BEST NON-FICTION OF THE YEAR 2011

Some of the most significant non-fiction books published this year concerned consciousness and free will.  David Eagleman, whose comic and cosmic Tales of the Afterlives was one of my favorites last year, soared even higher in my estimation with INCOGNITO: THE SECRET LIVES OF THE BRAIN.

I also read and admired Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide, Julian Baggini's The Ego Trick: In Search of the Self, and Michael S. Gazzaniga's Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain.

Gazzaniga says that free will only occurs in an individual's relationship with others, which of course is what the classics of literature have been telling us all along.  Free will only develops with empathy.  Ego-driven Man is a slave to his own fears and desires. 

During the year, I enjoyed Charlie Rose's continuing series of interviews with brain scientists, as well as his interviews with physicists such as Lisa Randall, author of Knocking On Heaven's Door.  I also read The Four Percent Universe by Richard Pansk, The Fabric of Reality by Brian Greene, and The Book of Universes by John D. Barrow.
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This year's Most Remarkable Tandem Read Award goes to the duo of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and Rick James' Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence.

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Another significant book this year shook us into a new icy awareness.  Jon Ronson's THE PSYCHOPATH TEST was an enlightening read, pointing out that many of those in power are biologically psychopathic, unable to feel empathy, manipulating all of those around them for self-serving ends.  This was certainly one of the best books of the year.

Other important books included Lawrence Lessig's Republic, Lost; Barry Estatrod's Tomatoland; and Robert H. Frank's The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good.
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The Non-fiction Most Fun To Read Award 2011 goes to:

Jonathan Lethem's THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE.  A hearty collection of sharp insights and humor.  There are 437 pages of miscellaneous Lethem items, including an interview with Bob Dylan, insightful ideas about Philip K. Dick (whose new book he helped edit), reviews of music, books, and movies, and random humorous pieces.  A few weeks ago, I blogged about his essay on postmodernism and Liberty Valance--at this link..




The runner-up was Grant Morrison's surprising Super Gods, rather astonishing to this reader for its depth, wit, and humanism.  I'm certainly not into comics, but Morrison ties well known comic icons with universal myth and offers sound psychological insights into the communal culture that touches us all.
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The Best Anthology of the Year:  DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS, nicely edited by Declan Burke.  A collection of sparkling essays and short fictional pieces commenting on the nature of Irish crime fiction, often very literary and insightful and always entertaining.

The runner-up anthology in this category was Deadline Artists: America's Greatest Newspaper Columns, edited by John P. Avlon.

Best Memoir By An Author 2011:  Tim Parks' reluctantly transcendental TEACH US TO SIT STILL.  Honorable mentions go to Pat Conroy's My Reading Life and to Katharine Weber's The Memory of All That, both excellent.

Best Memoir By A Musician: JUDY BLUE EYES by Judy Collins.  Honest and interesting.  It gives me a deeper understanding of the music of the time.  I read it in October and reviewed it with my other Halloween reading.  I also reread the late Suze Rotolo's memoir then.

Both Collins and Rotolo talked about the abortions they had back when it was still illegal.  I thought about them again this month when reading Hillary Jordon's novel, When She Woke.

Best Memoir By An Actor:  THE GARNER FILES by James Garner.  I've read many interviews with the man but never understood his argument with Warner Brothers until I read this one.  He was helped on this book by Jon Winokur, editor of Zen To Go and The Portable Curmudgeon, books I'm glad to have in my personal library.

Best Memoir By A Film Critic:  LIFE ITSELF by Roger Ebert.

THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2010

In Kentucky, we have a white Christmas this morning.  It is warm enough for kids to play in the snow, but not so warm as to melt it away.  Christmas is for gratitude, and I’m grateful for the day.

I’m grateful for the love of my family and friends, for world enough and time. And among the books I’m grateful to have read this year are:

Clancy Martin's How to Sell: A Novel. A crime novel, a coming-of-age novel, an indictment of capitalism, a darkly humorous literary take on American materialism. Modern American noir.

Robert Flynn's Echoes of Glory. This year's Spur Award winner has yet to catch on and doesn't seem to appear on any other best list. A shame, that--it is an excellent novel on all levels, brilliant as a parable, as a satire, as a novel of flesh and blood.  Witty and insightful and literary.

Austin Wright's Tony and Susan. This is a literary novel in the form of a genre novel, a novel within a novel.  Not originally published this year, but about to be reissued in hardcover.  I've reread it now and I see even more in it--much, much more. Its literary kin includes both Joseph Conrad’s VICTORY and Cormac McCarthy’s OUTER DARK.  A little-known gem that sent me in search of Wright's other obscure works.

Peter Temple’s Truth: A Novel, a splendid follow-up to his earlier novel, THE BROKEN SHORE. This author understands the evils of bureaucracy and he tells a story you can believe in.  Temple has garnered several awards now, and more will follow.

Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule, the longshot winner of the National Book Award.  A literary novel set on the backstretch of a minor thoroughbred racetrack with engaging characters and a flair for pathos and dark humor.  I reviewed it at Amazon.

The most life-changing books I read this year, the ones which most affected my world-view, were Margaret Atwood's Payback, DEBT AND THE SHADOW SIDE OF WEALTH, David Loy's The World Is Made of Stories, and Ernest Becker's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death (which I encountered earlier in David Loy's eye-opening Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism).  And my reading of Austin Wright's RECALCITRANCE: WILLIAM FAULKNER AND THE PROFESSORS changed forever the way I evaluate literary novels.

I've read several books on consciousness this year, the best of them being Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.  I also enjoyed Robert Lanza's Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, and Antonio Damasio's Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain .  Damasio's earlier books are also fine and he is a frequent guest on Charlie Rose's series on brain science.

The best poetry I read this year was in The Etiquette of Freedom: Gary Snyder, Jim Harrison, and The Practice of the Wild.  The text is a transcript of the CD which comes with the book.  Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison candidly discuss their secular-buddhist philosophy of life and read from their works.  I also enjoyed Jane Hirshfield's essays on poetry in Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry.

The best baseball book I read this year was John Wilker's Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards.  Part history, part coming-of-age story, warmly humorous.  A gem.  I also discovered Ron Faust's fine mystery,  Fugitive Moon, published back in 1995, about a high-strung baseball pitcher who becomes a fugitive after killings occur in whatever town he happens to be pitching in.

The best war novel I read this year was published back in 2005, Bright Starry Banner: a novel of the Civil War by Alden R. Carter.  It follows the history of the Battle of Stones River very closely, mixing in some fictional Cormac McCarthy-like descriptions of historical events.  I've read nothing else quite like it.

Early in the year, I read David Eagleman's delightful Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, with different humorous takes on the cosmology of the universe and mankind's place in it.  It was published in 2009, and I was led to it by last year's best lists found at the LARGEHEARTED BOY BLOG.

I've read several excellent biographies this year including Frank McLynn's Marcus Aurelius: A Life, James E. Person's Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind, and Frederick Robert Karl's Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives- A Biography.  I also enjoyed Eric Williamson's autobiographical left-wing memoir Oakland, Jack London, and Me, Leslie Marmon Silko's work of personal heritage, THE TURQUOISE LEDGE, and Antonia Fraser's Must You Go?: My Life with Harold Pinter.


There were many holocaust-related novels published this year, and I read a very good one: Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil: A Novel.  That it doesn't appear on many best lists is something I fail to understand in this, the year of Franzen's FREEDOM and Larsson's THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.  I read those too, good ones but greatly overplayed in comparison.

I was touted onto Paul Harding's small gem, TINKERS, and to James Hynes' NEXT, which I read in an ARC thanks to Amazon's Vine Program.  Hynes writes an outstanding novel every time, but like Daniel Woodrell, he seems to be little read outside of a small cult of loyal fans.  Count me as one of them.  Michael Crummy's DAMAGES belongs on this list, as well as Joseph Boyden's brilliant THREE DAY ROAD, published back in 2005.

This was the year I studied Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island after reading Robert A. Prather's The Strange Case of Jonathan Swift and the Real Long John Silver.  I don't buy the DiVinci Code theories, but the history itself is awe-inspiring and well worth reading.

Early in the year, I read some fine westerns, most of them Spur Award winners including Thomas Cobb's superb SHAVETAIL, Johnny Boggs's HARD WINTER and KILLSTRAIGHT.  Then I started reading Craig Johnson's splendid series starting with THE COLD DISH.  I have several of them to go before I catch up to this year's Walt Longmire novel.  His characters make good company.

This was also the year I discovered Emerald Noir, Ken Bruen's THE GUARDS, John Connolly's EVERY DEAD THING, Adrian McKinty's DEAD I WELL MAY BE, Declan Burke's THE BIG O, and Eoin McManee's THE RESURRECTION MAN.  I have many more in their backlists to read, and Ken Bruen's well-read protagonist led me to some other interesting books.  What a treat!

 In October, I read several Halloween-related books including Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, then Peter Ackroyd's  A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Seances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters, then Norman Partridge's Johnny Halloween: Tales of the Dark Season and Dark Harvest.  I also read Mike Ashley's excellent Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood which goes into the spiritualism of the fantasy/occult novelist.

In November, I went on a reading excursion into books that used the cat as a symbol for naturalism--books akin to such as Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Track Of The Cat (Western Literature Series) and Peter Matthiessen's THE SNOW LEOPARD:



Caught in Fading Light: Mountain Lions, Zen Masters, and Wild Nature by Gary Thorp. The author goes on a quest to see a cougar in the wild. He seems to be more of a formal Buddhist than either Jim Harrison or Gary Snyder.  A smaller book and a lighter read than the others here.

The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild by Craig Childs.  The strikingly beautiful picture of a cougar in the snow graces the dustjacket.  Childs is a great story-teller.

The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator's Deadly Return to Suburban America David Baron. This book is not new, but I'm glad to have finally read it.  On the first edition, it carries the same dustjacket picture as THE ANIMAL DIALOGUES but stylized and darker.

Shadow Cat: Encountering the American Mountain Lion, edited by Susan Ewing and Elizabeth Grossman. A treasure-chest of essays on the elusive lion/panther/puma quest, including Pam Houston's "Looking For Abbey's Lion."

Water Witches by Chris Bohjalian. A fine ghostly catamount quest novel (among other things) that I first read back when it first came out in 1995.  The epigraph is from Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." About the frozen leopard found high in the mythical house of God. "No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude."