2018 Top Ten Favorite Books

I don't usually do a Top Ten favorites list for the year, but I'm in the mood. What were your favorite books that you read in 2018?

My personal favorites for 2018 were mostly fiction, a couple of nonfiction, and, as usual, a lot of older stuff. Here's my list, in alphabetical order by the author's last name:

Eating People is Wrong by Malcolm Bradbury (1959), because of the title (natch) and because I love campus novels.

Diary of a Provincial Lady by E. M. Delafield (1930). This faux diary was so funny I immediately bought the sequels. 

Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy by Jonah Goldberg (2018), because he can make me think and laugh about serious subjects.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017), because it is wonderful, especially the audiobook.

Shylock Is My Name by Howard Jacobson (2016), which I thought was a brilliant retelling of The Merchant of Venice.

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan (2013), not because of the bling and the silly product placement, but because it gave me my first understanding of how unrelated and independent Asia is to the West.

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose MacAuley (1956). A very funny novel about a young woman and her aunt traveling through Turkey, that also has a serious side as the young woman struggles with her conscience and her faith.

H is For Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2014), because I get now why people like it even though it is about a bird.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (2016), for all the reasons everyone loves it.

Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike (2000). This was a surprise. It's the story of Hamlet's mother and her love affair with Claudius, his uncle and the murderer of his father, leading up to the moment the Shakespeare play opens. It is terrific.

Review: All the King's Men

 

Robert Penn Warren won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for All the King's Men, his fictionalized account of Louisiana's legendary governor Huey Long. In the novel, Long is Willie Stark, an idealistic country lawyer who takes on the political machine in his state and achieves meteoric success, only to be compromised by the same system he railed against.

This book has been on my list of Top 10 favorites since I read it in the mid-1990s, shortly after law school. Robert Penn Warren's combination of beautiful writing, compelling story, and political shenanigans wholly beguiled me.

Now, getting close to 20 years later, I wanted to re-read it to see if it still packed the same punch. It did, but in a quieter way. Either because I am older now or because I was familiar with the story, the political side didn't grab me, but the personal stories of Stark's family and the narrator, Stark's operative Jack Burden, struck me even harder with their heartbreak.

Warren was a poet first and a novelist second. His writing is full of metaphor, long descriptions, philosophical musings, and some long digressions away from the central plot. All these things, if not done right, can ruin a novel for me, fan of a good yarn that I am. But Warren does it right. It is definitely a book you have to settle in to and let it lead, but it is worth the dance if you do.

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NOTES

All the King's Men is listed on the Modern Library's list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century and the Time Magazine list of All-TIME best novels. 

This counts as one of my Pulitzer Prize choices for the Battle of the Prizes, American Version.  This challenge runs through January 31, 2012, so there is still time to enter -- books read since February 1, 2011 count.

A revised edition of All the King's Men was published a few years back, to little fanfare and a small dustup between Noel Polk, editor of the "restored" edition,  and Joyce Carol Oates.  It is much longer and, inexplicably, Willie Stark is called Willie Talos, which in itself would make it impossible for me to read, Willie Stark being such an icon of American fiction.

Review: Sophie's Choice

In Sophie’s Choice, William Styron does as masterful job of telling a horrific tale in bearable way. Sophie is a Polish Christian who survived 18 months in Auschwitz before the camp was liberated by the Allies. Of course her story is heartbreaking. But Styron unfolds the tale in a way that allows the reader to take it all in without being crushed by the sadness of it.

First, instead of marching out the story of Sophie’s capture and imprisonment in chronological order, Styron layers it on, each layer building on the next. When the 22-year-old narrator, Stingo (a Southerner moved to Brooklyn to write novels), first meets Sophie in the summer of 1947, she gives him only the briefest version of her experience in the war. It is only as they grow closer as friends that Sophie, through a series of drunken encounters, provides more details to Stingo, each time admitting that she had lied to him before in earlier versions of her tale.

By presenting the horrifying particulars bit by bit, Styron seems mindful of the warning, and even quotes Stalin as saying, that a “single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” The reader sees the tragedy of Sophie’s experience because, by offering just a little at a time, Styron allows the reader to digest her story, along with a great deal of information about the Holocaust in general. If Styron had presented her story in full from the beginning, the awfulness would be numbing.

Also, Styron balances Sophie’s tragic past with her tragic present in Brooklyn. In love with Nathan, a brilliant drug addict subject to violent fits of jealousy, Sophie has no chance of building a “normal” life in America. But, given her experiences in the concentration camp, it is impossible to imagine how she could. Rather than present an unbelievable fairy tale of survival, Styron uses the tortured relationship between Nathan and Sophie as the catalyst for her revelations to Stingo, as well as the vehicle of her ultimate, and well-foreshadowed, undoing.

Finally, for all its sadness, there is plenty of humor in the book. Some of Stingo’s failed romantic adventures are downright funny, as are his self-deprecating descriptions of his writing efforts. Again, without these side stories offering a respite from the main narrative, Sophie’s story would be unbearable.


OTHER REVIEWS

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NOTES

Sophie’s Choice is one of my Top 10 favorite novels of all times. It won the National Book Award in 1980.  It is on Anthony Burgess's list of his favorite 99 novels.  It is on the Modern Library list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century and Radcliffe's rival list. 

My (Current) Top 10 Favorite Novels

These are my ten favorite novels, in roughly the order I would put them if I absolutely had to (which I don't, because it's my list). It is subject to change at whim, which it did for the first time in a long time in 2010.

1. A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (discussed here);

2. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov;

3. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron (reviewed here);

4. The Road Home by Jim Harrison;

5. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco;

6. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (reviewed here);

7. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (reviewed here);

8. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald;

9. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell; and

10. Amsterdam by Ian McEwan.


NOTE
Updated June 19, 2010 (Cold Comfort Farm displaced The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All)

OTHER REVIEWS OF THE BOOKS ON THIS LIST
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