"It felt like the world had divided into two different types of people, those who had felt pain and those who had yet to."
-- Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart
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We are living in splintered times.
[Aside: Just saying such a sentiment makes the sentiment seem untrue, makes it seem too overtly obvious, too meaninglessly trite, too flat-out sentimental. But it's true: the times we are living in--the times that we have been living in for quite some time now--are beyond the pale in their ability to hurt us, and to lash out at us, and to cause us to feel isolated, and to cause us to feel anxiety, and sadness, and maybe even despair.]
We have all possibly felt it from time to time recently. I am not describing anything new for any of us. I know that.
In such times, though, we can seek out the company and the comfort of others. Friends. Family. Loved ones. The calm found in the presence of someone else. Succor. Solace. Call it whatever you want; it is "strength in numbers" sort of stuff. And it is real. But you could alternatively choose the opposite reaction and purposely seek, instead, to be alone.
The comfort of yourself--there is nothing quite like it; there is also nothing wrong with it.
There can be, and is, great medicinal benefit to securing for yourself a little quiet time every now and then, a little alone time, a little time in which you allow yourself to simply be yourself. Time in which you give yourself permission to enjoy the silence. Time in which you grant yourself the freedom to admit--if only to yourself--that it is okay to spend some time alone.
In such quiet times over this past year, I enjoyed the quiet company of books (words, authors, story-presence), and so I was never quite alone. It helped the time to pass, all the days and weeks and months of another year in pandemic-mode. We all have our own ways of dealing with it; we all do what we can. I like to read. And so I read a lot over the past year. I had some time to spare in 2021--alone and yet not alone--and I enjoyed my time spent with some great books.
Below is a selection, listed alphabetically, of some of the better books I read last year--a form of healing, of sorts, in these broken, wounded, divisive times.
FAVORITE READS OF THE PAST YEAR -- 2021:
Zauner--a young musician hailing from the northwestern music scene of Oregon and Seattle--is best known today as the singer/songwriter/guitarist of the indie rock/pop band, Japanese Breakfast. Before that she served a brief stint in the band Little Big League. Now she can add bestselling, award-winning author to her CV with this, her first book, evolved from a 2018 essay she originally published in The New Yorker. Born half-Caucasian (her father) and half Korean (her mother), Zauner's book is part grief-memoir, part identity-discovery testimony, part love story, part lyrical ode to her growing up a part of two cultures, and part introduction to Asian/Korean cuisine. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College's school of creative writing, Zauner is the real deal as a writer. She knows what she's doing here. Poetic. Confessional. Hilarious. Moving. Insightful. Wise beyond her years. And unforgettable.
Fleishman Is in Trouble (2019) -- Taffy Brodesser-Akner
New York City power-couple Toby Flieshman (a successful, young doctor) and his beautiful wife, Rachel (a successful, young talent agent) find themselves locked in a bitter divorce. Told in the 2nd-person, Toby is the novel's central character (at first), while the book's narrator is a woman who has been close friends with Toby since college, and who--we learn later in the novel--has a troubled marriage of her own. The novel is an interesting take on the relationship between men and women, gender roles, and domestic nightmares in various forms. (The Fleishman "in trouble," according to the book's title, might be Toby, as we are led to assume. Or it might be Rachel....) As soon as you think you have the characters and the story figured out, Brodesser-Akner--a staff writer at The New York Times, in this, her debut novel--pulls the rug out from under your expectations; you find yourself suddenly uncomfortable and unsure of all you thought you knew.
Horror Stories: A Memoir (2019) -- Liz Phair
It should come as no surprise that Liz Phair can write her ass off. The indie-auteur phenom of the early1990s music scene (indelibly linked with a genre of "alternative rock" of the day, blending in-your-face confessional poetry with in-your-face guitar-hooked pop-rock, which she helped to usher in) is most well known for her flat-out masterpiece, the 1993 album Exile in Guyville. And now (like Michelle Zauner above) we have Phair's first book, proving something her fans have already always known: Phair is a wonderful storyteller. Her individual chapters are all standalone stories pulled from various incidents in her life. At times these stories read more like a collection of contemporary fiction, and you find yourself thinking, This surely couldn't have happened like this.... But then of course she reminds you, through her art, that this is exactly how life is, and this is exactly how it all went down.
Interior Chinatown (2020) -- Charles Yu
This 2020 National Book Award-winner is a gem. Only the second novel from Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown tells an (at times) epic story of the Chinese-American immigrant experience while all the while telling the intimately personal story of young Willis Wu, "Generic Asian Man" and occasional "Delivery Guy" in a fictional TV cop-show Black and White, where he dreams--always in the background, typecast as the "model minority"--to someday take the spotlight and play the coveted role of "Kung Fu Guy." Written in a deceptively playful postmodern manner--including being formatted as a motion picture screenplay--this is a funny, harrowing, and ultimately moving experiment in both fact and fiction. I love this book.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004) -- Susanna Clarke
A brief story about this book:
In the long-ago days of my separation and eventual divorce (beginning way back in the dim year of 2004), I remember initially taking only a few things with me as I left the house. Essentials--the usual day-to-stuff one needs to get by, if only for a short while (or what would turn out to be another lifetime). Among the things I took with me at that time was a hardback copy of this book, just recently published. I tried to start reading it then, in the early days of my exiled solitude and loneliness. Susanna Clarke's dense, immense alternative-history fantasy (set in 19th-century, Napoleonic-war era England) was just a bit too much for my addled brain then. And I gave it up, only about 1/4 of the way through. Fast-forward (but not too fast) 17 years later, and I pulled the book from my shelves again, blew the dust from it, and cracked it open to the first page....
Long story short: I could not turn the pages fast enough this time. And it occurred to me, as I read it in earnest at this point in my life {with all that has happened to me since I first took the book with me as solace, to help me get lost in another world so long ago) that the person I was way back when wasn't ready to tackle the novel. I wasn't in the right place in my life. But I was ready now for Clarke's amazingly clever and unique tale, so much its own creation. Books will wait for us, I realized. They will choose their readers carefully. (Even though we think we choose them.) And when the time is right, they will select us. And they will carefully read us--all the while teaching us how, and when, to finally fully read them.
This book is a contemporary literary masterpiece of speculative/fantasy fiction. It deserves to be remembered, and read, and revered for ages.
Klara and the Sun (2021) -- Kazuo Ishiguro
No one--and I mean no one--writes a novel like Nobel Prize-winner, Kazuo Ishiguro. It is not easy to pinpoint exactly what it is he does that is so damned special. But it is there, in between the words almost, lodged in the characters and their plight--so fraught with longing, and desperation, and their dream of happiness, and the awareness of the almost impossible gulf between them and what it is they most desire. No one writing today comes close to Ishiguro for touching--every single time--upon just what it means to be human. Almost in parallel lines with his masterful 2005 dystopian science fiction novel, Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro's latest novel exists as a sort of "spiritual" sequel, in line with that earlier novel's themes.
One by one, Ishiguro's books can break your heart. And this one--in its shimmering, impassioned, sad longing--is no exception.
Life Itself: A Memoir (2011) -- Roger Ebert
I wish I could have met Roger Ebert. I wish I could have gotten his autograph. I wish I could have talked to him, asked him some questions--about his life, his art, about writing (of course), about movies (of course). I wish I could have listened to his answers, his anecdotes, his stories of life as an early reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, and then assigned the job as the Sun-Times' film critic, and then the winner of the coveted Pulitzer Prize, and then the popular co-host of the television show(s) he shared (in all its iterations) with beloved rival Chicago Tribune film critic, Gene Siskel. Ebert obviously never knew what he meant to me; growing up as a young boy, a film buff in isolated western Kansas, I first learned about something called "cinema" from this film critic in Chicago. His gift to me was priceless; I feel I owe him a "thank you," at the very least.
This book was his closing gift to all of us. And it is enough.
The Plot Against America (2004) -- Philip Roth
Leave it to Philip Roth to tell us where we would be in 2021. Chilling. Breathtaking. Heartbreaking. Eerie in its prescient, metaphorical glimpse at an all-too-real alternative reality of a fascist America--where Franklin Delano Roosevelt loses the presidential election to famed celebrity aviator/anti-semitic/Nazi-sympathizer Charles Lindbergh. And the rest is...well...history. (Sort of.)
Roth is an American master, and here he was writing at the top of his late-career powers. The Plot Against America is pretty much an undisputed contemporary masterpiece.
Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece (2018) -- Michael Benson
I am an admitted cinephile (in the correct parlance, I suppose). As such, I am also a confessed devotee of the master American filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick. I am a fan of his films; I enjoy them. I like to re-watch them, to think about them, to ponder them, to discuss them, to read about them. I have always liked his groundbreaking 1969 science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey, made in mythic collaboration with legendary science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. I have always liked the movie. I have always admired it and its place in film history. But it's never been a movie that I could honestly say I embraced warmly. That is, maybe...until I read this book. Benson's deep-dive into this strange, wonderful, masterful, one-of-a-kind work of groundbreaking cinematic art made me see Kubrick's classic film, at long last (as if for the first time), as the genuine masterpiece of "human cinema" that it is.
This Isn't Happening: Radiohead's "Kid A" and the Beginning of the 21st Century (2020) -- Steven Hyden
In 1997, the British alternative rock band Radiohead released their third album to the world, OK Computer, and it would quickly become one of those rock albums--arty, thematically conceptual, moody, with guitar and "noise" hooks, and dark, brooding, mysterious lyrics--that is heralded into the rarefied air of the Great Rock Albums of All Time. Three years later appeared their fourth album, their follow-up to a masterpiece that by all rights could not be followed up. And yet...the band did it. Not with a repeat performance of all that worked before, but with the exact opposite, almost. The appearance of Kid A in 2000 (just one year before the paradigm-shifting events of 9-11-01) was perhaps even more thematically, socially, artistically "important" than its predecessor--in fact, maybe one of the most important rock albums ever.
I have always loved Radiohead. And I have always loved the album Kid A. I could not put Hyden's book down.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Billy Summers (2021) -- Stephen King
Let me fill in some background a bit:
Ever since I was in high school and my Algebra teacher, the wonderful Ms. Kris Waldren (a veritable saint in disguise as a math teacher) loaned me her copy of the classic 1978 novel The Stand, I have been a devoted fan of Stephen King. And this was back in the early-to-mid-'80s, when King was in his cocaine-and-alcohol fueled heyday as a masterful storyteller and craftsman of popular (and in several instances very, very good) novels with a largely supernatural bent: Carrie (1974), 'Salem's Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), The Stand (1978), The Dead Zone (1979), Firestarter (1980), Cujo (1981), Different Seasons (1982), Pet Sematary (1982), Christine (1983), The Talisman [with Peter Straub] (1984), It (1986), Misery (1987).... Do I seriously need to keep going? Classics, I would argue. Great American popular novels. All of them.
And then...as is wont to happen over time, something happened. Granted, the man has nothing left to prove anymore. But for at least the past 20 years (or more) he hasn't really proven anything so much, other than that he has kind of run out of ideas and has merely coasted on his reputation and on a working man's devotion to churning out novel after novel after novel, all sadly reading more like caricatured, well-crafted fan fiction. (Which is too bad, because--as the above roll call of titles indicates--when King was in his prime he was on fire and could not be touched. No one was even close. But those days are gone.) And then a funny thing happened last year: He published a good novel. (No, not a great one. I don't think so, anyway. But a strong one. A good one.) Billy Summers hearkens back to his best art of slow, methodical, carefully layered character-building and plot construction. One thing that holds this book back, however, is its tired, cliche' story-type of the good-hearted hired-killer making careful plans to get out of the business, just one last job, a big one, and then he's gone. We've seen it just one too many times before, maybe. (As we have, of course, the young girl who gets thrown into the killer's life, giving him something pure to believe in, something and someone to help redeem him before the inevitable, telegraphed end.) We've seen all of this before. And yet what makes this book good is that King calls back some of his old, latent talent, and he does some of his old tricks, and he shows that he still knows how to do it all and do it very well. Faults and all, the book still does what it is supposed to do. And it kept me turning pages. Which is one of the most basic things you can ask of a writer, I suppose.
July, July (2002) -- Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien is easily one of the greatest living contemporary American authors we have. He is a genuine treasure. His unproclaimed "trilogy" (of sorts) of Vietnam War novels--the National Book Award-winning Going After Cacciato (1978), his masterpiece The Things They Carried (1990), followed by the award-winning In The Lake of the Woods (1994)--are, each of them, unmatched, unparalleled, and untouched in the canon of American Literature. This 2002 effort by O'Brien reads just like that, unfortunately--an effort that for some reason or other just never comes together and never quite works in the manner of his greatest writing. I don't know if he wanted this to be some sort of "Part 4," the last "chapter" of a great tetralogy of his Vietnam War. (If he did, it doesn't read like it. Overall, it reads like what it is: A tired retread of material he has done before and done exceptionally better.) Still...all that being said, there are a few scenes--Vietnam War scenes, particularly--that read just as powerfully as anything he has written. The problem is, those scenes are too few and scattered between longer passages of "present-day" material at a college reunion (The Big Chill sort of vibe), peopled largely by characters who are not particularly interesting or likeable. And yet those great moments linger in your memory, like the sun somehow catching the glint of gold lying in the silt at the bottom of a river. Those moments are very fine.
As it turns out, though--at least to me, anyway--even "lesser" Tim O'Brien (and, let's face it, maybe even "not good" Tim O'Brien) is still worth reading, and maybe even better reading than 90% of what is often out there to read.
Michael Chabon exploded to fame with the 1988 publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh--which, amazingly, he began writing as an undergrad in college and would eventually publish as his MFA graduate thesis. (Who does that?) He would follow this out-of-the-gate success with Wonder Boys (1995), and then the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), as well as 2007's The Yiddish Policeman's Union.
Chabon is a chameleon with his talent. I honestly believe there is nothing he can't do as a writer. And while Moonglow may not be "top-shelf" Michael Chabon--maybe high "middle-shelf," after all--it is still very good. Some postmodern fireworks here in the form of a pseudo-memoir by a writer named Michael Chabon, whose grandfather--dying after a long, full life--begins recounting his charmed life to his grandson, the writer. This is a funny, moving, deeply rich reading experience--kind of like every Chabon novel, in other words.
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (2020) -- Erik Larson
Like so many of the writers and their books on my list this year, I could say of Erik Larson what I have mentioned previously: He can seemingly do anything he wants. As a nonfiction historical writer, his subjects are wide and varied: Isaac's Storm (1999), Devil and the White City (2003), Thunderstruck (2006), In the Garden of Beasts (2011), Dead Wake (2015), and now this one, his latest, about England during W.W. II, about London, specifically, during the Blitz, and about the great British leader Winston Churchill, as he painstakingly struggles to hold the literal structures and the spirits of his country together while patiently trying to urge America (represented by his great friend and ally, President FDR) to come to England's aid. Winston Churchill is so great a character, I am convinced he exists in a world all his own: Had he been created by the greatest English novelist, no one would have ever believed it.
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