Read and Appreciated in 2004
A Year’s Best List
Other than fiction
What with the choice between TweedleDull and TweedleDarklord for U.S. President, it was a political year, and I couldn’t avoid reading some political and historical books, at the very least to keep myself reminded that life has always been this bad, and often worse.
There was, for instance, The Battle of Blair Mountain by Robert Shogan, about labor wars in West Virginia in the early part of the 20th century. John Sayles’s movie Matewan has long been a favorite of mine, and this book tells the true story of the Matewan battle, as well as others. It is sobering and compulsive reading.
Emma Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia, first published in two parts in 1923 and 1924, was reprinted by Dover Books in 2003, and I read it in 2004. Some of it gets bogged down in details, but it’s an important chronicle, one I found more fascinating and illuminating than I expected.
AK Press published some of my favorite books of the year, including an immense collection of interviews and articles by Noam Chomsky, Language and Politics, that is so comprehensive as to be overwhelming. I sometimes disagree quite vehemently with Chomsky (he’s not exactly reliable when it comes to Cambodia, for instance), but I’ve found him a good starting point for learning and thinking more about the world, because often I will read a page of two and say, “That can’t possibly be true!” and then go and find out more. More often than not, what Chomsky has said is not only true, but just the beginning.
Also from AK came Ya Basta!: Ten Years of the Zapatista Uprising, the largest collection of writings by Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos that I have seen. A valuable corrective to apathy and cynicism.
Alas, Dime’s Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, filled me with apathy and cynicism, but there are some enlightening articles collected in it nonetheless. The book made me stop reading about politics, which was probably a good thing.
My favorite amongst the nonfiction books I read this year was certainly Jay’s Journal of Anomalies by Ricky Jay. It’s an undescribable, beautiful, weird, fascinating collection of generously illustrated monographs about such subjects as animal hoaxes, flea circuses, ceiling dances, nose amputations, “the art and artifice of fasting”, conjurors, fakirs, automatons, strongmen, giantesses, grinners, gurners, and grimaciers. If you like to know strange things, this is the book for you.
Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer by Peter Turchi was also fascinating, and just as beautiful—illustrated with full-color reproductions of various maps and advertisements and art and objects. It’s an elegant book, both in its writing and its presentation.
I don’t read many biographies all the way through—mostly I mine them for what nuggets of information I need at the moment—but I read all of Kevin Bazzana’s Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould, mostly because I’ve long been fascinated by Gould’s approach to piano playing, and to Bach in particular. I had read one Gould biography a few years ago, or at least pieces of it, and wasn’t much impressed by either the writing or the information. Bazzana’s book is well written and informative, a model of what a biography can be.
Speaking of biographies—earlier in the year, I read Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson by Adam Sisman, a book that definitely has some dull spots, but overall provides a remarkably clear picture of how Boswell went about creating one of the more remarkable books of all time, his Life of Johnson. I haven’t actually read the Life from cover to cover, but find it a wonderful book for dipping into a few pages or scenes at a time, and Boswell’s Presumptuous Task had me going back to the Life like a kid who’d been granted his own candy shop.
As for works related to SF, I read quite a bit—everything from the early gurgles of science fictional criticism that were James Blish’s The Issue at Hand and More Issues at Hand (hugely influential books that seem to me not to have weathered the years all that well, which is not to slight their accomplishments but to say that they are of more historical than critical interest) to the recent attempts of valiant heroes to solidify whatever it is they talk about in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, a book that is more useful than I expected it to be, because the editors, Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, actually commissioned people who knew what they were talking about to write the articles included in the book. Not only did the authors know whereof they spoke, but most of them did so clearly.
