised, least of all by a man, and then Jake Spoon walked in the door and surprised her.” By contrast, McMurtry often ends with minor lines, all the more poignant for their understatement. One chapter ends: “The cattle looked tiny as ants.” I appreciated how immersive this book was, switching to another plot line as soon as one sagged, and how it never let go of its line-by-line beauty. I would read the other novels in this four-book series, but I’m nervous to break the spell this single one cast on me.
The third big book I loved was Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead. Now, I’ve been mistaken for Ms. Shipstead before, and a bookstore once used her photo instead of mine for an event I participated in, but I say, Hey, that’s fine, because she is a fantastic writer (and not bad looking either!). I loved this book precisely for its bigness: it shuttles between the story of a contemporary actress doing a movie about a female pilot, and the story of said pilot, covering decades and continents. As with Angle of Repose, occasionally the conceit of the dual storylines bent so hard I thought it might snap, but it didn’t, and I’d think: this is the kind of novel that reminds you how strong the form is, how much rich story, character, and theme a skilled writer can pack into it. My copy resembles a pirate’s map: wrinkled from the bath, its spine broken, beloved.
I also loved a few shorter books, refined and sharp as jewels: The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka, which shifts midway through so that its second half is only tangentially related to the first. It made me sob. I basically inhaled the Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, three dark memoirs of art, dysfunction, and drugs by the famous Danish poet. Search by Michelle Huneven, a novel about a food writer on a committee to choose the next minister of her Unitarian Universalist Church, was a treat to return to every evening: thoughtful, calming, funny. Listening to my daughter read me Junie B. Jones was a balm, too. Bless that weirdo—my daughter and Junie B.
This year I also got a Libro.fm subscription, which means I get one audiobook a month; I like it because it lets me choose which participating independent bookstore my money supports. (You’re welcome, Skylight Books.) I now have a near daily habit of donning my sneakers, my straw visor, and my ultra-chic black fanny pack, and walking the hills and canyons of my neighborhood with a book in my ears. Since I read so much dang fiction, I have made an arbitrary rule to mainline nonfiction on these walks. I especially loved Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe, read by the author. If by some miracle you’ve never heard of this book, it’s the exhaustively researched and dramatically told story of the Sackler brothers, who made their fortune off valium, and of their heirs, who got even richer—and destroyed the world—peddling Oxycontin. It’s devastating and compelling.
I also immensely enjoyed listening to Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels by Los Angeles Times reporter Paul Pringle. This one, which is as juicy as any LA noir, is partly about scandals and corruption at USC, and partly about how the bigwigs at the LA Times tried to stop Pringle from investigating them. I gasped as I walked.
I’m currently listening to Red Comet: The Short and Blazing Life of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark. This is another big book—at over a thousand pages, the biggest. This translates to 50 hours of listening time, and I’ve listened to 60%, so there’s no stopping me now, not that I want to. I appreciate how Clark proceeds from the assumption that Plath was an important, influential poet and writer whose life should not be viewed only through the lens of her suicide. I love learning what literature, art, and media Plath consumed at every age, and I admire Clark’s persistent interrogation of how Plath has been read and judged by past biographers. The snippets of poetry stop me in my tracks. This book led me to listen to Ted Hughes’s poem “The Hawk in the Rain,” and then to compare it to Plath’s “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” and when I’m done I’m going to revisit The Bell Jar and her collected poems, both of which have been gathering dust on my shelves since, oh, 1997. Sometimes, when I’m walking, I’ll pause to transcribe a line from Clark’s bio that delights me, such as: “Sylvia vowed to return for venison and snails when her own book won a prize.” A solid plan, then and now. Upon re-reading D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, Plath wrote, “I can be itched and kindled by a great work…fat with texture and with life.”
Me too, Sylvia, me too. This has been a wonderful reading year for me, and I hope for you, too.
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