So Long, and Thanks for All the Galleys: Thirteen Books for Ten Years

In October 2007, I introduced myself in the very first Omnivoracious post by recommending some books: my four favorite novels from what turned out to be a very good year for fiction. Now I'm saying goodbye, and I'd like to do the same. My fellow Omnivores, knowing how I am liable to turn what should be a little newsy post into a giant, digressive treatise--and knowing how much Omni has meant to me over the years--have been expecting an endless, Melissa Leo-style swan song (I've even been told there's an over/under line on the word count). And no doubt I won't disappoint. But since two things I love best are telling people about books and making top ten lists, I thought the best way to depart would be with some recommended reading: ten okay, thirteen books I loved from my ten-plus years as an Amazon Books editor (I don't even want to know how many that is in dog years).

Ah, but first about me! Why am I saying goodbye? Well, it's the simplest and most American of stories: I won a lot of money on a TV show, and I'm using it to buy some time away from Amazon to write. (I know, I'm still bewildered by this plot twist.) And Omni has already moved into the hands of some of my trusted colleagues, whose names are likely new to you but whom I've known for some time as great readers and enthusiasts, and who have some excellent plans for Omni in the coming months. Meanwhile, I'm going to be focusing mainly on some longer-term projects of my own, but I'm sure I'll find a way to surface online as well, and I hope the folks here will point you there when I do. (And of course I still know the password to my Omni Typepad account...)

And now the books. This isn't my top 10 list from the past decade, though I'm perfectly capable of a stunt as crass as that. I thought that rather than tell you about books you already know about, I'd point you to some that may have never made it onto your radar. So yes, I loved Oscar Wao and Henrietta Lacks and The Corrections and The Savage Detectives too, and Suite Francaise and 1491 and Nixonland and Fiasco, and Atonement and The Omnivore's Dilemma and Never Let Me Go (not to mention Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus). But here is a baker's dozen I hope find as many readers as those deserving favorites have:

• Black Hole by Charles Burns. I'm not actually sure where this book falls: is it an undisputed modern classic that's so familiar you're a little embarrassed for me that I'd bring it up in this context, or is it new to you? My guess is: if you're a comics reader of any kind, then it's the former, but if you're still on the other side of that genre divide (which I thought the last decade had mostly erased), it's the latter. But whatever kind of reader you think you are, this is it: weird and wonderful, gorgeous and grotesque, and quite possibly my favorite book of the whole decade. Burns uses his deep and deliciously exact black ink to give teen life the horrible and humane treatment it deserves. (See my longer celebration here.)

• The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. Of the many literary trends of the past decade, the precocious savant protagonist (e.g. Life of Pi, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, etc.) is not among my favorites, even though I liked some of the individual examples. But transcending them all was this debut novel from 2000 (please, not to be confused with the Tom Cruise picture), which, perhaps crucially, is as much a parent's story as a child's. I often see it mentioned as an underrated recent great, which gives me hope that it will last; I'm ready to rediscover it myself after ten years. I just have a hazy memory of eye-popping brilliance, and of a narrative conceit fulfilled beyond my hopes, but I look forward to having Sibylla and Ludo's world built for me again in all its detail.
• Salvage King, Ya! by Mark Anthony Jarman. My first four years at Amazon were spent working on Amazon.ca, and in the process I took a thoroughly enjoyable crash course in CanLit. I made plenty of discoveries for myself there (many of which can be found in the list of 50 Canadian Essentials we put together in 2004 that, to my amazement, is still available on the site), but my favorite remains one of the first I came across, Mark Anthony Jarman's debut (and still only) novel. The line I always use to describe it (it's even quoted on the back cover of the paperback) is "if Denis Johnson had written a hockey novel," and though it's reductive on two fronts (and I'm a little tired of saying it), it's still about as efficient a recommendation as I can come up with. Comparing someone to Denis Johnson is about the highest praise I know, and while it's no more a "hockey novel" than Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 is a book about politics, there is of course something beautiful in my favorite Canadian novel being about, in its in sidelong way, the great Canadian pastime.
• Muriella Pent by Russell Smith. Speaking of Amazon.ca, our (okay, my) pick as the best novel of 2004 was this one by Russell Smith, which didn't really get the recognition it deserved in Canada, much less down here. In Canada, Smith's reputation as a novelist is likely overwhelmed by his high profile as a men's lifestyle columnist and general man-about-town (neither reputation has made it across the border to the U.S. yet), but Muriella Pent is a mature, complex, and scathingly enjoyable novel, an equally vicious and compassionate satire of art-making and multiculturalism with well-earned echoes of Amis and Naipaul in its portrait of Marcus Royston, a Caribbean writer sent on a cultural exchange to Toronto.
• This All Happened by Michael Winter. Like Jarman and Smith, Winter is a fantastic Canadian writer who has hardly been published at all down here. Winter's later novel The Big Why did get picked up by Bloomsbury USA, but this earlier one is my love. I'm not sure a plot summary can do justice to its meandering charms--it's a fictional diary of a year in the life of bohemians in St. John's, Newfoundland--but its offhand rhythms and evocative observations managed to work their way into my insides (while giving a picture of Newfoundland that's about as far from The Shipping News as you could imagine). And extra points for one of the great character names of all time: Craig Regular.
• Flaubert and Madame Bovary by Francis Steegmuller. If this decade was the decade of anything for me as a reader it was the Age of NYRB Classics, the line of gorgeously published, impeccably and idiosyncratically selected paperbacks that I have been a shameless, broken-record shill for the past five years. I've hardly cracked even a fraction of their offerings, but this list could be filled just with NYRB favorites, including A High Wind in Jamaica, which may have become my Favorite Novel Ever, Stoner, Hard Rain Falling, The Slaves of Solitude, The Goncourt Journals, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, and this odd and lovely book, which is a sort of double biography of the novelist and his anti-heroine. Aside from its many pleasures (many of which derive from Flaubert's endlessly marvelous letters and journals), F+MB is also special to me as a meeting point for some of my most headlong recent literary crushes: on NYRB and Flaubert as well as on the late Steegmuller's wife, Shirley Hazzard, whose 1980 novel The Transit of Venus, which I encountered around the same time, is somehow too fabulously awesome to be limited to a mere bullet point on a list like this.
• Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman. Of the four great 2007 novels I recommended in that first Omni post, one ended up winning the National Book Award, one the Pulitzer, and one kick-started one of the most gratifying and unlikely literary success stories of the decade. The fourth, while hardly neglected, has yet to receive the accolades of the others, but it might be the best of them all, and I won't be surprised if it's the one people are still reading a hundred years from now. While the other three are each sprawling in their way, this is a hard-fired little gem focused on one thing: desire. I'm usually drawn more to irony than romance, but this is an intensely romantic novel that, as I wrote in that original post, "captures wanting, not having, having, and not having again better than anything else I've ever read."
• Pravda by Edward Docx. I'm not even sure why I picked this novel up originally, but I can tell from the sticker that I actually bought my copy, which, considering how many books came free in the mail the past ten years, I still managed to do with surprising frequency (the book-sickness runs deep...). I think, as has happened so many times, I was intrigued by the cover--maybe I had read a good review--and I opened to the first page and was sucked in: by a bit of immediate plot momentum (the main character's arrival in St. Petersburg) but mainly by the pace and authority of the writing, which, as I just reread it now, drew me in once again. As you can tell from the customer reviews, not everyone loves this book: it certainly flaunts a highbrow knowingness that some other favorites of mine--Hazzard, Fernanda Eberstadt, Philip Hensher--share. But I sure did love it, and I think, for all its highbrow trappings and stylistic flash, its greatest power comes from classic novelistic strengths like character, plot, and setting, all of which give its story a haunting and compelling inevitability (and authentic surprise) that the best fiction can provide.
• The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher. Speaking of Mr Hensher, I want to give one last cheer for a novel that, if we had the final say-so, would have been on that list above of books that everyone knows and loves. In certainly the most surprising set of Best of the Year meetings of my time here, we fell in love with Hensher's Booker-nominated novel and decided to make it our #1 Best of the Year pick in 2008 even before it was published in the U.S. When it came out, some folks shared our love and some didn't, but it has never reached the sort of book-club immortality that keeps so much fiction alive these days. And perhaps it never will--it's not for everybody--but I think any fan of Jonathan Franzen (especially The Corrections) will find a similar eye for character, history, and family dynamics here, in what is still one of my favorite novels of the decade.
• Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Beatles by Geoff Emerick. I'm not sure any book from the decade gave me more pure pleasure than this one, an unassuming but wonderfully observant memoir by a man who grew up inside Beatlemania, working as a teenage engineer on their early recordings before becoming a crucial collaborator on such high water marks as Revolver and Sgt. Pepper. I know the Beatles recording sessions have been chronicled with an obsessive exactitude otherwise reserved only for the Zapruder film, but this was my first look inside their working methods, and Emerick's stories were equally fascinating for their insights into the band's creative processes and for their evocation of a moment when this cultural revolution hit the buttoned-down recording offices of his employer, EMI--and hit these four suddenly world-famous young men, who were nearly as young as Emerick himself.
• Red-Color News Soldier by Li Zhensheng. To turn to another, very different (but weirdly contemporary) cultural revolution: this is one of those singular books that fit no existing category and whose existence seems almost a miracle. Like Suite Francaise, the story behind the book threatens almost to overwhelm the story within it, but in both cases the book itself carries a vast power of its own. Li was an official photojournalist in China (the book's title quotes from an armband he was given to wear) who captured tens of thousands of images of one of the most bizarre and catastrophic events of modern history, the Cultural Revolution in the last decade of Mao's rule, in which a whole generation rose up to denounce, and sometimes murder, their forebears. At great risk to himself he kept his trove hidden for decades, and his work is done a great justice in this book, which tells Li's story alongside that of the movement that was his subject, and presents his photographs, which have the declarative immediacy of an Eisenstein film, with a vividness that makes the events of the revolution seem terribly present.
• Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk. Aside from the NYRB Classics, my favorite publishing project of the decade was Continuum's brilliantly conceived and executed 33 1/3 series, each of which focuses, usually in just a hundred or so pages, on a single LP, as we used to call them. I started sampling the series by buying books about some of my favorite records (the best of these was Kim Cooper's on Neutral Milk Hotel), but I found the one I loved most when I took a flyer on a record I'd never heard and bought James Brown's Live at the Apollo along with the book about it. I fell for both straightaway; they each made me more fascinated by the other. Wolk uses a style that's unabashedly influenced by the aphoristic capsules of the great George W.S. Trow, but it's no mere homage: his story is so densely layered with the history of the music and the performers, and so microscopic in his evocation of Brown's actual Apollo performance, that he makes listening to the 31 jam-packed minutes of that great record even more thrillingly dramatic than they already are. (Again, I wrote a longer appreciation elsewhere.)
• The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. I have to confess a bit of an allergy to self-help books, in large part, I'm sure, because I'm too embarrassed to admit I could use their advice. But this is one I embraced, and whose pithy wisdom I've turned back to again and again. I had no particular connection to Tharp--in fact, I only just last year saw a show of her work for the first time, because I had liked her book so much--and maybe that's part of why I took to the book so readily, because not only Tharp but her medium--dance--were so unfamiliar to me that they were almost an abstraction. But her advice is aimed explicitly at anyone doing creative work, and she's self-conscious and articulate about her own paths to creation (and the ways they might be useful to others) in a way that few artists actually are, with just the right combination of rah-rah and stern discipline that I imagine must do wonders when running a dance company. And at the very least, she's given me one of my mantras for the past few years (and the ones to come): "make dancing pay for the dancers."

Well, may my next ten years of reading bring me as many good books as these. As much as I've enjoyed getting to see (and write about) the newest releases as part of my job, one thing I'm looking forward to now is getting to dig into some of the many books that colleagues and friends have been putting in my hands over the past few years, which now I might finally have time to catch up with: Money, Sophie's Choice, A Trip to the Stars, Voices from the Moon, Lonesome Dove (I know--I've never read any of them. What have I been doing with my life?). What books should I add to that stack?

Fellow omnivores, thanks for coming here the past three and a half years. I hope you'll continue to do so. --Tom

Comments

[ron on March 21, 2011 at 02:46 PM]

Best of luck on the writing plans. Was always impressed with the depth and intelligence you brought to your book reviews (and when we worked together) and am looking forward to reading some longer-form stuff from you.

-ron

[Susan Tunis on March 21, 2011 at 06:18 PM]

I'm quite saddened by your departure, Tom. I've enjoyed reading you very much. I wish you the very best as you move forward.

[Aging Lit Major on March 22, 2011 at 04:59 AM]

You will be missed. I loved your States posts during 2008. Looking forward to your future books.

[lillian on March 22, 2011 at 05:20 AM]

If I had known it would lead to this; I would not have rooted so hard for you to do well on the "TV Show"!! Enjoy and write fast so we can read you again soon.

[Western Reader on March 22, 2011 at 09:31 AM]

Tom, you will be missed! I've enjoyed reading your posts and your insightful comments and critiques. Your good fortune (and intelligence and grace under pressure) which enabled you to win big on Jeopardy! will take you far. I will await the first "Nissley creation" to hit the Amazon book list, and wish you well. Bon chance!

[James Marcus on March 22, 2011 at 09:54 AM]

Happy Trails, Tom!

[Alex Carr on March 22, 2011 at 10:14 AM]

So long, Tom, and thanks for the reviews of all those galleys--and, you know, for everything else.

[Mike Smith on March 22, 2011 at 01:02 PM]

Money! Didn't I recommend that to you? God that's a great one.

Good to see another shout-out for NYRB and especially High Wind in Jamaica.

[arthur on March 22, 2011 at 04:05 PM]

Sorry to see you go, Tom.

Good luck and well done on that game show - that's the way to go in this world, I've found.

Arthur

[Claire on March 22, 2011 at 05:19 PM]

Good luck in your new ventures, and thank you for your recommendations; I have enjoyed getting Omnivoracious in my in-box each day. I don't know if you saw that Philip Hensher has a new book coming out in a few weeks, The King of the Badgers, which I have on pre-order from Amazon.UK. It looks like it will live up to The Northern Clemency, which I also loved.

[David Horiuchi on March 22, 2011 at 09:29 PM]

Good luck, Tom, and thanks for all the knowledge and passion that went into those late-night Omnivoracious posts.

[Daniel on March 22, 2011 at 10:18 PM]

Bye, Tom! I already miss working with you!

[London escorts on March 23, 2011 at 03:59 AM]

In October 2007, I introduced myself in positions of first Omnivoracious recommending books: four novels my favorite of which proved to be a very good year for fiction.

[Mary B on July 22, 2011 at 07:55 PM]

Now it's almost the end of July, Tom, and I am still missing your weekly roundups of book reviews from other sources. Rich might be nice for you, but your fans are poorer.