I've never been a big fan of polling the audience -- a sure way of becoming depressed is to look at any metric of what's popular. Some weeks The New York Times best-sellers list can make you want to cry.
On the other hand, I do take suggestions, and appreciate it when people give me tips. So before I wrote my recent essay on the best books I read last year, I asked my Facebook and Twitter followers for their favorite books of 2018 and why they chose them. And far more responded than I could fit in the column below.
Not all the books they suggested were published, and I'll admit that I leaned toward obscure and surprising books. But just because a lot of people recommended Michelle Obama's Becoming and Bob Woodward's Fear doesn't mean they're bad reads, only that most readers probably already know about them.
Finally, if you bothered to send me a comment and don't find it included here (and more than 200 of you will) rest assured that it was cut out by some mean old copy editor for reasons of space. And thanks to all.
Randi Romo: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (Vintage). Set in Ethiopia, and then the United States, the book is a rich visualization of trauma, war, loss, love and redemption. A classic recipe shown through a multifaceted lens that makes you glad you've read this story.
Bill Jones: The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump by Michiko Kakutani (Tim Duggan Books). Deeply researched and supported by 34 pages of scrupulously sourced notes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's book provides historical and philosophical perspective, beginning with Arendt and Orwell, on the current assault on truth, facts and science.
Stephanie Vanderslice: The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (Viking). A sweeping, beautifully written book about the AIDS crisis in Chicago and the long-term effects on the survivors, alternating between 1985 and 2015. Un-put-down-able, it will break your heart and put it back together again. One of the best books I've read in years.
Frank Thurmond: The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford University Press). This is the first edition to demonstrate convincingly that Christopher Marlowe collaborated with Bill Shakespeare (and others) on the early three-part Henry VI history plays dramatizing the Wars of the Roses.
Gerald Koonce: Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Collins), who continues to entertain and educate. It is a dual timeline story that like Jon Meacham's The Soul of America: The Battle of Our Better Angels (Random House), reminds us that as bad as it is now, we've been through this before and made it to the other side.
Tara Sheffer: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press). It was delightfully strange and increasingly sharp. There's nothing better than an unlikable character.
Barby Libby Abney: The Reckoning by John Grisham (Penguin Random House). Periodically he comes up with one that is not formulaic (A Time to Kill, The Chamber, A Painted House) and this is one of those times. I had to put it down several times (the descriptions of the Philippines during WWII, for example, and another scene, which would be a spoiler if I were specific with it). Normally, I can predict his endings ... Didn't see this one coming. It may not be great literature, but one of the sub-themes is an issue that is important to me. Plus Grisham knows Southerners, and he knows the law, which makes good reading for an old English teacher who is married to a lawyer.
Elaine Duarte: Calypso by David Sedaris (Little, Brown). He always makes me laugh and this year I really needed to laugh.
Sam Shirley: The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner (Scribner). In a way she fills the hole that finishing everything Roberto Bolano has published in English has left.
Maeve Maddox: Is 2017 recent enough? If so, The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan (HarperCollins). I liked the writing and the way apparently disparate events and characters prove to belong to the same web of human experience.
Lee Razer: Carl Phillips' latest book of poems, Wild Is the Wind (Farrar, Straus and Giroux ). He has published a lot of good collections and is still at the top of his game, writing philosophically and meditatively about loneliness, love, despair, our fumbling and wonderful attempts to connect with someone else.
Brian Sorenson: The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing by Merve Emre (Doubleday). Companies big and small use the Myers-Briggs assessment to identify personality types and coach employees. It's fascinating to read about the unlikely origin of the tool, and to pressure-check our own belief in the theory of personality "type." The author -- whose narrative is well-constructed and beautifully written -- plays the role of skeptic at times, but leaves it up to the reader to decide if Myers-Briggs and other personality instruments are worthwhile.
Jimmie von Tungel: Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam, by Mark Bowden (Atlantic Monthly Press). Why? I was only 50 miles from there at the time and Americans should never miss an opportunity to remind themselves of neither the grandeur of the simple warrior in Vietnam nor the malevolent incompetency of the top military leadership.
Jerri Hoskyn: Hunger, A Memoir of (My) Body, by Roxane Gay (HarperCollins). Powerful telling of weight as armor and vulnerability, the difficulties in moving in the world as a "woman of size," and the long-term reverberations of childhood sexual trauma. This memoir has stayed with me and changed the way I see.
Marck Beggs: Come Again by Nate Powell (Top Shelf Productions). A deep, dark graphic novel set in Arkansas by the only cartoonist to win a National Book Award.
Karen Hayes: I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O'Farrell (Knopf), I will be reaching for it again soon. It made me feel positively, unequivocally alive. Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt alive.
David Jauss: I read a number of superb short story collections this year -- including Denis Johnson's The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Jeffrey Eugenides' Fresh Complaint, Lauren Groff's Florida, Rebecca Makkai's Music for Wartime, Elizabeth Strout's Anything Is Possible, Steven Schwartz's Madagascar: New & Selected Stories, and Richard Bausch's Living in the Weather of the World -- but the best of them all was Lee Martin's The Mutual UFO Network (Dzanc). Martin is criminally under-read. Anyone who loves short fiction should read this book -- and everything else he's written.
Email:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Style on 01/06/2019