The Best American Essays, bar none, 2010
My 75th book of the year (thereby equaling last year's total) is The Best American Essays 2010, Christopher Hitchens, ed.. Yes, I'm a few years behind on that series. And to my surprise, since I'm a regular reader of essay collections, this is the only book of essays I've read this calendar year. Haven't even opened a John Burroughs collection.
Note to self: fix that pronto.
I'm afraid there may be a bit of a curse on the editors of this series. This is the third one I've read in which the guest editor died soon after working on it, the other two being Stephen Jay Gould and David Foster Wallace.
I was afraid that the theme of this collection would be death and murder, since the first three essays (which are always printed in alphabetical order by author) had that subject, but it wasn't sustained. What did turn out to be rather common was that 23.8% of the authors aren't American. So the ex-pat Brit, Hitchens, selected three Brits, an Aussie and a Canadian. There were also other essays in which events at Oxford and Cambridge were discussed.
Another minor theme was essays themselves. Jane Kramer's fine contribution is an essay on Montaigne and the creation of the essay as a form. James Wood discusses the famous essayist George Orwell, comparing his essays to his novels, in part. Tolstoy and Updike and William F. Buckley have evaluations, and their essays come into it. The latter is a memorial by Garry Wills, which provided interesting insights into Mr. Buckley.
Some of the essays could also have appeared in the Science Writing collection (a discussion of the eyeball, a discussion of the genome industry, a discussion of a disease that Van Gogh might have had), but don't take that as a complaint. I am happy that Hitchens was willing to consider them, and all three were interesting.
John Edgar Wideman, whose work doesn't always move me, has an especially strong and effective essay on the Emmett Till case. I now grasp its comparison to the Dreyfus Case much more clearly.
Probably my favorite is S. Frederick Starr's "Rediscovering Central Asia." In my history classes I have made a point of discussing how Cordoba and Bukhara contributed to the revival of Greek learning in Europe, and Starr's illumination of much of this material taught me several useful things. I suspect some stories will come from this one.
As always, reading fine writing is its own excuse. These collections are always a balm.
CBsIP: The Wallet of Kai Lung, Ernest Bramah
Claims for Poetry, Donald Hall, ed.
My Àntonia, Willa Cather
The Successful Novelist, David Morrell
Zoo City, Lauren Beukes
a theory of everything, Mary Crockett Hill