Since we’ve been doing the
annual, year-end Best Books list,
I’ve had readers ask, “Why
don’t you run the list in time
for holiday shopping ?” To steal a line from Mark Twain, who’s all over Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and apparently wrote some books too, I am gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I do. I say I don’t know. But a newspaper is here to serve, and if bumping up the list a few weeks helps our valued readers with their gift list, well, who are we to deny them that ? As always, the players are chosen by a committee of one, and they are chosen for a simple reason: They are reading addicts with interesting taste. Here was their question: What was the best book you read in 2008 ? And why ? It doesn’t have to be new, just new to you. Re-readings don’t count—unless you can make a great case. The answers follow. And they’re so good you’ll want to save this section beyond the holidays. Happy reading.
———Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets, by Sudhir Venkatesh. Over nearly a 10-year period the author embedded himself in Chicago’s Robert Taylor Home projects, an impoverished, gang-infested, violent housing project. The book allows the reader to see a way of life that most Americans cannot imagine or comprehend.
The rules of daily life we all know and live by simply do not exist for some people in our society. Instead, in order to survive in what is tantamount to an urban war zone, people have had to develop their own rules, their own support structures, their own social hierarchy.
Shocking to read; impossible to put down. —Eric Jackson, general manager, Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs.
Also recommends: Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson; The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives, by Leonard Mlodninow.
The Water is Wide, by Pat Conroy.
I was walking down an empty hallway at Catholic High and found this book, a reading selection for the upper classmen, lying unattended in a heap of dust bunnies. I was insulted. This was the book the late rector of Catholic High, Father George Tribou, had given me as I began my first week of teaching. I thumbed through it, intending to read just a few pages. I ingested the whole thing. This true story revolves around a young teacher who is sent to educate the povertystricken children of a remote South Carolina island. The book taught me that the measure of progress often defies the numbers on a report card or standardized tests. This is not a book just for would-be teachers. It’s a book for would-be parents. —Steve Straessle, principal of Catholic High School for Boys and the father of five children.
Also recommends: They Made All the Difference, by Eileen Wirth; Eyewitness to Power, by David Gergen.
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.
How would I sum up The Road in one word ? Relentless. When I finished it, my urge to go lie down somewhere and whimper for a while was trumped only by my sudden need to begin digging a secret bunker in my back yard. I make a living out of analyzing plots and such literary constructs, and it’s a well established fact in the industry that as the plots of long works like novels build tension toward a climax, they must occasionally allow for the release of some of that tension so it can be rebuilt a little higher each time. It’s just not possible to sustain that buildup of tension for the entire length of a novel. Curse you Cormac McCarthy ! Not only have you made me stock up on canned goods and ammunition, you’ve made me have to re-write my lectures on plot structure. —Dennis J. Humphrey, Ph. D., Chair, Division of English and Fine Arts, Arkansas State University at Beebe.
The Coldest Winter, by David Halberstam.
Those who seek knowledge in the hope of developing wisdom should read Halberstam’s 700-page chronicle of the Korean War. Published in 2007, the book is especially trenchant now as China becomes a global economic, diplomatic and military power. Because the Korean War wasn’t as much with North Korea as it was with China. The United States had a war with China ? Sure did, in the early 1950 s. U. S. dead were roughly 50, 000. Chinese dead were many times more. Americans are notoriously vacant-minded about the past. What about the Chinese ? Try not to be so naive, dear reader. —Frank Fellone, deputy editor, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark.
Elegant, witty, and not a little perverse, this nearly perfect book about a charismatic girls’ school teacher can be cold at times, but its humor and brevity temper the gloomy effects, and its characters are real enough to break your heart. —Trenton Lee Stewart, Little Rock author whose most recent book is The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey.
Also recommends: The Unstrung Harp, by Edward Gorey; On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan.
The Looming Tower: al Qaeda and the Road to 9 / 11, by Lawrence Wright.
This Pulitzer Prize-winner by New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright is the single best book to read if you want to understand the ideology and actions that led to September 11 th. It chronicles the main players, from the Saudi Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to some of the key figures halfway across the world in the United States who would try to track down these individuals prior to their attack on America. Equally important is Wright’s focus on the intellectual history of al Qaeda, especially the influence of Islamist radical Sayyid Qutb, who was executed by Egyptian President Gamal Abul Nasser in the Sixties because of his desire to overthrow the statist government and replace it with—well, god, and all of his righteous fury. —Chris Battle, lapsed editorial writer and partner in the Adfero Group, Washington.
The Crazed, by Ha Jin.
Ha Jin’s 2002 novel The Crazed tells the story of Jian, a Chinese graduate student at provincial Shanning University who in 1989 is compelled to care for his mentor and future father-in-law, Mr. Yang, when the old man suffers a stroke.
In the throes of his illness, the mildmannered Yang rages against the futility of his academic life and re-lives signal chapters of his past—including the Cultural Revolution in which he was branded a “demon monster” and re-educated. Jian is affected by his teacher’s “insane” ravings during the Cultural Revolution, and becomes swept up in the student uprisings that culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre.
The Crazed is a meditation on the nature of truth and lies and the artificiality of intellectually erected dichotomies and literary vanities. But the reason to read it is Ha Jin’s masterful control of plain language, the calm insistent rhythm of his prose that is at once unpretentious, clinically precise and freighted with sorrowful wisdom. —Philip Martin, columnist, film critic, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski.
I shy from novels prominently displayed in airport bookstores, and, to be sure, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is everywhere. But when a good friend gave it to me for my birthday, I was experiencing a dry period in pleasure reading. Beautifully written, with a narrative that steals you in, Wroblewski’s book was everything my soul desired. Edgar’s story is both the story of generations of Sawtelles as well as their Sawtelle dogs. If you are a dog person, you will be moved by Almondine—a dog like few others, who intuits Edgar’s needs even before his mother and father do. We had a dog like that once, and this book brought him back to life for me. —Mary Ruth Marotte, Ph. D., assistant professor of English, University of Central Arkansas.
Also recommends: The View From the Seventh Layer, by Kevin Brockmeier; The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart.
John Cheever / Collected Stories and Other Writings, The Library of America.
John Cheever’s best short stories are a combination of almost perfect, even photographic, invocation of East Coast scenes and the undercurrent of terror that runs through them, and through modernity. They are stories of a particular time and place and class, yet of alienation from it all. And by intimating that feeling so well and simply and truthfully, Cheever breaks through it, leaving behind a sense of acceptance.
“The constants that I look for,” he wrote in a preface, “are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being. Calvin played no part at all in my religious experience, but his presence seems to abide in the barns of my childhood and to have left me with some undue bitterness.”
These are, in short, collected stories of The Fall. They may not open a way to redemption, but they might lead to a beautiful resignation. And you can’t stop reading. —Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
The House On First Street, by Julia Reed.
Reed, a daughter of the Delta from Greenville, Miss., visited New Orleans as a child and then fell in love with the city as a reporter covering one of Edwin Edwards’ trials in 1991. After years in New York (where she worked for Vogue and other magazines ), she married and bought a house in the Garden District of New Orleans just four months before Hurricane Katrina hit. Her humorous story of getting back to normal brings to life everyone from contractors to handymen. It reads like a novel since these are the type of colorful characters that give the city its charm. —Rex Nelson, who has a fancy government title but is best described as Arkansan at large.
Also recommends: The Senator and the Sharecropper, by Chris Myers Asch; The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing, edited by Marc Smirnoff; It Never Rains In Tiger Stadium, by John Ed Bradley.
The Buddha of Suburbia, by Hanif Kureishi.
The titular guru is the Indian father of the novel’s hero Karim—a man banal and bothered at home but an exotic mystic in the eyes of his perceived social betters, busy trying to achieve transcendence through free love and interior decorating. Karim is instructed by the nihilism—and the narcissismof the punk movement, and his journey makes The Buddha of Suburbia a superior first novel to Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, published two years prior with similar themes, and a clear blueprint for Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and On Beauty. Kureishi’s drive for drawing multicultural characters who seek education and mind expansion, rather than scoffing at and suppressing it, is a nice balm for the anti-intellectualism of ’ 08, no?— Kyle Brazzel, feature writer and columnist,
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