December 26, 2007: Best Reading of the Year
According to my logs, I've read 200 short stories and 47 books this year, not to mention innumerable articles from the New Yorker, MacWorld, various academic journals, and other sources.
I thought this year I'd offer a best-of list.
I should mention that though I read these books or stories this year, most first appeared many years ago. I do read some of the contemporary things coming on the scene, but they rarely seem to stick with me or affect me much.
So I guess I offer this list not as a "best of 2007," but a "best of the books I happened to read in 2007."
Anyway, here's the list:
Non-Fiction Book of the Year
The number one in terms of influence would be Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. Though it is intuitively obvious that people are rarely competent to describe the processes by which they make choices, I found Gladwell's discussion of human decision-making to be very enlightening. Once you've reached a certain threshold of competence, you are better off making decisions as quickly as possible, trusting your intuitive knowledge to guide you. The more you articulate and literalize, the further you stray from your best decision.
Honorable mentions for my non-fiction book of the year would have to include Lincoln's Melancholy by Joshua Wolf Shenk (for its description of how Lincoln used his depression to be a better man and a better president, how his darker moods informed his patience and determination) and Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson (for its exciting physical and intellectual adventure of identifying a U-Boat wreck with limited technology and record-keeping).
Short Story of the Year
This is a close call, but the winner has to be "Basement Magic," by Ellen Klages for being just the proper mix of emotion, magic, and weirdness. I'm an extremely jaded reader, and this story moved me literally to tears at its end. Something I've been hoping to add to my own writing is an idiosyncratic sense of strange awe and mystery and emotion; Klages here provides probably the best example.
A very close honorable mention must go to Karl Edward Wagner's "Sticks," which to those who know both me and the story shows just how amazing Klages's story was. Any other year, this story would have blown all the others away for its atmosphere, tension, and hints of cosmic weirdness.
Novel of the Year
Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank almost topped the list by being a very humanistic tale about how we might face apocalypse with decency and aplomb...even if we're Floridians.
But the Thomas Tryon novel Harvest Home takes the prize this year for being essentially a novel-length exposition of all the issues from Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery"--traditions with a hint of magic in a small New England town. Tryon manages to maintain the same level of curiosity, mystery, and dread in his novel, all while going even deeper into our mysterious interactions with our world via word and action. This book manages to be thoughtful, atmospheric, and terrifying all at once.
Discoveries of the Year
The authors I've discovered this year share only one characteristic: everyone else but me has read them for ages and I'm just finding them now.
- Ellen Klages's entire collection Portable Childhoods contains many more magical and strange stories, and she's definitely one of my favorite writers currently working.
- Robert Aickman's short stories are unapologetically obscure and mysterious, just as our lives tend to be.
- Ian Fleming writes with a surprising level of class and erudition given the terrible movies made from his works. His short stories especially are written eloquently and wisely.
- James Tiptree Jr. writes often about our perceptions and instantiations of gender with great thoughtfulness and surprise; she ably uses the tropes of science fiction to say something worth thinking about after all the strange planets or spaceships have faded from our memory.
- Karl Edward Wagner left us too soon, but the work he left behind is all the more rarefied and pure because of it, perhaps. Though hard to find, his short stories reward those who seek them with a gritty sense of the creeping entropy of existence.
Many other books and stories this year were wonderful, of course. But these just seem to shine brighter than the others.
