’tis the best of the season

‘Tis the “best of” season

Snow last Saturday in Manhattan turned the tree lined streets, and Central Park, into a wonderland, with the wet snow clinging to the tree branches. A winter afternoon designed for curling up with a book.

As this is the season when many newspapers and journals include a list of
“the best books of the year,” I couldn’t resist thinking about my reading across the landscape of 2017.

At the top of my list, and on every “best of,” is Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (Simon & Schuster, 2017) Written in first person narrative with local dialect, Ms. Ward paints a vivid and colorful landscape of life in rural Mississippi and then takes us by the hand and pulls us along with her so we too can feel the pain, the sadness and the pure love as the story unfolds. “If the world were a right place, a place for living, a place for men like Michael didn’t end up in jail.” … “But the world isn’t that place.”

Sing, Unburied, Sing, is an exquisite, haunting novel. A book you read, come to the last paragraph, put down, and then certainly pick back up again for a second reading. I know I will pull it down off the shelf to re-read. “Some days later, I understood what he was trying to say, that getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up.”

Laura Dassow Wall’s extensively researched and beautifully written biography, Henry David Thoreau, A Life (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is another book that I will certainly reread and consult as a resource.
In Go, Went, Gone (New Directions, 2017) by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky, the protagonist, Richard, a retired classics professor and widower living in Berlin begins visiting and interviewing men inhabiting a refugee shelter. We meet Richard through the mundane routine of his day. “At breakfast, Richard has Earl Grey with milk and sugar, accompanied by a slice of bread with honey and another with cheese.” When he meets the refugees, and becomes entangled in their complicated life stories we learn, through his eyes, what this means. “Our life was cut off from us that night, as if with a knife. It was cut, Rashhid says. Cut.”
A book I haven’t finished, and will be moved to the top of the 2018 reading list is The Genius of Birds (Penguin Books, 2016) by Jennifer Ackerman. The book chronicles Ms. Ackerman’s travels around the globe to study the intelligence of birds. In the few chapters I have read the book is beautifully written and fascinating to read.
As I have always loved biography after visiting the Four Freedoms Memorial on Roosevelt Island designed by Louis Kahn I read Wendy Lesser’s You Say to Brick, the Life of Louis Kahn, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). Ms. Lesser takes us into the complicated life of the architect who designed buildings that continue to engage us for both their beauty and how they function, as many are public spaces.
This year I have also been re-reading James Baldwin. The Library of America has published a set of three books of Baldwin’s work, Baldwin, the Early Novels and Stories, Baldwin the Later Novels and Collected Essays edited by Toni Morrison. Baldwin wrote about race in the 1950’s and 1960’s and his insights are particularly relevant now. James Baldwin is one of America’s greatest writers and it is a pleasure reading his work.

What did you read in 2017? I am ever curious to learn about new books. Those contemporary novels that did not make a list or into the review columns. Those biographies of individuals we may not have read about in history class. If you have made a list please share it with me so I can include a few of your books in my reading for 2018. Or if you have written a book I would like to read it.