Books are good company in sad times and happy times, for books are people--people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book."
-- E.B. White
"Books are a uniquely portable magic."
-- Stephen King
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* The following books are listed alphabetically, by the authors' last names.
10 FAVORITE READS OF 2023
You are Beautiful and You Are Alone:
The Biography of Nico (2021) -- Jennifer Otter Bickerdike
Full disclosure: I must admit for the longest time I knew next to nothing about the tall, blonde ingenue singer/songwriter/musician Nico, with her unique baritone voice and stubborn, thick German accent, and her finely chiseled cheekbones (giving hint to her days as a former fashion model), and her involvement, throughout the 1960s, with the likes of Andy Warhol and his Factory art studio in New York City, and her (relatively brief) involvement in the Velvet Underground, and her legendary notoriety of drug addiction, etc.
I was aware of some things about her: I remember one of my most cognizant associations with her (aside from hearing some of her tracks with Lou Reed, John Cale, and the Velvet Underground) came from filmmaker Wes Anderson's famous needle-drop of Nico's version of Jackson Browne's "These Days" during the wonderful Green Line Bus scene in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). [Aside: Unforgettable.]
Born Christa Paffgen in post-Hitler Germany and eventually renaming herself Nico, she would dip her toes into modeling and acting, landing a significant part in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960). She was rumored to have a bisexual affair with the French actress Jeanne Moreau, as well as relationships with Ernest Hemingway, Lou Reed, French actor Alain Delon, Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan (who purportedly wrote the song "I'll Keep It With Mine" for her). She recorded several solo albums, toured, slipped ever deeper into heroin addiction, and died in 1988. She was only 49.
Bickerdike's book is not always particularly well-written or fair-handed, I think. The author is often quick to smooth over some of the uglier parts of Nico's character (including accusations of recurring, violent attacks of anti-Semitism and racism). Nico was and is a difficult and complicated subject for a biographer--she is sometimes, oftentimes, hard to like. She is sad. She is tragic. But her story--and Bickerdike's unfolding of that story--is undeniably readable and hard to set aside. Love her or hate her, Nico was groundbreaking and important.
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005) -- Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
Like Nico above (ironically), I knew only the vaguest details about this person called Robert Oppenheimer. I knew of the Manhattan Project, of course, and of the Trinity test site in the desert of New Mexico, and of the twin horrible mornings of August 6, 1945, in Hiroshima, Japan, and August 9, 1945, in Nagasaki, Japan.
Oh, and I also knew of the name Oppenheimer and his "deadly toy" from Sting's 1985 hit, "Russians." [Aside: Such is my life.]
This is one of the most intensely thorough and well-written biographies I've ever read. Published in 2005 but started 25 years before, historian Martin J. Sherwin eventually recruited the aid of fellow writer and historian Kai Bird to assist in the researching, and the interviewing, and the writing, and the rewriting of the massive undertaking. Sherwin would not live to see the publication of the book, but Bird would follow on and see the long project through to its completion. The book, an eventual Pulitzer Prize winner, resurfaced this past year, of course, serving as much of the skeleton of Christopher Nolan's critically acclaimed 2023 film, Oppenheimer. I wanted to read the book to learn more about the enigmatic, prickly genius in the desert, so I could--if nothing else--perhaps have a better understanding of the man and of his resultant "tragedy" before going into the film.
I'm glad I did.
The Shards (2023) -- Bret Easton Ellis
Bret Easton Ellis, a young writer who came of age in the early-mid 1980s as a member of the Gen X "literary Brat Pack," published his first novel, Less Than Zero, in 1985 when he was only 21 years old. He was immediately on the cultural map of the day, thrust into the chaos of instant stardom and celebrity. Other books would follow, including 1991's notorious American Psycho--to date still his most successful novel, as well as his most controversial. Though embraced by some readers upon its initial release, American Psycho was generally reviled and misunderstood and labeled as misogynistic trash. (This reader, however, still regards Ellis' third novel highly: I would rank it as one of the most important books of the 1990s decade, not to mention one of the greatest sustained satires in contemporary American fiction since Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Seriously.)
But all of that aside, Ellis' writing career since his heyday has grown spotty at best. It's been 13 years since the publication of Imperial Bedrooms (2010), a sequel to his famous 1985 debut. And then in 2023 we saw the arrival of The Shards, a fictional-memoir of Ellis' senior year in high school in the Hollywood Hills of 1981. Ellis himself (or at least a fictionalized version of himself) is the book's main character and narrator, recounting events that occurred involving a series of brutal murders in the area, and growing to include, eventually, him and his intimate circle of friends.
It is an odd mixture, in a way, of his two most famous novels, and though at times the plotting is a bit slow, a bit stretched out, a bit too gratuitous and fantastical, it becomes apparent that there is method at work to the telling of the tale. And Ellis tells it well. He is still a skillful and assured writer, and this is a compelling "comeback."
The Last Chairlift (2022) -- John Irving
John Irving has always been a friend to left-wing politics and policies in this country. His novels are replete with the often disenfranchised, overlooked, misunderstood, mistreated, and misfit characters from the outlying world of the "perverse," of the taboo, of the socially unacceptable. From his breakout fourth novel and his first masterpiece, The World According to Garp (1978), in which he dealt with gender issues (primarily women and transgender...long before "transgender" was a catchword in the culture); to another masterpiece, The Cider House Rules (1985), in which he took on the issue of incest and the argument, again, of women's rights--particularly, this time, abortion; to yet another masterpiece (and still one of my favorite novels), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), taking aim, among several other things, at the Vietnam War and the 1960's counter-culture/Anti-War movement at home.
He is, without a doubt, one of my favorites. I think he is an American treasure. At 81 years of age, this--his latest novel--is "only" his 15th. He doesn't put books out quickly. Some of this is because: 1.) He is, by his own admission, a slow writer, agonizing over the work, shaping it, perfecting it, beginning--quite literally--with the last chapter and the last scene of each book, knowing, in detail, how the story will end, and then working backwards from there; and 2.) Many, if not most, of his greatest novels are long novels, densely packed with characters, and plot, and detail. It is no secret, in fact, that one of his favorite authors, and a great influence on his own writing, is the 19th-century English writer Charles Dickens. This affection for classical 19th-century European novels is of huge importance to Irving's writing. He is a modern 19th-century artist at his core; but whereas his hero, Dickens, could turn out massive tomes with the ease of breathing, it would seem, Irving labors over a book. He takes his time.
My point is, I don't know how many more novels Irving has left in him. He has said, in interviews for this book, that he thinks of each of his novels in terms of trains: He envisions them sitting on rails at a station, awaiting their time. Some of these trains are shorter and some are longer. The Last Chairlift, he claims, is his last "long train." He doesn't have any more long books in him. And so the novel does--admittedly--read a bit like a Greatest Hits sort of novel, in a way. I don't mean that disparagingly, either. I say it with love and admiration of the man's lifework. But it is a book that clocks in at 900 pages. (Yes, that's not a typo.) And it is filled to the brim with "John Irving characters" living out their lives, working through their conflicts, and struggling their way through the densely-wrought construct of a "John Irving novel."
And I loved every last bit of it.
The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019) -- Dorian Lynskey
Reportedly, when Donald Trump won the election to the U.S. Presidency in 2016 and summarily took office, sales of George Orwell's classic science fiction/dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four saw an increase in sales of 9,500%.
[Aside: Let's just stop and think about that number for a moment....]
Spurred on, partly, by such a cultural phenomenon, author Dorian Lynskey took on the task of writing: 1.) A deep-dive exploration into Orwell's literary precursors and influences: 2.) A mini-biography of Orwell himself and his subsequent involvement as a journalist in the Spanish Civil War (indispensable to the formation of the young writer's political leanings and artistic temperament); and 3.) a short but incisive literary disentanglement of Orwell's classic political novels Animal Farm (1945) and most particularly (obviously) Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), as well as their possible connections to our current day, since, after all, "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past...." (Nineteen Eighty-Four).
Not only for book-nerds and literary-buffs, Lynskey's book is accessible, readable, enjoyable, and highly thought-provoking.
Rememberings (2021) -- Sinead O'Connor
This is a true story:
It was 1990. I was a 23-year old young man, without--presumably--a care in the world, lounging around one afternoon and watching MTV. Suddenly a face appears on the television screen--a woman's face, a young woman, finely sculpted, wearing a black turtleneck, standing in front of a black background, her hair buzzed short, and her eyes...oh my God the most amazing piercingly-blue wide eyes staring directly into the camera, directly beyond MTV, directly through the television screen, and directly at me. And the voice, her voice, that begins to sing over a simple resonant chord, eventually joining with a drumbeat and backing music and vocals, comes out of her mouth and suddenly makes whatever I thought I was doing that afternoon seem completely, utterly meaningless....
The song/video was "Nothing Compares 2 U." The singer, I would come to find out, was a young Irish artist by the exotic and sexy name, Sinead O'Connor. And all I could help thinking at the time was: "Who the fuck is this?!"
I immediately rushed out and snatched up a copy of her then-current CD, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got (still, to this day, one of my favorite albums; a great collection of songs, with not one weak link in it), and soon picked up her previous album, as well, The Lion and the Cobra (1987). For months--a long stretch of 1990 and into the following year--O'Connor's CDs were on constant rotation in either my car or on my home stereo. I could not get enough of her.
And then the bottom fell out when she made her infamous October 3, 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live and sang Bob Marley's 1976 protest song, "War" (complete with some of her own original lyrics related to child abuse), finishing off the performance with yelling into the microphone, "Fight the real enemy!", and tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II (taken from her mother's bedroom years before), and dropping the pieces to the stage floor in stunned silence. [Aside: I remember watching all of that too....]
In an age before "cancel culture" was a nominal thing, Sinead O'Connor was promptly, summarily "canceled."
When I saw in the bookstore a new memoir from her a few years ago, I knew I had to have it. I hadn't heard anything from her or about her for a while. I was curious. And I let the book sit on my shelf for a time, until this past year when I decided to pull it down and give it a read.
Literally weeks upon finishing her book and closing the back cover, the news came out last summer about her sudden, untimely death. And amidst the sadness of her life, and her career (both its highs and lows), and her early ending, there was and is and always will be her music and her voice. And it reminds us of her raw, primal talent. And it leaves us wanting exactly what we haven't got.
Wading in Waist-High Water:
The Lyrics of Fleet Foxes (2022) -- Robin Pecknold
Exactly as the title of the collection promises, this is Robin Pecknold's compiled poetry/lyrics of 55 songs, spanning the current studio albums (unbelievably only 5 to date) from Pecknold and his Seattle, WA band, Fleet Foxes. Formed in 2006 and releasing its first album in 2008, the band has gone on to accrue a devoted and finely focused fanbase. Its musically diverse arrangements, and fluid time signatures, and poetic lyrical content, and tight, harmonic vocals have given Fleet Foxes an almost impossible-to-categorize style. Suffice to say, I have heard the band's music labeled as "Prog Folk." (And that seems pretty accurate to me.)
I have listened to the band from the beginning. I have seen them live. I have followed their performances online. I know these songs front and back.... Or at least I thought I did. And what this book makes clear is that there are layers to these songs--lyrically, metaphorically, tonally--that I had not noticed before nor even thought about before. What becomes clear reading the songs' lyrics this way--turning the book's pages, absorbing the songs' recurring imagery, metaphor, subject matter--is just how close all of this really is to poetry, and subsequently how closely all of the songs work together to form a complete body of work. Themes of love, destiny, family, loss, nature, friendship, and finding a way to lead an honest, authentic life are all floating through the ether of Pecknold's poems.
Reading this slim volume made me appreciate even more a band that I already loved. What a great little book.
Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)
-- Neil Postman
A bombshell when it first appeared in 1985, this book originally grew from a talk given by Neil Postman (a former educator) a year earlier in 1984--that strange "Orwellian year"--when he was asked to participate on a panel regarding the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and its relation to the contemporary world. Postman chose to hold up in comparison the two classic British dystopian novels of the mid-20th century, Orwell's novel (1949) and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932). His thesis then was that it is, in fact, Huxley's novel that reflects most closely the times we find ourselves in. As Postman points out, it is Huxley's future nightmare that sees society satiated, bored, contented, numbed with state-controlled entertainment and amusement, as opposed to Orwell's future nightmare that sees society numbed by state-controlled secrecy, propaganda, fear, torture, terrorism, violence, and death. According to Postman, it is a Huxleyian world we inhabit more than an Orwellian world.
Of course all of this was originally written and published almost 40 years ago, in the dusky past of Reagan's 1985, when the advent of 24-hr. cable news (CNN) and sports (ESPN) and entertainment (MTV) was in the ascendancy. Postman was talking about TV and its malignant threat to society--the dumbing-down, the lowering of standards, the dependence on technology, the demise of creativity, of rationality, of human intention and ambition and thought....
It doesn't take a genius to read Postman's pronouncements from 1985 and make the leap to 2023, where we all have instant, around-the-clock access to--forget about simple television--a viable computer now in our pocket, at our fingertips, ready to go at all times, listening to us, watching us, directing us, making decisions for us, entertaining us, filling our days, guiding our lives.
We're in trouble, and Postman saw it 40 years ago. This is a book that, frighteningly, is maybe even more relevant today than when it was first published. Essential reading for anyone who cares.
The Human Stain (2000) -- Philip Roth
I use phrases a lot when talking about writers I admire: "One of the great living writers," I might say; or "A great contemporary author," possibly; or "One of the best writers of the past 50 years," etc.
But if I'm asked to choose a "greatest" among American writers who has either recently passed or who is still alive and writing, I believe Philip Roth will be one of three who--in times to come--will be mentioned as one of the great American novelists of the last half of the 20th century and the opening decades of the 21st century. I believe he will be mentioned the same way we talk about great, foundational writers of the (fairly) recent past--novelists like Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, and Faulkner. The legends. The heavyweights. The artists.
I think Roth is that good, that important, that lasting.
The Human Stain, published in 2000, forms the third part of a loose "trilogy," of sorts (more like a triptych, I suppose), starting with the great American Pastoral (1997) and continued one year later with I Married a Communist (1998).
The book's narrator, the writer Nathan Zuckerman (who appears in several earlier Roth novels and is at times considered to be a fictional stand-in for Roth himself) is the common thread that runs through the three novels. In The Human Stain, Zuckerman is approached by Coleman Silk, a retired eminent classics professor at a prestigious East-coast college, who left his teaching career in disgrace after being accused, by some students, of making a racially insensitive slur in his classroom. Silk, who resigned in disgrace then (in order to avoid scandal) enlists Zuckerman to tell his story.
And the story of Silk's life is a stunner. As is Roth's novel, here. His writing is so clear, and crisp, and potent, and powerful. Roth was an absolute master, and this is yet another late-career work of art from him. It is a work of genius.
The Queen's Gambit (1983) -- Walter Tevis
Let's be clear: While I suppose there is some perverse desire deep inside me to foster a misguided notion in people that I'm an avid chess player--and not only an avid chess player but a good avid chess player--the truth is that while, yes, I have played chess before, and yes, I have read books about chess, and while I am interested in the game and can sit before a board and move pieces around and literally "play" chess, I am not a good chess player; I am certainly not an avid chess player; and if I'm really pressed to be honest, I don't even know if I can claim that I fully understand the game.
But I know I would like to. I have always wanted to be a chess player. For some reason I have always wanted to be that guy--the one who knows the game, who can talk about classic matches, classic moves, classic openings, classic endings.
But I'm not. And I'm okay with that. (I guess.) And so while I'm being honest I will admit that, like many readers, I suppose, I came to Walter Tevis' "little chess novel" by way of its 2020 miniseries on Netflix, starring Anya Taylor-Joy in the lead role of Beth Harmon.
That movie adaptation was fantastic, I thought. Tevis' book is even better. Possibly most well known for his tough, classic 1959 debut novel, The Hustler (turned into the equally great film starring Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason), Tevis would also gain notoriety for subsequent novels (as well as their popular film adaptations) like 1963's The Man Who Fell to Earth (with its psychedelic, trippy sci-fi fantasia starring David Bowie), and his sequel to The Hustler, 1984's The Color of Money (which would, in turn, be translated to the screen by the great Martin Scorsese).
But back to The Queen's Gambit, for the moment--a quiet, unassuming, brilliant, perfectly written little novel, with every word in its right place, nothing absent, nothing wanting, complete. Read it.
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