Chestertown supports three independent booksellers, which might explain why the streets are empty at 7 p.m.— obviously, we are all at home reading books. But which books? Curious about the literary proclivities of Chestertown readers, The Spy asked a handful of local writers, readers, and dignitaries to share their favorite book of the year. May one or more from the list below whet your reading appetite.
x
The book of the year is Kristin Kimball’s memoir of becoming a farmer, The Dirty Life. Like Kristin herself, the book is surprising, funny, inspiring—a delight. It’s a book that will be around for a long time, because you find yourself re-reading it—you don’t want it to end. And the best part is that Kristin is coming to Chestertown in February at the invitation of Washington College’s Center for the Environment. Best thing I can think of from 2010.
x
Adam Goodheart, Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
The best fiction I’ve read this year is Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic. He’s been writing gut-punch short stories for the New Yorker for years (collected in You Are Not a Stranger Here, 2002) but this is his long-awaited first novel. I’m not sure if a book can be both minimalist and a saga at the same time … but if so, this is it. It’s tightly, precisely crafted, with nary an ounce of fat in the prose – yet somehow also manages to achieve the scope of a great social novel, conveying Big Truths about the world and its various predicaments. (Oh, and there’s a historic-preservation subplot that many folks in Chestertown should enjoy.) I started reading Haslett’s novel back in February during one of the blizzards and couldn’t put it down; it’s the kind of book that makes me wish I got snowed in more often.
x
Meredith Davies Hadaway, Poet
Anne Carson’s Nox is a stunning work of literary art that defies designation by genre. It is all-at-once discovery, translation, collage, and elegy—a detective story that literally unfolds accordion-style from its box. Gorgeous and powerful, this book is an unforgettable foray into experiential poetry.
Phil Hoon, Lawyer
John Grisham’s The Confession is compelling and provocative with respect to one of our most vexing public issues and challenging debates—the death penalty. It presents a factually stark and compelling case against the death penalty by illustrating that an underlying verdict can so easily be incorrect. The book is timely because it echoes recent comments by retired Supreme Court Justice Stevens. That is, while the death penalty is arguably appropriate for certain heinous crimes, our society’s ability to invoke and apply that penalty without any chance of human error is subject to serious and grave doubt and question.
To that end The Confession presents an altogether believable story which postulates that the real question is not whether the death penalty is a legitimate exercise of law and punishment, but instead whether we can truly administer it with a complete assurance of due process and correctness. After reading The Confession, even ardent supporters of the death penalty might take pause because the margin and chance for irreversible and egregious error it presents is so profound. It certainly motivated me to think about it.
x
Mark Nowak, Director, Rose O’Neill Literary House
Colossal. That’s the first adjective in Marcela Valdes’s Washington Post review of Karen Tei Yamashita’s new six-hundred-page novel, I Hotel. And it describes everything I love about the book to perfection. I, Hotel, which was recently a finalist for the National Book Award, is a stunning mix of genres—part graphic novel, part intensively researched history, part experimental play, part epic tale. It’s ten novellas in one. And it opens with one of those brief paragraphs that, as I’m always telling my creative writing students, almost forces you to want to read on: “So I’m Walter Cronkite, dig? And it’s February 27, 1968, and I’m saying, the U.S. is mired in a stalemate in Vietnam, and you are there.” So, read on!
x
Mitchell Reiss, President, Washington College
Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin is a kaleidoscope of characters loosely joined by the spectacle of Phillipe Petit tightrope walking between the two World Trade Center towers. It is about the way we lived then, the way we live now, what we have gained and what we have lost.
x
x
I enjoyed The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, by William Kamkwambe. Besides admiration for a young boy who pursued his dream of helping his family and his community by his resourcefulness, I also appreciated how the book gave the flavor of the subsistence living in a rural African village, and what a community goes through during a drought.
x
Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge is a powerful story of the three Levi brothers, young Hungarian Jews. In 1937 the youngest is still at home, while the two older ones leave Budapest to pursue careers in medicine and architecture. Shadows of anti-semitism darken their world from time to time, but the brothers have been toughened all their lives against these insults. Eventually, they are overwhelmed by the madness of Hitler’s Nazis.
Making for very difficult reading, the second portion of the book describes the brutality and horrors of the work camps into which the brothers are drafted in different parts of Europe. But Orringer’s concluding scene affirms the power of love and the strength of family. The Invisible Bridge has the power and sweep of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, though set in a much crueler and more violent world than the one in which he wrote.
jenifer says
Thanks, Kelly. I want to read them all!
Adrian Blair says
I would have to submit my own book, “Dances With Woolite, the Secret History of Laundry.” There is a reason why the Belgian, Jef Lambeaux’s “Le Blanchisseur” (The Launderer) sculpture in Brussels chatters madly to our psyches, but I can’t tell you here. Suffice it to say that academics have long obfuscated the real reasons behind “neomodernism” and the so-called simplicity of structure in architecture and art—it’s not based on purity of vision. It’s a result of not having enough money. Laundry and architecture? Horse and buggy! Read on.
~Adrian Blair, The Chestertown Store
Joseph Mitchell says
It’s nice to see an article on books! I would like to remind everyone that we have many fine local authors who have published fine books this year. When visiting our bookstores ask to see books by local authors, thereby supporting the authors and booksellers alike. Perhaps the Spy could schedule an article on our regional authors in the near future.
Diana says
The best book I have read this year, in fact ever read, is “Cutting for Stone.” It is super interesting and the characters are highly memorable. It is in paperback now but is a big story that goes 360 degrees in scope.
Read the reviews on Amazon–and give it a try!