Best Books ’09

LITTLE ROCK — Part 1 of 2 Have you ever seen anyone fall in love with a book? I mean actually seen it-as if you’re watching a movie and the two main destined-foreach-other characters finally connect?

That’s what I saw last month.

And not just once but dozens of times. It happened in a highschool classroom. And a highschool cafeteria. And a study hall.

And the lobby. And out on the concrete benches near the parking lot.

It happened between classes, as students rushed to their desks-rushed to their desks!-and popped open their books to steal a few last sentences before the bell rang. It happened after the bell for the last class of the day-the last bell!-as one student sat unmoving, so engrossedwas he in his reading. After 10 church-quiet minutes, his teacher politely asked if the young man could take his reading home. The student glanced up, disoriented and foggy-headed from his dive deep into the story, and walked out with his head down, his book in both hands, as if singing from a hymnal.

It even happened in class, when another student tried “hiding” his novel inside his textbook-like a Manhattan commuter strategically burying a tabloid inside the pages of the New York Times. (His teacher didn’t have the heart to come down on the boy for that. Let him read!)

The boys, all juniors at Little Rock’s Catholic High School, were reading The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy. It was on their required-reading list. But formany, it had stopped being a class requirement pages ago-and had turned into something just short of obsession.

They had fallen in love with words, with a story, with a book.

It may not last. It may be fleeting infatuation-a right-place, righttime combo of perfect story for perfect age. Conroy’s novel is a coming-of-age page-turner set in an all-boys’ institution, full of fast friendships, youthful angst and anger, secret clubs and a little romance. For a 16-year-old boy, what’s not to like?

But maybe, just maybe, they’ve joined the cult. If so, welcome.

We’re happy to have you. We wish you well in your unending search for your next great literary love.

And your next. And your next.

For it will be a constant cause. A need. Like a marathoner punishing himself for that runner’s high, you are hooked on repeating a feeling.

But we are happy addicts. Give us not a cure but, please, feed our craving.

Perhaps this will help, this compilation of the Democrat-Gazette’s annual Best Books list-wholly subjective, highly eccentric.

In keeping with tradition, our collection of readers has little in common save for the most important thing: They are addicts, too. They’ll call in late to finish a great book, find reading time in the car during traffic, drink coffee at midnight to get in that last chapter. And mourn at the end of a beautiful narrative.

They know what you’re going through, boys. In fact, they know it so well that their love notes to this year’s infatuations wouldn’t fit into just one article. Look for Part 2 of the Best Books of 2009 soon.

The question was simple and demanding: What was the best book you read in 2009-and why? It doesn’t have to be new, just new to you. Re-readings don’t count, unless can make a great case.

In short, what did you fall for this year? Their latest loves follow. . . .

Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West, by Hampton Sides.

This book is a sweeping story about the numerous and varied clashes-military and cultural-that accompanied the American acquisition of the Southwest and California from Mexico in the 19th Century. The book recounts American efforts to stamp out resistance to the conquest and coerce allegiance to Washington. It details the 19th Century’s “antiinsurgency” campaigns in California during the Mexican War, and the few battles of significance in the Civil War in the old Spanish Territory. The narrative includes a president (James K. Polk), a would-be president (John Charles Fremont), an 80-year-old Navajo warrior (Narbona) and the book’s central hero, Kit Carson. But the lesser-known characters sometimes reveal more about the tensions of the era. My favorite example is the Methodist preacher and U.S Army officer, Maj. John Milton Chivington, an abolitionist who had participated in the Underground Railroad. Known as the “Fighting Parson,” Chivington led a regiment of federal volunteersfrom Colorado in a bloody campaign against Texas Confederates. He also railed against whiskey and gambling, when he had the time. His confiscation of legal alcohol in one town inspired a riot that threatened his safety. Undaunted, Chivington stepped up to the pulpit shortly after the confrontation. He set his guns down beside the Bible and declared that “by the grace of God and these two revolvers, I am going to preach here today.”-Nate Coulter, lawyer, Wilson Engstrom Corum and Coulter.

The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard, by J.G. Ballard.

My favorite book of the decade-never mind the year-is The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard, which was finally published in the United States this summer, some eight years after the original British edition. I would be hard-pressed to name a book I find more moving, disturbing and beautiful-a 1,200-page catalog of perfectly composed fantasies and apocalypses, polished to a luster by Ballard’s serene and graceful prose. Imagine watching The Twilight Zone if all its episodes had been scripted by Franz Kafka, and you’ll have some idea of the book’s effect. Ballard, who died in April, is best known for his autobiographical novel The Empire of the Sun and his car-accident-as-erotic-catalyst novel Crash, but his short stories represent his richest and most beguiling work. They are certainly the finest science fiction stories of the last century, and, in my opinion, the finest stories period.-Kevin Brockmeier, author, Little Rock. His most recent book is The View From the Seventh Layer.

Eastern Approaches, by Fitzroy Maclean.

The memoir of a Scottish diplomat-turned-soldier that pretty much touches on every fun and clandestine angle of World War II in Europe. Best of all, it’s true (or at least sounds like it). Maclean goes from playing games with the NKVD in pre-war Russia to SAS commando raids in the Western Desert and behind-the-lines missions with Tito’s partisans. Throw in the kidnapping of a Persian general and the occasional dinner with Winston Churchill, and you have a narrative that relegates the best of Ian Fleming and Alan Furst to the status of Reader’s Digest.-Jake Bleed, North Little Rock.

Season of Life: A Football Star, a Boy, a Journey to Manhood, by Jeffrey Marx.

The author was a ball boy for the Baltimore Colts in the 1970s. He was accepted as part of a team of professional athletes that included Joe Ehrmann, an All-Pro defensive linemen. When old Memorial Stadium in Baltimore was scheduled for demolition in 2001, Marx decided to renew acquaintances with as many retired Colts as he could find. Most scenarios were predictable, but a family tragedy had transformed Ehrmann from a free spirit into an ordained minister and a volunteer high school football coach for the Gilman Greyhounds of Baltimore. In coaching young men, Ehrmann dismissed the conventional ideas of masculinity such as athletic accomplishments, sexual exploits and material gains in favor of meaningful relationships with family and empathy for the less fortunate, traits which define a true man. Marx follows the Greyhounds and, as the season draws to a close, finds himself re-examining his own relationship with his father.- Mark Lamberth, highway contractor.

The Road to Serfdom, by Friedrich Hayek.

Conservative pessimists tend to fear socialism is always “right around the corner.” Is there precedent to current events? At the end of WWII an Iron Curtain was descending upon Eastern Europe; China was on the verge of a communist takeover; and the treachery of the Cambridge Five including Kim Philby, remained undetected. Friedrich Auguste Hayek (1899-1992) stepped into the fightwith his classic The Road to Serfdom, dedicated “to the socialists of all parties.” He warned that central planning-state control over the economic means of production-inevitably led to the loss of political liberty. Yet Hayek organized the Mont Pelerin Society of free-market thinkers, won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics, and lived to see the collapse of the Soviet bloc and China’s rejection of central planning.-Greg Kaza, director, Arkansas Policy Foundation.

Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout.

Olive Kitteridge purports to be nothing more than a humble collection of interconnected short stories told in simple, direct prose and set in a small, out-of-the-way town on the coast of Maine. Simple stories about small lives in a small town, right? Wrong. Strout reminds you that no life is small, that a town and its people can quietly abide and persist, while at the same time the townsfolk’s lives are rocked by adultery, betrayal, violence, fatal illnesses, suicide, familial dysfunction, depression, longing and loneliness-the challenges that touch all of us at some point (if we are lucky to live long enough) no matter how good, on balance, our lives may be. This is a wonder of a book. The writing appears effortless. The stories never strain, but simply ring true. And it is full of more wisdom-without ever spelling it out for you-than any book I have read in a long time.- Hank Bates, Carney Williams Bates Bozeman & Pulliam PLLC.

Finn Family Moomintroll, by Tove Jansson.

This book was published around half a century ago, has been translated into several languages, and still sitsupon many an American bookstore shelf, but I’d never even heard of this wonderful children’s book until recently. Reading it was like becoming friends with a wise, charming, very funny old soul. My whole family (two grownups, two children) loved this story of curious characters living whimsical lives in a Finnish forest. The Moomintrolls and their friends-an assortment of fantastical creatures with names like Sniff, Snufkin, and the Hemulen-have distinct and recognizably human personalities, though there isn’t a human among them. And though they have amusing problems (most significantly, what to do with the Hobgoblin’s hat?), the greatest pleasure lies in their comical and often touching interactions with one another.-Trenton Lee Stewart, author, Little Rock. His most recent book is The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey.

Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers.

Zeitoun leaves many questions unanswered but masterfully recounts the days and weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans through the lens of a fascinating family with distinctive travails during the crisis. While the first half of the book is a well-told account of Katrina that won’t surprise anyone who followed the story, the second half presents a new-and stomach-churning-chapter on those 2005 events. You will be, once again, outraged by the failings and abuses of our government in response to that crisis.-Jay Barth, professor of politics, Hendrix College.

Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates.

Reading this “cult classic” for the first time, I felt as though I were peeping through the curtains of the generation before mine and seeing behind the post-war sheers the hope and agony of every generation. It doesn’t stint on either. For, despite the reflexive irony, the hope seems achingly real. (As, of course, does the agony.) This is a novel that will wring your irony right out of you.-David Strain, professor of English and Humanities, University of the Ozarks.

Life, by Michael Greenberg.

You may be familiar with his regular work in the Times Literary Supplement or his freelance writings in publications like The New York Review of Books. Greenberg wrote a critically acclaimed book, Hurry Down Sunshine, about his daughter which I have not read. Beg, Borrow, Steal is an illuminating and rich collection of short essays compiled from years of observation. The topics are varied: a hazardous relationship with his father, of rats that live and play in the streets, life on the subway in a city, New York, that he loves. His encounters with a street vendor, a transsexual and the Chilean filmmaker Sergio Castilla, particularly, are so vivid they could be confused for fiction. They are not. He really did see and do all of the things in this book. Fortunately, he wrote them down.-Blake Rutherford, director of public communications, Stone Ward.

Tried By War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander In Chief, by James M. McPherson.

This book brings to life Lincoln’s agony over the decisions he had to make as Commander-in-Chief under circumstances similar to today. McPherson makes two major points early on. Lincoln understood that, under the Constitution, war had to be prosecuted as an instrument of national policy directed by the civilian authorities and that it could not be driven by the military alone. Secondly, what spoke to me was Lincoln’s statement that the test of the Civil War was to settle the struggle once and for all “[t]hat popular government is not an absurdity.” It is not Mr. Lincoln’s fault that he could not have anticipated either the Internet or Glenn Beck.- Paul Bowen, lawyer, Little Rock.

Huge, by James W. Fuerst.

Huge is a funny, touching and outrageous coming-of-age story about Eugene (Huge) Smalls, a sixth-grader with a through-the-roof IQ , serious anger issues and a penchant for noir authors like Raymond Chandler and Dashielle Hammett. And his only friend is a stuffed frog named Slash. Huge, who is actually pretty tiny, has taken up the charge of finding the miscreants who vandalized the sign at the retirement home where his beloved grandmother lives. His sleuthing takes him through the suburban rot of late-’80s New Jersey on his gleaming, customized Schwinn. Fuerst is usually dead-on in his depictions of mall life, bored teens and Huge’s frustration and rage. It’s quite a trip.-Sean Clancy, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.