It's been awhile since I posted this (and watched it sink down off the page by Easter or so), but what the hell... Not necessarily the best books published in 2010, but the best book you read in 2010. For me, off the top of my head, just for starters: Best Literary Novel: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Best History/Politics book: Nixonland by Rick Perlstein Best book about music: The Cello Suites by Eric Siblin.
Best Novel: Streets of Laredo - Larry McMurtry Best History/Politics: Imperial Life in the Emerald City - Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Best Overall Book - The Hungar Games - Suzanne Collins Honorable Mention (very close) - The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson Best Non-Fiction Book - American Lion - Jon Meachem Honorable Mention - Freakonomics Best Author - Stieg Larsson This was my slowest reading year ever. I probably read less than 30 books.
That's funny -- I just got Infinite Jest for Christmas. The size is a little intimidating -- you could probably kill a man with it if you hit him square in the head. But I've heard really good things about it, so I'm looking forward to reading it.
We had Chandrasekaran at UI to speak about his book, and of course being the geek I am I had him autograph his copy. Cool. Even better: it was the day of the vice presidential debate (Biden vs. Palin!), and I set up a pizza-and-debate viewing prior to his talk with he attending with a dozen of my students. Palin being a UI grad made it especially fun. Even better: I had a five minute conversation with Chandrasekaran (a WaPo editor) about Steven Goff and how important it was to have him as a soccer blogger. Ultimately, good book!
I was 0-for-2 with it until last summer. But I went on a DFW kick and ready both his collections of essays, which got me ready to get through it. Which reminds me: Best Essay Collection: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by DFW. Runner Up: Consider the Lobster also by DFW. Oh, w/r/t Infinite Jest, I had good luck reading a chapter, then going back and skimming the footnotes, then returning to the next chapter. That finally worked for me, but there are about six other ways of getting through it.
Okay, after scrolling through this forum to remember what I read/admitted to reading () this year, here's my take: Best fiction: Small Gods, Terry Pratchett Best non-fiction: The Big Burn, Timothy Egan Best socio-cultural: The Year of Living Biblically, A.J. Jacobs
Very cool. There's a whole chapter in it about a guy I hung out with a lot in the early years of high school who went off to West Point, then the CIA, and then became an insane swindler during the postwar Haliburton giveaways. Knew there was always something off about the guy.
So I'm 70 pages into the book and I'm already finding it tiresome. Who the fuck cares about some kind at a private tennis academy? Does the book get any better, or should I expect 1000 pages of the same (in which case I might as well just pack it in right now).
Well, it's also a pretty decent satire on consumerism. But if you're not into it, you're not into it.
I'm about 130 pages from the end. Read about 300, then put it down for a few months, picked it up again and have been reading it at lunch. I've found it goes from interesting/hysterical to mind numbingly dull, but overall i've enjoyed it. I'm planning on starting a thread discussing it when I finish. Edit: I wish I had found this site: http://infinitesummer.org/ before I started.
I read mostly crime fiction this past year. I liked a lot of the books by Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Robert Crais and Lawrence Block. They are light easy and quick reads. But the two that stood out the most were: God Is A Bullet by Boston Teran (his other book Never Count Out The Dead was good too) and The Wheelman by Duane Swierczynski.
Cool! Thanks for the link, Bluto -- that looks like a really interesting site. I guess I won't throw in the towel yet on the book. If it doesn't get any better, though, I'm going to chalk it up as over-hyped. I guess part of what bugs me about it is so much of it, at least in the beginning, is about drugs. As someone who's never been interested in drugs (either using them or talking about them or reading about them) it's not really something I want to read a lot about. I also feel like sometimes Wallace is showboating -- flexing his intellectual muscles for show -- it's almost like he wrote the novel with a medical dictionary at hand... Finally, a question for Bluto and Doc Wankler: what the fuck are these "cartridges" people watch? They're obviously movies, but is this some kind of futuristic technology? Is the novel set in the future? There's nothing else about it that seems futuristic. Maybe cartridges existed in the past, before my time, and that's why I don't know them?
Like I said elsewhere, this year was the first time I got through the book, and I bagged it the first couple of times I tried. The cartridge is similar to an old time VCR, and it contains a form of entertainment that's dangerously addictive. He's vague about it because viewing said entertainment is fatal. And the story was set in the future in 1996 when it was published, but said future is right around now. One of the most interesting aspect of the future is the commercialization of everything. In the new country that was recently formed, the Organization of North American Nations, or ONAN, each year is sponsored. So you have things like The Year of the Adult Disposable Undergarment, and things like that. Of course, not everyone is pleased with this state of affairs, like Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (A.F.R.), the Wheelchair Assassins from Quebec. Anyway... Back to the topic: I neglected "Best Volume of Poetry." The Prelude by William Wordsworth.
Best literary novel: Lord of Misrule, Jaimy Gordon Best mass-market novel: The Hittite, Ben Bova Best Non-Fiction book: Sh*t My Dad Says, Justin Halpern Best children's book: How Rocket Learned To Read, Tad Hills Best blog: Strobist Best sports/humor blog: Kissing Suzy Kolber Book I'm most looking forward to reading in 2011: Life, Keith Richards