Near the end of each year, The New York Times’ staff critics — Dwight Garner, Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai — share their favorite books among those they reviewed over the previous 12 months. But as you might imagine, as professional critics and general bibliophiles they read far more than is represented on those lists — books their colleagues reviewed, books they found by chance, books that had been teetering on their to-read piles while they attended to the demands of their jobs. Below, they talk about the wide variety of writing they enjoyed, authors who disappointed them and larger trends they noticed in the literary world. — John Williams, Daily Books Editor and Staff Writer
Q: What were some of the books published this year that you didn’t review but admired?
DWIGHT GARNER: One is Deborah Eisenberg’s book of stories, “Your Duck Is My Duck”; another is Christopher Bonanos’ “Flash,” his biography of tabloid photographer Weegee, which cast a lurid glow. (Parul reviewed the Eisenberg beautifully, as did Jennifer the Bonanos.)
I was moved by poet Tony Hoagland’s final book of poems while wishing it had a better title: “Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God.” Clive James’ book-length poem “The River in the Sky” is superb, an epic lament, written in late life, filled with exact and moving observations about life and culture. “If my ashes end up in an hour-glass,” he wrote, “I can go on working.”
I generally dislike books about bookselling because they’re treacly and self-satisfied, but Shaun Bythell’s subversive “The Diary of a Bookseller” is an antidote. Finally, Jonathan Meades’ “The Plagiarist in the Kitchen: A Lifetime’s Culinary Theft,” a defiant cookbook written “in praise of the unoriginal,” is delicious to read and even better to cook from.
JENNIFER SZALAI: I was really impressed by Anand Giridharadas’ “Winners Take All,” a close look at how do-gooder elites love to talk about changing the world while clinging to their privileged perch. It’s elegant and tough — a chapter called “The Critic and the Thought Leader” is particularly brilliant — but it never shades into contempt.
Eric Klinenberg’s “Palaces for the People” is another one; he shows how our physical environments can encourage (or discourage) social connections. I read Joanne B. Freeman’s “The Field of Blood,” about politicians slugging it out on the floor of Congress in the years leading up to the Civil War, with a mixture of awe and anxiety. I finally read Lisa Halliday’s “Asymmetry,” because of Parul’s glittering review, and sure enough, I was blown away by its intelligence.
PARUL SEHGAL: I don’t think I’m ever going to get over Ottessa Moshfegh’s “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” about a young woman in the ‘90s who medicates herself into a yearlong hibernation — Oblomov resurrected during the Clinton administration. Dwight’s review really got to the heart of what is so original about this book: its “misanthropic aplomb” and those serrated sentences. Moshfegh is the novelist for me right now; there’s such freedom and puckishness in her prose, and grandmaster technical wizardry, too.
Nick Drnaso’s graphic novel “Sabrina,” shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is another book that still haunts me. It’s about the murder of a young woman, internet paranoiacs and the American addiction to fear. A superb, very depressing portrait of the present.
Q: What about books not published in 2018 that you read in the past 12 months? I imagine you’re all pretty constantly reading things from years past. Anything you would especially recommend?
SZALAI: When reviewing Ronen Bergman’s “Rise and Kill First,” I kept encountering the name of a CIA operative, Robert Ames — which led me to Kai Bird’s “The Good Spy,” a biography that Dwight reviewed in 2014, when it was first published.
I had never read Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” and Jose Antonio Vargas’ mention of it in his memoir, “Dear America,” was a reminder to do so, as much as I knew it might crush me. I’ve been reading books about Weimar and Nazi Germany — the author of one of them, Christopher Browning, had a terrifying essay in The New York Review of Books in the fall, which led me to his book “Ordinary Men.”
One fun one (because I need a fun one): “The Curious Lobster,” a delightful 1937 book by Richard Hatch recently reissued by NYRB, which I’m reading with my 9-year-old.
SEHGAL: I’m always snacking on criticism, biographies and assorted forms of high-minded gossip wherever I can find them. This year I kept returning to Joe Orton’s diaries, Randall Jarrell’s reviews, Wayne Koestenbaum on opera, Margo Jefferson on everything. I thought a lot about Teju Cole’s photography criticism, collected in his book “Blind Spot,” and made a happy discovery in “Where She Danced,” a history of modern dance, by Elizabeth Kendall.
I also started to fill in some embarrassing gaps in my reading and took a plunge into the novels of Elizabeth Bowen and Penelope Fitzgerald. My most valuable discovery was the work of Christina Sharpe, a scholar of breathtaking range whose most recent book is “In the Wake,” about the aftershocks of chattel slavery in the Americas.
GARNER: When I’m off the clock I tend to read letters, diaries, books of travel writing and criticism, cookbooks, that sort of thing. Jean Rhys’ and Katherine Mansfield’s letters were steady companions this year. I spent a lot of time, after watching the evening news, with Dale DeGroff’s classic bar guide, “The Craft of the Cocktail” (2002).
There were two novels I did pick up and admire. One was James Hamilton-Paterson’s “Cooking with Fernet Branca” (2005), a bagatelle of a book, a sex romp with recipes, a weekend getaway for the mind. The other, better, one was Charles Willeford’s 1962 novel “Cockfighter.” Willeford is best known, when known at all, as a hard-boiled cult writer. But his observant books had unusual emotional registers, a sideways view of life and an indefinable comic air. This book, set in Florida and Georgia, is about a man for whom training fighting birds is an abiding passion. To admire this colorful novel is not to wish a return of that blood sport. The film of “Cockfighter,” released in 1974 and starring the amazing Warren Oates, is a keeper, too.
Q: Who are some of your favorite writers that emerged (on your radar) this year? Or writers who took a step forward in their work (in ambition or craft) that you considered significant?
SEHGAL: It was a year of revelations for me — mainly old stuff, freshly translated. I finally dug into the work of Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. His best work is in his novels, but the short stories, collected this year and translated into English for the first time, allow you a different kind of pleasure. You can trace the distinct periods in his style until that gorgeous moment when his voice arrives, like a thunderclap. Danish writer Inger Christensen was another surprise. Anne Carson compares her to Hesiod, and even in the new book, a slender essay collection called “The Condition of Secrecy,” you get a sense of her dazzling, polymathic intelligence.
GARNER: Tommy Orange’s first novel, “There There,” had muscle and focus. But this was a sweeping year — I’d suggest it’s a sweeping decade — for women writers, fearless and omnidirectional talents such as Sheila Heti, Rachel Kushner and Ottessa Moshfegh, each of whom had a new novel this year. The question of what these writers, and a handful of others, will do next is perhaps the best one American literature has now to ask.
SZALAI: I hadn’t read the journalism of Lauren Hilgers until I reviewed her debut book, “Patriot Number One,” and now I’m primed to read anything she writes. Same goes for Louis Hyman, whose “Temp” took a familiar subject — the gig economy — and showed how the world of precarious jobs was anything but inevitable. Months later, I still think about Allie Rowbottom’s feminist family memoir, “Jell-O Girls,” another outstanding debut. Q: Did anyone in particular disappoint you?
GARNER: Jamie Quatro and Uzodinma Iweala each wrote second books that felt like letdowns after their first, stronger, ones. Barbara Kingsolver and Michael Ondaatje seemed to be writing on autopilot — very high sorts of autopilot, perhaps, but autopilot still. Jonathan Lethem is among the most gifted novelists alive, and it has killed me to have to review his last two novels, including this year’s “The Feral Detective,” without enthusiasm.
I wanted “Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back),” the memoir from Jeff Tweedy, of the band Wilco, to be great, but it’s slack and talky and less than the sum of its parts. Lionel Trilling’s morose letters were published this year. As a friend of mine put it, he may have been America’s best critic but he’s its worst letter writer. The final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” series was so oddly off that it was as if, to borrow a lyric from one of Wilco’s best-known songs, he was trying to break our hearts.
SZALAI: I admired Gilbert King’s “Devil in the Grove” (2012) so much that I expected a lot from his follow-up, “Beneath a Ruthless Sun,” which ended up being too convoluted and digressive to deliver. Patricia O’Toole’s “The Moralist,” her biography of Woodrow Wilson, was penetrating on Wilson’s winding, halting entry into World War I, but her handling of his racist legacy — his segregation of the civil service being just one example — felt cursory.
SEHGAL: Like Jen, I was intrigued by the premises of certain nonfiction books and let down by the execution. One notable heartbreak was “Two Sisters,” by Asne Seierstad, about two Norwegian sisters who joined ISIS as fighters in Syria in 2013. It’s a strangely partial portrait and dictated largely by the sisters’ father, a wildly unreliable character — an odd decision to say the least, especially from Seierstad, a veteran journalist and a writer I much admire.
Q: What’s the book on each of your lists of 10 favorites that most surprised you, either in terms of how much you enjoyed it or why you enjoyed it?
GARNER: Sigrid Nunez’s novel “The Friend” was, for me, this year’s great happy surprise. I’d never really read her before — in fact, I’m embarrassed to say, she’d hardly been on my radar at all. The best feeling you can have as a reader is to devour a terrific book and then flip to the back flap and realize that, hey, this person has six more just waiting for me.
SZALAI: I never thought I’d rip through a 700-page book about Israel’s clandestine assassination program, but Bergman’s “Rise and Kill First” is a long book that doesn’t feel that way. The storytelling in Merve Emre’s “The Personality Brokers” is so exquisite and enthralling that I momentarily forgot how much I loathe personality tests.
SEHGAL: “Advice for Future Corpses,” a treatise on the biological process of death and how to care for the dying by Sallie Tisdale, a longtime palliative care nurse, had me riveted. It illuminates that one experience that remains, for most of our lives, entirely theoretical (as she says), the one event we cannot practice or truly prepare for. Q: Jen, as the critic who focuses exclusively on nonfiction for The Times, did you see any particular trends of note? Any change in the ways that books dealt with the Trump administration in its second year?
SZALAI: The first year of the Trump administration seemed to be the “holy moly” moment, and in 2018 the feelings of inevitability seemed to kick in. A number of new books tried to place what is happening in the United States in a larger context, whether historical or international. I did notice an uptick in volumes by conservative critics of Trump: Rick Wilson, David Frum, Max Boot. And of course, the White House insiders kept churning out their tell-alls. I’ve just heard of another one coming out in early 2019, by a former Trump adviser named Cliff Sims, that “aims to strike some middle ground”; the genre has apparently exhausted itself to the point where sounding reasonable and maybe a little boring is treated like an innovation in the form.
Q: Dwight and Parul, have you noticed any trends in the world of fiction that either started or intensified this year?
GARNER: Well, we’re starting to see Trump-era fiction. Gary Shteyngart and Jonathan Lethem, in their new novels, to name just two examples, sent pilgrims out into an America that seemed vastly colder and more despotic. In both cases the results were mixed. The reckoning, in this country’s literature, is going to take some time. Who will make sense of the dissembling new forces unpinning so many of the mores of American life? Who will fully convey the bewilderment and loss so many feel, and remind us exactly what’s been compromised? It’s a tall order. We need a new Emerson as well as a new Hawthorne, in whatever race or gender they happen to arrive. I wish I were a bit more optimistic. Most of the Trump references in American fiction thus far read like tendentious tweets. But it’s so early.
SEHGAL: I’m with Dwight. If early efforts are any indication, I’m leery about how this political moment will be metabolized by fiction writers. (The poets are another story: Terrance Hayes’ latest collection, which riffs on Trump, is spectacular.) I also noticed that Western writers are grappling with the refugee crisis and the West’s complicity and response. To name a few: Jenny Erpenbeck (“Go, Went, Gone,” from late 2017), Lisa Halliday (“Asymmetry”) and Donal Ryan (“From a Low and Quiet Sea”). They’re all trying to figure out how to approach what Erpenbeck calls “the central moral question of our time.”
To suss out the next trend, I say keep watching Rachel Cusk. From her 1997 memoir, “A Life’s Work,” so radically honest about the ambivalence of motherhood at the time, to her Outline trilogy, which finished up this year and laid waste to so many of fiction’s pieties and conventions, she consistently pushes the form forward.
Q: Dwight, you read Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” books as they came out, and reviewed several of them for The Times. Now that they’re done being translated into English, will you miss their regular appearance?
GARNER: No. I deeply admired — and deeply enjoyed — several books in the series, especially Volume Two. And Knausgaard clearly has an enormous gift. One condescends to him at one’s peril. But at this point I find myself in agreement with George Eliot, who said, “I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offense.”
