I don’t read many novels, but I picked up Middlemarch recently after reading an essay about George Eliot by Gertrude Himmelfarb. It struck me as kind of a woman’s book, but I loved it, all 800-plus pages of it. (Yes, I know the author was a woman.) Middlemarch is so good that I bought copies for two of my daughters and one of them, Grace, actually read it. Anyway, it’s an extraordinary book with brilliantly conceived characters who’ve stayed in mind every day in the months since I read it. So, to put it mildly, I recommend Middlemarch.
The best non-fiction book of 2007, for me anyway, is What’s So Great About Christianity by Dinesh D’Souza. This a great work, both wise and learned, in defense of Christianity against the current crop of atheists, people who think science has nullified religion, skeptics of one sort or another, intellectual snobs, and wishy-washy Christians. D’Souza takes on every argument you’ve ever heard (and some you haven’t) against Christianity. The book is bound to an instant classic, though I’d always rejected the notion of such a thing. But I suspect Christians and seekers and curious agnostics and maybe a few soft atheists and who knows who else will be reading What’s So Great About Christianity decades from now, just as so many read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis today.
–Fred Barnes
Since I’m new to this feature, let me recommend a book I always extol–but, I confess, haven’t read during the past year: Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse by Hugh Trevor-Roper. Backhouse was a member of a prominent English Quaker family (his brother, ironically, was an admiral) who, after washing out of Oxford, turned up in Peking in the late 1890s. He stayed in China until his death during World War II, slowly retreating from public view, going progressively native, issuing a couple of authoritative accounts of modern (late 19th/early 20th century) Chinese history, and donating 20,000-plus rare Chinese volumes to Oxford’s Bodleian Library. But, as Trevor-Roper illustrates, Backhouse was also a supreme confidence man: A sexual pervert and professional pornographer, as well as a forger, his most famous work (China Under the Empress Dowager, written with JOP Bland, published in 1910, and still cited in journalism and scholarship) was based on diaries and documents Backhouse invented. His entire career was spent seeking to defraud the British government, Chinese officialdom, foreign correspondents, and British businesses located in China, all the while hiding behind his well-constructed façade as a scholarly eccentric, historical expert, and academic benefactor.
Trevor-Roper’s account of Backhouse’s astonishing history is written in his characteristically laconic style, and his gradual reconstruction of events is an extraordinary feat of scholarly detective work and a thoroughly delightful, and compelling, read.
–Philip Terzian
The best book I read this year was Radical Son, David Horowitz’s gripping memoir of his conversion from a Marxist world view to a conservative one. It’s already ten years old, but I predict it will still be read a century from now–and not just by historians of the 1960s or of the American left. It is a deeply moving, acutely observed account of an inner transformation touching every dimension of one man’s life–political, intellectual, moral, personal. And the fact that it’s also a murder mystery doesn’t hurt a bit.
–Claudia Anderson
As someone who fly-fishes with a fanaticism bordering on mental illness, I made certain that a decent percentage of the books polished off this year were at least tangentially related to angling. I don’t believe in reincarnation, but if I did, I’d hope to come back in my next life as a spooky brown trout, so that when I came back in the life following that one, I’d have a better idea of how to catch myself. If I was only permitted one return engagement, however, I could do worse than coming back as Thomas McGuane. When not writing novels like The Bushwhacked Piano and Ninety-two in the Shade, he delivered a 1999 memoir entitled The Longest Silence, A Life in Fishing. If there’s a finer fishing writer, I have not read him. You don’t have to love fishing to love McGuane. Loving masterfully-crafted language will suffice: “One could raise the poetry as a nonconsuming naturalist, but who besides the angler crawls to the brook at daybreak or pushes his fragile craft to the head of the tide to come out on the flood with the creatures that breathe the water?”
Russell Chatham is a bit of a Renaissance man. His brilliant, beautiful lithographs and oil paintings are collected by everyone from Robert Hughes to Jack Nicholson. As an epicure, he can go into near pornographic detail on the proper preparation of a drake mallard. Over the years, the Livingston, Montana, native has kept pretty heady literary/fly-fishing company as well, everyone from the aforementioned McGuane to Jim Harrison to the late Richard Brautigan. As a stylist, Chatham resembles your lushy best friend, the one who sends the Pinot sprawling across the tablecloth, who leers at the waitress, and who seems to have misplaced his credit card when the check comes, but who is also capable of the blindingly original epiphany. Lacking McGuane’s precision, he often loses control of his fastball. His prose is sloppy, coarse, and alive. And his 1988 collection of essays, Dark Waters, is enjoyable from start to finish. I’m not a hunter, but one chapter entitled “Sporting Deaths,” the conflicted reflection of someone who takes life for pleasure, is as uncomfortably honest as writing gets.
If you don’t read every new Nick Hornby novel that comes down the line, you’re not hurting Nick Hornby. He has no idea who you are. But you are hurting yourself. From High Fidelity to About a Boy to How to Be Good to A Long Way Down to his newest, Slam, each offering is spun gold, as soulful as it is comically satisfying. As a bonus, the British Hornby writes beautifully about music, as in Songbook, his nonfiction celebration of his own favorite tunes. His novel High Fidelity, about an obsessive record store owner with snob taste, is sometimes credited as being partly responsible for the resurgence of the great soul man Solomon Burke. For that alone, Hornby deserves our gratitude.
Coffee table conversation-ender: If you’re like me, and have a lot of pre-pubescent gay friends who like to pet chickens, Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men From The Rural Midwest might be your ideal stocking stuffer. (I kid about the pre-pubescents–most of my gay chicken-petting friends are by now in their thirties and forties). Truth be told, I have no idea if the book is any good. It was given to me years ago by a TWS colleague, who either thought he was being funny, or who more than likely knowing him, really is into the gay chicken-petting scene. The reason I display it on my desk is because of the cover, seen here. I used to have problems with chit-chatty coworkers endlessly pitching camp in my office. Then I started displaying Farm Boys. Now, most of my office chats are away games, with me in control of the schedule. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
–Matt Labash
Four years ago, the culinary world’s elder statesman, Jacques Pépin, published his moving biography, The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen. I only recently finished it though I wish I’d done so earlier. Over the summer I had lunch with Pépin in New York and could only chat with him about his bestseller up to the point where he was working as a young cook at La Rotonde in Montparnasse. Pépin’s boss was the Gordon Ramsay of his day, a tyrant named Chef Crampette: “He was a short, fat man with an enormous, jiggling rear end and a face that would have looked more at home on an old, ill-natured bulldog.” He was also “the only remaining person in all of Paris to sport a Hitler-style moustache.” And speaking of Gordon Ramsay, Pépin tells me he’s not a fan: Regarding Ramsay’s reality series Hell’s Kitchen, the French chef says “you can see [Ramsay] vituperating there and yelling. You don’t see anyone cooking in that show, actually cooking, the process of putting this and that and doing it. And you don’t see anyone tasting and all that. All you see is that fear and the chef testing it, [saying] ‘That’s shit.’ What’s the point?” There is a point, however, to The Apprentice: It might not take a lot to get on TV, but to become a great chef, it takes a lifetime.
–Victorino Matus
I can think of no better book to give, or get, this Christmas than Andy Ferguson’s sublime Land of Lincoln. It is by turns hilarious, moving, and deeply thoughtful about America and our Lincoln fixation, which burns brightly even at this late date. There wasn’t a better work of non-fiction published in 2007.
If you’re looking for a novel, you could do worse than re-discovering Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which may be the most under-appreciated of her works.
–Jonathan V. Last
In honor of presidential candidate Mike Huckabee:
The Godfather by Mario Puzo.
The Collected works of Uncle Remus.
Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss.
To be avoided:
The Art of War by Sun Tzu.
–Dean Barnett
Heat, by Bill Buford. The former New Yorker writer abandons the literary life to become a professional chef. The stories–mostly set in grungy NYC kitchens and rural Italy–are fantastic. The book is as much a story about obsession as it is about food and cooking. Favre, by Brett Favre. So this book was released in 2004, who cares? Brett Favre now holds every significant NFL record for quarterbacks. He is the greatest QB ever. Plus, it has lots of pictures.
The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years of Reporting in Washington. Bob Novak on Bob Novak.
And the best book in the past ten years: I’m a Stranger Here Myself, by Bill Bryson.
–Stephen F. Hayes
When it comes to any classic, I like to read the book before I see the movie. Thus, with the onset of this year’s Oscar season, I was torn between Charlie Wilson’s War and The Kite Runner. But then as I wondered which foray into Afghanistan would be more painful–two preadolescents speaking Dari, or Tom Hanks naked in a hot tub (where’s a burqa when you need one?)–my eyes were drawn to the ever comely Keira Knightley staring out at me from the cover of Atonement, Ian McEwan’s semi-recent best seller. I “read” the book jacket: instant classic, short-listed for the Booker Prize, blah blah blah. Elizabeth Swann’s looking like a total hottie on the cover. Sold.
The book is worthy for its evocation of the war pre-Dunkirk and pre-Blitz (you see London with sandbags, before the bombs fall). I realized that not much popular culture dwells on the war’s earliest days, when the Germans were ascendant and WWII was not the same WWII celebrated in our national lore. It’s worthwhile to consider what it must have felt like earlier–before it was “certain” the Allies would win, when unthinkable evil appeared unleashed and unchecked.
–Michael Goldfarb
Literacy is overrated. Try these three movies sold in a bundle exclusively by Amazon: the Jean-Luc Godard edition of the Criterion Collection Director series. I assure you, this is not an act of willful film-snobbery; I am not terribly enamored with the French New Wave that Godard so epitomizes. But there is much to be said about Breathless, Band of Outsiders, and Contempt, the titles selected for inclusion. And, since these discs were put together by Criterion, you’ll learn something about the art of film from the numerous special features included within. (If the $76 price tag of the collection is intimidating, allow me to suggest Breathless in particular–its raw, intense, and jazzy style combine for an experience that still feels fresh almost 40 years after the film burst onto the scene.)
(Okay, one book: IV, by Chuck Klosterman. There’s not a smarter writer on American pop culture than the Esquire columnist, and this collection of essays makes for great reading.)
–Sonny Bunch
Because excellence is timeless, I stand by my holiday reading recommendations of December 2004:
Anything by P. G. Wodehouse.
Anything by Leo Strauss.
Anything by Donald Westlake.
–William Kristol
