The Best Books
Flavorpill Staffers Read in 2012
on Dec
17, 2012
Year-end best-of book lists can be tough. After all, if you’re anything
like us, you’re still catching up on the best books of 2010 — or 1910 — and
only sneaking a few brand new hardcovers into the mix. So when sitting down to
contemplate our collective year in reading, we decided to include everything,
not just the new stuff. After the jump, your humble literary editor and a
few other Flavorpill staffers expound on the best books we read this year —
whether they be books that came out this year, or just the ones we finally
(finally!) got around to reading. And inquiring minds want to know, dear
readers, what was the best book you read this year? Let us know in the comments.
I read the first
clause of this book “I stand at the window of this great house,” and I wanted
it tattooed on my arm. This is one of the earliest gay American novels before
the gay genre really became a thing, and it’s not even set in America. Giovanni’s
Room is probably the
most anomalous of Baldwin’s novels, as it centers on a tragic affair between
two bisexual men: a blonde American and an Italian bartender named Giovanni.
Both live in in the seedy, nocturnal Paris of the 1950s, full of drag queens
and sugar daddies of money new and old. In the same way that Baldwin manages to
paint the African American experience as one of all of humanity, he
universalizes the gay experience with empathetic acuity, and a fast-paced plot
of merely 200 pages. I read this in two days. And then I read it again.
Hackney,
That Rose-Red Empire, Iain Sinclair – Oliver Spall, Social Media Manager,
Flavorpill London
You can count Iain
Sinclair’s Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire as the best book this year. I’ve been
meaning to read it for a while and it is something brilliantly nostalgic,
pointedly critical and dryly funny throughout. I’d suggest you read it!
“Don’t even have to
think it over. David Mitchell’s Black Swan Greenis not only the
best book I read this year, it’s one of the best novels I’ve read in my life. I
found it on my shelf during all the hype about the release of the movie Cloud
Atlas which he wrote
several years later. And while I’ve not read that nor seen the movie, I can say
thatBSG is a very different kind of book, sort
of an anti-epic — a coming-of-age novel about a boy in western England during
the most eventful year of his young life. It is a quiet, brilliant, hilarious,
emotional triumph of the genre.”
I had never read Mary
McCarthy until this year. My mom made me watch the film for The
Group when I was
younger, and it left a bad impression on me that wasn’t reversed until I read
Maud Newton’s piece in the summer issue of Bookforum. Now I’m an absolute
McCarthy devotee, and I’ve been trying to read as much of her stuff as
possible. The Group didn’t come out this year, but very
few books I read in 2012 made me as happy.
I can’t begin to
distinguish where the world ends and this book begins. It scared the shit out
of me, deeply, and made me question the verifiability of my own memories, and
not in some stupid Kerouacian “your past is what you decide it is” way, but
rather in a truly intense, “it is possible none of this is what I am thinking
it is” kind of way. It’s eaten me from the inside and out with its little,
titular threats, deposited throughout the book’s landscape, and for that I love
it. I can’t recommend it to everyone, though, because not everyone wants their
throat slit.
Forget the Girls comparisons. With its audacious
honesty, vividly contemporary style, deep understanding of intellectual
ambition, and thrilling unfairness to the opposite sex, reading How
Should a Person Be? as
a young, heterosexual, Jewish woman in 2012 felt much the way I imagine reading
Philip Roth felt to young, heterosexual, Jewish men in the 1970s. But I’d like
to think that, as with Roth, you don’t have to fit into any of those categories
to appreciate it.
I’m working on a new
stop-motion short that has shades of Jan Potocki’s The
Manuscript Found in Saragossa, so I wanted to give it a re-read.
It’s a labyrinthine saga that reveals a twisted travelogue of arcane
adventures. It features a who’s who of gothic horror and esoteric figures:
gypsies, hermits, madmen, demons, secret societies, ghosts, and other
weirdness. Frame all that in a romantic, erotic, and historical context, and
you have Potocki’s heady epic.
Wild, Cheryl Strayed and The
Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach – Caroline Stanley, Managing Editor,
Flavorwire
Thanks to the overflowing
Kindle archive that I share with my Mom, there were a lot of things that I read
and really loved this year, but two of them really stick out: Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is one of those books that you read,
and then spend the next few months enthusiastically recommending to everyone
you know. It’s so much more than a fascinating memoir about a young woman’s
experience hiking the Pacific Coast Trail, it’s like a survival guide for life.
(Stop rolling your eyes and read it!) In a similar way, Chad Harbach’s debut
novel The Art of Fielding isn’t
just a book about baseball or college or college baseball for that matter —
it’s a sweeping examination of the human condition, our doomed quest for
perfection. Both books will make you weep uncontrollably, and perhaps more
importantly, continue to occupy a place in your thoughts long after you’ve put
them down.
Wild, Cheryl Strayed – Jill Knight, Accountant
My favorite this year
was Wild: From Lost to Found on the
Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed. I devoured this very
honest memoir of a 22 year old lady who after her mom dies and her marriage
dissolves finds herself a bit lost. This book follows her through her
adventures on the Pacific Crest Trail as she gets herself back on her feet. An
exciting, thrilling, inspiring read. I’m thinking for myself, Pacific Crest
Trial in 2014.
The Art
of Fielding, Chad
Harbach – Patrick Letterii, Venue Partner Manager
The Art
of Fielding. It might be because
I’m a big fan of baseball (to the chagrin of most of my friends), but this book
took over my life for a weekend.
If
on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino and Bad
Behavior, Mary Gaitskill – Emily Temple, Literary and Weekend
Editor, Flavorwire
This is pretty hard,
because I had a great year of reading, both with new books and with old. But
this was the year I read both Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler and Mary Gaitskill’s Bad
Behavior — the former
a deliciously deceptive series of false starts that somehow congeals into a
bittersweet ode to literature at large, the latter blistering and beautiful,
full of tiny, exquisite, terrifying moments of life and sex and despair — and I
have the feeling none of my years to follow will be the same.
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