2011 in books: one popular bandwagon avoided; another joined.
I still haven't read any of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest), but, what with the 23 December release of the U.S. movie adaptation of the first book, directed by David Fincher (Alien 3, se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network) and starring Daniel Craig (quite an upgrade for Larsson's Mary Sue, I'd say....) and Rooney Mara, my resistance is weakening: 2012 will very likely see me gritting my teeth to plow through Larsson's wildly popular scenes of misogynistic and ailurophobic violence (and, really, aren't domestic cats widely thought of as stand-ins for human females? cats and spiders...) in at least the first book, in an attempt to see what the rumpus is all about.
I have, however, plunged into George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series by reading the first book in said series, A Game of Thrones, from whence -- minus the indefinite article -- the HBO series based on Martin's work takes its title. I'm interested enough to at least read the second book, A Clash of Kings; after that, we'll see.
Since I'd like to keep my "year in books" posts a tradition to replace my previous tabulations of books read during the previous year (prompted by my occasional participation in the 50bookchallenge community; my last such post was on 2 January 2008, for the year 2007), herewith follows a brief survey of highlights of my reading done in 2011:
BEST BOOK READ IN 2011 THAT I'VE YET TO POST A REVIEW OF: This would be Kenneth Roberts's 1940 novel of the American Revolution from the point of view of a British loyalist (or "Tory"), Oliver Wiswell, a 800+ paged, always interesting, doorstopper that I checked out from a nearby public library (but not the library of the city in which I reside). I liked this novel better than Roberts's first novel, which I read in 2010, Arundel (which was set during the opening years of the American Revolution and whose climax was the American rebels' failed attempt to capture Quebec in 1775; Arundel is the first book of a tetrology). I seriously intended to review this sucker, particularly as it caused me to reread about half of Barbara W. Tuchman's The March of Folly (1984), but, for one reason and another -- mostly massive hours and grief at work and my own general fatigue, depression and suppressed homicidal rage resulting therefrom -- I didn't. I can't pretend that I've let my readers down (....), but I sure let myself down.
HONORABLE MENTION: That would be Giuseppe di Lampedusa's only novel, The Leopard (1958; English translation by Archibald Colquhoun published in 1960; original title: Il Gatopardo, which translates as "serval," not "leopard"). I've got the Italian version of The Leopard -- Luchino Visconti's 1963 movie version starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale -- in the top ten of my Netflix queue; as the only other movie of Visconti's that I've seen thus far is The Damned (1969), I'm rather apprehensive as to how well I'll like it, no matter that Visconti, like di Lampedusa, hails from a noble family. (Ironically enough, Visconti was Milanese, while di Lampedusa was Sicilian; the Milanese are not exactly beloved among the Sicilians, noble or peasant, in di Lampedusa's novel, which is largely set in Sicily during the closing days of the Risorgimento.)
BEST BOOK READ IN 2011 BY A SWEDISH AUTHOR WHO ISN'T STIEG LARSSON: This one is pretty much tied with Oliver Wiswell for "Best Book Read in 2011 That I've Yet to Post a Review Of": Frans G. Bengtsson's The Long Ships (originally published in two volumes in 1941 as Rõde Orm: Sjõfarare Væsterled [Red Orm {"Orm" is Swedish for "snake"} on the Western Way] and in 1945 as Rõde Orm: Hemma i Österled [Red Orm: At Home and on The Eastern Way; the first English translation of the complete novel, by Michael Meyer, was published in 1954 by Harper Collins; the New York Review of Books published a handsome trade paperback edition in 2010, with a foreword by Michael Chabon [The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; Wonder Boys; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; The Yiddish Policemen's Union], which is the edition that I read). As Chabon's foreword notes, The Long Ships would've been footnote-worthy if only for the fact that, at a time when racist theories of "racial purity" and widespread anti-Semitism held sway over a goodly chunk of the globe, a noted Swedish author (though not noted principally, at the time, as an author of fiction) wrote a book with secondary though important Jewish and Muslim characters who were neither hostile or comical stereotypes nor helpless victims. That The Long Ships is both a social satire whose protagonist is the most hypochondriacal "manly man" I can remember encountering in print and a rousing adventure story ranging over a goodly chunk of Europe in the 9th century is the exact type of serendipitous find that keeps readers browsing in bookstores and libraries of all stripes, ever hopeful of finding the next great read. I can easily imagine myself re-reading The Long Ships at some not-too-distant date, and enjoying it just as much: it's that good. And if anything will make me finally pick up and read the Dover edition of Snorri Sturulson's Heimskringla from cover to cover instead of in bits and pieces, The Long Ships will.
BEST "WHAT TOOK ME SO LONG TO READ THIS GUY?!" BOOK OF 2011: Without a doubt, John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), which was the basis for the 1960 movie Village of the Damned, the 1963 Children of the Damned, and the 1995 John Carpenter's Village of the Damned. (The 1960 movie is great, but I haven't seen the others: in the case of the John Carpenter remake, it's largely due to the wildly uneven quality of Carpenter's oeuvre.) The dry, detached tone of this book -- it's narrated by a first person narrator who heard about most of the events he describes via second- or third-hand -- and the quotidian details of a rural English village make the other-worldly (literally...) events all the more chilling and unsettling. As creepy as the glorious b&w 1960 adaptation is, the book is even more disturbing, given that it goes farther than the first. Wyndham's tone works better for me than, say, H.P. Lovecraft's usually does; I'm willing to read more of him: possibly The Chrysalids (1955; published in the U.S. as Re-Birth) will be next.
MOST DISAPPOINTING WORK BY AN AUTHOR WHOSE PREVIOUS BOOKS I ENJOYED: This would be Philip Kerr's sixth (of seven so far) Bernie Gunther novels, If the Dead Rise Not (2009); Bernie Gunther is a Berlin cop turned SS officer turned private eye, in exile in Latin America from his Nazi past and shattered country and in desultory search of a rat's ass he can care about, but this book -- which traces the repurcussions of crimes committed during the run-up to the 1936 Berlin Olympics twenty-plus years later to a Cuban government on the brink of being toppled by some highly unlikely revolutionaries -- didn't cut it for me, thanks largely to some dubious historical research on Kerr's part, but also due to some inexplicably flabby writing. Oddly enough, I was able to question the historical background of If the Dead Rise Not thanks to another book I read (though didn't review) in 2011: Alex von Tunzelmann's Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder, and the Cold War in the Caribbean (NY: Henry Holt and Company; 2011; ISBN: 978-0-8050-9067-3; 449 pps.). Still, the earlier books (March Violets [1989]; The Pale Criminal [1990]; A German Requiem [1991]; The One From the Other [2006]; and A Quiet Flame [2008]) are much better, even what with the eventually grating fanboy love thrown at Raymond Chandler in March Violets. (The first three books have been collected in omnibus format as Berlin Noir.)
MOST DISAPPOINTING WORK BY A NEW-TO-ME AUTHOR READ IN 2011: This would be Liam O'Flaherty's 1925 novel The Informer (it was filmed twice, in 1929 and 1935), a short account of a none-too-bright member of a socialist revolutionary cell in 1920s Ireland who dimes out a frenemy to the provincial police in exchange for a £20 reward (a not-inconsiderable sum in those days, particularly in Northern Ireland). Though someone on my LJ f-list might be intrigued by the fact that O'Flaherty came from the same place -- the Aran Islands -- that the sitcom Father Ted was set in, I would advise her to steer clear of The Informer, unless, like me, she has a morbid curiosity about either "great Irish writers" (debatable in O'Flaherty's case, on the evidence of The Informer) or the background to the 20th century "Troubles" between England and Ireland.
MOST PURELY ENTERTAINING BOOK READ IN 2011: A four-way tie: either Richard Condon's late 14th century/early 15th century historical crime caper starring the Antipope John XXIII, A Trembling Upon Rome (1985); Frans G. Bengtsson's The Long Ships (1954); Johnny D. Boggs's West Texas Kill (2011); or George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones (1996).
HONORABLE MENTION: The second book in John Le Carré's Karla Trilogy (published in omnibus form as The Quest For Karla), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977); this book follows Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) and is in turn followed by Smiley's People (1979). I posted a review of it in LibraryThing, but not in my own LJ, oddly enough. Given the decently-reviewed movie adaption of Tinker, Tailor this year -- featuring a trim Gary Oldman as the "fat spy" George Smiley no less -- Le Carré's star has been burnished anew. I'm looking forward to reading Smiley's People in 2012, and possibly a non-Smiley book too: perhaps the ersatz fictional biography of Le Carré's father, A Perfect Spy.
BEST GENRE EXPERIENCE IN 2011: Amazingly enough, the western, what with the twin delights of Johnny D. Boggs's West Texas Kill (for popcorn-movie style pleasure) and Mike Blakely's 1998 Comanche Dawn (for more serious historical novel-type edutainment). Even the disappointing The Outlaw Josey Wales by Forrest Carter didn't dampen my enthusiasm for exploring this genre further. I'm looking forward to reading more by these two authors, as well as hopefully finding others: maybe I'll finally start Larry McMurtry's four-book The Berrybender Narratives series; maybe I'll read a Louis L'Amour western (as opposed to a collection of his pulp fictional stories written before he settled upon being largely a western writer); maybe I'll even attempt another Zane Grey book. Although, considering my only other experience with his work, I wouldn't bet the farm on this last one.
HONORABLE MENTION: I suppose that would be the thriller genre, given that I read the first six of seven books in Greg Rucka's Atticus Kodiak series (Keeper [1996]; Finder [1997]; Smoker [1998]; Shooting At Midnight [1999]; Critical Space [2001]; and Patriot Acts [2007]), all courtesy of two local public libraries. If I don't like the Atticus Kodiak books quite as much as Rucka's mostly sensational espionage series Queen & Country (Q&C started as a comic book series published by Oni Press, but has since branched out into three prose novels whose quality has gradually declined, but even the least of them, The Last Run, is a worthwhile entertainment; I've mentioned my love for Q&C a few times in my LJ, although I've yet to post a review of any of the collected comic books or prose novels in it), they're still decent page turners, some of them, dare I say -- Finder, Smoker and Critical Space -- pulse-poundingly so. I just finished Patriot Acts on 28 December, and the series took a turn that could well intersect with Queen & Country, given Rucka's nearly explicitly expressed fury at the administration, specifically the foreign policy, of "Bush 43."
MOST ENJOYABLE REACQUAINTANCE WITH AN AUTHOR WHOSE WORK I HADN'T READ IN SEVERAL YEARS: I made good on my intention to read more Poul Anderson -- like another science fiction Grand Master, Robert A. Heinlein, a writer of libertarian sci-fi -- with taking up his Polesotechnic League series, which is about some rascally and inventive space merchants (cheifly Nicholas Van Rijn and David Falkayn), beginning with The Earth Book of Stormgate and Trader to the Stars (I'm also about two-thirds of the way through The Trouble Twisters, which will be my "carry-over" read into 2012).
WORST BOOK READ IN 2011: Unlike last year, there were no stand-out gawdawful books that I read in 2011 (excluding some of the many -- many, I say, many! -- collected comic books that I checked out from the library). As previously noted, I was less than thrilled with Philip Kerr's If the Dead Rise Not and Liam O'Flaherty's The Informer; come to that, I wasn't impressed with the only Hard Case Crime offering that I read in 2011 either.
WHOOPS, I LIED: Gotta be Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron with Bret Witter (2008). Seriously, this limp dishrag made me embarrassed to be an ailurophile. (Although The Informer was pretty bad too.)
BEST BOOK LOANED TO ME BY A FRIEND OR ACQUAINTANCE IN 2011: Kind of a trick question, really, given that only one friend or acquaintance loaned me a book in 2011: Peter Godwin's The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe (2010, though not published in the U.S. until March 2011), which is a ground-level survey, thanks to many friends and acquaintances interviewed by Godwin and his sister, the British broadcaster Georgina Godwin. This was a readable, depressing, sometimes horrifying, sometimes absurdly inspiring, look at the train-wreck of what used to be "Africa's breadbasket," Zimbabwe (the former Rhodesia), under the regime of one of Africa's post-colonial revolutionary heroes, Robert Mugabe. The narrative is a bit incoherent and ends very much up in the air -- understandably so, given that Mugabe seems determined to die in office, and that the prospects for improvement under his immediate successors seem apallingly bleak -- but it's a worthwhile read for anyone remotely interested in Zimbabwe, Africa in general, or human endurance under hellish conditions. However, caveat lector: among the many horrifying stories related herein is one of a woman who was gang-raped next to the decapitated corpse of her toddler. While one normally appreciates the humanization of "big picture" events, sometimes the humanization is so unutterably repellent that one flees into the arms of drier accounts found in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Economist, or the like. (I am, however, interested in reading his memoir of growing up in Rhodesia -- and briefly serving in its police force -- Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa [1996]; moreso than I am in reading The Fear's immediate predecessor, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa [2006].)
BEST BOOK READ IN 2011: Mmm: kind of a tough call. I'd say it's a toss-up between Frans G. Bengtsson's The Long Ships, Kenneth Roberts's Oliver Wiswell, or John Le Carré's The Honourable Schoolboy. For sheer literary oomph, though, I'd give the nod to Honourable Schoolboy. Overall, I really fell down on the literary front in 2011; as always, I'm chockablock with good intentions for the following year.
Aaaaannnnd.....I believe that's a wrap. Happy New Year, everybody.
*EDITED ON Sun., 1 Jan. 2012 TO ADD: Frans G. Bengtsson's The Long Ships. That's what I get for not keeping better records and for rushing a year-end post. Duuuuuhhh.
I have, however, plunged into George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series by reading the first book in said series, A Game of Thrones, from whence -- minus the indefinite article -- the HBO series based on Martin's work takes its title. I'm interested enough to at least read the second book, A Clash of Kings; after that, we'll see.
Since I'd like to keep my "year in books" posts a tradition to replace my previous tabulations of books read during the previous year (prompted by my occasional participation in the 50bookchallenge community; my last such post was on 2 January 2008, for the year 2007), herewith follows a brief survey of highlights of my reading done in 2011:
BEST BOOK READ IN 2011 THAT I'VE YET TO POST A REVIEW OF: This would be Kenneth Roberts's 1940 novel of the American Revolution from the point of view of a British loyalist (or "Tory"), Oliver Wiswell, a 800+ paged, always interesting, doorstopper that I checked out from a nearby public library (but not the library of the city in which I reside). I liked this novel better than Roberts's first novel, which I read in 2010, Arundel (which was set during the opening years of the American Revolution and whose climax was the American rebels' failed attempt to capture Quebec in 1775; Arundel is the first book of a tetrology). I seriously intended to review this sucker, particularly as it caused me to reread about half of Barbara W. Tuchman's The March of Folly (1984), but, for one reason and another -- mostly massive hours and grief at work and my own general fatigue, depression and suppressed homicidal rage resulting therefrom -- I didn't. I can't pretend that I've let my readers down (....), but I sure let myself down.
HONORABLE MENTION: That would be Giuseppe di Lampedusa's only novel, The Leopard (1958; English translation by Archibald Colquhoun published in 1960; original title: Il Gatopardo, which translates as "serval," not "leopard"). I've got the Italian version of The Leopard -- Luchino Visconti's 1963 movie version starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale -- in the top ten of my Netflix queue; as the only other movie of Visconti's that I've seen thus far is The Damned (1969), I'm rather apprehensive as to how well I'll like it, no matter that Visconti, like di Lampedusa, hails from a noble family. (Ironically enough, Visconti was Milanese, while di Lampedusa was Sicilian; the Milanese are not exactly beloved among the Sicilians, noble or peasant, in di Lampedusa's novel, which is largely set in Sicily during the closing days of the Risorgimento.)
BEST BOOK READ IN 2011 BY A SWEDISH AUTHOR WHO ISN'T STIEG LARSSON: This one is pretty much tied with Oliver Wiswell for "Best Book Read in 2011 That I've Yet to Post a Review Of": Frans G. Bengtsson's The Long Ships (originally published in two volumes in 1941 as Rõde Orm: Sjõfarare Væsterled [Red Orm {"Orm" is Swedish for "snake"} on the Western Way] and in 1945 as Rõde Orm: Hemma i Österled [Red Orm: At Home and on The Eastern Way; the first English translation of the complete novel, by Michael Meyer, was published in 1954 by Harper Collins; the New York Review of Books published a handsome trade paperback edition in 2010, with a foreword by Michael Chabon [The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; Wonder Boys; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; The Yiddish Policemen's Union], which is the edition that I read). As Chabon's foreword notes, The Long Ships would've been footnote-worthy if only for the fact that, at a time when racist theories of "racial purity" and widespread anti-Semitism held sway over a goodly chunk of the globe, a noted Swedish author (though not noted principally, at the time, as an author of fiction) wrote a book with secondary though important Jewish and Muslim characters who were neither hostile or comical stereotypes nor helpless victims. That The Long Ships is both a social satire whose protagonist is the most hypochondriacal "manly man" I can remember encountering in print and a rousing adventure story ranging over a goodly chunk of Europe in the 9th century is the exact type of serendipitous find that keeps readers browsing in bookstores and libraries of all stripes, ever hopeful of finding the next great read. I can easily imagine myself re-reading The Long Ships at some not-too-distant date, and enjoying it just as much: it's that good. And if anything will make me finally pick up and read the Dover edition of Snorri Sturulson's Heimskringla from cover to cover instead of in bits and pieces, The Long Ships will.
BEST "WHAT TOOK ME SO LONG TO READ THIS GUY?!" BOOK OF 2011: Without a doubt, John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), which was the basis for the 1960 movie Village of the Damned, the 1963 Children of the Damned, and the 1995 John Carpenter's Village of the Damned. (The 1960 movie is great, but I haven't seen the others: in the case of the John Carpenter remake, it's largely due to the wildly uneven quality of Carpenter's oeuvre.) The dry, detached tone of this book -- it's narrated by a first person narrator who heard about most of the events he describes via second- or third-hand -- and the quotidian details of a rural English village make the other-worldly (literally...) events all the more chilling and unsettling. As creepy as the glorious b&w 1960 adaptation is, the book is even more disturbing, given that it goes farther than the first. Wyndham's tone works better for me than, say, H.P. Lovecraft's usually does; I'm willing to read more of him: possibly The Chrysalids (1955; published in the U.S. as Re-Birth) will be next.
MOST DISAPPOINTING WORK BY AN AUTHOR WHOSE PREVIOUS BOOKS I ENJOYED: This would be Philip Kerr's sixth (of seven so far) Bernie Gunther novels, If the Dead Rise Not (2009); Bernie Gunther is a Berlin cop turned SS officer turned private eye, in exile in Latin America from his Nazi past and shattered country and in desultory search of a rat's ass he can care about, but this book -- which traces the repurcussions of crimes committed during the run-up to the 1936 Berlin Olympics twenty-plus years later to a Cuban government on the brink of being toppled by some highly unlikely revolutionaries -- didn't cut it for me, thanks largely to some dubious historical research on Kerr's part, but also due to some inexplicably flabby writing. Oddly enough, I was able to question the historical background of If the Dead Rise Not thanks to another book I read (though didn't review) in 2011: Alex von Tunzelmann's Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder, and the Cold War in the Caribbean (NY: Henry Holt and Company; 2011; ISBN: 978-0-8050-9067-3; 449 pps.). Still, the earlier books (March Violets [1989]; The Pale Criminal [1990]; A German Requiem [1991]; The One From the Other [2006]; and A Quiet Flame [2008]) are much better, even what with the eventually grating fanboy love thrown at Raymond Chandler in March Violets. (The first three books have been collected in omnibus format as Berlin Noir.)
MOST DISAPPOINTING WORK BY A NEW-TO-ME AUTHOR READ IN 2011: This would be Liam O'Flaherty's 1925 novel The Informer (it was filmed twice, in 1929 and 1935), a short account of a none-too-bright member of a socialist revolutionary cell in 1920s Ireland who dimes out a frenemy to the provincial police in exchange for a £20 reward (a not-inconsiderable sum in those days, particularly in Northern Ireland). Though someone on my LJ f-list might be intrigued by the fact that O'Flaherty came from the same place -- the Aran Islands -- that the sitcom Father Ted was set in, I would advise her to steer clear of The Informer, unless, like me, she has a morbid curiosity about either "great Irish writers" (debatable in O'Flaherty's case, on the evidence of The Informer) or the background to the 20th century "Troubles" between England and Ireland.
MOST PURELY ENTERTAINING BOOK READ IN 2011: A four-way tie: either Richard Condon's late 14th century/early 15th century historical crime caper starring the Antipope John XXIII, A Trembling Upon Rome (1985); Frans G. Bengtsson's The Long Ships (1954); Johnny D. Boggs's West Texas Kill (2011); or George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones (1996).
HONORABLE MENTION: The second book in John Le Carré's Karla Trilogy (published in omnibus form as The Quest For Karla), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977); this book follows Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) and is in turn followed by Smiley's People (1979). I posted a review of it in LibraryThing, but not in my own LJ, oddly enough. Given the decently-reviewed movie adaption of Tinker, Tailor this year -- featuring a trim Gary Oldman as the "fat spy" George Smiley no less -- Le Carré's star has been burnished anew. I'm looking forward to reading Smiley's People in 2012, and possibly a non-Smiley book too: perhaps the ersatz fictional biography of Le Carré's father, A Perfect Spy.
BEST GENRE EXPERIENCE IN 2011: Amazingly enough, the western, what with the twin delights of Johnny D. Boggs's West Texas Kill (for popcorn-movie style pleasure) and Mike Blakely's 1998 Comanche Dawn (for more serious historical novel-type edutainment). Even the disappointing The Outlaw Josey Wales by Forrest Carter didn't dampen my enthusiasm for exploring this genre further. I'm looking forward to reading more by these two authors, as well as hopefully finding others: maybe I'll finally start Larry McMurtry's four-book The Berrybender Narratives series; maybe I'll read a Louis L'Amour western (as opposed to a collection of his pulp fictional stories written before he settled upon being largely a western writer); maybe I'll even attempt another Zane Grey book. Although, considering my only other experience with his work, I wouldn't bet the farm on this last one.
HONORABLE MENTION: I suppose that would be the thriller genre, given that I read the first six of seven books in Greg Rucka's Atticus Kodiak series (Keeper [1996]; Finder [1997]; Smoker [1998]; Shooting At Midnight [1999]; Critical Space [2001]; and Patriot Acts [2007]), all courtesy of two local public libraries. If I don't like the Atticus Kodiak books quite as much as Rucka's mostly sensational espionage series Queen & Country (Q&C started as a comic book series published by Oni Press, but has since branched out into three prose novels whose quality has gradually declined, but even the least of them, The Last Run, is a worthwhile entertainment; I've mentioned my love for Q&C a few times in my LJ, although I've yet to post a review of any of the collected comic books or prose novels in it), they're still decent page turners, some of them, dare I say -- Finder, Smoker and Critical Space -- pulse-poundingly so. I just finished Patriot Acts on 28 December, and the series took a turn that could well intersect with Queen & Country, given Rucka's nearly explicitly expressed fury at the administration, specifically the foreign policy, of "Bush 43."
MOST ENJOYABLE REACQUAINTANCE WITH AN AUTHOR WHOSE WORK I HADN'T READ IN SEVERAL YEARS: I made good on my intention to read more Poul Anderson -- like another science fiction Grand Master, Robert A. Heinlein, a writer of libertarian sci-fi -- with taking up his Polesotechnic League series, which is about some rascally and inventive space merchants (cheifly Nicholas Van Rijn and David Falkayn), beginning with The Earth Book of Stormgate and Trader to the Stars (I'm also about two-thirds of the way through The Trouble Twisters, which will be my "carry-over" read into 2012).
WORST BOOK READ IN 2011: Unlike last year, there were no stand-out gawdawful books that I read in 2011 (excluding some of the many -- many, I say, many! -- collected comic books that I checked out from the library). As previously noted, I was less than thrilled with Philip Kerr's If the Dead Rise Not and Liam O'Flaherty's The Informer; come to that, I wasn't impressed with the only Hard Case Crime offering that I read in 2011 either.
WHOOPS, I LIED: Gotta be Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron with Bret Witter (2008). Seriously, this limp dishrag made me embarrassed to be an ailurophile. (Although The Informer was pretty bad too.)
BEST BOOK LOANED TO ME BY A FRIEND OR ACQUAINTANCE IN 2011: Kind of a trick question, really, given that only one friend or acquaintance loaned me a book in 2011: Peter Godwin's The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe (2010, though not published in the U.S. until March 2011), which is a ground-level survey, thanks to many friends and acquaintances interviewed by Godwin and his sister, the British broadcaster Georgina Godwin. This was a readable, depressing, sometimes horrifying, sometimes absurdly inspiring, look at the train-wreck of what used to be "Africa's breadbasket," Zimbabwe (the former Rhodesia), under the regime of one of Africa's post-colonial revolutionary heroes, Robert Mugabe. The narrative is a bit incoherent and ends very much up in the air -- understandably so, given that Mugabe seems determined to die in office, and that the prospects for improvement under his immediate successors seem apallingly bleak -- but it's a worthwhile read for anyone remotely interested in Zimbabwe, Africa in general, or human endurance under hellish conditions. However, caveat lector: among the many horrifying stories related herein is one of a woman who was gang-raped next to the decapitated corpse of her toddler. While one normally appreciates the humanization of "big picture" events, sometimes the humanization is so unutterably repellent that one flees into the arms of drier accounts found in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Economist, or the like. (I am, however, interested in reading his memoir of growing up in Rhodesia -- and briefly serving in its police force -- Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa [1996]; moreso than I am in reading The Fear's immediate predecessor, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa [2006].)
BEST BOOK READ IN 2011: Mmm: kind of a tough call. I'd say it's a toss-up between Frans G. Bengtsson's The Long Ships, Kenneth Roberts's Oliver Wiswell, or John Le Carré's The Honourable Schoolboy. For sheer literary oomph, though, I'd give the nod to Honourable Schoolboy. Overall, I really fell down on the literary front in 2011; as always, I'm chockablock with good intentions for the following year.
Aaaaannnnd.....I believe that's a wrap. Happy New Year, everybody.
*EDITED ON Sun., 1 Jan. 2012 TO ADD: Frans G. Bengtsson's The Long Ships. That's what I get for not keeping better records and for rushing a year-end post. Duuuuuhhh.