Best Books of the Decade?

I don’t believe we’ve already reached this year’s season of lists, much less that we’ve reached the point where “Best Blanks of the Decade” lists are being circulated.  But, as Pete Lit points out, we’ve already got the Times Online UK’s Best Books of the Decade list to ponder.  For the most part, I think ranked lists of literature like this are only useful in establishing what books are well regarded generally, and not useful in any comparative sense. So #98 is not necessarily much “worse” than #12.  Still, I have to admit that I’m always interested (from a cultural literacy standpoint) in finding out what’s what.

Here are the books from the the Times UK list that I’ve read, and a quick comment:

• #89 The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie (2008) – Certainly the best book of Rushdie’s from the past decade.
• #81 The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud (2006) — A meditation on morality that leaves you liking almost none of the characters.
• #50 No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies by Naomi Klein (2000) – Klein is very persuasive & thorough in looking at the psychology of branding and corporate identity formation (her subsequent books on economics are nowhere near as solid)
• #44 Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (2005) — Uchicago prof makes you go hm…
  
• #33 Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan (2004) — I was stunned by how good Chronicles was.  The distinctness of Dylan’s voice and the uniqueness of the literary style made this a thoroughly enjoyable read.
• #24 Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005) – Ishiguro steps lightly into the world of science fiction with magnificent results.
• #20 White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000) — Eventhough the story fell apart in the end, Smith’s pacing and voice was fresh.
• #12 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (2000) – I didn’t much like AHWOSG when I read it in 2001, but have loved everything else by Eggers that I’ve read since then.  Makes me want to revisit this book.
• #6 The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell (2000) –  Gladwell’s gift is his engaging writing-style and the fresh perspective he brings to most topics.   He’s often guilty of over-simplification, and of ignoring established disciplines when they don’t suit him, but he always makes you think.
• #3 Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (2004) – A great book that was really released in 1995, Obama would have been lauded as a great writer had he not ventured into American politics.
• #2 Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2003) — A remarkably good graphic novel, packed with much more history than the film version.

The rest of these are on my “to read” shelf or a wish list of some variety

• #1 The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006) – I’ve been meaning to read this for a year now, and am now going to wait until we get to the desolate part of the Chicago winter
• #98 Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2007) — want to read
• #54 Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss (2003) — Bought, traded away, still want to read
  
• #32 Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (2002) – On my waiting to read shelf at home
• #28 The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross (2007) – On my waiting to read shelf at home
• #The plot against america by Philip Roth (2004) — On my waiting to read shelf at home
• #14 Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (2003) — On my waiting to read shelf at home

Open Books Chicago

open books chicago

Three Cheers for Open Books! This weekend was the grand opening of their downtown Chicago store (near the Chicago stop on the Brown Line train). Open Books is a non-profit bookstore with a wealth of energy & programming devoted to addressing the scourge of illiteracy while promoting a lively atmosphere for reading.

I made it out there on Saturday afternoon, and was impressed by the place and the energetic staff. If you’re in the chicagoland area, check them out!

Open Books Website:
http://open-books.org/

A New City Article about the Open Books ethos:
http://lit.newcity.com/2009/11/16/the-good-word-chicagos-open-books-arrives-with-a-mission/

“Where the Wild Things Are” — Sendak Vs. Jonze/Eggers

Maurice Sendark’s “Where the Wild Things Are” wasn’t a big book in my childhood, so I didn’t really have any reservations about it being turned into a film, beyond a technical fascination with how they were going to take a short children’s book and turn it into a 90 minute film.

I remarked elsewhere that the Spike Jonze / Dave Eggers film was “a really good movie, but it’s NOT a kids’ movie.  It replaces the whim­si­cal with the real, which is jar­ring…  no mat­ter how fan­tas­tic the locale or inven­tive the characters“.

Rereading Sendak’s original version this week, I’m struck by how wonderfully whimsical and sweet the original story was, and how strikingly bold the Jonze/Eggers reinterpretation was.

In 2005, I got an opportunity to hear Kazuo Ishiguro talk about what the relationship between a book and the film based upon the book ought to be.   I remember he said that he hoped that the film would be a good kinsman to the book, related and familiar, but unique in its way.    He also remarked that the distinctness of the media should be appreciated in some way, and that sometimes as a writer you want to write an un-filmable book (to avoid becoming just a screenwriter).

By this standard, the Sendak’s story was meant to be un-filmable, and would have remained so but for an imaginative modernization by Jonze / Eggers.  They changed the audience in order to make their film work, and replaced the whimsy that entertained the toddlers and young kids (and their parents), with a mature story about how our imaginations can help us overcome the many darknesses of the every day.

Plight of The Poors (South Africa)

Earlier this week, I went Ashraf Cassiem’s talk (notes) at the University of Chicago about the Western Cape’s Anti-Eviction Campaign (South Africa), and the plight of the poor in the developing world… where the term “privatization” now has all the airs of a modernized variant of “colonization”.

I can recommend (at least) two very different books about the plight of the poor in South Africa.

In 2007, I read “We Are the Poors” by Ashwin Desai which details efforts by community groups that work in a similar space as Cassiem’s, advocating for the poor in circumstances of evictions, water shortages, medicine shortages, and crime.  Desai’s book does a great job of conveying the extra-ordinariness of the way these groups band together, and to highlight the adversarial tone taken by the governments towards the poor.

A very different book is David Cohen’s “People Who Have Stolen from Me: Rough Justice in South Africa” which I read in 2005.  While really about the complex nature of crime as seen through the happenings in a furniture store in Johannesburg, Cohen touches upon all of the massive change, upheaval, and social injustices that factor in.  It’s clearly a much more nuanced picture of causes of crime than the caricatures you’ll find on the nightly news.

 

Party Like It’s 1989

With today being the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I figure it’s a good time to talk about book recommendations about the Revolutions of 1989.

In 2004, I read Timothy Garton Ash’s  “The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ‘89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague” which sticks with me as being a great telling of the stories of 1989 from the ground.  Ash was able to convey a sense of how information moved (and sometimes didn’t move) between the various countries in the “Eastern Bloc”.  The edition I read was published in 1993 with an afterward published in 1999.

My hero from 1989 is Vaclav Havel, and in 2000, I read his collection “The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice” which sticks with me as being one of the most inspiring collections of political speech-writing ever put together.

The People’s Historians

Last night, I attended the Keynote to Campaign to End the Death Penalty’s Annual Convention, and got a chance to see “The People’s Historians” — Howard Zinn and Dave Zirin.

I haven’t read anything yet by either Zinn or Zirin (although I’ve seen the documentary “You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train”).  I’m under the impression that the go-to books are: “A People’s History of the United States” and “A People’s History of Sports“.  Does that sound about right?

“The Other” By Ryszard Kapuscinski

I’m usually a bit wary of the “lecture repackaged as book” genre.  For the most part, we readers are simply missing too much information, as these lectures were never intended to stand on their own (although I suppose that in the modern day this is changing).  Generally, they are grounded in a time and place, with a context that we are blind to, an audience which is silent to us,  and on top of all that tend to take the author out of their comfort zone to begin with.

Ryszard Kapuscinski’s “The Other” fits this general outline fairly well.  It’s superficially geared for a Polish audience and clearly is a homecoming of sorts for Kapuscinski [bio], who regularly references Polish philosophers who have limited global renown (at least to those outside of the discipline).  Even the topic of “The Other” (or “the Europeans” developing understanding of “the Other”) seems to lose some of its impact as merely a summation of the insights Kapuscinski gleaned from his travels & adventures.

In spite of all this, what Kapuscinski brings to the table, and what makes “The Other” a worthwhile read (in spite of the aforementioned flaws in the sub-genre), is perspective.  A quarter way through “The Other”, I felt like it was all either too general or too specifically geared for his audience.  By the halfway point, I found myself wishing that we all had such perspective on the world and the complexity of human interactions.  As I continued to read “The Other”, with the absurdities of American politics in the background, I couldn’t help but think how there still is little understanding of “the “Other”  — abroad or at home, in spite of the networked, interlinked, globalized world of today.

Reading On This Date: October 24…

One of the benefits of having a list of books I’ve read over the past decade, is that I can post the occasional “what was I reading on this date X years ago” entry.

So looking at October 24th:

• 1999, 10 years ago, I had just started reading Milton’s “Paradise Lost”.
• 2004, 5 years ago, I was in between two excellent books, Paul Bowle’s “The Sheltering Sky” and Charles Bukowski’s “Last Night of the Earth Poems”
• 2008, last year, I was looking at Bill Eppridge’s great photo set “A Time it Was: Bobby Kennedy and the 1960s“

Currently, I’m reading the interviews that make up Vaclav Havel’s “Disturbing the Peace”.

Ulysses S. Grant

Over the weekend I watched the 4 hour PBS documentary on Ulysses S. Grant “Warrior – President” which I’d wholeheartedly recommend to anyone interested in the US Civil War and its immediate aftermath (and frankly, its continued reverberations 100+ years later).

It reminded me of a great book I read in 2006 (a gift from Sir O), by Josiah Bunting III on Ulysses S. Grant.   Bunting’s look at Grant was part of the well-regarded “American Presidents” series curated by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and presented Grant’s Presidency with the modern understanding of President Grant as the defender of the ideals of emancipation, civil rights, and the reconstruction of the union.  It’s a contrast to earlier notions (which were perhaps motivated by the Civil War’s detractors) that sought to discredit Grant the President by focusing solely on the scandals within and around his administration.   Bunting’s book, while short, is well-worth reading, and really sets the modern narrative for Grant (without turning a blind eye to the flaws of his administration).

The PBS documentary’s second half takes nice look at Grant’s life post-presidency, specifically his relationship with Mark Twain and the outpouring of support from the public while Grant wrote his memoirs on his deathbed.   It’s a heartwarming conclusion to a story that had great highs and great lows.

The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech that Inspired a Nation

Early this year, I read Pauline Maier’s document history of the Declaration of Independence. It looked at the Declaration as the end point of a process and made some fascinating comparisons to other document sources, the conventions of the day, the competing interests in the revolutionary movement, as well as the genius of the primary author (and of the drafting committee). The declaration itself was a fascinating hodge-podge of old & new, (and ‘er, “something borrowed & something blue”) that has shown itself to be much more than the sum of its parts.

Drew Hansen’s “The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech that Inspired a Nation” tries to do something very similar with Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech (audio). Hansen puts the speech in its context at the March on Washington, in the Civil Rights Movement of the day, and in Dr. King’s career up to that point. Hansen illuminates which aspects of the speech were part of Dr. King’s usual ministerial stump speech, which parts were crafted specifically for the context of the March on Washington, and what was simply inspiration that came to him at the moment.  In so doing, Hansen gives us tremendous insight into the man, the moment, and the times.

As interesting as the textual analysis itself was, Hansen succeeds most in putting the speech as a whole in its context during it’s time, in its immediate aftermath, and talking about the process (of decontextualization) that made it iconic.

For as much of a watershed moment as it’s “remembered” as being, and in spite of the powerful impact that it had on those who were listening at the times, the speech was essentially forgotten for most of the interval before Dr. King’s assassination.  King himself had begun to lose his luster as moving the struggle for civil rights outside of the South brought him new detractors, and challenging the Vietnam war further complicated his relationship with the powers that be.  Sadly, it is his martyrdom that allowed for his entire career to be looked at beyond the individual news-cycles of the day, and helped society at large to appreciate the affection that African-Americans had for Dr. King.   It is only further after the fact that the speech was recalled and elevated to be a stand-in for the entirety of the Civil Rights Era.

It’s tough to read something like this without comparing the story to the happenings in the present day, and there’s a consistency in the style (and substance) of the attacks — all usually prefaced with “I’m not a racist” — made on Dr. King and President Obama that’s startling and ultimately disheartening.   Dr. King suffered through a line of attack that should be familiar to the modern American — from being accused of trying to enslave the white man, to being a socialist, being more orator than “doer”, winning an under-deserved Nobel Prize, taking attacks on personal conduct/history — and ultimately came to understand that while he had seen the promised land, that he was unlikely to get there with us.

Fortunately, one piece of his legacy is still making the journey to that promised land with us.