And the Freebie goes to...
Best book I read this year:
1. Longfellow Redux by Christopher Irmscher
For the longest time, I, like so many of you, was prejudiced against Longfellow. But Irmscher's interesting and lively book really made me reconsider and appreciate what HWL accomplished. It's time that Americans threw off the sophomoric hostility to him and regained their appreciation for an artist who succeeded not only in speaking to the diverse population of 19th Century America, but to all the generations since. He's certainly the anti-Whitman, but you can appreciate them both, and Irmscher's book is a great first step in doing so.
Best new discovery:
3. Archaic Smile by A.E. Stallings
Stallings restores my faith in contemporary poets. Clever, insightful, passionate and thoughtful, a first-rate artist. Very, very highly recommended.
Best audio book this year:
5. Moby Dick by Herman Melville*
A hynotic and fascinating book, very well read. Every bit as symbolic and metaphysical and weird as they say, and very worthwhile.
Most thought provoking:
6. The Morality of Law by Lon Fuller
7. The Anatomy of Law by Lon Fuller
8. The Law In Quest of Itself by Lon Fuller
9. Legal Fictions by Lon Fuller
10. The Case of The Speluncean Explorers by Lon Fuller & Peter Suber
11. The Principles of Social Order by Lon Fuller
12. Reason And Fiat in Case Law by Lon Fuller
Fuller is fantastic. Having read all these, I see why people were so astonished when I tell them I'd never read him before this year.
13. Lon L. Fuller by Robert Summers
Decent. not particularly enlightening.
Most disappointing:
14. Over The Edge of The World by Laurence Bergreen
How can you write a boring book about Magellan? Readers are better suited sticking with the final chapter of A World Lit Only By Fire.
15. The Argonautika by Appollonius of Rhodes
Astonishingly boring. Some parts are interesting; it even starts out like a Star Trek movie, in a way. But by the end, Appollonius is so intent on incorporating every geographical location that claimed some connection to Jason, and he takes these claims with such absurd literalism, that it turns into a mind-numbing catalogue instead of an adventure.
16. Mortality by Christopher Hitchens
I was disappointed, though not surprised, by this book.
Best re-read:
17. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand*
This really is a masterpiece. It is so well-plotted and cleverly organized, in ways hostile readers never allow themselves to acknowledge. And it is a lot more subtle than people admit. Rand is surprisingly gentle toward some of her characters, particularly Peter Keating and (what I noticed this time) Guy Francon, who are much more three-dimensional than is normally recognized.
The rest:
Love this book.
19. A First Class Temperament by Geoffrey Ward
An excellent, objective, often humorous look at FDR's early years. As with Before the Trumpet, it's clear that Ward admires FDR, but is willing to admit that he was a liar, a fraud, a mama's boy, and a fool (my words, not his).
20. The Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace
I wrote about this book here.
21. Arguably by Christopher Hitchens*
Very good, if a bit too long.
22. Following the Equator by Mark Twain*
They're right. This was much too long, but interspersed with occasional bright spots. The reader could have been better, though.
23. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot*
This is not a good book. As the negative Amazon reviews note, Skloot sort of tries to make the case that the Lacks family was deprived of something they deserved due to the experimentation on Henrietta's cells. What she succeeds in doing is depicting most of the family members as greedy, lazy, corrupt, mean, ignorant, or some combination of these things--as though they are somehow owed something for Henrietta's cells, when in fact they are owed nothing. Those cells are a boon to mankind because of the efforts of scientists who are not to blame for the racial injustices of the 1950s, and certainly are not responsible for the alleged wrongdoing of the entire scientific community taken as a whole. The contemporary scientific world is emphatically not guilty for the mistreatment of the mentally ill in Baltimore at the time. Skloot doesn't actually say otherwise, but without that, there really is no adhesion between the story of the contemporary family and the science of HeLa. This is a moderately interesting story which has been expanded to book length by gluing on to it extraneous "social justice" matter that adheres through nothing more than baseless emotion.
24. Flagrant Conduct by Dale Carpenter
I reviewed this book here.
25. Beg The Question by Bob Fingerman
Cute.
26. Euripides transl. Diane Arnson Svarlien
Svarlien's translation is very good.
27. Old Glory by Jonathan Raban
An interesting book, sometimes beautiful. But overly negative, even brooding. It was written in the late 1970s, so the national mood was pretty dark. But a larger part of it is Raban's loneliness. Huck Finn had a companion on his journey down The River, but Raban does not. Worse, Raban clings to a European apathy, not to say contempt, for liberty. At one point he expressly becomes afraid of freedom, saying that he looks forward to something that will provide a limit. In context, it seems to reflect a sort of disappointment in the independence that he sought. Note how uninterested he really is when he gooes south of Hannibal, after onstensibly undertaking the journey because of Huckleberry Finn, he rarely reflects on the book or its meaning, let alone on the themes of opportunity and liberty that it has come to embody. A elegantly written, but bitter, and overly critical, book by a guy who just does not get what it's all about. A shame. But the cameo by Rush Limbaugh's grandfather is fun.
28. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Loved it again.
29. Life on The Mississippi by Mark Twain*
Loved it again, also.
30. What Have They Done to Our Money? by Murray Rothbard*
Persuasive.
31. Emancipating Lincoln by Harold Holzer
Not very interesting.
32. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
I finally got around to reading this, and enjoyed it a lot. The end is hippie-ish, but that just means Bradbury predicted that, too, along with much else. The idea of books as stillness, and modern society as constant, empty, soulless noise, is quite true and effective.
33. Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman*
Enjoyable, but it's a memoir, not an expose, as I expected it to be. Still, very powerful.
34. What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe*
Superb, particularly for its pro-John Quincy Adams perspective. The audio book is really poorly produced, but the book itself is extremely good and complete.
What a strange book. It reads like a naturalist novel written by a romanticist. It's got all the random detail of naturalism, but the characters are usually romantic in nature, particularly at the beginning, and there's a lot of what appears as literary symbolism in the rough. Yet it also reads like a jumble of incidents, not organized around any moral pole, as romanticism would be. When Jerusha writes her sister for a red dress...what happens? The matter is never raised again. Is this incident just put in for realism? Is it that Michener just forgot? You hate to accuse any writer of that, but it actually seems plausible, because the book reveals no trace of the meticulous care you would expect from a great writer. In fact, oftentimes the book reads more like a treatment for a novel that he intends to get around to writing at some point--as if he's telling about a story, rather than telling a story. Single paragraphs are devoted to major incidents, whole characters are introduced only to disappear without anything ever happening to them (like Bromley Hale). The result is like an old man telling family stories...which is, of course, partly what Michener was going for. It has a panoramic scope, but also a rambling, trivial quality. I just cannot make up my mind whether I like it or not. But I probably won't try another Michener novel soon.
36. Pity the Beautiful by Dana Gioia
Not very interesting.
37. Disappearing Ink by Dana Gioia
Makes some good points. I enjoyed the essays on Longfellow, which led me to Irmscher's book, and on Frost. Gioia's essays are great. But the short reviews are drab, and quickly forgotten. I do wish Gioia would single out someone for negative treatment, to show us what he stands for. Like Robert Hughes in the visual arts, Gioia can be a very insightful and interesting critic, but also has a strange inability to recognize modern crap as crap. This book is a good follow-up to Can Poetry Matter? but the first book is better.
38. Prime Directive by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens
Poor. The entire suspense of the mystery depends upon the characters failing to investigate curious incidents when they occur, only to piece them together later on, when they realize in retrospect that they were unusual...yet the reader has all along been wondering. The conclusion is rushed and unfocused, the climax is split between the odd circumstances themselves and the flashback in which readers are learning about how the media res circumstances came about. Things should not be this way. If a story starts with a smouldering ruin, it's enough to tell us how the city burned down--not to have the characters themselves try to figure out afterwards how it burned down, especially when they are made to ignore all the significant clues at the moment, so as to have a fancy reveal at the end. Also, the authors' efforts to fit the story into the Star Trek universe were clever but ultimately distracting.
39. The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser
Great. And good for would-be poetry readers, too. I particularly enjoyed the examples Kooser uses, which are drawn from lesser-known poets, and which are usually very fine works. Kooser stresses accessibility a lot, and that is very refreshing--although he takes this to a greater extreme than I.
40. Slow Apocalypse by John Varley
I reviewed this book here.
41. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe*
I'm sure Christians found it powerful at the time. But it sure does drag. I did like the way Tom's journey is a descent into hell, but Stowe's efforts at literary sophistication don't really succeed, her attempts at humor are incredibly awful, and even her drama is strained. If this is how all the literature was at that time, no wonder Twain was a comet in the sky to these people.
42. Time And Again by Jack Finney
Very effective at evoking 19th Century New York, although with a little too much of the aw-shucks, gee-whiz. And the ending is very strange--the key to the mystery is just revealed to us second-hand...and then there's no real conclusion. Odd.
43. Birdbrain by Johanna Sinislao
Bad. Really lousy, in fact. The Conrad allusions are moderately clever, but the characters are uniformly detestable, implausibly so. And yet it's not clear whether the author realizes just how unlikable they are, particularly Jyrki. His incredibly asinine lectures about enviornmentalism lead one to conclude that the point of the book is that nature is out to destroy us and that environmentalism is just a pointless waste of time anyway...and thus that Sinislao is engaged in a very clever satire. If so, it's subversive, indeed!
44. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Love it.
45. In The Heart of The Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick
Very readable and thrilling account of a truly horrifying ordeal. I had no idea how many cannibalism cases there were, and it is amazing that there were more than one instance of sperm whales attacking ships. I enjoyed this book so much, in fact, that I went back and listened to the audio of Moby Dick a second time.
46. The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois*
Very powerful. At times written in an exaggerated style typical of that time. But very persuasive, especially in his critique of Booker T. Washington. I'm still more on Washington's side of that division, but it was wrong for me to delay so long in hearing DuBois' side.
47. Every Day Is An Atheist Holiday by Penn Jillette*
Wonderful! In some places, much more profound than his first book. The chapter about just calling Christians "Christians" was fantastic.
48. Slave Law in The American South by Mark Tushnet
Although the case he discusses is interesting, as is the Stowe connection, the prose style is so bad that it seems almost intentional. Tushnet appears to go out of his way to construct clumsy sentences and hasty, unfinished phrases. The chapter on Stowe turns into a dreary collection of literary critics, and is not very enlightening. And the title is misleading. There was a lot more to the law of slavery than is revealed by this one case. Maybe this would be a good intro, but it's definitely not a good place to end one's study of slavery. Check out David Brion Davis instead.
49. Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot by Amanda Beer
Very good, despite its oh-so-timely fixations. I don't believe Milton had a gay relationship, and Beer's effort to suggest otherwise is not credible. Her feminist comments are a bit more apt, and I was very pleased that she rightly sees that Paradise Lost is not a misogynist rant--quite the contrary. So, with a couple qualms, I recommend it.
50. Lost Kingdom by Julia Siler*
So-so. Very sympathetic with the Hawaiian royal family, without any consideration of whether the monarchy was actually good for Hawaiians themselves. This is just romanticism rather than a serious history. Keep that in mind, and you'll enjoy it as a story. But it is not a scholarly work.
51. Intelligent Virtue by Julia Annas
Excellent! A very clear explanation of how virtue as a skill differs from the idea that virtue is a set of actions or duties. I was disappointed that Annas does not use the example of medicine, which would make her point far better. Annas argues that virtue is a skill like, say, playing the piano. But if eudaimonia is flourishing, then virtue is a lot more like diet, or an exercise regimen, which is a person's ambitious plan at flourishing.
*--denotes unabridged audio book
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