A good friend complained that I never update this blog anymore. So let me recycle some content from Goodreads and cover some highlights of the 50 books I read in 2012.
Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy: The Half-Made World
Honorary Mention: The Magicians (Lev Grossman), Scorch (Gina Damico), Twenty Palaces (Harry Connolly)
Best Literary Fiction (tie): Bel Canto, Ann Patchett. A beautifully composed story, packed with a fascinating yet immensely believable cast of characters, full of gentle humor and romantic spirit. Patchett’s writing, and her ability to handle multiple viewpoints with fidelity, gives the story an epic scope, despite the fact that it takes place entirely in one house over the course of five months. Add in just a touch of magical realism – although, really, not much more than in any of Patchett’s novels – and you have a tale about bonds forged under hardship, connections that transcend the spoken word, the eternal power of hope, and love.
Best Literary Fiction (tie): A Visit from the Goon Squad
Honorary Mention: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Michael Chabon), State of Wonder (Ann Patchett), The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen)
Best Non-Fiction (Memoir): Decoded
Honorable Mention: Ball Four (Jim Bouton), The Manhattan Project (Cynthia Kelly)
Best Non-Fiction (Instructional/Informational): Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected
If you need any more convincing: I’ve been studying and teaching martial arts for twelve years. Halfway through this book, I started recognizing things I’ve done wrong. In practice, in real fights, in my own mindset. This book was an eye-opener.
Honorable Mention: Debt: The First 5000 Years (David Graeber), Let’s Get Digital (David Gaughran), The Cult of the Presidency (Gene Healy)
Best Thriller/Mystery: The Affair
Unsung Hero: The Sisters Brothers
Honorable Mention: Everything I Tell You is a Lie (Fingers Murphy), The Dirty Parts of the Bible (Sam Torode)
Biggest Disappointment: The Magician King: A Novel (The Magicians)
THE MAGICIAN KING squanders most of that good ground.
For one, Quentin, protagonist of the first book, has not matured much since. Watching Quentin miss things about himself and his friends that were obvious to everyone else was entertaining in the first book (unreliable narrator!); in the second, it’s just tiresome.
For another, not only does Grossman apparently take the hallmarks of the Heroic Journey seriously this time around, so does every other character in the story. Not only that, they all comment on it with an arch knowingness that gets instantly old. More than once a character observes that they are on a quest, and so this must be time for that next part of the quest, etc. This is also peppered with that sort of smug, exacting, pop cultural tangentialism that only Joss Whedon can pull off (and I’m not the biggest Whedon fan, so you can tell how much I liked this).
For all of this, I was willing to give the book a pass. But the sections of Julia’s backstory were unrelentingly creepy. Every female character in the story gets objectified to some extent – the author letting you know exactly how sexy you should find them, in no uncertain terms – but Julia’s experience is the worst. Not only is it seedy, but it wallows in its seediness. And just when you think things can’t get any worse for her, they get disgustingly bad.
The overall quest that Quentin is unwittingly set on is an afterthought, tacked on as an excuse. What saves this book, somewhat, are Grossman’s gift of invention and capacity for keeping the pages turning. But I can’t honestly recommend it, unless you can stomach hyper-literacy substituting for wit and unpleasant sexualization more than I can.
Dishonorable Mentions: The Wise Man’s Fear (Patrick Rothfuss), Switchflipped (Greg Stolze), Bleeding Hearts (Ian Rankin), The Mongoliad (everyone, apparently)
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That’s this year’s list. You can check out the entries for 2011, 2010, 2009, or 2008 if you’re hungry for more.
Not even close. I have plenty of good things to say about Charles Stross and Patrick Rothfuss, both excellent at their craft. But Gene Wolfe’s daunting tetralogy is one of the few science fiction novels in the 20th century that has an undisputed claim to being literature. Not a literary novel that backs into the sci-fi genre (like Slaughterhouse-Five or The Handmaid’s Tale) but unapologetic genre fiction that challenges the boundaries of style, theme and narrative. As I mentioned when I finished it, The Book of the New Sun is better at what Infinite Jest tried to do than Infinite Jest was. Recommended for anyone who wants a challenge.
A groundbreaking work. An excellent middle ground between the breezy fantasies of Ian Fleming and the rain-soaked existentialism of le Carre, Len Deighton’s unnamed spy navigates the bureaucracy of British intelligence, the conspiracies of foreign agencies in a Cold War and the occasional gunfight. He weathers it all with a cool facade that belies a nervous, analytical mind. Hidden in here is a great story about the way intelligence networks use and dispose of assets, plus some good clean writing.
I have my reservations regarding this one. DFW is a genius with language, certainly, but this one could still be about two hundred pages shorter. Not every paragraph in here is an arrow at the heart. And yet the scope of what this book accomplishes, as well as its importance in the cultural landscape, combined with the fact that it’s genuinely good, propel it to the top of the pile. Not just an important read, but an engaging one (85% of the time). One of those books you have to read to understand the American experience.
A hotly contested field. But I can’t give it to A Distant Mirror because I’m not done with it yet (a shoe-in for next year; though). I can’t give it to The Ascent of Money because Ferguson, informative as he is, was too dry to really keep my interest (I’ve had this book since the day after I got my Kindle and have only just recently finished it). But Fortune’s Formula is incredible. Ignore the eye-catching subtext about the geniuses who beat Vegas and Wall Street. Fortune’s Formula is a history of money, communication and information in America, in both licit and illicit forms. Here’s the story of the gamblers who put the intracontinental wire service on the map; of cryptographers to whom we owe digital computing and the Internet; of mortgage brokers crashing the stock market (the first time). Here also is a story of gambling, investment and math. It’s all true, and it’s impossible to put down.
I have very low expectations of fantasy fiction. I expect flowery prose, melodramatic pacing and inappropriate use of glottal stop apostrophes. The Name of the Wind surprised me with its serious stakes, its anachronistic tone and its tweaks to the nose of fantastic convention. It’s Harry Potter for grown-ups: the protagonist, a student in a magical academy, has to scrape together every penny he can, has realistic relationships with friends and coeds, and has no prophecy to coax him along. The sequel can’t come fast enough.
Ad Nauseam was a close one – a collection of unrelated articles that would be better served as a blog than as a paper book. But at least there was something useful. 61 Hours is Lee Child’s most flaccid thriller. Jack Reacher, its protagonist, is typically a man who uses guile, knowledge won through experience and occasional brute force to triumph over an army of foes (see Persuader; One Shot; The Hard Way; Bad Luck and Trouble, etc). In 61 Hours, Jack Reacher is a guy who wanders from scene to scene, impacting nothing. The plot unfolds without him. There’s a reason this is the cheapest Reacher book you can buy for Kindle on Amazon.com.
Winner: The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin’s strength has always been to illustrate the odd quirks of human society by depicting them through the eyes of aliens. In lesser writers, this might come across as a condemnation; with Le Guin, it’s simple re-evaluation. How does the commodification of labor, food, comfort, shelter and everything else we take for granted in a capitalist society shape us? It may be the most efficient means of distribution yet discovered (as I believe), but it is if nothing else odd. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed makes that clear.
Winner: Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane. A tough one, really. All the Harlan Coben and Lee Child novels were roughly equivalent – good, diverting, fast-paced but ultimately just a little too contrived to merit a Best In Year title. But Lehane has a smooth, strong style like the pull of gravity. His tale of two federal agents investigating a disappearance in an insane asylum keeps the reader rattled, uncertain and hooked all the way through. Read it before the movie comes out.
Winner: No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy. Stephenson’s penchant for long-winded asides, though entertaining and informative, keeps his novels from being the focused vectors of craft that they ought to be. And Bulgakov’s whirlwind satire of Stalinism vaults confusingly – though whimsically – from point to point. It’s McCarthy’s highly regarded novel that earns the top slot. Though all of his best novels concern the absurdity of human plans in the face of mortality, No Country makes those plans easily accessible to a modern audience (how to steal two million dollars of the mob’s money). And he gives mortality a face and a name, in the person of Anton Chigurh.
Winner: Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain. I wanted to give it to one of the political depth charges I read this year – Bacevich’s The Limits of Power, Sharlet’s The Family, Chalmers Johnson’s Nemesis. Ultimately, however, they all padded their word counts with exhaustive details that showed the depth of their research but sacrificed the grace of their story. Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, on the other hand, paints a vivid, unflattering and engrossing picture of the transactions going on in each restaurant kitchen in America. It’s a wild ride, and Bourdain deserves the fame this book has brought him.
Winner: Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson. Perhaps I’m cheating somewhat here, as I never finished Red Mars as a teenager. But that gave Robinson the greatest burden to fight against. I knew what to expect from Powers, Bester, Varley and Zelazny going in, but I had low expectations for Robinson. “I couldn’t slog my way through this before,” I thought, “what hope do I have now?” Boy, was I off. A sweeping, detailed, realistic and ultimately very human look at how a disparate group of humans might terraform our neighbor planet.
Winner: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz. Picking up this critically acclaimed novel, I was expecting a dense bildungsroman set in the Dominican Republic, one of those Important Novels that everybody reads but nobody enjoys. Instead, Diaz treated me to a breezy trip through three generations of laborers, hustlers, players and geeks. He sprinkles his anecdotes with note-perfect references to sci-fi and early 80s RPGs as well – and trust me, I would have noticed if he got them wrong. Read it, love it.
Winner: Emergency, Neil Strauss. Jack and Jill I should have known would let me down; more than enough critics have heaped their derision on James Patterson for me to be wise. And my inability to plow through How The Mind Works says as much of my short attention span as Pinker’s dense, myopic writing style. But Emergency was pitched to me as 
Winner: One Shot, Lee Child. Really, any of the Lee Child books could have answered here. Jack Reacher, his sullen, hulking ex-MP hero, is like Sherlock Holmes meets Jack Bauer: competent enough to take anybody down with his hands or with a gun, but usually capable of outwitting them first. Perfect beach or airport reading.
