The best books I read in 2016
2016 was a bad year. Most of the things I read were, literally, bad news. I also read some books. Many of those, fortunately, were very good.
I wrote a list like this in 2014 but never finished my 2015 writeup because I’m bad at finishing the things. If you want to see those books, here’s a list. For a full list of the books I’ve read and I’m reading, add me on Goodreads!
If you are an author I know (whether on Twitter or real life) who came out with a book this year and I didn’t read it, I apologize.
On the plane back from Israel to the United States after visiting my brother in yeshiva — which was on January 5th or 6th, depending on how you’re counting — I finished three excellent books, and one that a lot of other people like but I didn’t. The first was Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano, the first (and only so far) Modiano I’ve read, and a lovely mediation of memory and history. The closest thing I could compare it to is Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour, with a dash of Casablanca.
On the same flight, I read Trans-Atlantyk by Witold Gombrowicz. (I didn’t realize until I wrote this paragraph that I crossed the Atlantic while reading it.) It’s a puzzling, delightful, and funny book about a young Polish intellectual visiting Argentina who drinks too much one evening and gets involved in a duel. Gombrowicz himself visited Argentina as a cultural ambassador in 1939. During his trip, Hitler took over Poland. He didn’t go home for 24 years. (Read the Danuta Borchardt translation; the other one is apparently unreadable.)
The third book I finished on the plane was the best one. Fat City by Leonard Gardner is one of the most beautiful books I’ve read. It’s about trying and failing and drinking and boxing. Gardner writes like James Salter did, as if he’s distilling the essence of the life itself in every sentence. (I wasn’t surprised to learn that Fat City is one of Denis Johnson’s favorite novels.) John Huston’s movie adaptation is nearly as much a masterpiece, too.
The fourth book I finished on that plane — the one I didn’t like — was Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Didn’t do much for me.
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities by Delmore Schwartz was yet another example of why poets are often also the finest prose writers. “The World is a Wedding” joins Akutagawa’s “Hell Screen” as one of my favorite short stories.
Alexandrian Summer by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren is a funny book, about two Jewish families living in Alexandria, Egypt, before emigrating to Israel in 1951. Goren includes details — horse racing, the strange and disturbing sexual experiences that can accompany growing up, and courtship rituals — that, like Stefan Zweig, try to capture a life long since passed. Literature is not adequate enough to capture it, but he must try anyway. Read André Aciman’s introduction to the book (Aciman is our great Jewish-Egyptian-American novelist) and Goren’s essay on how the novel found a second life in 2016.
The Door by Magda Szabo is the best novel I read all year. I was unable to stop thinking about it for months afterwards. The plot won’t sound compelling at all if I told it to you, so I won’t. Just read it. Szabo’s Iza’s Ballad was translated and released by NYRB Classics this year. It’s also marvelous, but The Door is in another league.
The best nonfiction book I read this year was Kaddish by Leon Wieseltier. At 608 pages, it is also the longest. Kaddish swept over me like a wave. Every page is deeply moving, filled with history, and will forever change the way I answer to Kaddish. I am impressed, jealous, and in awe of how deeply learned Wieseltier is in Torah, and I am embarrassed that my Hebrew is not very good. (Also, I wrote up a brief investigation about how an anonymous friend Wieseltier mentions in passing is probably Ruth Bader Ginsburg.)
Following those two, I read a bunch of books I didn’t like very much, so I decided to return to an old favorite: Jose Saramago. Death with Interruptions was supposed to be one of his lighter books, and I guess it was in the sense that it wasn’t really angry at G-d, but it was as smart, funny, fun to read, and precise as anything else he’s written. It’s also, unexpectedly, a love story. Saramago’s premise is, as always, brilliant: What if Death takes a holiday?
Here began a string of great books. I watched and loved Elia Kazan’s movie adaptation, but the script for Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire was just as powerful. Poor Blanche DuBois.
Next was The Studio by John Gregory Dunne. Miraculously, in 1967, Dunne asked for and was granted complete access to 20th Century Fox’s movie studio. You can’t make this stuff up. I wrote about it at length in a newsletter I founded and abandoned.
Thinking about John Gregory Dunne got me thinking about Joan Didion. She is his widow, and her book about his death, The Year of Magical Thinking, wrecked me.
This summer, I went on a fellowship tour in Germany. I bought a few books there, three of which were from Penguin’s Little Black Classics collection. All of them — Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, The Nightingales are Drunk by Hafez, and My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun by Emily Dickinson — are masterpieces. The Rilke is a classic I’ve been meaning to read for ages, and I’m glad I finally got to it. It’s a manifesto with guidance that I should try to live up to. Hafez is a much-admired Persian poet that’s also been long on my list, and Penguin’s collection is a gorgeous introduction. I studied Dickinson for a few weeks in college, and reading a book of her poetry — pronouncing each syllable aloud or just mouthing it when noise would be embarrassing — was one of the richest experiences I had this year. What a genius.
A big theme when I read books is: I meant to read the book years earlier, and now I finally got around to it. It’s seldom been more true than in the case of Fear: A Novel of World War I by Gabriel Chevallier. The semiautobiographical novel first came to my attention when NYRB Classics discovered and released it two years ago and Franklin Foer reviewed it. It is, in every way, just as much a classic as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. This one, though, is told from a French soldier’s perspective rather than a German soldier’s. They’re astonishingly similar. Both go to war, are ashamed, are at odds with their glory-expectant families at home, and wonder how you can go to war with a land, anyway. The two deserve to be studied together.
Joe Gould’s Secret by Joseph Mitchell is interesting in several respects. It is a demonstration of how someone, even though they are a perfectionist, can change their style so much over 20 years. It’s about the role of nonfiction writers to their readers and their relationships with their subjects. But most of all, it’s a mystery: how the hell did Joseph Mitchell collect a paycheck from the New Yorker for 30 years without writing anything? And how do I get that job?
I didn’t so much love Harry Potter and the Cursed Child as much as I lived in it. Buying the book at midnight in Union Square’s Barnes and Noble with Rebecca, then racing to her apartment and staying up until 3 a.m. to finish it is an experience I’m grateful that J.K. Rowling gave me. Then I stayed up until like 7:30 writing a bunch of takes, which you can read here, here, here, and here. The book is far from perfect, but I am glad to have more of Rowling’s imagination. The same goes for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original Screenplay.
The Mirror Thief by Martin Seay was a big book I’m glad I took the time to read. It mixes up a bunch of my favorite pet subjects: alchemy, luck, obscure authors, and mirrors. Somehow, it wraps all of these things up into a well-paced cohesive story that takes place in three timeframes and 600 pages.
Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz is one of those small, punishingly beautiful books that never leaves you. Because it is about the Holocaust, it took me longer to read than it should have. I read it a few months after Kertesz died. Against the wishes of the Nazis, he made it to 86.
Future Sex by Emily Witt made me wish I had her courage, insight, and, uh, wit. Much of the essay collection has been published in magazines elsewhere, and if you want to take a look, one of the most powerful pieces is her diary of Burning Man in the London Review of Books.
Years after I skipped it in a film theory class because I didn’t feel like spending money on the textbook, I got a Barnes and Noble gift card and purchased Ways of Seeing by John Berger. I wish I didn’t wait. Berger’s insight on film and fine art is so brilliant, so clear, and so well-communicated in the book’s format that I just wanted to wander around the Met while holding it in my hand. (Berger also wrote the introduction to Fear.)
Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays by Cynthia Ozick is yet another demonstration for how Ozick is the best critic alive. Her opening salvo on contemporary criticism is a beautiful piece of work. Her piece on literary fame is humbling. We’re so fortunate to have a critic who’s so learned, has an astute sense of morality, and who is so experienced. I’m glad she was there to witness W.H. Auden give poetry readings, and to write about it lucidly decades later. It’s an essay collection, so much of the work has already been published in different forms elsewhere. I recommend, in particular, her essay on the life of Franz Kafka and the idea of the “Kafkaesque” and her essay on Martin Amis and the ethics of writing fiction about the Holocaust, both in The New Republic. But really, you should read it all. Like all great critics, she gave me an incidental reading list that I’m excited to get through.
Other books I liked a lot: This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Beloved by Toni Morrison, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, The Prague Golem: Jewish Stories of the Ghetto by Harald Salfellner, Rashi by Elie Wiesel, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism by Kristin Dombek, Against Everything by Mark Greif, A Farewell to Arms: The Hemingway Library Edition by Ernest Hemingway, Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region by Masha Gessen.
