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"Bloated industries put the economy in a bind," said the headline in The Chicago Tribune. For instance? "The world's auto industry can now produce 20 million more cars than consumers can buy." The article didn't cite the publishing industry as another example, but it certainly could have. (A photo of my office might serve as Exhibit A.) No one—no committee, for that matter—can keep track of the flood of books that appear each week, each day, let alone presume to pick the best of them from the past year.
What follows, then, is a highly subjective selection of books that stand out among the ones I've actually been able to read. Early in the new year, we'll feature some coming attractions of 2003.
Before we get to the list, it should be noted that this was a very good year for books by regular contributors to Books & Culture. Here I'll mention just four (with apologies to many others not named): Mark Noll's America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford Univ. Press); Philip Jenkins' The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford Univ. Press); Lauren Winner's Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life (Algonquin); and Karl Giberson and Donald Yerxa's Species of Origins: America's Search for a Creation Story (Rowman & Littlefield).
The book I was happiest to see this year is Books Children Love: A Guide to the Best Children's Literature (Crossway), by Elizabeth Wilson, a substantially revised edition of a book which was first published in 1987 and which has remained in print ever since. The author, who celebrated her 80th birthday on December 20, is my mother. And it's a terrific book.
Now to the list of the top ten—which actually includes 12 titles—in alphabetical order:
- After the Quake , by Haruki Murakami (Knopf). Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin. I've written about this linked collection of stories elsewhere, so I won't repeat that here, except to say that Murakami's book was my bedside reading for the anniversary of 9/11.
- Breaking Away: Coleridge in Scotland , by Carol Kyros Walker (Yale Univ. Press) and London Orbital: A Walk Around M25, by Iain Sinclair (Granta Books). Two very different walking tours, which need to be taken together. Breaking Away combines letters and notebook entries by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, recounting an extended jaunt in the summer of 1803, with extraordinary photographs and commentary by Carol Kyros Walker, who retraced Coleridge's journey. The whole is a beautiful job of bookmaking, a pleasure to hold and read. This is the third such book she's done; the two earlier ones, also from Yale, are also worth seeking out: Walking North with Keats and an edition of Dorothy Wordsworth's Recollection of a Tour Made in Scotland. Walker is well aware of Coleridge's foibles but nevertheless is over-indulgent. Still, the mix of STC's words and her photographs is stunning. Iain Sinclair's London Orbital chronicles a walk following the highway that encircles the greater London area. Novelist, poet, latter-day flaneur, Sinclair is an abrasively talented writer with an eye to the underside of things; his books belong on the same shelf with Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces and Dead Elvis. Like many who specialize in not being fooled, Sinclair can wax oddly sentimental—as in his tribute to J.G. Ballard—but he's produced an indispensable report on the world we've made.
- A Daring Young Man: A Biography of William Saroyan , by John Leggett (Knopf). "His name was known to anyone in America who read a magazine, listened to the radio, cared about theater, or bought a new book." When I was in high school, in the 1960s, William Saroyan was still a fixture of anthologies and reading lists. I wonder how many students today have heard of the author of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and The Human Comedy. The son of Armenian immigrants, raised in poverty, Saroyan enjoyed early fame, enormous popular success, and the praise of literary opinion-setters. The rest of his long life was a bitter struggle to attain those heights again. John Leggett, whose Ross and Tom was an unforgettable account of literary success followed by tragic failure, has written another great biography, which not only tells Saroyan's story but also illumines a steadily receding era of American life. Postscript: Saroyan's granddaughter, Strawberry Saroyan, whose birth is described in Leggett's book, has a memoir forthcoming from Random House in July, Girl Walks into a Bar.
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