December 30, 2017

From The Paris Review (Jeffrey Gleaves on Favorite Books of 2017):

I like my reading to be as ironic as possible, that’s why Robert Coover’s Huck Out West was my favorite novel this year. Coover’s sequel to Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn takes Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to the edge of “sivilization,” through the Civl War up to the centennial year of 1876. Huck Out West is hilarious and pointed in the way only Coover can be. If you’re left wanting to stay in that era, then Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835–1870 is an impressive history. I’ve long appreciated Ulrich’s view of history as a chorus of singular stories. A House Full of Females isn’t your typical history pulled from headlines, memoirs of “important white men,” or official records; it’s a history gleaned from individual journals, personal stories, and heirlooms, putting us as close to the real story as possible.

From The Paris Review (Joel Pinckney on Favorite Books of 2017):

This year was filled with great new books, I’m sure—admittedly, I didn’t read most of them. Much of my year was spent with the Russians; I lived for months in Anna Karenina, Doctor Zhivago, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov. A few new books that I read and loved, however, were Camille Bordas’s How to Behave in a Crowd, Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance, and Ben Loory’s Tales of Falling and Flying. How to Behave in a Crowd, Bordas’s first novel, enticed me with its eleven-year-old narrator, puzzled by the world he encounters, all the while facilitating the healing his family so badly needs. Another first novel, In the Distance did something new, subverting the Western genre and, in so doing, raising important questions about cultural attitudes made evident by assumptions we make about art, particularly toward guns and immigrants. It’s also just a great story. Tales of Falling and Flying was the most fun I had reading a book in 2017. Loory’s playfulness with language is infecting; he writes like a boy playing with a new puppy. In his hands, language is a conduit of life and liveliness, an insight into what our imaginations could do if we let them. Finally, my favorite piece of writing from this year was an excerpt from George Saunders’s introduction to The Grace Paley Reader, published in The New Yorker. As he praises the writing of Paley, Saunders shows what makes him so beloved: the deep feeling with which he writes, the intent to get to the heart of the matter. In a year from which many of us stumble with dogged weariness, bits like the following are rejuvenating, giving me a new hunger for the year to come: “All of Paley’s work is marked by heart, precision, and concern for others, and surges with real, messy life, and the way life, lived, actually makes us feel: outgunned, befriended, short on time, long on regret, so happy we can’t stand it, so in love we become fools.”

From The Economist:

In India the share of women marrying by the age of 18 has dropped from 47% to 27% in a single decade.

From Harper's:

Strange-face illusions appear when two strangers are asked to gaze at each other in the dark.

From The New York Times (James Rollins on "Who are your favorite writers – novelists, nonfiction, journalists, poets – working today?"):

I’d pick E. Annie Proulx. I try to read every award winner each year, so I begrudgingly read “The Shipping News,” which even to this day is the novel on my bookshelf with the most highlighted passages. Proulx’s versatile use of language and sentence structure undid some blockage in my head. I attribute reading that book to freeing something inside my brain that allowed me to become a published writer.