The Best of the Best

The New York Times' critics whittled down its list of 100 Best Books of 2008 to just 10 and here they are.

Fiction :

Steven Millhauser - Thirteen Stories
Toni Morrison - A Mercy
Joseph O’Neill - Netherland
Roberto Bolaño -2666
Jhumpa Lahiri - Unaccustomed Earth

Non-fiction :

Jane Mayer - The Dark Side : The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals
Dexter Filkins - The Forever War
Julian Barnes - Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Drew Gilpin Faust - This Republic of Suffering : Death and the American Civil War
Patrick French - The World is What it Is : The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul

It's a pretty exciting list and all the books are described on the website, and there are links in each case to first chapters - so go explore!

Books Most Notable

The New York Times has published its list of the 100 Most Notable Books of 2008, chosen by its literary critics, and embracing both fiction and non-fiction titles. The top ten titles from this list will be announced on Wednesday.

Michiko Kakutani and Janet Maslin individually list their 10 favourite titles of the year. There's also a list of Notable Children's Books.

All in all, plenty to browse and some excellent reading suggestions.

Author Mural

A fascination for authors workspaces spills over into art, Eric Konigsburg reports in the New York Times.

Elana Climent's mural At Home With Their Books features six chronologically ordered panels, each depicting authors with a New York connection was painted for New York University's Languages and Literature building.

You can enjoy a slide show of panels featuring Edith Wharton, Washington Irvine, Zora Neale Hurston and Frank O'Hara, each featuring authentic details.

100 Notable Books of 2007

Yes, you know when Christmas is on its way when newspapers announce their best of the best lists.

The New York Times has just released its list of 100 notable books of the year with links to reviews. The best 10 books of 2007 will be announced November 28th.

Comparative Literature

Here are a couple of nice things to amuse you this Monday morning.

There are all kinds of wacky facts about books in this PDF downloadable from the New York Times. (Or you can just click on the pic left if you're lazy.)

What are the best selling books internationally at the moment? Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling, yes, you'd expect their works on the list. But Paul Auster's Brooklyn Follies is in there too, and I'm also fascinated to learn that while Auster's book sold 70,000 copies in the US in 2006, it sold 165,00 copies in France!

There are also a couple of internationally best selling authors I'd never heard of (and I bet you haven't either) - Ildefonso Falcones de Sierra and Carlos Ruiz Zafon, who both of course write in Spanish.

And the titles of some of the Harry Potter rip-offs around the world made me smile: my favourite is Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-up-to-Dragon (China)!

Statistic after statistic on the page shows just how much work in translation is one way traffic, with far more American titles being translated into foreign languages than the other way round.

You might also like to take a look at the list of 100 top favourite books compiled by British bookchain, Waterstones and reproduced in the Telegraph. The company asked its 5,000 staff to name their favourite five books written since 1982, the date Waterstones opened its first store.

(And yes, unbelievable as it sounds, the kind of people who work in bookshops in the UK do read, unlike too many of their counterparts here!)

The number of male authors on the list outweighs the number of female authors - this could be because (as my own small scale research bore out too) while women tend to read books by both men and women, men tend to read mostly books by men. (I'd love to know how many of those employees are blokes.)

Still, we do love to compare ourselves against lists and this one provides a very useful starting point for anyone who isn't too sure about what they might like to read.

Anyway, Happy World Book Day! Don't forget to stop off at a bookshop to buy yourself (and your loved one) a gift.

Library in a Battle Zone

The battle to keep some semblance of normalcy in a corner of the world gone mad is chronicled in the diary entries of the director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad, Saad Eskander.

Saad is struggling to keep the central library open and replace the rare books and documents that have been destroyed despite:

... bombings, blockades, shootings, threats, shortages and petty frustrations that make up everyday life.

The diary is now available online via the British Library website, reports Patricia Cohen in the New York Times. Here's just a few of the things he has had to contend with:

As he wrote in his latest entry, he was having trouble repairing the Internet system; the Restoration Laboratory “was hit by 5 bullets”; and “another librarian, who works at the Periodical Department, received a death threat. He has to leave his house and look for another one, as soon as he can; otherwise, he will be murdered.”

A single poignant story that represents the whole mess that is Iraq.

Update (10/6/08) :

I want to make the library a democratic model of how Iraq should be. From the start I hired Sunnis, Kurds, Shias, women, men. The national library must be a place - perhaps even the most important place - where Iraqis from many different groups come together." He claims to have paid special attention to women's rights.

Saad Eskanderhas more to say about running his library in heart-breaking timees in this interview by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian.

Little Book of Delight

Read a book in just twenty minutes yesterday over a cup of tea.

It was Auggie Wren's Christmas, another of Paul Auster's, and it came free with a copy of his new novel Travels in the Scriptorium, but can be bought separately.

Auster was asked by the New York Times to write a Christmas short story for the Op-Ed page.

He went on to write a story about a writer who is asked to write a short story for the New York Times to appear on Christmas morning. Stumped for what to write about, he receives some unexpected help from the tobacconist whose shop he frequents, a colourful character called Auggie Wren.

Wren offers to tell the author the best Christmas story he has ever heard in exchange for lunch. And in the diner he weaves a tale ... which is unsentimental, has no santas or angels, or trees or snow, but even as it overturns all expectations and blurs moral lines, still touches the heart.

Now if you don't feel like running out and buying the book, and would still love this taste of vintage Auster, you can read the whole thing online, here.

But then, you'd be missing a dimension, because this limited edition print version has funky illustrations by Isol throughout, and is a bit like a kids' book for grown-ups! (Isol's Auggie Wren, right.)

The little story inspired Wayne Wang's 1995 film, Smoke, for which Auster wrote the screenplay and created one of my favourite movie characters . (Blue in the Face features the same cast of characters and was entirely improvised, and filmed on the back of Smoke in just five days.)

Here's Auggie Wren's monologue from the film script and left, a picture of Harvey Keital in the film role.

And am much tickled reading the cast list, to discover that the book thief was played by Auster's twenty-year old son Daniel! As if it isn't bad enough that Auster keeps wandering inside the frame of his own stories, he wants his family in there too!

Is it too early to start your Christmas shopping for 2007?

Seeking The Great American Novel

When the editor of the New York Times Book Review:

... sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years" -

- Toni Morrison's Beloved emerged as winner. The runner's up were Underworld by Don de Lillo, Blood Meridian by Cormac Mc Carthy, John Updike's Rabit Angstrom: The Four Novels and Philip Roth's An American Pastoral.

The complete list is here with links to the original NYT reviews of the books. (Also well worth reading is A. O. Scott's essay about the search for the Great American Novel.)

I'm dreadfully badly read in American fiction. I've read other novels by Toni Morrison (most recently Jazz) but not Beloved. I have read no Philip Roth (though I accidently watched the film of The Human Stain on TV and thought it had a great cast but was clumsily handled).

I have had Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses (which also apparently received multiple votes) sitting on my to-be-read shelf for a couple of years.

I read the first two books in the Rabbit tetralogy when I was in my teens (more than three decades ago - ouch!) and far too young to appreciate them.

It's interesting looking at the reader reviews on Amazon - great literature is not always the most popular reading. Underworld is particularly controversial. Readers love it or hate it totally. Give it one star or five.

I thought this story of ordinary lives lives in the shadow of the cold war one of the most satisfying books I've ever read.

Like the film The Red Violin or Annie Proulx's Accordian Crimes, much of the plot comes from the passing from hand to hand of a physical object - in this case a baseball. But otherwise there is no real plot: scenes and incidents fit together like a chinese puzzle and the reader is left to discover all the interconnections.

But I've never come across a book that was harder to get into. (The opening section describes a baseball game and you just have to imagine that you are the eye of the camera panning around the auditorium.)

You know, I've never met anyone here in Malaysia who has managed to read Underworld, so if you have, let me know. And if you are a determined reader who loves a challenge, go for it!

Meanwhile, I have to go hunt out Philip Roth ...

Postscript:

The Elegant Variation argues that "The absence of literary bloggers from the list of consultees has much to do with the staid nature of the results."

Related Posts:

The 100 Greatest Novels (23/10/05)
1001 Books You Must Read (19/4/06)

Books of the Year

Another post for those who love book lists and recommendations (as I do!).

Literary luminaries who've written for the Guardian over the past year were invited to write about their favourite books of the year. The article is nicely timed to coincide with the annual orgy of christmas shopping!

(Oh dear, wave after wave of book greed comes upon me ...)

The paper also invites readers to e-mail in a short piece about what they've enjoyed most over the last twelve months. But since I'm sure you won't do that, why not just leave a note here? Meanwhile, I'll start thinking about how I'd answer this question myself in a year when I've read just so much good stuff.

Meanwhile here's Eric's list. (And it was great to meet my fellow litblogger for the first time the other day. This man is formidably well-read.)

Update:

Goodness - looks like everyone is issuing their best books lists this weekend! In the Sunday Times, Peter Kemp lists his favourites of 2005 and concludes that it's been a very good year for fiction. And the New York Times has announced its 100 notable books of the year.