Vice President Agnew with his literary masterpiece
I've only done a
book list once. This year seemed a good time to revisit the idea, considering that I read a staggering 256 books in 2016 - more books than movies watched. If nothing else came from this wretched year, it came from stretching my literacy to the breaking point.
To avoid an unconscionably long post, I'll combine fiction and nonfiction for my lists, 15 for best and 10 for worst.
Fifteen Best Books Read in 2016
My only regret is that I didn't read more film books this year. I mostly focused on my pet topics, namely '60s politics and its ancillaries, along with prestige novels I'd missed. As usual, this list includes only first-time reads.
15. The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe (2016, Elaine Showalter)It's always delightful to find a great biography illuminating an obscure personage. Showalter elevates Howe, known as the lyricist for
The Battle Hymn of the Republic, from trivia question obscurity to reputable historical figure. She examines Howe's frustrated literary career, emphasizing missed potential without exaggerating her skill, while navigating her difficult, destructive marriage and later work as feminist and racial egalitarian.
14. Common Ground (1985, J. Anthony Lukas)Lukas's
Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years remains my favorite Watergate book, and his much-lauded explication of Boston's busing crisis is equally formidable. With reportorial immediacy, Lukas weaves between city officials, working class whites and black families impacted by the struggle, with tensions ranging from slurs and insults to rapes, robberies and riots. Without passing judgment on any side, Lukas shows Bostonians adjusting to the new normal, slowly acclimating themselves to the change. Harrowing though the book is, it ultimately proves optimistic that prejudice needn't be permanent.
13. The Nix (2016, Nathan Hill)The worst that can be said of Hill's debut novel is that it's overstuffed, with peacock posturing (a ten-page sentence about online gaming?), Dickensian coincidences and narrative material enough for three books. But this very ambition makes
The Nix irresistible: flitting between modern day America, '60s counterculture and a million points in between, it renders so many milieus, experiences and memorable characters so vividly that we forgive its excess. Spellbinding and multifaceted, it's a shoe-in for this year's Pulitzer.
12. Lincoln: A Novel (1984, Gore Vidal)Gore Vidal tones down his usual outré excess in this masterful historical novel. With remarkable skill, Vidal evokes wartime Washington, a flurry of conflicting politicians with overlapping ambitions, bruised egos and conflicting ideologies. Managing everything, of course, is Lincoln, whose quiet, intuitive genius slowly makes itself known to his awestruck contemporaries. Its cynical yet admiring portrait of Honest Abe surely informed Steven Spielberg's
Lincoln, but stands alone as a literary masterwork.
11. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991, Susan Faludi)I've never been a great feminist, yet the past few years of misogynist reaction inspired me to better my understanding. Though written a quarter-century ago, Susan Faludi's marvelous book exposing the New Right's attack on women's rights rings depressingly true today. A remarkably layered and thorough analysis, Faludi skewers media portrayals, conservative politicians, antifeminist women and intolerant employers with equal aplomb. An excellent primer for those looking to explore cultural sexism.
10. The Given Day (2008, Dennis Lehane)Another Boston epic, crime writer Lehane expands into full-blown historical epic in this portrait of WWI-era Boston. Despite an occasional tedious subplot (Babe Ruth's recurring appearances), Lehane richly evokes a fraught and contentious time period, with his police protagonist Danny Coughlin investigating anarchists and Bolsheviks while being drawn into union activism. It culminates in the 1919 Boston Police Strike, where police walk-offs plunge the city into anarchy. Much better than its sequel,
Live by Night, which receives a film adaptation this year.
9. The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (2001, Vincent J. Cannato) Few books demonstrate the shortcomings of institutional liberalism more scathingly than this portrait of John Lindsay's New York. While Cannato attacks Lindsay from a center-right perspective, his criticisms of Lindsay's prickly ego and preachy ineffectiveness are on point. He's also more than willing to credit the Mayor's good intentions, dynamic personality and occasional achievements. Where the book really succeeds, however, is showing New York as a viper's nest of racial, political and labor conflicts insoluble to the most well-meaning idealists. Even the most conservative reader will view Lindsay as more sinned against than sinning.
8. Monster of God: Man-Eating Beasts in the Jungles of History and the Mind (2003, David Quammen)Nature writer Quammen presents an unusual work: examining man-eating monsters through a sociological lens. While hunting rare beasts like Asiatic lions and Siberian tigers, he muses on mankind's eagerness to inflate these fierce but wonderful creatures into evil monsters intent on devouring human flesh. This gives the book a cultural heft far beyond expectations, and an impassioned plea for animal understanding.
7. Empire Falls (2001, Richard Russo)Russo's novel is a slow-burn beauty, absorbing readers in the rhythms of small town Maine and the quiet desperation of its inhabitants. So creepingly absorptive is the book that its explosive climax seems unduly abrupt. Then again, what resolution wouldn't seem anticlimactic? We'd rather spend another 300 pages with depressed Miles, deceitful Francine and precocious teen Tick than have it come to an end.
6. The Price of Salt (1952, Patricia Highsmith)I wasn't enamored of
Carol, Todd Hughes' adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's classic novel of repressed romance, but the book itself is wonderful. Highsmith blends beautifully aureate prose with matter-of-fact presentation of lesbians struggling to keep their identities secret and passions in check. She scores presenting the delirious highs of long-denied happiness with dread, disgust and low key tragedy. This work remains powerful even in our nominally more enlightened age.
5. Grant (2002, Jean Edward Smith)Any of Smith's stellar Presidential books (
Eisenhower in War and Peace or this year's
Bush) could make this list: his blend of energetic prose, sharp insight and studied objectivity make him the ideal biographer. I chose
Grant because it's the best defense of that general-turned-president to date, showing him as principled man, military genius and flawed-but-successful president. Some readers might not dismiss the Grant Administration's corruption so easily, but Smith makes a strong case that his efforts at Reconstruction deserve more praise than even progressive supporters provide.
4. Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (1993, Robert V. Remini)The leading scholar of Jacksonian America, Remini turned from Andrew Jackson to his arch nemesis in this exhaustive, beautifully rendered biography. Remini leaves no stone unturned probing Clay's complex personality, showing him as both an opportunistic, scheming egomaniac and a visionary with a farsighted view of American potential. Readers will appreciate Clay's brilliance while recoiling at his prickly arrogance.
3. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000, Michael Chabon)I'm ambivalent towards Michael Chabon: for every
Wonder Boys that's smoothly engaging, he serves a mind-bogglingly tedious
Yiddish Policemen's Union. Fortunately, his most-acclaimed novel meets the hype. Like
Middlesex, another favorite, it mixes a poignant immigrant story with a vivid, captivating slice of American life. Its protagonists' adventures match the comic strip characters they create, even if they lack the cathartic ending. Ambitious and absorbing, fun and poignant at once. Here's hoping Chabon's latest,
Moonglow, meets the standard.
2. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (1989, Taylor Branch)I waffled on whether to choose this, the first in a three-volume set, or David J. Garrow's single volume
Bearing the Cross. While the latter work packs more into one book, Branch's books are truly epic history, layering a time, place and cause with remarkable depth. From telling details to big picture tumult, Branch never falters in his portraiture of the Civil Rights Movement's earliest days. At its center is Martin Luther King, no simplistic icon but a conflicted man battling intransigent politicians, ambitious aides and his own frustrations to mold a movement that changed America forever. A staggering achievement.
1. The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam (1994, Tom Wells)The antiwar movement is so easily caricatured, whether as harmless hippies, lazy punks or bomb-throwing radicals, that it's hard to provide a clear-eyed perspective. Tom Wells' book, staggering in scope yet remarkably readable, peels through decades of romance and demonization to show a vivid cultural portrait: the leftists yearning for revolution, youths driven to despair by an unwinnable war, disillusioned terrorists, Middle America's angry, oft-violent reaction, and American policymakers' confused, counterproductive handling of the tumult. Hardly objective, Wells's electrifying, intimate treatment sets the standard for '60s histories.
Honorable mentions:
Brass-Knuckle Crusade: The Great Know-Nothing Conspiracy, 1820-1860 (Beals);
A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right and the 1960s (Klatch);
Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (Ullrich);
The Leopard (Lampedusa);
The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World (Goldberg);
The Nightingale (Hannah);
Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut);
Stokely: A Life (Thomas);
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (Krakauer);
Why the Right Went Wrong: From Goldwater to the Tea Party (Dionne).
Ten Worst Books Read in 2016
The upside is that I read relatively few bad-to-terrible books this year. The downside is that the bad ones were utterly wretched, their sins ranging from cockeyed politics and poor historical understanding to prose so awful it made me wish I were illiterate.
10. Kissinger, Volume I: The Idealist, 1923-1968 (2015, Niall Ferguson)One anecdote embodies Ferguson's toadying portrait of America's most controversial statesman. Seeking to humanize Kissinger, Ferguson (once a reputable if eccentric historian before selling out to the barking mad right) spends several pages elucidating Henry's love for a dog he adopted during World War II. Several chapters later, buried in a footnote, he informs us that Kissinger locked said dog in his car and it suffocated to death. No apologies for Kissinger's meddling in Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile and elsewhere top this stomach-churning deafness.
9. A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010, Jennifer Egan)Often a Pulitzer Prize doesn't signify literary quality, as Allen Drury, James Michener and Herman Wouk can attest. Egan's book offers fragmented vignettes of a rock band's disparate paths, from courting Third World dictators and drifting through Bush-era New York to an endless chapter in PowerPoint. Like the worst Pulitzer winners, it's more an exercise in pretension than literature - albeit one that many literary critics loved.
8. Tied Up in Knots: How Getting What We Wanted Made Women Miserable (2016, Andrea Tantaros)The print debut of Fox contributor Tantaros offers what you'd expect: an antifeminist diatribe about how liberals don't want women to make sandwiches so men transform into Nicholas Sparks-loving crybabies. It says something that such insipid, tone-deaf hyperbole is the best argument those opposing women's rights can muster, when they're not issuing death threats on Twitter. Such claptrap would be merely mendacious if Tantaros weren't among those suing Roger Ailes for sexual harassment this year.
7. What It Takes: The Way to the White House (1991, Richard Ben Cramer)For years, I've heard Cramer's 1,100-plus page chronicle of the 1988 election upheld as the magnum opus of campaign reportage. I found it a tedious slog wasting dozens of pages on minutia like Michael Dukakis's turkey tetrazzini, George H.W. Bush fretting over baseball pitches and Joe Biden's childhood stutter. Worse than such tepid anecdotage is Cramer's Epic Gonzo style, a Gibbon-meets-Tom Wolfe slurry of indigestible prose and childish ejaculations like
AAAAAAAAAARGH and
Whammo! Any insights gleamed from such onomatopoetic vomit are purely accidental.
6. The Jane Austen Book Club (2004, Karen Joy Fowler)Admittedly, my opinion is clouded by an ex-girlfriend who enjoyed this book and dragged me to a lecture by its author the same night she dumped me. Without that personal connection, I'd have been spared this tedious exercise in stolid chick lit. Fowler tries imputing his dull, boring protagonists with depth by having them read a beloved author for connections and stuff, which makes the tedium unbearable. (In fairness, she also introduced me to Rainbow Rowell's excellent teen romances
Fangirl and
Eleanor and Park. Take the good with the bad.)
5. The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America (1994, Hugh Pearson)The Black Panthers remain so controversial that, a half-century later, objectivity is nearly impossible. Were they well-intentioned, if provocative revolutionaries or glorified, posturing street thugs? Pearson's book, written in the '90s (with the cooperation of radical-turned-reactionary David Horowitz), makes the latter case in cartoonish extreme. Pearson's Huey Newton embodies everything foul and disreputable about black culture, the Panthers mindless criminals whose Marxist rhetoric was a sham. Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin's
Black Against Empire is far more objective and readable; heck, Bobby Seale's cookbook
Barebecue'n with Bobby offers a better explication of Panther ideology.
4. 1876: A Novel (1976, Gore Vidal)Considering how much I enjoyed
Burr and
Lincoln, I went into
1876 with high expectations. Sadly, this novel exhibits Vidal at his worst, with his tedious protagonist returning to America after decades in exile to pass judgment on the uncouth Americans while indulging his tastes in laudanum and prostitutes. Vidal's smug vulgarity so overwhelms the story that interesting historical material (Ulysses Grant's corruption, the disputed Hayes-Tilden election) flickers through only intermittently.
3. The Canfield Decision (1976, Spiro T. Agnew)The nicest thing to say about the disgraced Vice President's sole venture into fiction writing is that it's better than his memoirs. More realistic too, for all its absurd plotting, woodenly pedestrian writing and love scenes presented with the stolidity of a constipated bureaucrat who only experienced sex as a concept gleamed from rock songs overheard in bars and elevators.
2. Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970, Richard Bach)Nobody with a brain liked Bach's book back in the '70s, and surely no one but non-discerning toddlers enjoys it now. Its merciful brevity doesn't hide the insipidness of its allegory of a precocious seagull who, thinking there's more to life than eating garbage, flies across the Universe and becomes Avian Jesus. It's Exhibit A for rebutting puffed-up Boomers who insult the taste of Millennials: for all our sins, our generation didn't make this hippie garbage a best-seller.
1. Come Nineveh, Come Tyre (1973, Allen Drury)Allen Drury's
Advise and Consent series descended quickly from Pulitzer Prize material to unhinged reactionary ranting about those damned liberals plunging America into socialist dystopia. This book provides the climax, where a well-meaning dupe President becomes the pawn of liberal ideologues, murderous Blackshirts, an evil, power-grabbing Senator and the Soviet Union, resulting in murders, dismantling of democracy and a Russian takeover in such lurid terms that even Alex Jones would dismiss it. Reading this in 2016, when a Republican aped Drury's progressive strawmen far more than any Democrat, is infuriating on a cosmic level. Is this what the next four years have in store?
Thanks for reading about my reading! I'll post my annual film list sometime before the New Year.
