Five Books I Loved This Year

Here are five of my favorite books of the year. Note: these are books I read this year, not books that were released this year. A list of 2014 titles I loved would have to include Next To Nothing, Keith Banner's collection of realist stories with working-class and gay themes (reviewed here), Cara Hoffman's Be Safe I Love You, William Boyle's Gravesend (reviewed here) and Michael Kazepis's Long Lost Dog of It (reviewed here). I liked Dog so much that I sent a copy to Long Lost Australian Cousin Anthony to try to get him to make a film of it. Those last two are published by Broken River Books, which has been doing some great things.

But now, the five books I really loved this year!

Thrown by Kerry Howley. Supposedly creative non-fiction, but with fiction elements. Did author Kerry Howley become a "spacetaker" (a sort of non-sexual groupie or hanger-on) to a pair of MMA fighters—the down-and-out Sean Huffman, who won't even cut weight to fight anymore, and the up-and-coming Erik Koch, who made it to the UFC? Well, someone followed them around for a couple of years. In the book, Kerry takes the form of Kit, a graduate student of phenomenology—making the title a pun, get it?—who is definitely real. As "fictional as longitude and latitude", to name two not-quite-real things. Kit stumbled upon an MMA card after slipping out of a boring conference on philosophy, and decides to make her search for the ecstatic through watching these fights her big research project. Needless to say, she quickly washes out of grad school. The boys aren't quite meatheads, and Kit is utterly hilarious in her enthusiasm and her intellectualization of MMA. The high-low game was old when Barthes did it to pro wrestling, but I cracked up reading virtually every page of this book. Kit-the-construct is infectious. Try this.

Becoming Dickens: The Invention of A Novelist by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. This biography of Dickens is really about a thin slice of life—specifically his career as a journalist and his first published fictions as Boz. It is primarily a look at how changing technologies, economies, and politics created the possibility and necessity of a Dickens. Douglas-Fairhust even begins the book with a shout-out to Sterling's and Gibson's seminal steampunk novel The Difference Engine. Technology and industry are at the forefront here, and anyone with an interest in the history of journalism or publishing must read this book. Dickens himself is an ever-compelling figure, but the reputation he achieved at the height of his powers often obscures the young hustler he was. The book is supposedly scholarly and is published by a university press, but is quite readable, with a minimum of academic-historical gibberish. (Thrown has tons of gibberish, but it is self-consciously gibberish.)

The Martian by Andy Weir. Self-published a few years ago, and a big hit when it was brought out by a commercial publisher in 2014, I first heard about the book by someone complaining about it on Twitter. She haaated it, though all the people at the science fiction convention she had recently attended were raving about it. I checked out the sample on amazon.com, hoping for a lolcow, but I was hooked. Mark Watney, an astronaut stranded on Mars by himself, is a good engineer and clever botanist, but he is not a Heinleinian hero, thank God. He's a goofball and almost pathologically cheerful, and he makes a ton of mistakes in this survival story. The journal entry structure is well-done, and the shift of scene back to Earth comes at just the right time. Hard SF has a sufficiently bad rep in certain circles that when I recommended it to an acquaintance, she was already pre-appalled about "another white male" book. But The Martian, despite its Robinson Crusoe-style conceit is actually about collective endeavor, not rugged individualism. The one tiny flaw in it is a shift to a weird and momentary omniscience to explain something about the habitat in which Watney is hiding out, but overall this book does exactly what hard SF is supposed to—it locates and explores the drama in human beings running up against the limits and rules of the physical universe.

The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn. I read these four novels—two of them actually novellas, in an omnibus of four. (There's a fifth volume, which I also read and loved, but I'm already pushing the limits of "five books I loved this year.") Patrick Melrose is a very unfortunate person—the son of a sadistic rapist father whose family ran out of money, and a pathetic rich mother eager to give all her money away—life starts out shitty enough. He's raped by his father at age five, and Dad finds himself thinking afterward:

During lunch David felt that he had perhaps pushed his disdain for middle-class prudery a little too far. Even at the bar of the Cavalry and Guards Club one couldn't boast about homosexual, paedophiliac incest with any confidence of a favourable reception.

Indeed. That's Never Mind, a short novel which spins around the drama of a dinner party. In Bad News, David is dead and adult drug-addict Patrick has to go to New York to fetch his rapist's ashes. It's another day or two in the life, with plenty of debauchery and very good look at the East Village before gentrification ruined it by rehabilitating the ruins. In Some Hope, there is some hope, and another dinner party, featuring an utterly terrible and hilarious Princess Margaret. Mother's Milk is a little longer and a little different, as it covers the summers of several years. Patrick is married, with children, now, and his dying mother has signed away their fancy French guest-house to a New Age charlatan. The books are best read as one large novel, given the number of recurring characters and how perfectly they age and change, or age and refuse to change. There are a few too many coincidences—a New York drug addict in book two finds his way to England to be part of the band playing for the party in book three, for example—but as a story arc the four-books-in-one holds together extremely well.

And the best book I read this year? Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham. I was recommended this novel by an ASMR video:



And it is excellent. It's not one of the more widely read of Maugham's novels, but it is in print, and the video above has a whispered summary of the major events. It's about writers, and publishing, and the arbitrariness of fame, and a woman dedicated to free love in a time when such things were forbidden, but the best parts are when Maugham stops the plot to take giant shits on Hugh Walpole. He does this for roughly eighty percent of the book. If only it were eighty-five percent! Read this book!