This is for Tiff. And, I suppose, anyone else who likes to read. You'd have to like to read, because this ain't a concise post.
I can't create a list of the best books of 2007 because there's no way I can actually read only books from the current year. I haven't even read most of the Western Canon yet. So I'm going to list everything I read last year, which comprises a few hundred years as opposed to one, and then give you a top 5 list with mini reviews from that.
Fiction I read in 2007 (not in any order):
- Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
- The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
- Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco
- The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - Umberto Eco
- The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemmingway
- Prince Caspian - C.S. Lewis
- The Magician's Nephew - C.S. Lewis
- The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
- The Consolation of Philosophy - Boethius (thanks, Derek)
- Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (thanks, Natalie)
- The Road - Cormac McCarthy (thanks, Steve)
- The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
- Good Benito - Alan Lightman
- Watchmen - Alan Moore (thanks, Ian)
- A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
- American Gods - Neil Gaiman
- Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
- Ratner's Star - Don DeLillo
- The Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King
- Song of Susannah - Stephen King
- The Dark Tower - Stephen King (thanks, Keith x3!)
- Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre - Walter Kaufman
- A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism - Andrzej Walicki (thanks again, Derek)
- Please Kill Me - The Uncensored Oral History of Punk - Legs McNeil
- Rip It Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978-1984 - Simon Reynolds (thanks again, Steve x 2!)
- I'm not including technical manuals and texts. I read far too many of those this year and the list would only be interesting to me and maybe my cat.
1. Cloud Atlas
This is one of the best novels I have ever read. The admirable things Mitchell does with structure remind me of Underworld by DeLillo, but its his capacity for playing with language that makes reading this so delightful. The time periods (19th Century, early 20th, late 20th, early 21st, a few decades in the future, distant and post-apocalyptic future earth) and sources (travel journal, correspondence, journalism, autobiography, interview, and oral storytelling) reflected in the split-sections of the novel each have a completely realized and satisfying lexicon and style. Of course, intriguing structure and clever language do not necessarily make a novel memorable or worth reading carefully; Cloud Atlas is, however, both. The themes are universal, challenging and compelling. Dialogues about savagery and civilization are stated simply and with great insight. This book is wise about individuals, realistic about our collective blind tendencies toward honoring power, and hopeful about those that fight against it, however small. This is going to be a story I need to re-read every few years as our species heads inevitably toward the not-so-speculative future depicted within it.
2. The Road
Interestingly, the two best novels for me this year both had post-apocalyptic themes. The Road is ambiguous about both the cause and nature of its cataclysm, and takes place solely in the aftermath. Very brief mentions of the world as we know it occur in recollection, but they aren't common enough to make our life even conceivable as a precursor to theirs. The world is bleak, bereft, broken. We follow a father and son through a burned-out America, and they appear to be the only ones who have kept the memory of love alive. They are forced into situations where human lives must be taken, but we assume that they are right because they are the only ones whose motivations we know. Our heroes may be situational savages but they are surrounded by human animals that want their blood. It isn't science fiction. These aren't vampires. These are people driven to desperation and madness by anarchy and starvation. And as we identify more and more with the father and the son who face these endless enemies, we share their fear, and don't want to make their decisions with them. The Road is very sparse in its language, sketchy, bare, and short. The novel's impact is as much a function of this style as it is of the subject matter. It can be a problem as well. The repeating rhythm of the text and your rapid progress through it can lull you away from the language itself. When the careful reading of a single, slightly vague sentence can shift your view of the entire story, it is frustrating to miss out on these tiny but vital elements of the story. If you read this novel - and, of course, I think you should - make sure you go back if you find yourself tuning out the details.
3. Lolita
As a portrait of obsession, it has no equal. Obsessive, possessive attraction, actually. Every word out of Humbert Humbert, the narrator/protagonist, references in some way his love, his nymphet, Lolita. This is not an exaggeration. His description of the roads of America, his car, hotel rooms, his wives, tennis, even a murder - when read out of context - seem to be describing the lines of his obsession's body, her movements, her smell. But equally impressive is that everything about this novel is questionable. H.H. describes his own various institutionalizations in the years before the main story begins, leaving his entire narrative open to the possibility that it is largely delusional. The names of all of the characters, including Humbert himself are changed, Dragnet-style, to protect the innocent. The story is presented as the memoir of a deviant by the lawyer charged with distributing it, and the lawyer's introduction is presented as fact, not fiction. Not one part of the story is reliable or objectively determinable. Is Dolores Haze, the famed Lolita, a victim? We have only H.H.'s description to go on, and he makes it seem as though she is the one that initiates, that she is far more experienced than her 12 years should have allowed, that she is the one that breaks his heart. This novel plays with you in numerous ways concurrently.
4. Kafka on the Shore
If you've read Murakami before, then I really don't need to say much about this. It's 100% Murakami: oddly matter-of-fact but detached depictions of sex, remixed Greek myths, unclear difference between character hallucinations and the possibility of a genuinely magical world, sad, beautiful, silly. If you've never read Murakami and the above sounds intriguing, read this one or The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, they're both very good. Kafka on the Shore is also very intricate. It's a joy to see how the utter strangeness that seems random at first begins to make sense, and how these threads of ideas - a man that can talk to cats, the Johnny Walker logo as a vampire, cryptic prophecies, a quirky library and a powerful cabin in the woods - tie together so neatly and in such a satisfying pattern by the end.
5. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre
Usually I find philosophical texts to be dry - I think I'm not unique in that assessment. This one is different - it is a collection of essays and prose by what the editor deems to be contributors to Existential thought, many who either pre-dated or vehemently denied their role in the movement. There is prose by Rilke, and it is magnificent. There are Kafka stories that say more about "being" in two pages than Kierkegaard says in his long, rambling selections presented in the book. The essay by Sartre called "Portrait of the Anti-Semite" is devastating and brilliant, it implicates us all in prejudice and shows the absurdity of even the smallest discrimination. I need more context than just this book to understand Heidegger, but I could at least superficially glean that he wasn't superficial. All of these are assembled and prefaced with a succinct overview of each writer/thinker. Combined, it's a picture of existentialism that Kierkegaard could never achieve on his own. (Is that enough Kierkegaard slagging? Maybe I should mention that Jaspers' abominable thought-spew makes the self-absorbed Dane seem coherent?)
And now, a word about Stephen King
As a final note, I have to explain why I haven't put the Stephen King books in this list of my top 5 of last year, despite their high placement in my all-time list. The Dark Tower is seven books long, I've taken 15 years to read them, and I couldn't possibly count the three I read in 2007 as individual novels that could be ranked among the others. (Why am I ranking anyway? Meaning-making, constructing the beginnings of an ontology to make sense of my aesthetic values. Or, merely because of a request from Tiff?) I should write a post about the Dark Tower series, and maybe King in general soon. Not for people who've read and enjoyed his work, but for those who assume that Stephen King is just a typewriter with scary glasses.
