1) Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood by James Lever. A send-up of the movie star memoir that is a mash-up of Hollywood Babylon and The Territorial Imperative. Scabrously funny.
2) Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West. An account of Ms. West's travels through Yugoslavia with her husband and a cast of thousands in 1937. Of course, this is like describing Moby Dick as a book about a whale.
I grew up in NW Baltimore. My favorite record store growing up was Record and Tape Collector on 409 W. Cold Spring Lane. The store closed decades ago. It was next door to Alonso's, a neighborhood tavern with extraordinary burgers and good pizza. Alonso's still exists in a gentrified form. I took my future bride there in 1982 and at the table next to us Frank Robinson and Elrod Hendricks dined, drank, and reminisced, but I digress.
The record store had a bulging collection and a knowledgeable and helpful staff. I remember one of them telling me yes, the Velvet Underground albums, which were only available as imports at the time, were worth the extra bucks. My friends and I would go on Fridays to check out the new releases. The staff would write capsule reviews and affix them to the demo copy. I remember the review of the Rolling Stones' last flirtation with greatness, 1978's Some Girls. It read: "Great Rock, Great Blues, Great Soul, Great Disco, Great Country."
Similarly, Black Lamb contains multitudes. It is a travelogue, history, ethnographic exploration, cultural dissertation, and a gustatory delight with enough sex and violence for ten long seasons on HBO. It is quite lengthy at 1100 or so.
West captures Europe on the precipice of disaster, yet the book is leavened with humor, albeit gallows humor. The writing is superb throughout, as is West's moral probity:
"Violence" said Mussolini in the unmistakable accents of moral imbecility, "is
profoundly moral, more moral than compromises and transactions." Time has
rolled backward. It seemed likely man was to lose his knowledge that it is wiser
being good than bad, it is safer being meek than fierce, it is fitter being sane
than mad. He was not only ignoring the Sermon on the Mount, he was forgetting
what the Psalmist had known. And since these things are true it was certain that,
once man had forgotten them, he would be obliged, with pains that must be
immense, to rediscover them.
3) To Lie with Lions by Dorothy Dunnett. Ms. Dunnett's place in the pantheon of historical novelists is assured. She emulates Dumas' swashbuckling approach, but darkens it with a penetrating insight into the evil stratagems men and women devise. Some of her themes, particularly the rapaciousness of capitalist robber barons and the fluidity and tumult of sexuality, seem more germane with each coming year. Her books require more than a passing acquaintance with European history, in this novel's case, the late 15th century. Her books are liberally sprinkled with quotations in foreign tongues: French, Italian Latin, Greek, Arabic. Her descriptions are colorful, her narrative construction sound, and her timing impeccable. She is quite willing to unsheathe the rapier of her wit. The Holy Roman Emperor is "almost stupid, but not absolutely so." (pg. 579)
4) The Passenger/Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy. It strikes me that McCarthy's protagonists before or after Blood Meridian, the dividing line in his fiction between Southern gothic and Southwestern gothic , have all ended up on society's fringes or even its outer periphery. The inheritors of the mantle of the Western cowboy, like John Grady Cole in All The Pretty Horses, end up living under highway underpasses in Cities of the Plain. Bobby Western, the protagonist of The Passenger, ends up exiled to a shack in an attempt to escape shadowy agents. His sister Alicia, the protagonist of Stella Maris, enters a psychiatric hospital and commits suicide. McCarthy crosses a vector with Pynchon and DeLillo in this new, two volume work. These writers, and many more, address with alarm the growing power of America's surveillance state. As Andrew Sarris wrote of Fritz Lang, "in a century that has spawned Hitler and Hiroshima, no artist can be called paranoiac, he is being persecuted." A good chunk of 20th century art explores this strain of paranoia and it is certainly still present in the 21st century, both here and abroad.
5) Either/Or by Elif Batuman. Batuman's The Idiot seemed to me a holding pattern. The focus on Salin. Batuman's alter ego, and the brooding Ivan seemed like a rehash of Batuman's folie a deux with Luban in her first book, The Possessed. Salin is back in Either/Or, but Batuman has gotten back in touch with her funny bone. She regards Salin's youthful misadventures with rueful wisdom. Either/Or is the best sentimental novel in some time and the best academic novel since Lucy Ives' Loudermilk.
6) The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan. A novel concerning Australian POWs and their Japanese captors in Burma during World War 2. Makes Bridge on the River Kwai read like a YA novel.
7) Mary Queen of Scots by Stefan Zweig. A concise and tart biography.
8) Gabriele D'Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War by Lucy Hughes-Hallett.
An exhaustive and caustic biography.
9) The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze. An economic history of Nazi Germany. The numerous charts are a bit much for those not in the field, but this is a compelling portrait of economic determinism.
10) Jack by Marilynne Robinson. Robinson's latest was, for me, her hardest to sink into. Perhaps because the first person narration of Jack Boughton accurately reflects the tangled thicket of his mind. Still, there are enough grace notes in this tome for a career in fiction. Robinson belongs on the list of possible American Nobel candidates including McCarthy, Charles Johnson, and Ishmael Reed.
I also recommend:
Night Boat to Tangiers by Kevin Barry
Within the Context of No Context by George W.S. Trow
The Searcher by Tana French
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
Winner of the National Book Award by Jincy Willet
The Human Stain by Philip Roth
The Lion of Hollywood by Scott Eyman
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zahner
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