2011 Year in Review: Great Books

I read over 30 books in 2011, and some of them were excellent. Most of my reading occurred while on holidays, like riding on trains through Europe. In Dubai, I would get several pages read each day on my morning and evening taxi commutes, and while waiting the 10 minutes for my laptop to boot up in the morning. Here were my favourite books this year, I recommend all of these with enthusiasm.

Too Much Happiness
Alice Munro

In December 2009, two years ago, James and I met in Boston on one of the many excellent "long distance romance" trips that we shared before finally moving together to Dubai. We went to the Harvard Book Store, which is (along with that place in Princeton and Daunt Books in London) one of the best bookstores around. There's something so inviting in the way that the selection is carefully curated and displayed, with notes of recommendation from the well-read staff. And so, in the Harvard Book Store, I said that I loved Alice Munro's writing and James offered to give me this book as a gift. I finally read it in 2011, and loved it. Efficient, crisp short stories that always have that moment of poignancy or stunned surprise, pulling me even deeper into the characters. Like the cold Canadian winter, bundle up in knits and listen to the quiet, and wonder about the thoughts and motivations flowing in the minds of the others bundled up around you.

 A Visit From The Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan

As you can tell from this list, my preference for book genres tends to favour non-fiction (memoirs especially) rather than fiction. However, two of my absolute favourite books of 2011 were fiction, and I loved them both for their trajectories and momentum. True storytelling, compelling and absorbing. I read this book on our trip through Europe in the summertime after buying it in Nottingham on a sunny day. Each chapter acts as its own standalone story, with a new character as the narrator or focus in each case. And yet, each chapter and character is gently connected, without any contrivance. Sometimes, the stories leap ahead many years to reveal things about peripheral characters who had appeared a few chapters before. Other times, these peripheral characters emerge in heroic or tragic ways that made me gasp. I closed this book and sighed.

The Submission
Amy Waldman

I loved this story, I loved the characters, I loved the examination of New York culture and political knee-jerk reactions, both liberal and conservative. A contest to design a 9/11 memorial brings together a cluster of jurors, who review the anonymous submissions and choose the one that best fits their vision. The envelope is opened and the winning designer is an American architect named Mohammad Khan. The book explores the ways in which the different characters react to this, including Khan himself. There is the 9/11 widow, the journalist trying to get her big scoop, the wife of a Bangladeshi illegal immigrant who had perished that day, the head of the memorial committee, the brother of a victim whose directionless life finds purpose in fighting the memorial, and the politicians who all approach the announcement with election-minded calculation. There is a public hearing. There are shifts in the steadfast beliefs of the characters. There is uncertainty. And it all comes together in an epilogue that ties everything together, all of the loose ends, in a most satisfying way.

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu
John Updike

I bought this for James because he loves baseball, and I decided to read it because I love Boston. In a number of writing classes, the teachers would often bring out John Updike short stories as reading exercises, and just like those, this book was perfect: capturing the mood, the character, the atmosphere of Ted Williams' last game with the Boston Red Sox.

Holidays in Hell
PJ O'Rourke

Following our trip to Beirut earlier this year, I wandered over to the mall and James asked if I could find him this book if I went to the bookstore. He had remembered reading it before, and remembered that there was a story set in Beirut that he wanted to read again, now having seen the place for ourselves. After James had finished reading the book, I took it myself, and I read it in the style that I often read collections of short stories: hopping around, nothing sequential, starting with the ones that most interest me, putting checkmarks in the table of contents as I go along. I started with "A Ramble in Lebanon," in which he is in Lebanon in 1984, a much different time from what we experienced during our visit, wherein he is essentially the only tourist in the country. Other stories find him making pithy observations in trashy America, or Panama, or in a chapter entitled "Third World Driving Tips," which includes the following list: "Honk your horn only under the following circumstances: 1. When anything blocks the road. 2. Why anything doesn't. 3. When anything might. 4. At red lights. 5. At green lights. 6. At all other times." The holder of the driver's license in our household found this to be particularly relevant to his current experience. I also laughed that this chapter began with the author saying, "It's important to understand that in the Third World most driving is done with the horn, or 'Egyptian Brake Pedal," as it is known."

Just Kids
Patti Smith

"It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me."

It's New York City, it's the 1970s, it's friendship, it's possibility, it's art and music and photography, it's random streets and stories in Brooklyn, and random streets and stories in Chelsea. "There were days, rainy gray days, when the streets of Brooklyn were worthy of a photograph, every window the lens of a Leica, the view grainy and immobile." and "Pink light washed over rows of boarded buildings. New York light, the light of the abstract expressionists."

I bought this at Daunt Books in Marylebone on an April trip to London with James, and the woman at the counter glided her hand cross the cover as she rang up the price, saying "this is SUCH a good book." And it was.

 

How Did You Get This Number

Sloane Crosley

I loved her book, "I Was Told There'd Be Cake" and then I saw a series of her essays in the New York Times. These are the stories of being a young woman in Manhattan, dealing with apartment hunts, and moving days; travels and hopes; memories and nostalgia and all of the craziness that happens in the little moments. I bought this book for our trip to South Africa, rejoicing when I found it on an obscure shelf at the bookstore in Dubai (so massive that it's quite daunting to just go in for a browse, and difficult to locate a copy of a desired book if, say in the case of this one, it's been shelved in the "Travel Writing" section rather than memoir or essays or something more logical). Sloane Crosley reminds me of some of the girlfriends from New York City, the sardonic wit, the fun evenings out with great laughs.

Paris to the Moon
Adam Gopnik

I borrowed James's copy of this book, on his recommendation and read it before our summer holiday in Europe. It captures the spirit of the expat existence so well, wanting to live the romance of a chosen city and yet dealing with the ensuing headaches that come from not actually being a native son or daughter. But more beautifully, it captures the experience of living in Paris. The winters. The dinners at cozy bistros, at which James and I would soon eat on our holiday there. The strolls through the Luxembourg Gardens. The beauty. Truly, a lovely glance into the life of an expat in Paris.

Blood, Bones & Butter
Gabrielle Hamilton

I still think about various passages from this chef's memoir. I had eaten at her restaurant in the East Village many years ago, and I enjoyed her stories of the highs and lows of running that restaurant in much the same way as I had enjoyed Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential," i.e., you think it's a romantic venture to open a little cafe and serve plates of pasta and eggs to the locals, think again. Other things that I still think about many months after reading this on a train ride through Europe: at her wedding to an Italian man, rather than a wedding cake, they have serve a burrata, and everyone gets a little teaspoon from which they can take a small scoop of the creamy, cheesy mozzarella. Later in the book, during a blood sugar crash in Brooklyn, they drive aimlessly on the Sunday afternoon trying to find a proper restaurant for a sitdown meal, only to find that they are right in the purgatory between lunch and dinner service. As her blood sugar and mood worsen, her husband finally pulls up in front of a deli, where she procures beautiful rustic sliced meat sandwiches on fresh bread, and her husband hops over to the corner grocery for cans of cold beer, and they devour the whole meal in their car parked curbside. A last story, of learning from her mother-in-law the secrets of her orecchiete pasta, rolling it, pressing a thumb in the dough to make the little dimples, and drying it on the shelf to be boiled later. I made handmade pasta a few months after reading this book, and enjoyed the labourious process, the slow swirl of flour into egg yolks, the long process of kneading the dough until it was elastic and then rolling it out. It tasted like good, fresh pasta. As how I imagine those orecchiete tasted in the book.

The White Album
Joan Didion 

I have been reading a number of bloggers who frequently declare their adoration for Joan Didion, and because of this, I realized that I would like to read some of her writing. While in London, at Daunt Books (again!), I found this book to be the only one of hers available for sale and so I bought it. A collection of essays, which I could read in my hop-around mode, as described in the PJ O'Rourke description above. It was only later that I remembered that I had in fact once owned this same book, not the exact copy, but a hardcover version, purchases from the canalside secondhand shop near Monmouth Junction. But I had never read it, and had donated it during the clean-out phase that preceded my move to Dubai. And so I found myself now reading the White Album, and enjoying it as I started to read in a coffee shop on the Champs Elysees and then finishing it on a 747 flying from Frankfurt to Dubai. "A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image." Also, how I had I never known that she had this experience, much like my own: "In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist's office in Beverly Hills, the improbable had become the probable, the norm: things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me. I could be struck by lightning... "

Poser
Claire Dederer

A native of the Pacific Northwest and new mom takes up yoga and she writes about the experience with the same attitude that I take to yoga - enjoying it for many reasons, but not getting sanctimoniously serious about it.  She enjoys many unexpected benefits from a regular practice, both in her strength & physique and in her outlook on life. It reminded me of Vancouver; it reminded me of the little studio in Highland Park that I used to go to, where you could hear the night rainfall outside and the teachers were the most gentle people;  and it reminded me of the yoga studios that I visited in NYC, which featured patrons who ranged from lanky supermodel physique obsessives to aggressive financial types to "Wheatpacking District" bohemians, and which could be severe and intense, or nurturing with live guitarists. I was inspired to try to reboot my yoga in Dubai after reading this book, and thought I'd found the answer when a neighbour mentioned a place within walking distance that features drop-in classes. But then the same neighbour had nothing but complaints about the place, and I was getting adequate workouts from running so... well maybe in 2012 I'll start practicing on my crow pose again.

Day of Honey
Annia Ciezadlo

I wrote about how much I enjoyed this book here. As I wrote then, it's about a New Yorker who moves to the Middle East, honeymooning in Baghdad and then moving to Beirut. She writes about the rituals and traditions in each city, the little nuances that make up Middle Eastern life, with a particular focus on food. Having taken an Arabic cooking class this year, this book really enriched that experience, describing so much more about how things are cooked, and why. She also captures the spirit of a traveler, an expat, a nomad.  And also helped illuminate some of the tendencies that I observe amongst my coworkers - like, apparently it's a common Lebanese habit to comment on people's weight. Complimenting them on a weight loss, even when the recipient sheepishly protests that they have done no such thing, or stating the obvious when someone returns from a vacation with rounder cheeks, "you gained some weight!"

The Most Beautiful Walk in the World
John Baxter

A birthday present from James that was a lovely way to remember our time in Paris. The writer is an expat living in the city, thoroughly immersed in all of the daily rituals, and he has a keen eye for the unique "only in Paris" details that make you feel like you're walking the streets alongside him.

Fever Pitch
Nick Hornby 

There's a die-hard Arsenal fan in our household, and thanks to him, I have watched many a match during my time in Dubai. I owned this book many years ago, but after giving it a start, I never completed it. Just didn't pull me in, didn't resonate, didn't make much sense.But now, I have an ambassador to the team, a translator of all the references and lingo that Nick Hornby sprinkles throughout his stories. So we've been reading this together, with many pauses along the way for James to share his own memories of the same games or for me to ask for clarification on a reference. And it's good - it's more than just football, it's sport as metaphor. It's about growing up in England, it's about growing up anywhere, and the challenges that we all face, and the ways in which we get through them. It's about the routines we set up for ourselves, the hobbies we find to channel our energies, and the passion and identification with a group of people on a field. One of my favourite parts about this book has been the way that the chapters are entitled with a phrase and then the football opponents and the date of the match. Almost every time, I only have to read the opponents and the date, and James will instantly know the title. For example, I'll read "Arsenal vs Luton, August 27, 1983," and James will say, "Charlie Nicholas." Or "Liverpool vs Juventus, May 29, 1985," to which James says "Heysel!" Thanks to Nick Hornby, and James' stories during this book, I now have a greater appreciation for the history of what I'm seeing when we watch an Arsenal game.