Ten Books

At the end of the year, lists of the ten best this and thats proliferate. There are multiple ten best book lists, usually focused on what was newly published in the year. Here is my list of the ten best books I read in 2007--and it turns out that a goodly number were also published during the year. I have left out all but two of the books I read as part of the research for my new book, which I am revising before submitting to a publisher in the next couple of months, even though many of them were fascinating. They were also heavily theological, and who needs theology on New Year's Day.

So, here goes (in no particular order).

1. The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolano. A strange book that I was reading for months--it seemed for the whole year--about poets on the run. Broken up into apparently disconnected sections, the bulk of the book lacks plot or even coherent narrative. And yet it is so well written, so engagingly literate, so suggestive, that I literally had to finish it. It is like a mysterious person you feel you have to get to know, but the more time you spend with him/her, the more elusive, the more intriguing s/he becomes. How to account for the allure of this book....and it's a translation, so who knows how much better it must be in Spanish.

2. Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson. A novel that turns up on almost everyone's list for the year--and for that reason I thought of leaving it off of mine. But I just finished it a week or so ago and it is still so fresh. At first I wasn't sure I was going to like it or get through it. Like Bolano's book, this one is very long. But the fast and truthful dialog, the voices that seemed to come out of my own head, drew me in and on. There is a quality to this of The Heart of Darkness, I would guess intentional, that adds weight to what seems almost a casual thriller. Except there is no thriller plot. The book illuminates the moral bankruptcy of Vietnam, as if we needed to hear that, while offering an odd and disturbing insight into what it takes to live after catastrophe--which we do need to hear.

3. All Aunt Hagar's Children, by Edward P. Jones. This collection of stories came out in 2006, but I picked it up around the time I was in Washington, DC, for the ordination of my niece. As it happens, Jones writes vividly and particularly about DC, complete with addresses, and one of the stories I read soon after the ordination takes place on the street where the church was located. Meaningless to fiction, of course, but at the same time it illustrates how immediately alive these stories are, as if one were right there just this morning. Jones is a wonderful writer. His stories feel like entire novels condensed into a relatively few pages. They also tell the white world more about American race than most of us will ever learn by just walking around in our protected skin.

4. After Dark, by Haruki Murakami. Murakami is my favorite writer of fiction right now, and this was his new novel for 2007. I don't think it is up to Kafka on the Shore (2005), but it is a good book to read if you want an intro to Murakami's world and style. He can be disconcertingly allusive or off-hand. His characters are often too ephemeral to take hold of and the world he inhabits is often a distortion of the world in which we live, just beyond recognition, but disconcertingly familiar. In this book, we watch, as voyeurs, one woman asleep while her sister slips almost thoughtlessly into the night world of Tokyo that never sleeps; but the sleeper somehow effects what happens in our waking world. The boundaries between realities, as in all of Murakami, are distressingly permeable.

5. Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth. I can hear you now: Ken, how could you! Philip Roth is so, uh, mean, sexist, obsessive....Right. All true. It's like reading John Updike, I hate myself in the morning. What sucked me in here is that this novel about one of Roth's alter-egos, Nathan Zuckerman, is also about the fears and physical distress that accompany prostate cancer. I could identify with Zuckerman. It's a well-written book, as Roth books are, and you might enjoy it, especially if you've had prostate cancer or might one day. Ok, it's a book for guys who fret about impotence and death (that would be all of us). That's ok, I think, every now and then.

6. The Laying on of Hands, stories by Alan Bennett. A paperback collection from 2002 I picked up in the Fall. I had not read Bennett before. Two of the three long stories here will lead me to look up more of this work. The first, "The Laying on of Hands," is a must read for Episcopalians, Anglicans, and Anglophiles: it is a screamingly funny and precise evisceration of church liturgical politics. The third, "Father! Father! Burning Bright," is a touching but also wickedly pointed account of a dutiful son waiting at the bedside of his dying father. We don't write like this in the United States because we don't understand our own class structure well enough--mainly, I suppose, because we don't think we have one.

7. Messenger, New and Selected Poems 1976-2006, by Ellen Bryant Voight. I read quite a lot of poetry, but this was someone I had not read (shame on me). Voight is a clear and evocative writer with a narrative line that is subtle and sorrowing. The books consists of selections from other books and serves to send one back to the originals to experience the the shape of the work. "All ears, nose, tongue and gut,/ dogs know if something's wrong;/ chickens don't know a thing, their brains/ are little more than optic nerve...." The beginning of a long book sequence titled Kyrie, about the Influenza epidemic of 1918. Curls your hair.

8. Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition, by Richard Smoley. For those of you who, like me, are fed up with traditional Christianity and its smugness, this book offers a smart and informative overview of what the church has effectively hidden all these centuries. Elaine Pagel writes about this tradition, and you may have read her, but Smoley gives us even more. The spiritual world he describes feels strange to one steeped in the dogmatic theologies of the church, as if one has happened upon a midnight rite of passage that is supposed to be vile but turns out to be not only illuminating but liberating.

9. I Am A Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter. I read Hofstadter's book as part of the research for my book (that's also why I picked up Smoley). What interests Hofstadter is the nature of consciousness--Who Am I?--or, as he puts it, what it means to have or be a human soul, without the religious connotations. Hint: consciousness is shared. Part of what drives the author is the death of his wife and his yearning to know what or how we live on, not just as memory, in the consciousness of others. It's a provocative and sometimes annoying book. You may know Hofstadter from Godel, Escher, and Bach way back in 1979. This is an easier but equally mind-bending read.

10. Elia Kazan, by Richard Schickel. This biography was first published in 2005, the paper edition in 2006. I've wanted to read it since it was first published but just got around to it in 2007. Schickel is a good writer and brings to life the nuts and bolts of Kazan's work in theater and film. Most helpfully, he gives us some deeper sense of why Kazan testified against his fellow "communists" before Congress. I think that Schickel bends over too far to exonerate Kazan, but he makes a strong argument in his defense. Most importantly, Kazan's work is well examined here. And it is at the heart of our best theater and film of the mid-twentieth century. Go back and watch "On the Waterfront," "A Streetcar Named Desire," or "A Face in the Crowd" to recall how deeply we know this work--and how much better it is than almost anything you can see today on the screen or stage.

Ok. Long post. Apologies. May you all have a year of blessings and blossoms.