Best and Worst of 2009

Top tens are fun. Here's what I liked and hated from the literary world in this past year.

10. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Obviously I'm not the first to appreciate this one. Does it deserve to be at the bottom of this list though? No, not really. There's no excuse for that but it's staying.

9. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Is it non-fiction or fiction? Who cares. This man is brilliant.

8. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The White Whale! Amazing man book with tons of metaphors that I never got couched in its encyclopedia of all things whale hunting.

7. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
Man must act on principle instead of on impulse. But has South Africa come to this yet? Coetzee explores what makes man different from animal, aging, and the political climate of his homeland. See the movie too.

6. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Brilliant stuff, probably even better in its original language.

5. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
Plot-less but so good.

4. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters by J.D. Salinger
I omitted Seymour's part of this book because I didn't want to penalize this story, maybe my Salinger favorite, from being included.

3. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Maybe the best prose of all year. Effortless, smart and natural.

2. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Sorry, this was the best prose of all. This would have been number one but it gets distracted a little in the middle. Its retaining of number 2, though shows how strong the rest is. Give me more Roth!

1. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
This man leaves me speechless.

Best Short Story Collections:
1. Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
2. Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver
3. In the Garden of the North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff

Best Non-fiction:
1. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Don Miller
2. The Longest Trip Home by John Grogan
3. Superfreakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Dishonorable Mention:
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
To Hate Like This is To Be Happy Forever by Will Blythe
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Marry Me by John Updike

Superfreakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Sam posted earlier this year on this book's predecessor and it seemed like he wasn't too thrilled with it. I thought the first book was awesome and really interesting. This book is more of the same but not quite as interesting. They didn't pull out that many original correlations as they did before and some sections were less relevant. It's still a good read and written very well, though, and the first part on the economics of prostitution is intriguing.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Don Miller

Donald Miller's real good. Not liked by the entire Christian circle, but you can't argue that his thoughts are thought provoking. In this book, he asks why do some lives make sense and others don't? If your life was a movie would anybody make it to the end? He challenges us to be bold and accept different stuff. If we keep trying to reach the comfortable and live the comfortable life then our deaths will never come "too soon". With lots of funny episodes throughout, this book works and is highly readable.

Rabbit Run by John Updike

Rabbit Angstrom was a hometown hero but now he's slipped into a mundane job with a wife whom he's doesn't truly love and a life that doesn't seem worth it. So he runs. And that's the book and it's really good and some of the most harmonious and poetic uses of the English language for prose can be found in here. Small plot, but lots to feast on.

The Wild Things by Dave Eggers

It goes without saying that we all loved this book as kids and the fact that there is a movie just made us giddy with nostalgia. I really only read this novel though because Dave Eggers wrote it. But I can’t say he did a good job with it. There is much more to the story obviously than we gleaned from the short children’s story, such as Max’s parents are divorced and somewhat distracted, and his sister is in her teenage bitchy years. Wanting to escape from this, Max sails (for years) to the place where the wild things are. Max announces that he is their king and is there to solve their problem with the chattering noise they hear underground. Good start but then this conflict with the monster below is never developed. It seems that the worst thing Max is there to end is boredom. The enact a pretend war, where Eggers just looks to entertain his young audience by talking about how the wild things gnawed on each others’ arms and pulled up chunks of the earth with lava on it—simply put, silly stuff. They then decide to build a fort, taking up the last fifth of the book. This book was obviously suited to a generation much younger than me but I thought it would still follow the basic principles of a tale. In my opinion, it would have been much better had Max come to the place where the wild things are and helped them defeat something pretty much harmless, like the dark, and then left to go back home, not because he had to but because he was simply getting hungry and had to be home for dinner. That’s what I imagined the story to be anyway.

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

This man is nothing short of a genius and understands much more things about life and the world than anyone I can think of. I read this epistolary work a few years ago and loved it so much that I had to read it again. Actually that’s not the entirety of my motivation for rereading this—there’s a lot of thick stuff in there that I only unlocked during the second go round. Who knows what will happen on my third.

This book is a collection of short letters written under the guise of a senior devil adviser to a young tempter who is trying to turn a man morally corrupt. Basically, Wormwood is the bad devil that resides above one of your shoulders and Screwtape is writing letters to him advising him on how best to conduct business. The book is brilliant in how it forces you to rethink what is actually wrong and how easy it is to fall into that. More important though, it reveals a lot about the theology and “the Enemy”. One of my favorite books.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Pretty much more of the same with this book. It came out before Engulfed. After reading it, I think the best thing about Sedaris is his dad. He’s a real character.

When You are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

I initially bought this book for my host mom for her birthday but due to a very sad and estranged relationship with her husband, my host dad, who did not give her a present, I decided I would stay out of things and not give her anything as well. So I kept and I read it. My past history with David Sedaris, who writes regularly for The New Yorker, has been off and on. My first impression of him was that he was not a very good writer but he did have a unique ability to turn an everyday, mundane situation into an enjoyable read. His most recent New Yorker appearance though was a stark improvement in his writing and what actually made me decide that my host mom might like him. This book is nowhere near genius but Sedaris’ candor is somewhat absorbing. He’s super gay and kinda flaunts his partner throughout the book but if you can get past that then the book will, in the least, entertain you, which I think is all it really tries to achieve.

The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen

I particularly like memoirs more than autobiographies because they usually only include the most compelling parts of one’s life rather than try to include every detail. Yet there is still usually a constant theme throughout, something cohesive that binds all the stories and achieves something more than just random events strung together. I don’t really remember that happening in this book. I remember him talking about his hot German teacher on one page and then his fixation with birds on the next. The writing is infinitely more readable, though, than it was in The Corrections because it came out smoother and more natural, which is a benefit of writing a memoir—you don’t have to try too hard. On the other hand, though, Franzen took too many liberties with this and, to me at least, the book came out as a half effort.

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote a list of 8 rules for writing short stories. He ended the list by saying that Flannery O'Connor broke all of them except the first ("Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.").
He clearly meant this as a compliment, and he was right on. How she wrote the stories in this collection and made them as good as they are just doesn't add up. Another rule on Vonnegut's list is to "give the reader at least one character he or she can root for," and it is the one she most consistently breaks. The characters with whom one identifies (other than a child or two) are usually just the least despicable.
All the same, Vonnegut was right to say that she never breaks the first rule. Every story in this collection is stunning, haunting, and impossible to ignore. The title story might be one of my favorites ever. In fact, The River might be another.
One thing O'Connor does is introduce you to a character who is ruminating on his or her (usually her) annoyance with another character, suggesting to the reader that the object of the rumination likely has a deeper, more justified, and more profound resentment or even hatred for the one ruminating. This is an interesting motif, but it hardly accounts for the excellence of these stories in the face of such unlikable characters. But the excellence is undeniable.
So then: what is it that makes these stories so great? Honestly, I couldn't say.