2014 has been an amazing year of reading books for me—thanks to AWP, meeting more publishers of independent presses, and mostly avoiding mainstream literary fiction. The following is a best-and-worst of the books published this year that I happened to read this year. It does not include books by dear friends because I have three dear friends with great books this year, and that just gets silly. (If only all Brooklyn critics could opt out in this way, the year-end lists would be different indeed!)
1. Best: Testo Junkie, by Beatriz Preciado
An “autoerotic intoxication protocol” by a Spanish post-Marxist feminist and gender renegade that has changed the way I understand my body, my life and that emotional, intellectual and sexual cyber-prosthesis sometimes called a laptop. Scary, scary shit that everyone should read.
2. Worst: Department of Speculation, by Jenny Offill
This was a very good Brooklyn Mother book, impressively structured, witty, well-written, and deserving of its many accolades compared to the others in its genre, but its existence annoyed me for a large chunk of 2014. I felt that Offill failed to bring any heart or soul or greatness of spirit into the airless chamber of bitching that is her topic. She said it well, but she said nothing new.
3. Best: Seiobo There Below, by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Fall down and start screaming and wailing and gnashing your teeth at this cult Hungarian writer’s unchecked brilliance. The Krasznahorkai is a blizzard of ecstatic layers on art, transcendence and God. The Krasznahorkai is unknowable, immersive and deranged. Please read the Krasznahorkai. I also interviewed the translator for The Paris Review, which was good fun.
4. Worst: The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell
Has no one else noticed that David Mitchell’s voices are boring? As a young woman, I loved Cloud Atlas, but I also brazenly skipped the parts in dialect. Mitchell has moments of lovely prose and interesting, intricate plotting, but for vast rafts of the novel the point is to enjoy the voices, and I don’t. To me these quirky characters don’t feel like people and, thanks to plentiful mimetic indulgence, bring us gems like “I felt like a clubbed baby seal.”
5. Best: Fear, by Gabriel Chevallier (re-issued this year by the NYRB imprint)
This obscure volume by a sardonic teenage Frenchman starts with the smell of war and tells us everything from there. The most honest and illuminating book on trench warfare I’ve ever read.
6. Best and Worst: Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel, by Anya Ulinich
Lena Finkle got divorced and lived on to have hot sex and a happier life, contrary to what mainstream culture would have us believe. Best book, most beautiful illustrations, worst New York Times Review.
7. Best: Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A NAB (non-American black) view on race in America in very-funny-immigrant-novel format. Adichie provides social comedy, social commentary and takes neither shit nor prisoners. This book is about blackness, but the send-ups of whiteness are also pretty eye-opening.
8. Worst: Sugar Skull, by Charles Burns
This is only a “worst” book in comparison to the other two volumes of Burns’s X’ed Out series, two of my favorite graphic novels—or novels, period—of all time. I was let down by the overly literal and tidy end.
9. Best: I Loved You More, by Tom Spanbauer
Despite having spilled my own ink, I still prefer Rob from LitReactor’s statement on Tom Spanbauer: “The sensation of reading his books is that, while you’re reading them, it’s like he’s placed his hand on your chest, the warmth and pressure and intimacy of it reassuring you that you are alive, and you are not alone.” Yes. That.
10. Best: The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq, by Hassan Blasim
The absurdity and horror of living in the political catastrophe that is Iraq is laid out in these tight, disturbing, allegorical stories by an Iraqi writer. I haven’t read anything quite like this.
An Anthology of Clouds 