The best books I read in 2010

Kevin D., stylishly putting the rest of us to shame.

The House of Versace by Deborah Ball is an absorbing business book for fashion lovers. Ball chronicles one man's creative development, and the partial dissolution of a glamorous brand due to his sister's hubris and excess.

The book unveils Gianni Versace's post-WWII modest Calabrian roots, intuitive sense for what makes women feel sexy and luxurious, his sad killing by serial killer Andrew Cunanan, his celebrity-packed memorial service, and his sister Donatella's sometimes unwise management decisions.

The author uncovers the shocking way the Versace family jettisoned Gianni's 15-year partner Antonio D'Amico from company profits.

I found Wall Street Journal Business Reporter Deborah's Ball's work to be impartial, astute, and compulsively readable, despite little description of Versace's actual designs.

(post script: The label's last Milan collection in September, impressed NY Times critic Cathy Horyn, who called the long-lengths, and tight-fitting styles- superior.)

Secret Historian by Justin Spring

My heart is bursting with gratitude for Justin Spring for his exhaustively researched and exciting Secret Historian. And thanks, too, to self-invented, self-identified sexual rebel (though no label suffices) Sam Steward, the esteemed professor turned Hells Angels' tattooist, turned above average erotic fiction writer, all while fighting a valiant battle with barbiturates.

Spring spent 10 years studying Steward's journals, letters and notorious card catalog of notes on casual sex left behind in his Oakland attic.

This necessary and fulfilling bio, rejected by 10 publishers before FSG stepped up, will make a lovely holiday gift, even if the recipient, (unlike Steward) does not favor beatings and humiliation by straight guys in dirty socks.

Best of 2010...

Here you go... The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell and Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño...npb

Books of the year 2010

No, I'm not going to list them all here, but if you are interested in some of my favorites, click here to visit the NPR podcast area where you can easily download my appearance on this morning's Your Call Show.

In addition to highlighting some of my picks, callers were plenty, offering up both book suggestions, as well as giving big audio hugs to their favorite independent bookstores in the Bay Area. Lots of love from the Santa Cruz area, by the way. . .

Thanks Rose, and KALW, for having me on; and thanks also to Rachel from Booksmith for joining me on the show, and for trying to get a word in edgewise - there was soooooo much to talk about!

~Have a very merry one, and we'll see you in 2011~

kevin

The best books I read this year

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Nina

Being prompted to choose favorites can sometimes be an annoying experience. It reminds me of the save-or-kill scenarios that people sometimes bring up, e.g. "If you were on a crashing plane with your mother and father and there was only one parachute to save one of their lives, who would you give it to?". Considering my rather confused sense of morals I usually don't participate in such mind games or arbitrarily and generously respond, "He who has not made peace with the Lord must live another day". This time around though, when asked to select my two most beloved books of 2010, it was easy to comply and I left the Lord out of it, too. See below my shelf talkers for two literary gems I'll always hold dear to my heart:

Dolly City by Orly Castel-Bloom

If I had written this book, I'd be so purged of all the vile filth festering in my mind, that I'd bake wondrous pastries for strangers out of pure saintly impulse. That's how satisfyingly sadistic Castel-Bloom's little masterpiece is. Gratuitously violent isn't a sufficient tag, as this story is also a finely crafted satire of statehood (Israel) and the art of mothering (fucking up) a child. Orly, you're my new favorite matriarch and I'd light your cigar for you anytime.

(Dolly City was also described as the "the most important Israeli novel of the last four decades" by Tablet's Liel Leibovitz)

Heartsnatcher by Boris Vian

This is a queer, cockeyed dog of a novel. In it, horses are crucified for their unwholesome sexual appetites, the elderly are auctioned off for the young to abuse and farm animals get days off. Prominently featured, too, is one of my favorite character types, the overbearing and reliably psychotic mother. For a taste of Vian's comedic skill, read pages 58-59, starting with "Vulgar, vulturous, vulpine villagers!"

(Boris Vian had a particularly interesting life. He was a Jazz trumpeter, film actor, author, playwright, cabaret singer, translator, record company executive and Transcendent Satrap of the College de Pataphysique. The man also had a heart condition and, to make up for the lost hours anticipated by an early death, hardly ever slept. He calculated that at the age of 40, he would have lived as long as someone 102 years old who had slept normally. He died in 1959, aged 39, watching a film version of his satirical erotic novel, J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Spit on Your Grave), of which he strongly disapproved.)

The best books I read in 2010

Next up: Josie

(Two of) the best books I read in 2010

One of my favorite books of the year, Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? is exactly what its title implies: an inquiry into how to live, and how to do it well. Through a fictionalized account of her personal life, Heti explores the ways in which self-doubt, capriciousness, and the ego are tied to one’s ability to live a creative life in the modern age. Yes, I know, this all sounds so serious. Or maybe it doesn’t. Either way, this novel is a rare gem of modern literature that effectively combines intellectual, philosophical musings with a narrative that is creative, absorbing, and quite funny, without being pretentious. How Should a Person Be? is about what it means to make art, and what it means to be a human. After finishing it over the course of a few days, this book stuck with me for weeks. I even read passages of it aloud to a friend, something I rarely do. This is a fine book from a fine Canadian author, one that made oh-10 just a little bit better.

[Unfortunately, How Should a Person Be? has not yet been published in the U.S. But, never fear. An excerpt from the book was published in the current issue of n+1, which is available right here at Green Apple Books. And, the book itself can easily be ordered through the Canadian publisher House of Anansi Press. Also, Sheila Heti has a great website where you can read a lot of her writing, including excerpts from her three books, as well as some great articles and interviews.]

I read my other favorite book way back in February, in a single sitting. Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver quickly pulled me into the stark world of a cold Scandinavian winter, and the complex life of one uncompromising, socially isolated woman. Though the tale begins quite modestly, this story quickly compounds and calls into question what even the most seemingly moral among us will do for what we want, or what we think we need. The darkness and vulnerability of Jansson’s characters and their relationships with one another left me contemplative, if not haunted. Understated and beautifully written, this book has continued to stand out among everything I have read in the last year, in the best way possible.

The best books I read in 2010

This is me at work. My leisure time looks nothing like this. I usually read sitting down.

It is difficult to do justice to one of my favorite books I read this year, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. This book invaded my consciousness and, at least for the time I was reading it, colored the world around me anew. Poetry can do that, and so it's not surprising that the sole novel by Rainer Maria Rilke, writer of some of the most beautiful and arresting poetry in (any) language, is like the effect of a beautiful poem experienced tenfold, like a dream that feels impossibly long. Written as a notebook of the stream-of-consciousness musings of a young man living, wandering and writing in Paris, this semi-autobiographical novel examines subjects such as writing, death, memory, childhood, identity, and "God" via a typically modernist fragmented narrative that nonetheless moves seamlessly through time and space. This is a novel that simply cannot leave you unmoved.

My other favorite book read in 2010 is Short Talks by Anne Carson. Here I feel I should admit, cliche though it may be, that I would read Anne Carson's version of the phone book (come to think of it, I would actually really, really like to read Anne Carson's version of the phone book.) Anyway. Being very brief meditations on a wide range of subjects (including but not limited to: A Short Talk on Walking Backwards, A Short Talk on Gertrude Stein, A Short Talk on Waterproofing, A Short Talk on Hedonism, A Short Talk on the Sensation of Aeroplane Take-off), all of these micro-essays are short, some of them are profoundly substantive, some are light and lovely, and they took me a surprisingly long time to read because nearly every one of them stopped me cold, made me want to linger with it a moment. It's a perfect book to keep bedside, travel-side, or just by your side for a little while. Now, because I can't resist and I can't say it better, I'll just share my favorite one, and let you decide if you want another:

Short Talk on Orchids

We live by tunneling for we are people buried alive. To me, the tunnels you make will seem strangely aimless, uprooted orchids. But the fragrance is undying. A Little Boy has run away from Amherst a few days ago, wrote Emily Dickinson in a letter of 1883, and when asked where he was going replied, Vermont or Asia.

The best books we read in 2010

[Over the next few weeks, we'll be running a series of posts featuring our staff members' selections of their favorite books read in 2010. Forgive our presumption, but we're booksellers: most of us can't limit ourselves to just one book.]

Sparks (captioning himself in the 3rd person)

After reading the NY Times list of Ten Best Books of 2010 a friend joked with me that if he had to read two books a week, his year-end list would include titles from only the last 3 months as well. (In all fairness, two of the ten books on the Times' list were published as far back as June, but pity the first, apparently forgettable, half of 2010.) I like to think that most booksellers have longer memories and are, therefore, more charitable: some of the books we'll be sharing with you were published this year, others were published twenty years ago. Some are out-of-print, some are in piled in healthy quantities on our tables. All in all, I think we've got a great selection of titles to share.

Without any further ado, here are the two best books I read in 2010:

The Way of the World, by Nicolas Bouvier (NYRB, $16.95)

The Way of the World is a new old book, having been originally published in French in 1963 and in English by the redoubtable NYRB in October 2009. (The Marlboro Press published it in the mid-90s, now out-of-print.) I read the book in January while living in the middle of Illinois, a heartless month in a cold place. Like all great travel narratives, it filled me with the urge to escape. I wrote about the book then and don't think I can do any better now:

Nicolas Bouvier’s beautifully rendered recollection of a trip he and a friend, the artist Thierry Vernat, took from Geneva to the Khyber Pass is a testament to the kind of admirable travel that leaves one breathless. The Way of the World records a trip I can never take (history renders certain things impossible), but like all memorable literature it pulls the reader along, it stirs up the depths we do our best to ignore in order to survive the office, regular meals, the slight pleasures of daily living...

...Ultimately, it may be that the most remarkable aspect of the book is not its vivid recollections of the pleasures and sorrows of the road, but Bouvier's insouciance when faced with the tribulations of travel. This attitude is best typified at the end of the book, as the traveler realizes his destination:

"That day, I really believed that I had grasped something and that henceforth my life would be changed. But insights cannot be held forever. Like water, the world ripples across you and for a while you take on its colors. Then it recedes, and leaves you face to face with the void you carry inside yourself…"

My other favorite book this year is a collection of Eliot Weinberger's essays, An Elemental Thing (New Directions, $16.95). Before even finishing this collection, I'd ordered the rest of Weinberger's books and promptly devoured them as well. Here's my shelf-talker:

Eliot Weinberger, a college drop-out turned translator (of Paz, Borges, Bei Dao, among others) writes essays unlike anything you've read. These pieces--erudite, wide-ranging, poetic--are of universal scope, touching upon topics as diverse (and cohesive) as the varieties of Chinese wind, a history of the rhinoceros in Europe, the Nazca lines in the Peruvian desert, vortexes, and a reverie on the stars that is one of the most beautiful things I've read. Weinberger's vast learning is matched by an equally encompassing sense of wonder, and his ability to draw the exotic closer, while still permitting it an air of mystery, is a thing to marvel at.