BOOKS & CULTURE CORNER
The Top Ten Books of 2003
Plus: The Worst Book of the Year, more good reading, digital books, and a little Christmas music.
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- The Curse of the Raven Mocker , by Marly Youmans (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). If you haven't heard about this novel, that may be because it was published as a Young Adult book. Then again, it's a novel that eludes categories right and left. It's a fantasy—but nothing like most books in that genre. It draws a lot on Cherokee lore, but it isn't a "Native American" book. It is a portrait of the artist as a girl about to become a woman, and a story of the Spirit (and of spiritual warfare). As I have learned since first getting acquainted with her work a year and a half ago, Youmans (pronounced like "yeoman" with an "s" added) is the best-kept secret among contemporary American writers. She writes like an angel—an angel who has learned what it is to be human. I hope you too will discover Youmanland.
- Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music—and Why We Should, Like, Care , by John McWhorter (Gotham/Penguin) and The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester (Oxford Univ. Press). Every year it happens that writers who are working completely independently of each other publish books at more or less the same time that play off each other in surprising ways. These "doublets" are rarely reviewed together—they are assigned to different boxes—but they should be read together. Linguist and social critic John McWhorter tells the story of the rise of casual speech and writing in America and the corresponding decline in the formal, the "well-spoken"—a development he links to the valorizing of the "oral" and to the tumult of the Sixties. Simon Winchester, the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map that Changed the World, and Krakatoa, among other books, tells a very different story: the documenting of the whole history of the language in the Oxford English Dictionary (the ever-changing "oral" frozen for observation in thousands of "snapshots" of usage). How do these two stories shed light on each other? Part of the fun is that the two writers are entirely different in style. McWhorter writes like a jazzman, improvising, provoking, riffing, playing with the language he loves. And he's congenitally opinionated, a born contrarian who nonetheless possesses a ready fund of common sense. Winchester is a raconteur extraordinaire, a connoisseur of the odd and arresting fact, your urbane guide. Read separately, their books are absorbing; together, they are dynamite.
- Jonathan Edwards: A Life , by George Marsden (Yale Univ. Press). Here I can do no better than to repeat what I wrote in a piece for beliefnet.com celebrating the 300th anniversary of Edwards' birth: "It is one of the great merits of Marsden's biography that he shows us the decidedly unheroic aspect of Edwards' life (which is, of course, the stuff of every human life) while at the same time doing justice both to his towering intellectual achievements and to his incandescent faith, animated by a palpable sense of the sheer beauty and majesty of God. Neither debunking nor hagiographic, it is an almost supernaturally fair-minded portrait."
- The Murder Room , by P.D. James (Knopf). Two years ago, James' novel Death in Holy Orders appeared on this list. Now James has returned with another in her series of novels featuring Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard. This, the 12th in the series, may be the last. There is a valedictory note to it—and a satisfying outcome for Dalgliesh and Emma Lavenham, the young scholar whom he first met in Death in Holy Orders. The subject of the new book might be described as the violence of spectatorship, a theme with great pertinence.
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