On the last page of This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz writes: “The half-life of love is forever.” The same seems true of the half-life of great books, which linger long after you finish reading them, if not for eternity. While any superlative list of literature is subjective, the following novels, short story collections, and works of nonfiction are those that stuck in our minds, hearts, and souls in 2012. If you’re so inclined, let us know what gems we missed. Happy reading!
(In Alphabetical Order by Author)
This moveable feast of a book tracks America’s longstanding obsession with Mexican cuisine and its spin-offs, including Tex-Mex, Cal-Mex, and West-Mex. Author Gustavo Arellano (who writes the syndicated weekly column ¡Ask a Mexican!) offers a lively and entertaining gastronomical and historical tour, equal parts research, reportage, and riffs. While it whets the reader’s appetite, Taco USA also aims at history buffs, and anyone intrigued by the paradoxical, parasitic, and symbiotic relationship between America and Mexico. Beneath its celebration of food, the book critiques culinary capitalism in a tale tinged with irony and prejudice –a story of conquest and reconquest, invention and reinvention. –Keith Meatto
Rick Bass, In My Home There Is No Sorrow
The first page of this book contrasts the beauty of Rwanda’s natural landscape with the remains of human bones from the 1994 genocides. Throughout the rest of the novel, Bass juxtaposes many ideas, often contemplating the ethical responsibility of his “charmed life.” While Bass raises more questions than he answers, he actually reaches one conclusion about guilt and responsibility (his two favorite words): “There can be sorrow in knowledge, but its undeniable that there can also be great beauty. Nowhere else have I seen the two so twined.” -Andrew Hertzberg
Roberto Bolano, Between Parentheses/ The Secret of Evil/ The Third Reich/Woes of the True Policeman
Dead men tell no tales, unless they are named Roberto Bolaño. Since the prolific Chilean writer died in 2003, 20 books of his fiction and nonfiction have been published in English translation, including four in 2012. Written before his masterpieces The Savage Detectives and 2666, The Third Reich is a psychological thriller, a meditation on evil, and a glimpse at the seeds of a brilliant and prolific literary career. Between Parentheses includes more than 100 columns that the indefatigable Bolaño wrote for Spanish and Latin American newspapers, plus several speeches, and an interview in the Mexican edition of Playboy –all short and sweet pieces that read like a feisty literary blog by a playful curmudgeon, a Latin cross between Mark Twain and Christopher Hitchens. The Secret of Evil, also a collection of short works, seems less likely to win Bolaño new fans and more likely to satisfy addicts who need another fix, the literary equivalent of flipping through a scrapbook or photo album of a deceased relative or absent friend. Stay tuned for a review of The Woes of the True Policeman in January. -KLM
Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Pulitizer-Prize winner Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a gripping non-fiction account of the different characters of the Annawadi slum in Mumbai, India, from the local trash picker to a college student to a female slumlord. If I didn’t tell you it was non-fiction, however, you wouldn’t know it. Boo writes with such virtuosity and descriptive prowess that the individuals of the slum and the slum itself seem straight out of the imagination of an accomplished fiction writer. Sadly, what she describes is the reality of India, a country with an increasing unequal distribution of wealth. Read Behind the Beautiful Forevers for an unflinching, clear-eyed look at the economics, politics, and society of India –one of the world’s rising yet still desperately poor nations. –Jordan Mainzer
Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists
Having written already about love, architecture, and Proust, prolific pop philosopher de Botton rejects the “boring debate” between faith and atheism to stake out a middle ground. To ease the pain and alienation of modern life, he argues, secular society should emulate and adapt insights from religion, namely Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism. He claims that the faithful are delusional in their supernatural beliefs, but that atheists throw out the baby with the bathwater. In his words: “Even if religion isn’t true, can’t we enjoy the best bits?” (Yes, he is British). With his usual blend of diligence, humility, humor, and insight—De Botton embraces the holy oxymoron of religion for non-believers. -KLM
The essence of David Byrne’s new book has been well covered over the last hundred years by musicologists and philosophers, from David Suisman to Theodor Adorno, Yet, Byrne’s role as a forward musical thinker throughout his career with Talking Heads and as a solo artist makes up for his lack of originality. How Music Works is not only an effective music and scene history book (Byrne’s descriptions of CBGB’s stand out), but functions well as a “where do we go from here?” piece, showing that understanding the scientific and artistic processes behind music can lead to a more educated populace, a more creative populace, and ultimately, a greater society. -JM
Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King
Samuel Zemurray, a Russian Jewish immigrant, started as a fruit merchant in New Orleans and reinvented himself as an international banana tycoon, ultimately as the head of United Fruit, a behemoth arm of U.S. imperialism during the Cold War. Although Zemurray lived a secular life, Cohen sees his Jewish roots as a key to his identity. In New Orleans, he was shunned not only by Gentiles, but by the city’s German Jewish establishment. Late in life, he became a Zionist, throwing money and influence to the nascent state of Israel and resettling European Jewish refugees. As Cohen sees it, Zemurray embodies the religious freedom of America, where Jews are free to be Jewish or not Jewish, as they choose. The interprative focus not only adds depth to Zemurry’s biography, but makes sense given Cohen’s prior books, which include: Tough Jews, Israel is Real, The Avengers: A Jewish War Story, and The Record Men: The Chess Brothers and the Birth of Rock and Roll. -KLM
Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue
Telegraph Avenue connects Oakland and Berkeley, two cities whose historically different racial compositions have earned them separate boilerplate reputations in the mind of outsiders: Oakland, gritty, home of the Raiders, music Mecca, melting pot; Berkeley, local, micro-climate-gifted, capital of yuppie fantasyland. Michael Chabon’s latest novel, Telegraph Avenue, is set against and among such clichés as it tells of two couples, one black and one white, for whom the eponymous avenue and environs are everything. What Telegraph Avenue makes clear is that Chabon’s East Bay is a redoubt against intrusion. His central figures have a low-to-zero tolerance for being messed with and, when confronted with bullshit, end up proving themselves to be highly adaptable. They rebuff or coopt the external forces of change, wielding them to make progress on their own terms, and the Oakland/Berkeley corridor that they know survives another day. Ultimately, the novel is not only a mash note to the East Bay, but a testament to the value of home. –Chris Lillis Meatto
Junot Diaz, This is How You Lose Her
Like its predecessors Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the new short story collection by Macarthur genius Junot Diaz is technically dazzling, culturally challenging, and emotionally devastating. Line by line, page by page, story by story, it is a book that breaks and mends your heart. As a whole, This is How You Lose Her read as a quest for spiritual and emotional cleansing. Fragile, scarred, and insecure, the (mostly) Dominican characters drown in sex, drugs, and guilt to cope with trauma and stave off the possibility of intimacy, which would leave them vulnerable to more pain. Ironically and inevitably, their quick fixes make their lives worse until they bottom out, then reach some kind of peace or clarity. The stories imply two challenging questions: How do you find love and how do you make it last? -KLM
Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King
Alan Clay, a divorced American in his fifties, is a former Schwinn executive who finds himself in severe debt to friends and former co-workers and pressed to pay his daughter’s college tuition. This feeling of inadequacy pervades into all realms of Clay’s life until he is given a chance to prove himself in King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) in Saudi Arabia. After reading Hologram, I’m curious to see how KAEC develops (the city is scheduled for completion by 2020) and how this book will be perceived in the future. While it doesn’t try to be as prophetic as say Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, it does give some insight into the psyche of an American businessman who supported globalization and unwittingly made himself irrelevant. -AH
Louise Erdrich, The Round House
In her new novel, which won the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction, Erdrich tells the story of a Native American boy who seeks vengeance after a white man rapes his mother. Part detective thriller, part coming of age story, The Round House meditates on the legacy of atrocities Native Americans have endured since European settlers came to the continent with bibles, bullets, and booze. Summing up the book’s main theme, the boy’s father, a tribal judge, declares: “There are many kinds of justice” -KLM
Tania James, Aerogrammes: And Other Stories
Following in the footsteps of Jhumpa Lahiri, Tania James’s debut collection of short stories is best summarized by one of her characters, an aspiring screenwriter who calls his work “not quite Bollywood, not quite Hollywood: Indians in America or England Torn Between Identities.” -KLM
Mandy Keifetz, Flea Circus: A Brief Bestiary of Grief
The heroine of Flea Circus is Isabelle “Izzy” Oytsershif, a foul mouthed Jersey Girl slash brilliant mathematician who mourns the suicide of her performance artist boyfriend. Keifetz structures each chapter around a letter of the alphabet. Each chapter starts with an alliterative list of words that appear later. Each chapter’s first sentence follows the same formula, from “A is for Altamont” to “W is for Wall.” Spoiler: there are no X, Y, or Z chapters. What seems at first like a gimmick–as well as a callback to countless children’s books and Milosz’s ABC’s— ultimately gives the novel shape, herds its discursive style into discrete story units, and reflects Izzy’s desperation to solve her despair. The structure also makes the book more fun: reading each chapter is like playing a game of word search. -KLM
Etgar Keret, Suddenly, A Knock on the Door
The thin house–a house four feet wide and occupying a space between two buildings in Warsaw–isn’t a likely candidate to entertain the guests who show up unexpectedly and demand a story from the author on the spot in the title story of Etgar Keret’s latest collection, Suddenly, a Knock On the Door. While it would not be able to hold the action of the piece, it does explain the style of the Israeli author’s storytelling: as Steven Kurutz of The New York Times writes, the thin house, built with Keret in mind, is “small but complete.” There are a total of thirty-six stories contained within the 188 pages of the book, an average of five pages per story, though as we know averages work, many come in much shorter, with some barely stretching over one page. In these brief pieces, Keret packs in whole worlds. -Gina Myers
In the central storyline of Gods Without Men, an Indian-American man marries a Jewish-American woman and the incipient tensions in their marriage combust after their son disappears in the desert. But such a summary barely scratches the surface of this grandiose, sprawling, and dense novel. With its multiple points of view, multiple settings, and non-linear structure, it often reads like a collection of loosely linked stories. Some plots literally converge; others merely inform each other. Gods is cerebral, somber, and grim. As he did in the reverse outsourcing fable Transmission, Kunzru assaults his characters until they break, and relents only after they have lost nearly everything.-KLM
Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet
The story begins with narrator Sam and his wife Claire running away from their daughter Esther. To be fair, it is with good reason: every time Esther speaks, it is poisonous to them. In fact, all children have gained this power. While language itself has become toxic, it is often what is not said that becomes just as important as what is said: “language acts as an acid over its message.” The Flame Alphabet is another link in the tradition of understanding the duality of language: it’s limitation as well as its necessity. The Flame Alphabet explores not so much a dystopian society, but that of an absurd world where we cannot communicate even with those whom we love. -AH
On the surface, the new novel by the author of Atonement, Amsterdam and Atonement, is a classic spy thriller in the tradition of Ian Fleming, John Le Carre, and Robert Ludlum. Based on the two affairs at the center of the plot, Sweet Tooth might have been titled The Spy Who Shagged Me. But beneath the intrigue, the book offers an elegant exploration of what happens when the personal becomes political and vice versa. Ultimately, the heroine discovers what McEwan makes clear early on; being a fiction writer is not unlike being a spy: both deceive other people for a living. -KLM
Ben Mezrich has chronicled the high-stakes shenanigans of shady students at elite educational institutions for nearly a decade. His best-sellers include: Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions; Ugly Americans: The True Story of the Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided the Asian Markets for Millions; and The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook. In his latest book, the precocious protagonist is Thad Roberts, an aspiring astronaut who steals moon rocks from NASA. Allegedly worth millions, the lunar samples are literally priceless, since it’s illegal for anyone to buy, sell, or even own a piece of the moon. Sex on the Moon is a compelling hybrid of heist thriller, love story, and morality tale. Beneath the page turner plot, the book both celebrates and critiques the American values of self-improvement, prosperity, and recognition. As in his prior work, Mezrich vacillates between elitism and anti-elitism. His portrait of Roberts implies a fine line between striver and criminal, romantic and sociopath. -KLM
Rick Moody, On Celestial Music: And Other Adventures in Listening
There’s a certain ebullience to Rick Moody’s new essay collection, a compulsion to keep talking, what Moody himself calls an “inability to stop trying to explain this imprinting, this mark that music has made on me.” This sentiment may bring back all the nights you stayed up with a friend, putting songs on the speakers one after another to keep the party going until the proverbial break of dawn when everyone is spent and sub-verbal. Apparently, the prolific novelist Moody, still best known as the author of The Ice Storm, is one of us—not a rarified music critic but a music nerd who’s parlayed his chops as an A-list fiction writer into a chance to go semi-pro. Not a bad hustle. Fortunately, the substance of On Celestial Music complements Moody’s prose chops rather than imparting the sense that he’s out of his depth. –Michael Nicoloff
Morrison’s new novel Home revolves around Frank Money, a traumatized and mentally unstable Korean War veteran, hating and questioning his home, which symbolizes his desolate, hopeless life. While Morrison may not be breaking any personal ground with this book, she does add to her canon of in depth character development and what it means to be responsible. Whether Morrison is exorcising the nation’s ghosts or her own, Home feels like a story that needs to be told. -AH
Tom Mueller, Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil
Every cook knows olive oil is essential. For Tom Mueller, it’s the lifeblood of Western Civilization. In Extra Virginity, his lively, earnest, exhaustive, and sometime exhausting debut, Mueller discovers oil not only as food, but as fuel, lubricant, medicine, skin care, perfume, aphrodisiac, religious symbol, and way of life. In the words of one aficionado, true extra virgin olive oil is the stuff that “makes you get down on your knees and say, ‘Fuck’.” -KLM
Alice Munro, Dear Life: Stories
In this exquisite collection, one woman says: “Devotion to anything, if you were female, could make you ridiculous.” Clearly this is not the case with Alice Munro, whose 12 books of short stories published over six decades have established not only her devotion to craft, but also her reputation as a master of domestic fiction – the contemporary Canadian Chekhov. Dear Life includes 14 stories, many first published in The New Yorker, and many that feature Munro’s typical female protagonists: resilient women who struggle quietly against social and familial expectations in rural, suburban, and urban Canada. While the plots are filled with affairs, elopements, illegitimate children, and funerals, Munro avoids melodrama. These stories are slow, but never dull, and the subdued prose fits her contemplative characters, particularly those who are writers or teachers by vocation or avocation. While all of Munro’s fiction has autobiographical elements, an authorial disclaimer declares that the final short stories of Dear Life are a series that is “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact… the first and last –and the closest – things I have to say about my own life.” This statement begs the question as to whether Munro, now 81, will live to publish another book. There is plenty of morbidity in Dear Life, in which many characters –juvenile, middle-aged, and elderly— confront death. But on the page, Munro shows no signs of age: like all her previous work, these new stories are tightly crafted, emotionally complex, and bitterly sweet. -KLM
Stewart O’Nan, The Odds: A Love Story
The odds of a marriage proposal being accepted are 1 in 1.001, i.e. nearly perfect. The odds of a married couple making love on any given night are 1 in 5. The odds of a married couple reaching their 25th anniversary are 1 in 6. Such stark, if not totally surprising, probabilities provide both the chapter headings and the thematic glue of The Odds, O’Nan’s sharp and sad new novel, a love story wrapped in a heist wrapped in a rumination on risk, reward, and regret. -KLM
Rajesh Parameswaran, I Am An Executioner: Love Stories
This debut collection of short stories is filled with Indian culture. There are arranged marriages, culture and caste clashes, saris and chappels, and mouthwatering meals of chutney, samosas, and okra. The narrator of one story is a tiger; another is an elephant. Yet Parameswaran seems eager to subvert cultural clichés. In the title story of I Am An Executioner, the narrator speaks in what seems like a parody of Indian English: “Normally in the life, people always marvel how I am maintaining cheerful demeanors.” In another story, the hapless hero is an unemployed computer salesman who pretends to be a doctor –that stereotypical Brahmin profession – with disastrous results. In “Demons,” an Indian-American woman tells a neighbor that her dead husband on her living room floor is doing yoga, saying: “That is, you know, one of the things we do in India.” And the gullible gringo swallows the story. -KLM
Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds
War. Huh. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Say it again. -KLM
Christine Schutt, Prosperous Friends
According to a Bulgarian proverb, the person who tries to sit on two stools at the same time winds up on the floor. So it goes for the members of the love triangles in Prosperous Friends, a slim novel in which the characters, despite their ostensibly charmed lives as artists and writers, struggle to find happiness, purpose, or fulfillment. In this slim, tight novel, Schutt, pulls off a tale that in lesser hands might have been meta-pretentious or merely bleak. -KLM
In her new novel NW, Smith explores the London neighborhood through the eyes of best friends Leah and Keisha over the course of 35 years. While geography may seem like the obvious premise (NW being the postal code in the northwest section of London), the perception of time grows in importance throughout the novel. Their first memories are of a limited location: Northwest London and the subtle differences between the people, streets, and homes that exist therein. They knew where their friends were without Twitter and how to get somewhere without Google Maps. This is not to say they don’t embrace technology and social media when they grow older. The novel begs the question: how does one stay grounded in the physical realm while steadily adapting to an abstract one? -AH
Emma Straub, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures
Full disclosure: I have read only the first chapter of this debut novel, but am quite looking forward to the rest. Check back in January for a full review. -KLM
When faced with adversity, many people look for ways to escape, whether it be through drugs, sex, or an 11,000 mile solitary hike through the wilderness. In Wild, the woman behind the “Dear Sugar” column at The Rumpus, Cheryl Strayed reconstructs her hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, in response to her recent divorce and four years of inadequately trying to escape the grief and emptiness left by her mother’s death. Twenty-six years old at the time and hiking alone, Strayed, an inexperienced hiker, enters the trail naively, carrying too much in her backpack (nicknamed Monster), wearing boots a size too small, and totally unprepared for what she has gotten herself into. But by the end of the journey, she becomes “Queen of the Trail,” no longer “the woman with a hole in her heart.” At turns funny and heart-wrenching, Strayed’s memoir is thoughtful, honest, and entertaining, whether or not the reader has any interest in the outdoors. –GM
In this debut novel published by Portland’s Tin House Books, a woman in her 30’s mourns the death of her sister, the loss of her first love, and the dissolution of her almost-famous punk band. The narrator of The Listeners is an unattractive, anorexic, hirsute, chain-smoking, hard drinking vegetarian with synesthesia. She hangs out with people named: Fod, Mert, Cam, Geck, Jupiter, Dagger, Riley a.k.a. Coyote, Pine, and Uncle Seven. The games she plays include: Nakedies, Curious, and Wake The Sister. She uses child-like slang (spark, nidget, pettles, and neezle) and after a bad gig, compares her band to “the polka unit at the Penis Oaks Retirement Village.” Ouch. -KLM
Keith Meatto is Editor in Chief of Frontier Psychiatrist. After his solo effort compiling the best fiction and best nonfiction books of 2011, he is grateful to Andrew Hertzberg, Gina Myers, Jordan Mainzer, Chris Lillis Meatto, and Michael Nicoloff for making the 2012 list longer, wider, and deeper. So many books, so little time.
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