2009 Annual List

The Editrix 
Benjamin Black/Christine Falls
Peter Carey/Theft
Henry James/The Turn of the Screw
Donna Leon/Death at La Fenice
Per Petterson/Out Stealing Horses
François Place/The Old Man Mad About Drawing: A Tale of Hokusai
Francine Prose/Reading Like a Writer
Terry Pratchett/Diggers
Sarah Stewart Taylor/O’ Artful Death
Mark Twain/The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Moi
Jesse Ball/The Way Through Doors
Roberto Bolaño/2666
Suzanne Collins/The Hunger Games
Don DeLillo/Falling Man
Jonathan Lethem/Chronic City
China Miéville/The City & The City
Per Petterson/Out Stealing Horses
François Place/The Old Man Mad About Drawing: A Tale of Hokusai
Francine Prose/Reading Like a Writer
Thomas Pynchon/Inherent Vice
José Saramago/Blindness

2010 Annual List

The Editrix
L. Frank Baum/The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Charlotte Brontë/Jane Eyre
Lewis Carroll and Martin Gardner/The Annotated Alice
Michael Chabon/The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Castle Freeman, Jr./All That I Have
Stieg Larsson/The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Jonathan Lethem/Motherless Brooklyn
Denise Mina/Field of Blood
Rex Stout/The League of Frightened Men
Rex Stout/Triple Jeopardy: Three Novellas (Home to Roost; The Cop-Killer; The Squirt and the Monkey)

Moi
Paolo Bacigalupi/The Windup Girl
Muriel Barbery/The Elegance of the Hedgehog
L. Frank Baum/The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Earl Derr Biggers/The House Without a Key
Lewis Buzbee/The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop
Deborah Eisenberg/Twilight of the Superheroes
Cornelia Funke/Inkheart
Edward P. Jones/The Known World
Fritz Leiber/The Swords of Lankhmar
Kelly Link/Stranger Things Happen
Stieg Larsson/The Girl Who trilogy
Rex Stout/Some Buried Caesar

2011 Annual List

The Editrix
Jane Austen/Pride and Prejudice
Dan Chaon/Await Your Reply
Thomas H. Cook/The Fate of Katherine Carr
Jennifer Egan/A Visit From the Goon Squad
Stephen Greenblatt/Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
Paul Hardy/Tinkers
Henry James/Daisy Miller
Herman Melville/Billy Budd, Sailor
Brian Selznick/The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Virginia Woolf/Mrs. Dalloway

Moi
Dan Chaon/Await Your Reply
Jennifer Egan/A Visit From the Goon Squad
Damon Galgut/In a Strange Room
Margo Lanagan/Tender Morsels
Karen Lord/Redemption in Indigo
George R. R. Martin/A Game of Thrones
Colum McCann/Let the Great World Spin
China Mieville/Embassytown
David Mitchell/The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Haruki Murakami/1Q84
Virginia Woolf/Mrs. Dalloway

The Known World by Edward P. Jones

“The evening his master died he worked again well after he ended the day for the other adults, his own wife among them, and sent them back with hunger and tiredness to their cabins. The young ones, his son among them, had been sent out of the fields an hour or so before the adults, to prepare the late supper and, if there was time enough, to play in the few minutes of sun that were left. When he, Moses, finally freed himself of the ancient and brittle harness that connected him to the oldest mule that his master owned, all that was left of the sun was a five-inch-long memory of red orange laid out in still waves across the horizon between two mountains on the left and one on the right. He had been in the fields for all of fourteen hours.”

The opening lines of The Known World by Edward P. Jones.

Before we’re told his name, we’re told that Moses has a master, which, in a society built on slavery, is a more important and more pertinent piece of information about him. But we’re also shown that, despite his status as a slave, Moses also enjoys a degree of authority: it is his to tell the other slaves when they can stop working and leave the fields. The implication seems to be that this authority is the reward for his dedication: he regularly works longer than anyone else, and on this day he does not take the death of his master as an excuse to slack off. So it’s clear from the beginning that this will be not just a novel about slavery, but a novel about the nuances and details of slavery, about how the institution is experienced by individuals.

We’re shown Moses “freeing” himself from a “harness.” Not that he is free of the great harness of slavery, but perhaps it is suggestive of some smaller freedoms that he enjoys as an overseer and as the slave of a man determined to be a humane master.

In this book, Jones has a habit of interrupting a scene to offer information on the past or future experiences of a character; I initially found this technique disruptive and I resisted the book because of it.

But I tried to understand my own resistance and to think more objectively about what the technique might accomplish. I thought I saw some similarities with Samuel R. Delany’s investigations of the ways in which personal memories invade and inform the present. I also thought I heard echoes of an oral tradition in this discursiveness, which would be a resonant element in a story and a society in which literacy is a charged subject. And I thought about the fact that for any historical novel set in America in this period, the Civil War is always the elephant in the room. The usual solution is to ignore the elephant on the grounds that the characters can have no knowledge of events that will occur in their future, and that’s a very reasonable position, but inevitably the reader has that knowledge, and I thought that Jones was addressing that dynamic in an interesting way, since his digressions often dealt with the post-Civil War/post-slavery experiences of the characters.

It seems to me that one effect of a historical novel is to emphasize the historicity of its subject matter. Yes, it may allow the reader to feel a greater identification with characters who live in an unfamiliar time and place, but it also, I think, tends to insist on the distinction between “then” and “now.” And in a novel about slavery, about the greatest tragedy of American history, is such distancing desirable? Or does it make it too easy for the reader to compartmentalize slavery as something that happened “back then,” and to ignore the ongoing legacies and repercussions still with us today? It seems to me that Jones’s digressions have the effect of collapsing chronology, of minimizing the distinctions between then and now, and thereby reminding us that the effects and influences of the institution of slavery are still very much with us.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

“Nine months Landsman’s been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker.”

The opening lines of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon.

Nine months: the gestation period of homo sapiens. Signaling, perhaps, a novel of rebirth?

Certainly the protagonist, this Man of the Land, has fallen far, as the word “flopping” suggests. He’s not homeless or unemployed but he’s crawled deep inside a bottle, alcohol being his preferred course of self-medication as he tries to avoid thinking about the string of tragedies that has upended his life. Can he pull himself out?

The question of Landsman’s land will also prove to be vexed—not just for him, but for all the Jews residing in the Federal District of Sitka which, in this novel’s world, was created as a haven for the refugees of Eastern European Jewry as they fled the conditions that produced World War II. In the novel’s timeframe, they’ve now lived in Sitka for sixty years and made a thriving city of it, but they are about to be dispossessed as the United States comes in and reclaims this Alaskan territory in a process dubbed Reversion.

But for the moment, Detective Landsman (and really, what other job could he have in a book that begins like this? he’s gotta be either a cop or a PI) has a more immediate problem in the homicide victim that’s been found by the night manager of his hotel. (The victim’s alias is a clue to another of the novel’s preoccupations: Emanuel Lasker was a famous chess champion of the turn of the twentieth century.) Perhaps the path of investigation will also prove to be that of redemption—if he can overcome bureaucratic obstacles and his own demons along the way.

The familiarity of the form is animated by the exuberance of the writing and the astounding depth of the imaginative conception of this alternate Alaska.

Zamenhof, by the way, was the man who invented Esperanto, a “constructed language” made from repurposed bits of other languages, which is a nice metaphor for this novel whose constructed history is made up of re-imagined bits of real history.

A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis

Justice? —You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
—Well of course Oscar wants both. I mean the way he talks about order? She drew back her foot from the threat of an old man paddling by in a wheelchair, —that all he’s looking for is some kind of order?
—Make the trains run on time, that was the . . .
—I’m not talking about trains, Harry.
—I’m talking about fascism, that’s where this compulsion for order ends up. The rest of it’s opera.
—No but do you know what he really wants?

The opening lines of A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis.

The opening mirrors that of Gaddis’ wonderful novel JR, which begins:

—Money . . . ? In a voice that rustled.

In each case, the first word announces the primary preoccupation of the book, not the concepts named so much as the behaviors and institutions—financial in the one case, legal in the other—that surround them. It took me a long time to notice that the word “justice” was not a word of dialogue (the way that “money” is), since it precedes the dash that signals dialogue in Gaddis. Presumably it is the questioning thought resonating in Harry’s head, to which he responds with the line of dialogue that follows.

Both novels are written almost entirely in dialogue, with minimal punctuation or attribution. They demand the reader’s full attention, which is the reading experience I think of when a book is described as “absorbing.” (JR remains the only book ever to make me miss my subway stop.) Nevertheless, his command of the patterns and cadences of speech is mesmerizing, and after a couple of pages, one falls into the rhythm of the work so that it is transporting while still requiring close attention.

And both books are extremely funny, satirizing their respective subjects, but also with a degree of respect.

And what is it that Oscar, and other litigants, really want? It goes on:

—The ones showing up in court demanding justice, all they’ve got their eye on’s that million dollar price tag.
—It’s not simply the money, no, what they really want . . .
—It’s the money, Christina, it’s always the money. The rest of it’s nothing but opera, now look.
—What they really want, your fascists, Oscar, everybody I mean what it’s really all about? She tapped a defiant foot against the tinkling marimba rhythms seeping into the waiting room somewhere over near the curtains, where the wheelchair had collided with a radiator and come to rest. Trains? fascism? Because this isn’t about any of that, or even ‘the opulence of plush velvet seats, brilliant spectacle and glorious singing’ unless that’s just their way of trying to be taken seriously too —because the money’s just a yardstick isn’t it. It’s the only common reference people have for making other people take them as seriously as they take themselves. I mean that’s all they’re really asking for isn’t it? Think about it, Harry.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

“Lyra and her dæmon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen. The three great tables that ran the length of the hall were laid already, the silver and the glass catching what little light there was, and the long benches were pulled out ready for the guests. Portraits of former Masters hung high up in the gloom along the walls. Lyra reached the dais and looked back at the open kitchen door, and, seeing no one, stepped up beside the high table. The places here were laid with gold, not silver, and the fourteen seats were not oak benches but mahogany chairs with velvet cushions.

“Lyra stopped beside the Master’s chair and flicked the biggest glass gently with a fingernail. The sound rang clearly through the hall.

“‘You’re not taking this seriously,’ whispered her dæmon. ‘Behave yourself.’”

The opening lines of The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman, the first volume of the His Dark Materials trilogy.

The first four words of the story introduce one of the most important aspects of the novel, the existence of “daemons.” It will be many pages before we fully understand what a daemon is, but the odd word immediately sparks the reader’s curiosity and also signals that the world of this story will be something different from our own. A few lines down, we get our second important piece of information about them: whatever they are, daemons are conscious and capable of speech.

In retrospect, it will become clear that the construction “Lyra and her daemon” is almost as important, since the relationship of people to their daemons is the key to their nature and their significance in the story.

It also seems to me that the use of the first name with no last name suggests that Lyra is a child or adolescent (though maybe the real signal is the fact that the book is marketed as a Young Adult novel). And the references to a hall, the large tables, the portraits of the Masters, etc. all establish the institutional/educational setting while suggesting the possibility of a different time period from our own.

The story opens in mid-action, with Lyra sneaking along through the dining hall, and this narrative strategy is both engaging and characteristic, since this book’s story is relentless and enthralling. Within a page or so, Lyra will become privy to restricted knowledge, witness an attempted murder, and become swiftly caught up in the events that will drive this novel and the two that follow.

And yet, even still, there is the slightest touch of levity as well, as Lyra stops in her sneaking progress to ring the crystal goblet and her daemon (whatever it may be) fussily upbraids her. She is an outstanding example of that long line of curious, snooping children in literature.