The Ones I Liked

Not the Best Books of 2019

 

Nearly 305,000 titles were published in 2019, rendering any notion of the "ten best" or even the"thousand best" books absurd.  Naturally the lists touted by the Times, the Post, the Guardian, and my other sources of information are dominated by the same titles, the same authors (Ben Lerner!), and by the major publishers.  You won't find any small presses represented, nor will you be surprised to learn that few first-time writers, or non-MFA holders, or people who don't live in Brooklyn made the cut.  If you read this blog from time to time, you know that we here at TR like to branch out and read books out of the mainstream, small press titles, books by unknown writers, books by writers not living in the United States, translated works and books that are quirky, nontraditional, and likely to be ignored by the cultural taste makers in London and New York.  We're snobs, sort of, cultural nobodies who happen to like to read, and we operate on the premise that what is popular is often not what is best, though this isn't always the case, as my own list of favorites demonstrates. 

It has been a splendid year for books.  I can't remember a time when I stumbled upon so many fine writers, so many interesting novels, so much engrossing non-fiction, such splendid and moving poetry.

I wanted to share the titles of some books worthy of your consideration, listed here in no particular order.  I hope that you had a good year of reading and that in 2020 you will find many hours to escape from the insanity of the world in the quiet, solitary silence of good books.

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Marion Poschmann's The Pine Islands, a slender novel about "a journeyman lecturer on beard fashions in film," was not only a pleasant excursion into Japanese history and geography, but it led me back to Basho's great classic The Narrow Road to the Deep North in the David Landis Barnhill translation. Poschmann is a highly regarded German writer whose books are just now being translated.

Ariana Harwicz's Die, My Love is a chilling story of a woman's deepening hatred for her husband and child (and for everyone else).  This isn't merely another Hollywood version of the alienated wife in the mode of "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," nor is it a story of madness; instead, Harwicz, a young Argentinian writer, mercilessly dissects the pretensions of love, marriage, and child rearing.  The corpse that's left isn't pretty.

The inimitable Daša Drndi's two novels of the life and near-death of Andreas Ban that I read this year, Belladonna and EEG (her final novel) operate in that rare space of politically sophisticated and philosophically dense fiction that is one of the staples of Eastern European writing. Ban, a melancholic psychologist and writer, meditates on history, genocide, love, hope and hopelessness in the style of Dubravka Ugrešić (The Ministry of Pain) and Zoran Feric (The Death of the Little Match Girl).  These are all bracing books--dense, unrelenting, demanding, but ultimately rewarding as you must think deeply and pay attention as you read. 

Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive, which I have written about in this blog, was the most affecting novel that I read this year. I have now read all of Luiselli's books and also recommend Sidewalks, her short essays on persons and places, thoughts while walking--with a lovely introduction and appreciation by Cees Nooteboom.  I am astonished to learn that former president Obama read and enjoyed this heart-wrenching novel about our border and its victims. Would that someone with power to effect a change in our immigration policies read this fine book. 

Deborah Eisenberg has been on my must-read list for a long time. This year I read her collection All Around Atlantis and have Your Duck is My Duck on my desk.  Few writers can do what Eisenberg does with eccentric America--she is, as someone put it, "the chronicler of our madness." Funny and sad, refreshing in our time of insane public life--memorial characters who look like you and me.

I read a lot of poetry this year. The two books I have read steadily all year are collections from veteran poets: John Balaban's Locusts at the Edge of Summer and Arthur Sze's (winner of the National Book Award this year) The Redshifting Web. Both poets work in open forms, observe the world with compassion, and open up avenues of feeling that draw you not only into individual poems but into the rich body of their work.  Once attracted to Balaban, I sought out three volumes of his translations of Vietnamese poetry (he served in Vietnam as a conscientious objector during that war) and recommend these books as well.  

Andres Resendez's The Other Slavery, an account of the enslavement of Native Peoples in the Americas was a book that stayed with me all year not only for its meticulous research but for the grace and style of the story's telling. 

I read three of Patti Smith's books over the past few weeks--We Kids, Devotion, and, best of all, M Train.  The story of my coming around to read the books that everyone else has already read is too long to repeat here, let's just say that I admired Patti as a musician for many years and had no idea that she wrote splendid books until I stumbled upon M Train in our one remaining bookstore. Patti's travels, her sensibility, and her prose--hallucinogenic, surreal, and as complex as her song lyrics--are worth taking up. I especially love her travels to pay hommage to the graves of writers she admires since I have had the same habit.

Lucy Ellmann's roller-coaster of a three sentence, one-thousand page stream of consciousness book is an insightful, long, long look at where we are now as seen through the consciousness of a not-so-average Ohio housewife.  It takes patience, but Ducks, Newburyport is worth the effort.  You'll be lulled into complacency by a bunch of pop culture references (I didn't get half of them) and then startled into wakefulness by a observations that are poignant and right on target.  Ellmann is the real deal: a novelist who is willing to break up the form and create something like Joyce's final 85 pages of Ulysses--Molly Bloom, with a millennium of pages to fill.

That's it for now.  Happy New Year to all!

George Ovitt (12/31/2019)