Botched & Ecstatic

Dante, Inferno*
Anne Carson, Red Doc>
Louise Gluck, Averno*
Maggie Nelson, Bluets*
Fuminori Nakamura, The Thief
Yoko Ogawa, Revenge
Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein*
Salomon Kroonenberg, Why Hell Stinks of Sulfur
Lafcadio Hearn, Shadowings
Lafcadio Hearn, Some Chinese Ghosts
Isabelle Eberhardt, The Oblivion Seekers
Brian P. Levack, The Devil Within
Caspar Henderson, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings
John Glassie, A Man of Misconceptions
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
Shoson Nagahara, Lament in the Night
Lars Iyer, Spurious
Robert Kloss, The Alligators of Abraham
Renata Adler, Speedboat
Melanie Rae Thon, The Voice of the River
Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia
Joni Tevis, The Wet Collection
Domenica Ruta, With or Without You
Dan Beachy-Quick, A Whaler’s Dictionary
Thomas de Quincy, The English Mail-Coach and Other Essays
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky*

* = reread

Lawrence Durrell, Justine*
Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar*
Lawrence Durrell, Mountolive*
Lawrence Durrell, Clea*
Junius Henderson & Elberta L. Craig, Economic Mammalogy
Mark Derr, How the Wolf Became the Dog
Samuel I. Zeveloff, Raccoons
Bill Wasik & Monica Murphy, Rabid
Geoff Dyer, Zona
Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon
Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns
Mat Johnson, Pym
H. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud
Mary Gaitskill, Veronica*
Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten*
Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees*
Barbara J. Ambros, Bones of Contention
Matias Viegener, 2500 Random Things About Me Too
James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime*
Sean Ferrell, The Man in the Empty Suit
Victoria Braithwaite, Do Fish Feel Pain?
David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster
Teju Cole, Open City*
Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station
Grevel Lindop, The Opium Eater: A Life of Thomas de Quincey
Thomas de Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater & Other Essays*
Amy Leach, Things That Are
Lisa O’Donnell, The Death of Bees

* = reread

The world doesn’t need another best of list, but I found myself fairly alienated by most of the lists I read, many of which seem to regurgitate the same dozen or so titles. My list is not based necessarily on works published in 2012, which always struck me as arbitrary (I don’t read based on the publishing cycle); these are the best books I personally read in 2012. Here they are in no particular order.

1. John D’Agata / Jim Fingal, The Lifespan of a Fact (2012)

I don’t know; one marker of a good book, I think, is that it generates an interesting conversation. A lot of books that keep showing on “best of” lists have none of this; beyond the platitudes in clichés (“I loved this,” “I couldn’t put this down,” etc.), no one really has anything to say about these books. The Lifespan of a Fact is a flawed book, it’s a problematic book, and, in and of itself, it’s far from the best book of the year. But it produced a hell of a conversation, one that was, at least for me, useful and revealing about our relationship to nonfiction and literature.

2. Jan Morris, Hav (2006)

I received this from Riverrun Books’ Paperback to the Future series, in which bookseller Liberty Hardy personally selects a book for you each month. Morris’ Hav, which includes the original 1985, Booker Prize-shortlisted Last Letters from Hav, and a more recent sequel (packaged together by NYRB Classics), is pitch perfect on multiple levels. A faux-travelogue that chronicles an imagined country, it offers an allegory on travel, on nation and culture, on history and on politics, captured by a master travel writer spinning a fantastic tale.

3. Brian Castro, The Bath Fugues (2009)

Castro’s Shanghai Dancing is one of my favorite books of all time, and the only of his currently available in the United States. The Bath Fugues is not quite as powerful as that novel, but it’s still heads above much of what’s being published in America, and with any luck it’ll be available here soon. Ask for it by name.

4. & 5. Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy & Henry Petroski, To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure (2012)

I reviewed both of these books for LA Review of Books (and both were sent to me for free), and may not have otherwise found them if not for my editor, Evan Kindley, who suggested them (though I reviewed other books for them which were far from my favorites this year). These two, however, were excellent, precisely in the fact that they enlarged my sense of our relationship to history and our relationship to human endeavor. My reviews of both are here and here.

6. E. C. Large, Advance of the Fungi (1940)

Some books just jump out at you from the shelf and demand to be bought. So too with E. C. Large’s 1940 history of our attempts to understand fungi and plant disease. It opens with a heartstopping race to understand potato blight by two botanists in an attempt to stave off the Irish Potato Famine, amidst the complete and criminal indifference of the British government. From there it continues for another 500 pages. I’ll admit I haven’t finished it yet; it exhausted me in its scope and ambition. Even only halfway through, I still think it’s the best book I’ve read in awhile; sometimes the mark of a great book is that you can’t take it all in on the first go.

7. Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things (2012)

Many have listed Strayed’s memoir Wild as one of their favorites of the year, but Tiny Beautiful Things is for me clearly superior. While Wild struck me as a well written and engaging memoir, it didn’t really aim to reinvent the do-a-stupid-thing-in-order-to-come-to-grips-with-horrible-thing-in-one’s-past formula. Tiny Beautiful Things, on the other hand, could reasonably be said to have invented its own genre. That’s worth noting.

8. Louise Gluck, Poems, 1962-2012 (2012)

A book to keep close throughout one’s life.

9. Gilbert Seldes, The Stammering Century (1928)

Another book sent to me to review, and the other book on this list from NYRB Classics. Contemporary with Charles Fort’s The Book of the Damned and Lo!, and Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York, a maverick history written by an armchair historian that’s vital, evocative, and necessary. If I get that review published, I’ll link to it; in the meantime, read Evan Kindley’s review of it here.

10. Montague Summers, A History of Demonology and Witchcraft (1926)

Wildly problematic, and yet compulsively readable, Summers’ history of witchcraft is a thoroughly researched history which shed light on things long forgotten and offered fresh translations of documents never before seen in English. At the same time, Summers steadfastly maintained that witches were real, and that the Catholic Church was completely correct in executing most of them—if anything, he suggests, they should’ve killed more. A singular book by a singular individual. At some point a long essay I wrote on Summers may see the light.