One of the reasons newspapers -- and other publications -- like to do end-of-year wrap-ups is because they're easy to pull together in a short period of time.
Most years I write a year-in-books essay that borrows from reviews I've written over the past year. I don't call it the "best books" of any given year because I don't have a handle on the zeitgeist, as I work with a core sample of probably 50 to 75 books a year, and only get to write about a couple dozen of those.
More than a million books were published last year, a few by people who will no longer talk to me because I didn't have the time, the energy, or the heart to give their novel/memoir/self-help book a full-fledged review. To paraphrase the old adage, there are too many books for the amount of time we're allotted in this realm. Maybe in the next life we can read all we want, but for now, I've got about an hour per night and whatever I can sneak in during the daytime.
(And some of that time is devoted to reading strictly for my own pleasure; I spent a portion of the past year re-reading Larry McMurtry's "Thalia" trilogy and Duane Moore series, and most of Dan Jenkins' novels, without imagining I'd be mentioning them in print -- though I guess I just have.)
Even so, there were a lot of books I read last year that I wanted to write about but couldn't find the time or the tone. I was fascinated by "The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man" (Knopf), billed as a Paul Newman autobiography. It was a nuanced and remarkably honest memoir that presented the icon as vulnerable and uncommonly intelligent, with a case of impostor syndrome. I related to both the narrative and the voice.
I've always been a big fan of the actor, but this book and Ethan Hawke's documentary series "The Last Movie Stars," which drew from the same source material but emphasized Newman's and his wife Joanne Woodward's love story and film careers rather than his personal life, made me respect the man.
Newman was a slight, socially awkward kid who overcompensated for his shyness by playing the class clown. In college, a date told him she liked going out with him because he was "harmless." He professes to never having cared much for the acting process; he just discovered he was good at it.
"Acting gave me a sanctuary where I was able to create emotions without being penalized for having them," he writes.
Only Newman didn't write those words. He spoke them into a tape recorder in the 1990s when he was considering writing an autobiography. Over a five-year period, Newman's friend, the screenwriter Stewart Stern ("Rebel Without a Cause") interviewed Newman and many of the actor's friends and associates for the express purpose of that book.
Then, one day, Newman abandoned the book project. He took the tapes into his backyard and burned them. Hawke believes he did so because he became "bored with the celebration of the individual ... totally bored with being quote-unquote Paul Newman, and the whole story and the mythologizing of himself."
That's a good theory. In the book, Newman seems determined to present himself as a man whose greatest talent was his luck. He saw the book as a chance to disabuse his public of the Paul Newman myth, then realized that by writing a book he'd just be adding fuel to the flame.
A couple of decades later, David Rosenthal fashioned those transcriptions into a version of that book -- a kind of unauthorized autobiography. I'm glad that the transcripts survived and the book exists, because the dead ought not bully the living. But it's not the book Newman would have written; it might even be a fairer, more scrupulous take on a man who was notoriously hard on himself.
. . .
Another book I didn't write about is Ed Yong's "An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us" (Random House). Yong, a science writer for The Atlantic who won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his coverage of the covid-19 pandemic, explores the idea that the world is infinitely richer than human beings can perceive because we are constrained by the limitations of our own sensors.
Yong describes the perceptual landscapes of other animals -- what in biology is called their Umwelten (German for "environments") -- that differ vastly from our own. (We don't see ultraviolet light; for birds and bees it is a color. Dolphins can effectively X-ray other creatures -- echolocation allows them to "perceive your lungs and skeleton ... shrapnel in war veterans and fetuses in pregnant women.")
There is a political moral implicit in the book, especially in this age when we all seem to inhabit hermetic realities. We all have our Umwelten, we all have slightly different views of the shadows dancing on the wall of our caves.
Imani Perry's "South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation" (Ecco) is the most recent winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction, and it's far more interesting than the travelogue the title seems to promise. Perry, who was born in Birmingham, Ala., and grew up in Cambridge, Mass., is an academic who writes a regular column for The Atlantic. Here she describes her feelings on returning to Alabama to interview Angela Davis:
... I am American. That means something to me, some common ground with others of this soil, even as the country feels irredeemably racist and maybe not worth saving. It is what Du Bois called a twoness -- two warring souls -- Black yet American. You face it in its most raw truth below the Mason-Dixon Line.
To be an American is to be infused with the plantation South, with its Black vernacular, its insurgency, and also its brutal masculinity, its worship of Whiteness, its expulsion and its massacres, its self-defeating stinginess and unapologetic pride.
What the white South confronted in the movement era was a paradigm shift. There was a model for sustaining white supremacy: terrorizing Black folks, the dispassionate acquiescence of the white North and the federal government, economic control, and an ideological hold on its ranks managed by humiliation and cruelty. But a model only holds as long as its assumptions can be sustained.
John Banville's "The Singularities" (Knopf) is tricky to write about and difficult to recommend to anyone who isn't already well versed in the Irish novelist's oeuvre. Banville is a writer's writer, a playful mordant figure whose work can bear comparisons to Nabokov, Henry James and Don Delillo. His latest is a wildly entertaining novel of nostalgia, life and death, and quantum theory that revisits characters and themes from his previous books. It's a brilliant novel but probably not the best entry point for Banville's work.
Jimmy Johnson's "Swagger: Super Bowls, Brass Balls, and Footballs: A Memoir" (Scribner) is the rare ol' ball coach's book that doesn't feel like a ghostwritten clip job. Johnson did have help; veteran South Florida Sun-Sentinel sports columnist Dave Hyde gets co-writer credit. While there's no sure way for outsiders to know whether the voice is authentic or not, it sure feels that way.
I know a few people to whom I could safely recommend Katherine Rundell's "Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne" (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux). But taking reader interest into account, this is probably the best I can do for this rollicking portrait of the Elizabethan poet of sex, death and joy. Rundell is a wonderful stylist who is able to combine detailed, rigorous research with mind-expanding analysis. She writes the way more rock and movie critics should.
. . .
Volume 1 of "The McCartney Legacy" (Dey Street Books) by rock critic Allan Kozinn and filmmaker Adrian Sinclair, is a certified doorstop of a book, running more than 700 pages and covering four years (1969-1973) of Paul McCartney's post-Beatles life. It is exhaustive and completely unnecessary to anyone other than McCartney obsessives. It is also highly readable and suitable for dipping into at random.
The obvious model here is the day-by-day deep dives of Mark Lewisohn, perhaps the world's foremost Beatle historian, who is currently working on the second volume of his proposed trilogy about the band (Lewisohn provides a cover blurb, so he obviously is OK with someone else applying his rigorous methods to McCartney's after-Beatle life.)
After taking a nasty detour into political allegory with his last novel "Cockroaches," Ian McEwan's "Lessons" (Knopf) arrives as comfort food for those longing for old-fashioned, ambitious literary storytelling.
The (presumably semi-autobiographical) tale follows a gentle soul named Roland Blaine, haunted by a sense that he has never quite fulfilled his potential. Set over 70 years, Roland's misadventures (an affair with a predatory teacher; a failed marriage to a woman who -- like the Brendan Gleeson character in the Martin McDonagh film "The Banshees of Inisherin" -- decides she has to choose between her private life and her art) are set against the global catastrophes of the post-war period.
David Milch is one of the heroes of prestige TV -- his HBO series "Deadwood" is on my short list of the best television shows of all time. His memoir "Life's Work" (Random House) is a standard heartbreaking memoir about a man who escaped a ruinous drug-hobbled youth to do transformative work in his chosen medium. Then he got old and his mind began to go.
Milch is suffering from Alzheimer's disease and put this book together in collaboration with his wife and adult daughters, who helped him piece together recollections of his fierce and remarkable life.
Apparently, Bonnie Garmus' "Lessons in Chemistry" (Doubleday) is one of the runaway successes of this year, a bestseller big enough to spur production of an Apple TV+ series starring Brie Larson.
I didn't know anything about it (it was published in March) until my wife Karen asked me if I had a copy in my slush pile because it was her book club's selection for this month. She likes it a lot, and so I've dipped into it too, and understand what the fuss is about. In Elizabeth Zott, a chemist who becomes the unlikely star of a TV cooking show despite possessing none of the joie de vie of, say, Julia Child, Garmus has created an indelible character readers might want to follow through any number of stories.
But this isn't exactly light reading. Zott suffers in ways typical of career women of her era: she forsakes her doctorate work after being assaulted by a professor; she's hassled and belittled by mediocre male scientists; and her romance with a rock-star chemist generates rumors she's just using him to further her career. His sudden death leaves her bereft and pregnant. But she persists, a single mother in the '60s.
It's next up for me, and it goes to show you can find good books everywhere. Sometimes even near the top of the New York Times Bestseller list.
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