The 10 Best Books of 2011
Choosing our 10 Best Books of the Year was not an
arbitrary process, but neither was it a scientific one. How could it be, when
the editors here, like all readers, respond subjectively to any work of fiction
or nonfiction? The one guideline for the 10 was that they had to have been
reviewed in our pages sometime in the past 12 months.
Our 100 Notable Books of
the Year were
narrowed down to this final list, which contains a contingent of four first
novels, Stephen King’s 52nd novel (by our count), and nonfiction books that are
models of their various forms — biography, memoir, history, argument and
scientific analysis.
FICTION
By Chad Harbach. Little, Brown & Company, $25.99.
At a small college on the Wisconsin side of Lake
Michigan, the baseball team sees its fortunes rise and then rise some more with
the arrival of a supremely gifted shortstop. Harbach’s expansive, allusive
first novel combines the pleasures of an old-fashioned baseball story with a
stately, self-reflective meditation on talent and the limits of ambition,
played out on a field where every hesitation is amplified and every error
judged by an exacting, bloodthirsty audience.
By Stephen King. Scribner, $35.
Throughout his career, King has explored fresh ways to
blend the ordinary and the supernatural. His new novel imagines a time portal
in a Maine diner that lets an English teacher go back to 1958 in an effort to
stop Lee Harvey Oswald and — rewardingly for readers — also allows King to
reflect on questions of memory, fate and free will as he richly evokes
midcentury America. The past guards its secrets, this novel reminds us, and the
horror behind the quotidian is time itself.
By Karen Russell. Alfred A. Knopf, cloth, $24.95;
Vintage Contemporaries, paper, $14.95.
An alligator theme park, a ghost lover, a Styx-like
journey through an Everglades mangrove jungle: Russell’s first novel, about a
girl’s bold effort to preserve her grieving family’s way of life, is suffused
with humor and gothic whimsy. But the real wonders here are the author’s
exuberantly inventive language and her vivid portrait of a heroine who is wise
beyond her years.
By Eleanor Henderson. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers,
$26.99.
Henderson’s fierce, elegiac novel, her first, follows
a group of friends, lovers, parents and children through the straight-edge
music scene and the early days of the AIDS epidemic. By delving deeply into the
lives of her characters, tracing their long relationships not only to one
another but also to various substances, Henderson catches something of the
dark, apocalyptic quality of the ’80s.
By Téa Obreht. Random House, cloth, $25; paper, $15.
As war returns to the Balkans, a young doctor inflects
her grandfather’s folk tales with stories of her own coming of age, creating a
vibrant collage of historical testimony that has neither date nor dateline.
Obreht, who was born in Belgrade in 1985 but left at the age of 7, has
recreated, with startling immediacy and presence, a conflict she herself did
not experience.
NONFICTION
Essays.
By Christopher Hitchens. Twelve, $30.
Our intellectual omnivore’s latest collection could be
his last (he’s dying of esophageal cancer). The book is almost 800 pages,
contains more than 100 essays and addresses a ridiculously wide range of
topics, including Afghanistan, Harry Potter, Thomas Jefferson, waterboarding,
Henry VIII, Saul Bellow and the Ten Commandments, which Hitchens helpfully
revises.
A Father’s Journey to Understand His Extraordinary
Son.
By Ian Brown. St. Martin’s Press, $24.99.
A feature writer at The Globe and Mail in Toronto,
Brown combines a reporter’s curiosity with a novelist’s instinctive feel for
the unknowable in this exquisite book, an account — at once tender, pained and
unexpectedly funny — of his son, Walker, who was born with a rare genetic
mutation that has deprived him of even the most rudimentary capacities.
A Life of Reinvention.
By Manning Marable. Viking, $30.
From petty criminal to drug user to prisoner to
minister to separatist to humanist to martyr. Marable, who worked for more than
a decade on the book and died earlier this year, offers a more complete and
unvarnished portrait of Malcolm X than the one found in his autobiography. The
story remains inspiring.
By Daniel Kahneman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.
We overestimate the importance of whatever it is we’re
thinking about. We misremember the past and misjudge what will make us happy.
In this comprehensive presentation of a life’s work, the world’s most
influential psychologist demonstrates that irrationality is in our bones, and
we are not necessarily the worse for it.
Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War.
By Amanda Foreman. Random House, $35.
Which side would Great Britain support during the
Civil War? Foreman gives us an enormous cast of characters and a wealth of
vivid description in her lavish examination of a second battle between North
and South, the trans-Atlantic one waged for British hearts and minds.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário