I’m trying to read books by living people but because I’m in the midst of writing I incline toward the dead (they may be better than me but… they’re dead!). So, Jane Eyre, which is so good I would like to get to read it for the first time and I would like to adapt it for screen (that happens every two years courtesy of the BBC) and then for the opera—it’s that good. The Collected Poems of Jane Kenyon, who had a better grasp on everyday happiness and the gray depths of melancholy than almost anyone else. I also read Johnny Unitas’ biography because everyone on the in-laws’ side was reading it and so I had to read the part where John (we don’t call him Johnny) installed my mother-in-law’s linoleum floor when they were all in Baltimore (she also has a very good recipe for making an easy dinner for all of the Colts).Robert McCrum, who has spent 10 years at the literary helm of Britain’s Observer and before that, as editor at Faber and Faber, steps down and offers a thoughtful view of the literary world as it is and as it has been.
No doubt many book pages (this is a guess based on past performance as I am less inclined to consult or passingly peruse such) are devoted to the arguable notion of some kind of seasonal reading impulse (summer reading?). OK, if you want to waste your time with such hooey, let me offer you my own arbitrary and capricious list of 2008 books (known in mediaspeak as Fifteen Books That Oprah Missed and You Shouldn’t) you may have but ought not to miss:
- The Song Before It Is Sung by Justin Cartwright
- Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir by David Rieff
- The Expeditions by Karl Iagnemma
- Nazi Literature in the Americas by Robert Bolaño
- The Flowers by Dagoberto Gilb
- The Dark Room of Damocles by Willem Fredrik Hermans
- Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea by Sergio Ramírez
- The Outlander by Gil Adamson
- The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter
- Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam by Pope Brock
- Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization by Nicholson Baker
- Jackalope Dreams by Mary Clearman Blew
- The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square by Ned Sublette
- World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler
- Fall of Frost by Brian Hall
- The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel