The Ten Best Books I read in 2018
It’s a new year, and so, without further ado, here’s my list of the 10 best books that I read in 2018. All told I read about one-hundred and fifty books last year. My tastes run the gambit from philosophy to history (with an especial interest in World War I), and fiction of every shape, form, and genre (from science fiction to crime novels). I have excluded books that I read in German, and included only the ten best English-language books I read in 2018.
Here they are.
10. History of Slavery: An Illustrated History of the Monstrous Evil by Susanne Everet
I don’t know what it is, but the equilibrium in a lot of coffee table books between images and words somehow seems to be off. You either get a picture book or something so heavy on text that the authorial voice just kind of obscures the impact of the images. Every book I’ve read by Susanne Everett has hit the sweet spot, in terms of the ratio of images to text. The subject’s horrific, but her handling is masterful, and the book is enlightening.
9. Halo for Hire: The Complete Paul Pine Mysteries by Howard Browne
I think one of the Paul Pine mysteries, The Taste of Ashes, was the number one book on my top-ten list last year. The best thing about this collection is that it not only includes the best Paul Pine mysteries (following the investigations of a detective stomping around postwar Chicago), but the earlier, less-fleshed-out books in the series are included, which allows us to the see the concomitant evolution of a writer and his creation. Very few writers are as good with dark, dry humor as Browne was, and that undercurrent of sadness, of humanity, which threads through all of his stories, makes them stand out from most of the jaded fare in the genre.
8. Measures of Poison edited by Dennis McMillan, with contributions by multiple authors.
Collections with multiple authors tend to be a minefield, in terms of quality, with some good stories sequenced against some bad ones, with some truly great ones maybe leavened into the mix somewhere. Not so with this collection. It’s a who’s-who of great crime/mystery writers at the peak of their powers, from George Pelecanos to Scott Phillips. There are some beautiful illustrations included, and as with all of the books from the McMillan imprint, the presentation makes the book an objet d’art in its own right, apart from the stellar contents.
7. There’s a Devil in the Drum by John F. Lucy
Any book that can correct a knowledge deficit is always a good thing. Before I read this book all I knew about the Irish in the Great War was that rumblings calling for Home Rule were in the air. I knew a hell of a lot more after reading Mr. Lucy’s book, which is written in spare, beautiful, and sometimes lyrical prose wherein battle is described in words that would make every Irishman from Brendan Behan to Shane McGowan proud. It’s a sad and beautiful little book, about the participation and sacrifice made by many Irishmen on behalf of England in the Great War, before Yeats’s “Terrible Beauty” was born and such participation would have been regarded as treason.
6.Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City by Julia Wertz
This book caught my eye on a display rack at my local library, and I figured it would be a kind of cute, adult version of the Richard Scarry books I used to pore over as a kid. I wasn’t expecting the book’s manic detail, its author’s obsessive-compulsive genius for cataloging not so much NYC’s seedy byways, but the quaint, the hidden, and the out-of-the-ordinary or out-of-the-way charms and factoids concealed beneath potholes or in pigeon rookeries scattered throughout the Naked City. I had a lot more fun with this one than I anticipated going in, since it was just an impulse grab.
5. Welcome to the Pleasuredome: Inside Las Vegas by David Spanier
I’m fascinated by Las Vegas in the same way that some women are obsessed with serial killers. I mean, I don’t necessarily like Las Vegas. I find the place repulsive, gaudy, a massive glittering con, and yet something about it continues to lure me back to the place, not literally (since I’ve never been), but in my literary wanderings. This book is written by someone who understands the psyche and psychosis of gambling, the quirks of a twenty-four seven town, the sad obverse side of a world of sin, and Mr. Spanier’s store of descriptive powers and general knowledge are pretty impressive. This is my favorite Vegas book since Whale in the Desert. Some reviewers have complained that the book is dated, but since the author is not in possession of a time machine (to my knowledge) I don’t see how he could have foreseen the Macau/Venice makeover the city would later have grafted onto its old skeleton of decorated sheds on the Strip.
4. Sympathy For The Devil
I’ve read a ton of books about the Vietnam War. I have some vets in my family, and some draft dodgers in my family, and the experience just kind of feels like some kind of epigenetic secondhand virus I carry in my blood, as if I have memories of it even though I wasn’t there. Metaphysics and Lamarckian fallacies aside, though, this is probably the second best book I’ve ever read about a grunt’s perspective in the ‘Nam (after Joe Haldeman’s 1968). The book follows a Special Forces enlistee named Hanson. He’s a bit like Oliver Stone’s onscreen alter-ego in Platoon, Chris. He’s a literature buff who comes to Vietnam with a head full of theory and then really meets the Dragon Nietzsche alluded to. It’s about as brutally violent as you would expect, but the creepy, haunting nature in which the violence is described (as a transcendent kind of religious learning experience) makes it a lot more unsettling than just a catalog of gory scenes. Like Michael Herr’s Dispatches, it’s a book about how war horrifies and appalls, but also how war slowly becomes a kind of intimate lover whose grasp you can never really shake, once it’s taken away from you an innocence deeper and more essential than virginity.
3. Before My Helpless Sight: Suffering, Dying and Military Medicine on the Western Front, 1914-1918 by Leo van Bergen
This is a very different kind of war book that sets itself the straightforward goal of documenting the costs of war in very human terms; what shells do to bodies; what trauma does to the brain; what war does to the spirit. There are some incredibly graphic images (including photos of mutilated dead children) inside, and I don’t recommend this book unless you feel it is necessary to bear witness to the atrocities shown and described herein for your own reasons (I don’t know why I feel compelled to study this stuff, but I do). The most horrific scene described? A soldier in a lazarette who seemed to be recovering from his wounds was given his lunch tray. He immediately sat up in bed, dumped the contents from the tray, and discarded all his silverware aside from a stainless steel fork. He then began using his flipped-over tray to literally pound the tines of the fork into his chest, hammering the eating utensil through his breastplate and directly into his heart.
2. The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature by Bruno Snell
I don’t throw around phrases like “mind-blowing” very often, but this book warrants it. Author Bruno Snell uses the works of Attic antiquity to show how the Greeks, through creative art, accidentally stumbled upon new modes of consciousness. The book is a study of intellectual evolution of Western thought and Western man, showing how the arts may not be downstream from other cultural factors like science, medicine, or military conquest, but may actually be the driving engine for everything else. That’s a large premise to start with, and a hard one to defend, but Snell builds a masterful case.
1. The Family Carnovsky by Israel Joshua Singer
And finally, the best book I read in 2018. I’m not really big on intergenerational sagas for the same reason I typically don’t get exercised about anthologies: the quality just tends to vary too much from strand to strand. In some multigenerational books maybe the grandparents’ generation is fascinating and their grandchildren are dullards, or vice versa. Israel Singer’s book offers a seamless, flawless chronologically whose only equal is maybe John Williams’ masterpiece Stoner, which is a book about how the decades pass for a seemingly unassuming English professor whose internal spiritual life is just as fascinating as his external world is boring.
Singer’s book follows three generations of Jews, from the Shtetl in the East on into Germany, where the family attempts to assimilate, and then finally into the tumult of the Weimar Government years, wherein one of the Carnovsky’s who married a gentile (horror of horrors!) but still managed to become a doctor (whew!) has to deal with his Mischling son’s self-hatred, antisemitism, and confused identity. Very, very rarely, does one see world history so perfectly integrated into the smaller story of actual lives lived. The book ends in poignant tragedy in America, where the Carnovsky family, having escaped persecution, is burdened by too many ghosts, and (to paraphrase Leviticus) they continue to flee where none pursueth. A brilliant meditation on pride, identity, self-loathing, intergenerational strife, history, and an all-around clinic from a master writer of whom I’d never previously heard. The book is long and while it’s not a page-turner in the traditional sense, its unflinching veracity makes it hard to put down and impossible to forget. All the other books I read this year on this list deserve their place, but this one was far and away the best of the lot.
Here they are.
10. History of Slavery: An Illustrated History of the Monstrous Evil by Susanne Everet
I don’t know what it is, but the equilibrium in a lot of coffee table books between images and words somehow seems to be off. You either get a picture book or something so heavy on text that the authorial voice just kind of obscures the impact of the images. Every book I’ve read by Susanne Everett has hit the sweet spot, in terms of the ratio of images to text. The subject’s horrific, but her handling is masterful, and the book is enlightening.
9. Halo for Hire: The Complete Paul Pine Mysteries by Howard Browne
I think one of the Paul Pine mysteries, The Taste of Ashes, was the number one book on my top-ten list last year. The best thing about this collection is that it not only includes the best Paul Pine mysteries (following the investigations of a detective stomping around postwar Chicago), but the earlier, less-fleshed-out books in the series are included, which allows us to the see the concomitant evolution of a writer and his creation. Very few writers are as good with dark, dry humor as Browne was, and that undercurrent of sadness, of humanity, which threads through all of his stories, makes them stand out from most of the jaded fare in the genre.
8. Measures of Poison edited by Dennis McMillan, with contributions by multiple authors.
Collections with multiple authors tend to be a minefield, in terms of quality, with some good stories sequenced against some bad ones, with some truly great ones maybe leavened into the mix somewhere. Not so with this collection. It’s a who’s-who of great crime/mystery writers at the peak of their powers, from George Pelecanos to Scott Phillips. There are some beautiful illustrations included, and as with all of the books from the McMillan imprint, the presentation makes the book an objet d’art in its own right, apart from the stellar contents.
7. There’s a Devil in the Drum by John F. Lucy
Any book that can correct a knowledge deficit is always a good thing. Before I read this book all I knew about the Irish in the Great War was that rumblings calling for Home Rule were in the air. I knew a hell of a lot more after reading Mr. Lucy’s book, which is written in spare, beautiful, and sometimes lyrical prose wherein battle is described in words that would make every Irishman from Brendan Behan to Shane McGowan proud. It’s a sad and beautiful little book, about the participation and sacrifice made by many Irishmen on behalf of England in the Great War, before Yeats’s “Terrible Beauty” was born and such participation would have been regarded as treason.
6.Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City by Julia Wertz
This book caught my eye on a display rack at my local library, and I figured it would be a kind of cute, adult version of the Richard Scarry books I used to pore over as a kid. I wasn’t expecting the book’s manic detail, its author’s obsessive-compulsive genius for cataloging not so much NYC’s seedy byways, but the quaint, the hidden, and the out-of-the-ordinary or out-of-the-way charms and factoids concealed beneath potholes or in pigeon rookeries scattered throughout the Naked City. I had a lot more fun with this one than I anticipated going in, since it was just an impulse grab.
5. Welcome to the Pleasuredome: Inside Las Vegas by David Spanier
I’m fascinated by Las Vegas in the same way that some women are obsessed with serial killers. I mean, I don’t necessarily like Las Vegas. I find the place repulsive, gaudy, a massive glittering con, and yet something about it continues to lure me back to the place, not literally (since I’ve never been), but in my literary wanderings. This book is written by someone who understands the psyche and psychosis of gambling, the quirks of a twenty-four seven town, the sad obverse side of a world of sin, and Mr. Spanier’s store of descriptive powers and general knowledge are pretty impressive. This is my favorite Vegas book since Whale in the Desert. Some reviewers have complained that the book is dated, but since the author is not in possession of a time machine (to my knowledge) I don’t see how he could have foreseen the Macau/Venice makeover the city would later have grafted onto its old skeleton of decorated sheds on the Strip.
4. Sympathy For The Devil
I’ve read a ton of books about the Vietnam War. I have some vets in my family, and some draft dodgers in my family, and the experience just kind of feels like some kind of epigenetic secondhand virus I carry in my blood, as if I have memories of it even though I wasn’t there. Metaphysics and Lamarckian fallacies aside, though, this is probably the second best book I’ve ever read about a grunt’s perspective in the ‘Nam (after Joe Haldeman’s 1968). The book follows a Special Forces enlistee named Hanson. He’s a bit like Oliver Stone’s onscreen alter-ego in Platoon, Chris. He’s a literature buff who comes to Vietnam with a head full of theory and then really meets the Dragon Nietzsche alluded to. It’s about as brutally violent as you would expect, but the creepy, haunting nature in which the violence is described (as a transcendent kind of religious learning experience) makes it a lot more unsettling than just a catalog of gory scenes. Like Michael Herr’s Dispatches, it’s a book about how war horrifies and appalls, but also how war slowly becomes a kind of intimate lover whose grasp you can never really shake, once it’s taken away from you an innocence deeper and more essential than virginity.
3. Before My Helpless Sight: Suffering, Dying and Military Medicine on the Western Front, 1914-1918 by Leo van Bergen
This is a very different kind of war book that sets itself the straightforward goal of documenting the costs of war in very human terms; what shells do to bodies; what trauma does to the brain; what war does to the spirit. There are some incredibly graphic images (including photos of mutilated dead children) inside, and I don’t recommend this book unless you feel it is necessary to bear witness to the atrocities shown and described herein for your own reasons (I don’t know why I feel compelled to study this stuff, but I do). The most horrific scene described? A soldier in a lazarette who seemed to be recovering from his wounds was given his lunch tray. He immediately sat up in bed, dumped the contents from the tray, and discarded all his silverware aside from a stainless steel fork. He then began using his flipped-over tray to literally pound the tines of the fork into his chest, hammering the eating utensil through his breastplate and directly into his heart.
2. The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature by Bruno Snell
I don’t throw around phrases like “mind-blowing” very often, but this book warrants it. Author Bruno Snell uses the works of Attic antiquity to show how the Greeks, through creative art, accidentally stumbled upon new modes of consciousness. The book is a study of intellectual evolution of Western thought and Western man, showing how the arts may not be downstream from other cultural factors like science, medicine, or military conquest, but may actually be the driving engine for everything else. That’s a large premise to start with, and a hard one to defend, but Snell builds a masterful case.
1. The Family Carnovsky by Israel Joshua Singer
And finally, the best book I read in 2018. I’m not really big on intergenerational sagas for the same reason I typically don’t get exercised about anthologies: the quality just tends to vary too much from strand to strand. In some multigenerational books maybe the grandparents’ generation is fascinating and their grandchildren are dullards, or vice versa. Israel Singer’s book offers a seamless, flawless chronologically whose only equal is maybe John Williams’ masterpiece Stoner, which is a book about how the decades pass for a seemingly unassuming English professor whose internal spiritual life is just as fascinating as his external world is boring.
Singer’s book follows three generations of Jews, from the Shtetl in the East on into Germany, where the family attempts to assimilate, and then finally into the tumult of the Weimar Government years, wherein one of the Carnovsky’s who married a gentile (horror of horrors!) but still managed to become a doctor (whew!) has to deal with his Mischling son’s self-hatred, antisemitism, and confused identity. Very, very rarely, does one see world history so perfectly integrated into the smaller story of actual lives lived. The book ends in poignant tragedy in America, where the Carnovsky family, having escaped persecution, is burdened by too many ghosts, and (to paraphrase Leviticus) they continue to flee where none pursueth. A brilliant meditation on pride, identity, self-loathing, intergenerational strife, history, and an all-around clinic from a master writer of whom I’d never previously heard. The book is long and while it’s not a page-turner in the traditional sense, its unflinching veracity makes it hard to put down and impossible to forget. All the other books I read this year on this list deserve their place, but this one was far and away the best of the lot.
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