Joanne Harris' "Gentlemen Players" is the gold standard for this year's best mystery. Set around an exclusive English boys school, it's filled with plot twists, possible red herrings, and solid narrative voices and pacing. It left me breathless, completely suckered, at points -- a delightful read.
As one who has traveled to Afghanistan twice in the last three years, and easily devoured 25 books about the place, I cast my vote for Rory Stewart's "The Places in Between" as the best book of 2006 and the best book about that country and its people. Stewart has an appealing view of the world and its people, open to understanding the customs and observing the way of life he meets as he walks across Afghanistan in January 2002. That he did not die is a testament to this man and his dog -- a Mastiff he adopts early on and a typical marvelous thread the reader follows with deep engagement.
The author's description of the world he meets, including, for example, people's toilet behavior, is in no way gross, but is typical of the detail and vividness of this book. Karen Armstrong's "The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions" is an important book, in this year when religion is running amok in our country. Armstrong writes about religion, mythology and belief in ways that engage both non-believers and believers.
(Maybe not True Believers). She traces the changes in religious beliefs from early beginnings in bloody sacrifice to more humanistic Golden Rule practices. with middle European hunter-gatherers, then moves to China, India, Greece and the Middle East, and ends around 200 A.
D. By the time Judaism and Christianity show up we can see where many of the beliefs in those faiths came from. Great notes and bibliography.
This may sound kind of dense but really it's quite thrilling -- Armstrong is a swell writer! I know a lot has been made of the over-the-top style of Marisha Pessl's debut, "Special Topics in Calamity Physics," but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I actually found the style to be consistent with the age and precociousness of the narrator.
It's definitely the best fiction book published this year that I read. I realize I'm not alone in this, but my favorite book of the year was Claire Messud's "The Emperor's Children." It brought back to life and then neatly eviscerated a post-synergy, pre-Sept.
11 New York City in devastating detail. Messud nailed not only the city's vainglorious peaks, but the sticky crevices of its often passionless ambition, and it still makes me squirm to think of exactly how familiar some of the characters felt. Well, Salon, once again you've let us all down by completely ignoring the genre of poetry!
My favorite poetry book of 2006 is "Ooga-Booga," by Frederick Seidel, who is something of a literary outsider. I can't describe in a few sentences how utterly unique this stuff is. These poems are frightening, suave, spooky, silly, brutal, mesmerizing, perverse.
The lines have a free-flowing rigidity, an off-the-wall stateliness that is always surprising. His subjects range from sex to mortality to geopolitics to high-end fashion to Italian motorcycles to all these things wrapped up together, but whatever he's writing about, he always does it with an honesty that spares nothing and no one. I rediscovered the public library this year, so I had the pleasure of reading a lot of the books that in earlier years I would just have perused in the bookstore.
Hands down, my favorite was "Brookland" by Emily Barton. An absorbing, detailed quasi-historical novel, it tells the story of the Winship sisters and their gin distillery (!) on the shores of 18th century Brooklyn, N.
Y. At that time the borough was a pastoral backwater, with bustling Manhattan only accessible by rowboat ferry. The heroine, Prudence, runs the distillery by day and dreams of constructing a high-flying wooden bridge over the river by night.
Her struggle to realize her dream, while keeping the family business going (who knew that the minutiae of crushing herbs to flavor gin could be so lyrical?) and living with her mercurial sisters and supportive husband, make the novel so resonant to the modern, multitasking woman. A beautifully imagined blend of historical fact and inventive whimsy, the book was so satisfying I nearly flipped right back to the beginning once I finished it.
Julia Child, with Alec Prud'homme, "My Life in France": In this delightful, spirited memoir, the woman who introduced Americans to the pleasures of French food recounts her early years of married life in postwar France, her training at Le Cordon Bleu, and the arduous but rewarding task of cookbook writing. Most amazingly, she describes in lush detail meals she ate in France as far back as the mid-'40s: Potently briny oysters, rye bread dotted with unsalted butter, Dover sole "perfectly browned in a sputtering of butter sauce." Child died in 2004, but this book suggests she was sharp until the last: The only thing greater than her recall is her charm.
My pick is "Blue Nude" by Elizabeth Rosner. Its roots live in the nightmare of the Holocaust of the 1940s. Weaving together the stories of the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and her experiences growing up with the equally troubling stories of the son of a Nazi, we see glimmers of a new way of being through these difficult situations.
Readers also wrote in to suggest the following titles: "The Inheritance of Loss" by Kiran Desai; "The Stolen Child" by Keith Donohue; "In the Company of the Courtesan"; "Kensington Gardens" by Rodrigo Fresán; "A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan" by Michael Kazin; "The Ha-Ha" by Dave King; "Lisey's Story" by Stephen King; "Widdershins" by Charles de Lint; "Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero" by David Maraniss; "Black Swan Green" by David Mitchell; "They Call Me Naughty Lola: Personal Ads From the London Review of Books" by David Rose; "Changeling" by Delia Sherman; "The Ruins" by Scott Smith; "Eat the Document" by Dana Spiotta; "The Courtier and the Heretic" by Patrick Stewart; "Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern" by Joshua Zeitz posted by Literanista @ 9:37 AM Joanne Harris' "Gentlemen Players" is the gold standard for this year's best mystery.
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