I bought an Amazon Kindle this December. For the first time ever, I have actual reading equipment (apart from bookmarks, which the Kindle obviates, and my glasses, which it does not). It’ll take a while more before my opinions of the device are divorced from its novelty. In any case, there were eleven months spent and several books read without it, and here are the best books among them:
Top 3 Fiction
Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson. This year’s been one of discovering good fiction (in which taste is entirely subjective and YMMV-ous). Big in size, plot complexity, years spanned, characters introduced, the book combines history, warfare, politics, telecommunications and computer geekery in one hell of a tale. I’d wanted to read a Neal Stephenson since I read In The Beginning Was The Command Line back in college, and I guess it was about time.
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace. Unexpected gift from @jeanmarsh. Much has been written about DFW the man himself, and he’d been made out to be some sort of far-outlier literary genius of our times.
Turns out that he was.
In 2009, I’d read Oblivion, a collection of his short stories, and his two of his essays (one, two – both PDFs) for Harper’s Magazine. Infinite Jest, his 1996 magnum opus, was next. A DFW passage is a ride on a seemingly out-of-control roller-coaster, courtesy some supremely gifted but totally maniacal driver, a ride that dizzyingly speeds right up to the thin border between thrill and terrify, and dizzyingly fro, and to again, not the plots –which are as surreal as they are subtle, but the sheer writing itself.
So Infinite Jest is hard to describe. The Wikipedia page for the book ties itself up in knots over the plot. Suffice it to say that it’s a stark commentary on America’s short-cut pursuit of happiness through pleasure. 1000+ pages of a brilliant alternate future that may well not be so alternate after all.
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson. In retrospect, it’s a fantastic translation. And if it isn’t, the Swedish original writing must have been just short of magical. The story makes numerous references to events in the preceding two books (requiring not a few trips to Wikipedia), and ends well, tying up threads well. Fitting end to a trilogy. Now, uh, to read the first two.
Top 3 Nonfiction
The Iranians, Sandra Mackey. Written in 1996, Mackey’s book traces a detailed history of the Iranian people, from before Zoroastrianism to the Islamic Republic. I was particularly interested in the three revolutions this century – the popular one in 1906, the 1953 coup and the 1979 Islamic revolution, and Mackey describes in vivid detail. Disappointingly, the period after the revolution – the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf war and the 90s – is rather dull and unnecessarily drawn out. It seems like Mackey ran out of steam and dumped her notes into two or three long final chapters.
A History of Modern Britain, Andrew Marr. Begins with Labour’s unexpected big win in the 1945 election, through its coming to terms with its much-diminshed global stature, to burrowing into socialism, to clawing its way out to a well-balanced capitalist system. My only gripe is that while it takes occasional detours into the lives of ordinary Britons, the book follows the same tired theme of looking at distinct eras in British society only through the lens of changing governments.
Among the believers, V. S. Naipaul. Naipaul’s account of his travels in the early 80s through nations not originally Islamic – Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia. According to Naipaul, a people’s rigid conformity with a foreign faith combined with an unconscious clinging to artefacts from their original one confirms the shallowness of their entire belief system. Therefore, it is no surprise that people both are unsatisfied with their world and, tragically, seek meaning by only digging deeper into that shallow system.
The other books read this year:
Nonfiction:
A-list
B-list
C-list (disappointments)
Fiction:
