A list of one's own

The end of the year is all about the twin human impulses of reflecting and categorizing—a dangerous combination that results in an overload of lists. Lists of the best celebrity bloopers of 2007, of the catchiest pop songs of 2007, of the biggest blockbuster movies of 2007…and, inevitably, of the best books. This month, every media outlet in and out of the publishing industry released their picks for top books of the year, which is all well and good. The problem is that these lists are pretty much all the same. If I see one more mention of Joshua Ferris, Denis Johnson or Junot Diaz, I’m going to scream. Thousands of books are released each year, but the literary elite slaver over only a dozen of them that they by winking consensus have deemed to be the crème de la crème.

I, for one, am tired of it. And I’m not the only one. Over at the blog The Millions, they’ve interviewed literary types not about which of the newly released and well-reviewed novels they think are best, but simply about what they read and liked this year. I’m so taken with this idea that I’m now going to inflict on you my own list—a record of those books I read this year that struck me, moved me, made me think, or all three.

Fiction:

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
Two short novels set in occupied France by a writer soon afterward killed in a labor camp. Circumstances of authorship aside, the writing here is spectacular, spare, and sweet. What a terrible loss to literature.

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
Fascinating story about a man who witnesses a tragic balloon accident and becomes obsessed with it—McEwan at his carefully observed best.

The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe
A take-shelf find! I was completely engrossed in this very frank novel of young office workers running around New York in the 1950s, screwing up their lives in marvelous ways.

Moon Palace by Paul Auster
I’ve read a lot of Auster in the past year—he must be hitting a nerve with his strangely glowing yet dark novels. This one was odd as usual but very arresting.

Evening by Susan Minot
The movie looked lame, but I took a chance on the book. Despite some mediocre writing and an obvious plot, I was really taken with the idea of an old woman looking back on her life and loves and wondering what might have been.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
I liked this book before Oprah did, so there. What can I say that hasn’t been said? Read this. then be glad you live in a pre-apocalyptic world.

Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
More accessible than her sci-fi stuff, this novel grabbed me in its clutches with its astonishingly accurate portrayal of the twisted psychological games girls play with each other.

This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes
A.M. Homes doing a middle-aged man going slightly insane while the world is falling apart—literally—in California. You can’t go wrong with that.

Night & Day, Orlando, and Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf
I went on two-week Virginia Woolf jag and read all of these in succession. Not sure why, because her stilted style really annoys me at times. But she does have that thoroughly modernist ability to show the world as it really is, and not how we tell ourselves it is.

Nonfiction:

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
Everyone, everywhere, please read this. I’m not one for alarmist environmentalism, and this is not that. It imagines an Earth if humans suddenly disappeared, and in the most engaging nonfiction prose I’ve read in a long time, illuminates what we have already done, for better and for worse, irrevocably and not, to the planet.

Writings from the New Yorker 1927-1976 by E.B. White
I am always floored by E.B. White’s writing, which cuts to the heart of human experience with searing, hilarious wit.

Fun Home by Allison Bechdel
A graphic memoir by a lesbian dealing with the legacy left her from her closeted gay father’s untimely death.

Scribbling the Cat by Alexandra Fuller
In her follow-up to “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” Fuller revisits Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique in the company of a soldier who can’t quite leave the war behind, and finds she can’t either.

Kate Remembered by A. Scott Berg
Katharine Hepburn: an utterly fascinating woman, in a somewhat biased biography by a friend.

Lastly, I read three books in the past couple months that affected me deeply: Savage Beauty and Zelda, by Nancy Milford, and What Fresh Hell is This? by Marian Meade. These are biographies of, respectively, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker. I have far more to say on these books that can fit here, so stay tuned for a longer piece, but for now, let me just tell you that I should have been a young woman in New York in the 1920s and ‘30s. I’m eighty years too late. But if I had been there, would I have fallen into the same traps as these women did? They all started out so bright, and then faded into sad twilights of their own devising. The stories of these women will remain with me for a long time to come.

And one more thing: Talked-about books that I read and found overrated. Maybe it’s just me:
Falling Man by Don DeLillo
The Accidental by Ali Smith

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

The Keep by Jennifer Egan

Saturday by Ian McEwan

The Map that Changed the World by Simon Winchester

Happy reading!