I read what for me was an average number of books in 2011–not the more-than-a-book-a-week pace I tried to maintain during what I now think of as my “reading years”–the first half of the last decade–but something in the low 30s.
I’m able to produce a list of 33 books that I know I read in 2011, compiled by looking at my eReader and notes I kept about books I checked out of the library. I could easily have missed a couple, but I doubt that I’ve overlooked more than that. I’m not counting technical books because, though I can think of at least two I read from cover to cover, for the most part I was reading a chapter here and a chapter there.
I see that this year I read twice as much fiction as non-fiction, so I’ll single out two novels and one non-fiction book as my “Best Books of the Year”.
The best new novel I read in 2011 was Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won over Great House by Nicole Krauss by the narrowest of margins. Both of these books jumped around in time, with chapters centering on characters or events that were tangential to one another, and both required thought after I had put them down–there were puzzle pieces to put together once you had the whole book in mind. In the case of Goon Squad, the puzzle was the meaning of the title, which on review brought into relief the central theme of the book, the ravages of time. Krauss tried to do something similar with her title, but not quite so successfully. The puzzle in that case was more in working out the plot, in particular unmasking the misrepresentations of the first-person narrators in the various chapters. Great House was more opaque and might stand up better than the Egan on second reading, so maybe some of my satisfaction with Goon Squad was a stonger feeling that I “got” the book. (After finishing Great House I attending a reading by Krauss. The impression she left was that the opacity wasn’t particularly planned but was rather the way the book wrote itself.)
The book I most enjoyed reading and had the most trouble putting down was Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. Maybe in ascribing “best” to the other novels, I am over-compensating for the centrality of baseball in this novel. But all the same, Fielding is a great read for fan (like me) and non-fan. Only three of the five main characters are ballplayers (and one is gay), and a central subplot has nothing to do with baseball. Still, the resolution of the various subplots is surprising–and surprisingly satisfying.
My non-fiction winner was James Gleick’s The Information. (Runner-up was Saul Bellow’s Letters). I hesitated to read Gleick’s book because the first mentions I saw centered on Ada Lovelace, whose story has been told so many times before that I didn’t think I’d be interested. Before reading this book, I was aware of the importance of “information” culturally and ontologically, but there was so much that I was previously unaware of. Over and over in the reading, I came upon summary sentences that gave me a chill, they brought things together so clearly or highlighted the importance of one point or the other. I saw someone comment on-line that this was the most important book he had ever read. I could argue this point myself, for I am in agreement that “information” brings a clarity to what we know about history, humanity, and the universe, no small matters.
