“How?” asked the staring Professor. “Why?”
“Because I am afraid of him,” said Syme; “and no man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.”- G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
Jacob Bacharach observed something on his blog the other day that prompted a reminiscence of my own: my lingering fondness for Catholic novelists. G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, C.S. Lewis, Walker Percy, Tim Powers, Walter M. Miller: I could pick up any of the novels of theirs I own and read them again today, for unexamined pleasure, no matter how many times I’ve read the book I pick*. They’ve survived for me, while the catechism has dwindled.
Why is that? Part of it involves the gentle wit of their style. Maybe they’re all cribbing Chesterton and Lewis, condemning the excesses of the secular world with sardonicism and a touch of smugness. A more savage satire would be off-putting, given its source, and that sort of bitterness gets tiring in heavy doses. It speaks to the snob in me, the man who’s been affecting world weariness for half his life, and it makes me feel like less of a boor for doing it.
Part of it likely involves their flavor of mid-century Catholicism. Late 20th-century readers, familiar with the Church of Rome only through encyclicals and headlines, wouldn’t recognize Catholicism the way it’s portrayed at the Order of Leibowicz or on Malacandra. It admits that, no, faith doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but what in secula seculorum does? Given the last century’s few benighted attempts at letting the intellectuals run the show, I can’t deny the appeal. There’s something Byronic in that doomed romanticism, something existentialist in the willingness to push on even in the absence of reason. The new atheists have yet to achieve such sentiment, anyway.
“One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a playworld which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”
- C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair
The third part, of course, is nostalgia.
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* Which isn’t to say I’m oblivious to their flaws: Chesterton’s tendency to pass paradox off as wisdom, Lewis’s bogus apologia, and so forth.
Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy: 
, Felix Gilman. One of the most fresh, original fantasies I’ve read in years, and with an ingenious style as well. Gilman’s fantasy one-off of the American West is colorful, entertaining, and vivid. He dispenses with the pretentious language common to fantasy writers and, in doing so, packs an epic level of exploration into a modest tome. Loses a bit of narrative momentum in the final act, but the setting remains so fascinating and the characters so believable in their desperation that the pages keep turning.
Best Literary Fiction (tie): 
Best Literary Fiction (tie): 
, Jennifer Egan. Everything a modern novel should be: funny, moving, full of detail, light in language, laden with themes without being obvious, and above all free of pretense. It’s a story of social networks, both in the modern Facebook sense and in the original “friends of friends” sense. It’s also a story of family, love, self-consciousness, terrible people rationalizing their behavior, and rock ‘n roll.
Best Non-Fiction (Memoir): 
, Jay-Z. The definitive guide to hip-hop culture. This isn’t just an intensive look at the lyrical process and colorful history of Shawn Carter – though it would be worth it for that alone. It’s also a ground-level view of street life in America, from the corners of Marcy Projects to the curbs of Trenton to center stage at Madison Square Garden. Jay-Z writes with the efficiency and skill that you’d expect from a world class rhymer. An eye-opening book and a key to understanding the culture that one third of America lives.
Best Non-Fiction (Instructional/Informational): 
, Rory Miller. One of the most instructive, provocative books I’ve ever read. Recommended without qualification for anyone who wants to know how to get out of a fight. This is NOT a book packed with martial arts techniques (there are a handful, none dwelt on for more than a few pages). This is not a book about how to win every fight you come across. Rather, this is a book about the few seconds before a fight: how you can recognize that a fight is brewing and, most importantly, how you can avoid it. That alone justifies the purchase price.
Best Thriller/Mystery: 
, Lee Child. After the disappointment of 61 HOURS, a brilliant return to form. This is another flashback Jack Reacher episode (shortly after THE ENEMY, immediately before THE KILLING FLOOR). Reacher is thrust into an impossible mystery with a variety of forces arrayed against him. Smart, sexy, fast-paced and bloody. (My only complaint is that he used the genre trope of ending a chapter on a cliffhanger that he immediately resolved on the next page. More than once. That’s cheap, Child)
Unsung Hero: 
, Patrick deWitt. A brutal, absurd, existentialist Western, in the style of Cormac McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN but with more humor. Charlie and Eli Sisters are the deadliest killers on the West Coast, a pair of gunmen who feud – and who defend each other – as only brothers can. DeWitt’s dry, dark style yanks you around between sympathizing with these scamps and recoiling at their casual capacity for murder, which is of course the point. Recommended for all fans of McCarthy, the Coen Brothers, or truly dark comedy.
Biggest Disappointment: 
, Lev Grossman. I loved THE MAGICIANS (Lev Grossman’s first book in this series) because of its tone of detached, ironic cynicism. It never took the genre of magical schoolkids too seriously – in fact, Grossman went a long way toward deconstructing the genre. The magical school was very trying; grown-up wizards were bratty and gossipy; the magical quests were brutal and tiring. And the moral of the story, that the first barrier to happiness often lies within oneself, was solid.
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.