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I'm writing this soon after reading that more than 500,000 people lost their jobs in November—"non-farm" jobs, that is, to which staggering total we could add some farm jobs as well. (The CSA farmer south of Chicago from whom Wendy and I get a box of produce every week, three seasons of the year, had to lay off her help.) And even before the financial crisis hit, the publishing industry was in a state of uncertainty often indistinguishable from panic. (Imagine a convention of buggy-makers sometime after the advent of what they were calling "the horseless carriage.")
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I could go on in this vein. And on. Nevertheless, at this moment in time, there are books aplenty. Reading is wonderfully democratic, and we still have a network of libraries crisscrossing the country, though there are more gaps than there used to be. (Maybe President Obama will include libraries in his ambitious plans to strengthen our infrastructure while stimulating the economy.)
And we are here, again, to celebrate some particularly good books. Not the best books of the year, whatever those might be. (One influential reckoning is the New York Times' list, The Ten Best Books of 2008, posted on the web though not yet published in the print version.) What you have here is a personal list, not issued by any magisterium. These are some books that rose to the surface when I unsystematically thought about a year of reading.
The Aeneid . Vergil. Translated by Sarah Ruden. Yale University Press. Not so long ago, if you were an educated person in the Anglo-American sphere, you could read Latin. I can't. I had made three unsuccessful tries to read Vergil's great poem in English (the first time when I was in college, unbidden), each by a different translator. In each case I bogged down pretty quickly. So I wasn't too optimistic when I picked up the galleys of Sarah Ruden's translation last spring. But her version (line-by-line, and metrical) immediately drew me in. I read most of the book on the flights Wendy and I took to and from the funeral of our dear young friend Anna Woodiwiss. And when we were home I read it straight though again. I know I still haven't read Vergil. But I've read Sarah Ruden's Vergil, and that's not to be disdained. Another classical translation that moved me, in this case from Greek—one which, like Ruden's, operated under strict constraints—was John Tipton's rendering of Sophocles' Ajax, published by Flood Editions. (Both books, as it happens, are pleasing to the eye and well designed to cradle in the hand.)
All the World's a Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare. John Reed. Plume. Here I will quote from "Wrapping Up 2008, "a piece I did for the December issue of First Things (not yet available on the web, though it will be in time): "The words are (mostly) by William Shakespeare, but they have been rearranged by John Reed. Perhaps a summary of the action will help:
Hamlet goes to war for Juliet, the daughter of King Lear. Having captured his bride—by unnecessary bloodshed—Prince Hamlet returns home to find that his mother has murdered his father and married Macbeth. Hamlet, wounded and reeling, is sought out by the ghost of his murdered father, and commanded to seek revenge. Iago, opportunistic, further inflames the enraged prince, persuading him that Juliet is having an affair with Romeo; the prince goes mad with jealousy.
All the World's a Grave is a most unsettling book. I felt dizzy several times while I was reading, and I paused now and then to pull King Lear or Hamlet from the shelf to reassure myself that the familiar texts remained intact. What's destabilizing—and often wildly comical—is not just the rude mash-up of characters and settings violently plucked from their canonical sources but the way in which the power of Shakespeare's language flickers uneasily, surging and hissing and fizzing out only to revive and fade again as the words play against their new contexts."
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