Results for “best non-fiction”

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This year produced a strong set of top entries, though with little depth past these favorites.  Note that sometimes my review lies behind the link:

Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Stories.

Gaël Faye, Small Country.  Think Burundi, spillover from genocide, descent into madness, and “the eyes of a child caught in the maelstrom of history.”

Madeline Miller, Circe.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, volume six, My Struggle.  Or should it be listed in the non-fiction section?

Can Xue, Love in the New Millennium.

Anna Burns, Milkman, Booker Prize winner, Northern Ireland, troubles, here is a good and accurate review.

Homer’s Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson.

Uwe Johnson, From a Year in the Life of Gessine Cresspahl.  I haven’t read this one yet, I did some browse, and I am fairly confident it belongs on this list.  1760 pp.

Which are your picks?

Soon I’ll offer up my longer lists for fiction and non-fiction, but let’s start at the top.  My nomination for best book of the year is Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey.  It is a joy to read, the best of the five translations I know, and it has received strong reviews from scholars for its accuracy and fidelity.  I also would give a top rating to the book’s introductory essay, a mini-book in itself.

Normally I would say more about a book of the year, but a) many of you already know the Odyssey in some form or another, and b) this spring I’ll be doing a Conversations with Tyler with Emily Wilson, and I’ll save up my broader thoughts for then.  I’ll just say for now it is one of the greatest works of political thought, as well as a wonderful story.  In any case, a reread of this one is imperative, and you will learn new and fresh things.

There you go!

I was disappointed by most of this year’s well-known releases, and did most of my rewarding fiction reading in past classics.  But these are the fiction or fiction-related works I found to be outstanding this year:

Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians.  A novel of an affair, with intoxicating Irish prose and a genuine energy on the page, though it is more a work of intensifying fervor than a traditional plot-based story.

Claire Louise-Bennett, Pond, more from Ireland, short, nominally fiction but more like a circular sensory experience of reading overlapping short stories, with a cumulative effect akin to that of poetry.  I found this one mesmerizing.

Javier Marias, Thus Bad Begins.  I have only started this, but so far I like it very much.  I have enough faith in Marias to put in on the list.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Reputations, a short Colombian novel on memory — personal, historical, sexual, and otherwise, this was my favorite short work of the year.

The Complete Works of Primo Levi, in three volumes, edited by Ann Goldstein.  By no means is all of this fiction, but I will put these books in this category.  A revelation, as Levi has more works of interest, and a broader range of intellect and understanding, than I had realized.  There is plenty of linguistics, economics, history, and social science in these literary pages as well as consistently beautiful writing and superb translations.  This is technically from 2015, but I missed it last time around.

Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai.  Review here.  Strictly speaking, this is a reissue of an earlier published but neglected work.  Maniacal, intense, super-smart, about a mother bringing up a prodigy.

Emily Dickinson’s Poems as She Preserved Them, edited by Cristanne Miller.  The visual presentation of poetry matters too, plus she is one of the very best.

The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. LeGuin, self-recommending.

Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia.  A revealing mismash look into the mind of the author, giving you an integrated picture of her world view, with carefully calculated feints thrown in.  I should note this one works only if you know and love her novels already.  Ferrante’s “children’s” story The Beach at Night is also worthwhile, very dark, you can read it in a small number of minutes.  Here is a good NYT review.

Jean-Michael Rabaté, Think Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human.  This work of criticism is grounded in literary theory, but informative and smart nonetheless.

Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review Guide to Literary Fiction.  An amazingly comprehensive and informative work, mostly about literature in translation, from the creator of the Literary Saloon blog about fiction.  I liked it so much I decided to do a Conversation with Michael Orthofer.  If you could own only ten works on literature, this should be one of them.

If you give me only one pick, I opt for the Primo Levi, even if you think you already know his work.

A few I didn’t get to read yet, but have hopes for are Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, and Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk, caveat emptor in both cases, plus Invisible Planets, edited by Ken Liu, a collection of Chinese science fiction.

My post on best non-fiction of the year will be coming soon, plus I’ll do new entries for any excellent fiction between now and the end of the year.

This year there are three stand-out winners, which is not usually the case.  These are all major books which virtually everyone should read, at least provided you read non-fiction (fiction) at all:

1. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.  My review is here.

2. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, interesting on every page and lives up to the hype.  Here is a good review by Michael Rosenwald.

3. Haruki Murakami, IQ84.  I haven’t finished it yet, but I feel confident putting it on the list (I’m about one-third through).  I even agree with many of the reservations expressed in this review but the book is nonetheless a major achievement.  There are dozens of reviews here.

Here is the (lame) PW list of the ten best books of the year.  And if you are wondering, I have sour impressions of the new Eco and Joan Didion books.

Soon I’ll prepare a longer list of my favorite books of the last year, in part for your gift-giving purposes.

1. Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers, The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create.  Could the be the best book on NFTs?  I think we should be genuinely uncertain as to whether NFTs have a future.  In the meantime, I consider NFTs a good Rorschach test for whether an individual’s mind is capable of moving out of “the dismissive mode.”  Do you pass or fail this test?  The “snide, sniping” mode is so hard for many commentators to resist…

2. Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art, edited by Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans.  Excellent text and also color plates, including paintings and sketches of her, a very good introduction to her work.  Here is a good bit: “Rarely, if ever, has a major poet grown up so deeply embedded in an avant-garde visual culture.  Yet she seems actively to have resisted the lure of the world of images, preferring to live and write, as Bell liked to think she did spontaneously, out of her own mind.”  A wonderful chronicle of a very particular time, artistic and otherwise.

3. Peter Cowie, God and the Devil: The Life and Work of Ingmar Bergman.  The author knew Bergman, and early on, so this is a useful biography in several regards, most of all for some background information and TV and theatre projects that never came to fruition.  But it is not useful for converting the unconverted, nor does it have much more interpretative meat for the in-the-know obsessives.

4. Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis.  One of my favorite books on the British Enlightenment.  For instance, the author captures the tenor of 18th century British debates about liberty very well.  Very good chapters on Hume, Shelburne, and Macaulay.  Whatmore somehow writes as if he is actually trying to explain things to you!  If you read a lot of history books, you will know that is oddly rare.  Recommended, for all those who care.

5. Anthony Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium. So far I’ve read only 22 pp. of this one, and it clocks in at 900 pp. plus.  It is obviously excellent and I wanted to tell you about it right away.  I expect it to make the top few picks of the best non-fiction of 2024.  The author’s main theme is that Byzantium built a “New Roman Empire,” and he details how that happened.  The writing is also clear and transparent, for a time period that is not always easy to understand.

William Magnuson, For Profit: A History of Corporations is not a book for me, but it is a good and sane introduction for those seeking that.

Rob Henderson, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.  Yes, that is the Rob Henderson of Twitter and Substack.  He was raised by foster parents and joined the Air Force at the age of seventeen.  He ended up with a Ph.D. from Cambridge.  This is his story, it covers class in America, and it is a paean to family stability.

There Were Giants in the Land: Episodes in the Life of W. Cleon Skousen.  Compiled and edited by Jo Ann and Mark Skousen.  If you are interested in LDS, one approach is to read The Book of Mormon.  Another option is to read a book like this one.  It is also, coming from a very different direction, a paean to family stability.

Thomas Bell, Kathmandu.  There should be more books about individual cities, and this is one of them, one of the best in fact.  Excerpt: “At its most local levels, of the neighbourhood, or the individual house, Kathmandu is ordered by religious concepts, either around holy stones, or divinely sanctioned carpentry and bricklaying techniques.  The same is true of the city as a whole.”  And how do they still have so many Maoists?

Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala & English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas, edited by Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne, and Shash Trevett.  A truly excellent collection, worthy of making the best non-fiction of 2023 list.  Or does this count as fiction?  It’s mostly about things that happened.

Eric H. Cline, After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations.  A good sequel to the very good 1177 B.C.

Allison Pugh, The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World accurately diagnosing networking as a skill that will rise significantly in value in a tech-laden world.

Dorian Bandy, Mozart The Performer: Variations on the Showman’s Art shows how Mozart, first and foremost, was a showman and that background shaped his subsequent output and career.