Man, this was tricky. Whatever I write, it feels like I'm leaving something out or including something I can't quite explain why it's so great. But anyway.
10 new(ish) books I'll remember from 2009, which doesn't necessarily mean the 10 most objectively great:
2666 - Roberto Bolaño (CHI)
In a small industrial town in Mexico, someone is butchering women. Brutally, repeatedly, and luckily - since it means everyone can blame everything on this one monster and not have to think about what the 20th century has done to all of us, physically, ideologically, culturally. 2666 sprawls over 80 years, dozens if not hundreds of protagonists, a handful of seemingly unconnected plots, and still manages to be frighteningly on point. Completely deserving of the hype.
Atemschaukel (All I Possess I Carry With Me) - Herta Müller (GER)
The Nobel isn't necessarily proof of a great writer. Writing something like this, however, is. Atemschaukel isn't a light read, but probably an essential one, taking the day-to-day life in a hard labour camp as its starting point (without ever making it less than real) to show how language itself can both limit us and open up brand new ways of seeing the world - but also how difficult it can be to simply go back again.
Pride And Prejudice And Zombies - Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith (GBR/USA)
Is it silly? Beyond all measure. Does Grahame-Smith manage to replicate Austen's prose? Nowhere near. Is it fun? You bet. And what's more, it's still Pride And Prejudice; the zombies don't destroy the story, they just amplify (or exaggerate, if you will) it.
The Patience Stone – Atiq Rahimi (AFG)
Like Johnny Get Your Gun from the other side; a wife sits at the bedside of a paralysed Taliban soldier, refusing to read prayers over him anymore until he answers some questions she has; and since he cannot say anything, she tries to answer them herself... Before, and after, is war.
The Restless Supermarket - Ivan Vladislavic (RSA)
It's the dying days of apartheid. In a café in Joburg sits the world's greatest crossword puzzle solver, old, white and armed with a dictionary, watching in horror as everyone suddenly starts changing things. Oediomatics, he calls it; they're fucking up their mother tongue. Why won't anyone listen to him? It's his privilege to decide what words mean, after all...
The Graveyard Book – Neil Gaiman (GBR)
Gaiman tackles The Jungle Book, turning it into a horror story which – as always with Gaiman – is about more than mere monsters and good vs evil.
Fun Home – Alison Bechdel (USA)
A memoir in the form of a graphic novel. At first, it seems "just" a coming out story, growing up gay and finally realising it – only to realise that your father has been living the same lie his entire life. But also an unabashed yet critical love letter to literature and the memoir form itself; of needing to pick apart the stories we unwittingly tell about ourselves in order to know what stories we want to tell. Beautiful.
Inherent Vice – Thomas Pynchon (USA)
Pynchon takes on the hard-boiled detective novel and somehow turns it into the search for what killed mystery, dreams and alternatives as the flowery 60s head into the cynical 70s – and of course, the 00s into the 10s. And like Eastwood in Gran Torino, he both builds on and tears down his own myth in the process.
Senselessness – Horacio Castellanos Moya (SLV)
A hilarious, dark comedy about a very unfunny subject; a journalist is hired to edit a collection of testimonies about atrocities committed during a civil war in an unnamed Central American country. And as much as he admires the colourful language these plucky natives use, he soon starts to realise that everyone who committed the crimes has been pardoned in the name of forgive and forget, and they may all be after the most important person here: him. Constantly turns the tables on any reader who tries to dismiss it as just a hilarious, dark comedy about a very unfunny subject.
The Death of Bunny Munro – Nick Cave (AUS)
It's funny how little it takes to turn the typical middle-age misunderstood sex-obsessed male novel protagonist into a complete monster – and then make him so pathetic you almost have to pity him. Nick Cave digs into his darkest corners (the ones that made him write murder ballads for 20 years) and comes up with howlingly funny and very bitter broadside. Lolita on MTV.
Five old(ish) books, excluding re-reads:
Jerusalem - Selma Lagerlöf (SWE)
We Have Always Lived In The Castle - Shirley Jackson (USA)
Closely Observed Trains - Bohumil Hrabal (CZE)
Persepolis I-IV - Marjane Satrapi (IRN)
Pride And Prejudice – Jane Austen (GBR)
Five non-fiction:
Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes – Greil Marcus
The World Without Us – Alan Weisman
Shakespeare – Bill Bryson
Iran Awakening – Shirin Ebadi
Bad Vibes: Britpop And My Part In Its Downfall – Luke Haines
It has been a favorite of mine for years, and still maintains it's position in my top 10 reads of all time.
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