Well, yeah, it is sort of ridiculously ridiculous to rate from 1 – 12 a batch of books published over a wide range of years and in genres as varied as stories in translation, poetry, history, historical fiction, travel writing, biography, and autobiography. But it works for me! I have been posting these always-eclectic annual top books read lists for Madam Mayo blog since 2006. Aside from serving as a reading diary for myself, it is my gift to you, dear writerly reader: If you are not familiar with any given book on this list, should it appeal to you to try it, may you find it as wondrously enriching a read as I did.
(1) The Education of Henry Adams
by Henry Adams
By Jove and by Jupiter, whyever did I not read this sooner?! Every chapter a chocolate truffle, The Education of Henry Adams is a fundamental text for comprehending the culture and overall development of the United States.
P.S. Michael Lindgrin has more to say about ye tome, “this strange and beautiful journey of a book,” over at The Millions.
(2) Tie:
My Ántonia
by Willa Cather
O Pioneers!
by Willa Cather
Reading Cather is a joy. Both of these Cather novels are well-deserved American literary classics. Over the past couple of years I have been turtling my way through Cather’s oeuvre. So far: The Professor’s House (top books read list for 2017) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (top books read list for 2018).
(3) Tie:
Fashion Climbing
by Bill Cunningham
Utterly charming, wonderfully inspiring. I would warmly recommend this book for any artist.
The Library Book
by Susan Orlean
Fascinating throughout. Favorite quote:
“You don’t need to take a book off the shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen.”
(4) Mrs. Bridge
by Evan S. Connell
I read this novel only because my book club picked it– lucky me. It’s wickedly funny, and, curiously, and most elegantly, written in crots. (I was unaware of Connell’s work when I wrote one of my own early short stories, also in crots, also published in the Paris Review. Well, howdy there, Mr. C! If you were still alive it sure would be fun to talk to you about crots!)
P.S. See Gerald Shapiro’s profile of Evan S. Connell in Ploughshares.
(5) Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu
by Ted Anton
Yet another work I wish I had read years earlier. Culiano was the author of Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. His life ended early, and not well, alas. I never met Culiano but I was at University of Chicago for several years just before he arrived, so I knew the super-charged intellectual ambiance well– and I think Anton captures it quite accurately. Recently occultist John Michael Greer has been making noises about Culiano’s understanding of cacomagic, and this the unnamed subject of Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, which is what prompted me to finally pick up this biography, which had been long languishing in my “to read” pile. (If you’re a metaphysics nerd and cacomagic is what you’re interested in specifically, however, Anton’s biography, otherwise excellent, will disappoint.)
(6) Tie:
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West
by Wallace Stegner
Stegner is always a rare pleasure to read. I came away with immense admiration for John Wesley Powell’s many and visionary achievements. And the whole problem of water in the West thing!! Obvious as that may be, but I grew up in the West and it was not so obvious to me, nor to most people I knew at the time, and this book goes a long way towards explaining why. (Illuminating indeed to pair this work with a Cather novel… see above…)
A Desert Harvest
by Bruce Berger
This splendid anthology collects selected essays from Bruce Berger’s masterwork of a desert trilogy, The Telling Distance, Almost an Island, and There Was a River.
P.S. Read my Q & A with Bruce Berger here.
All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West
by David Gessner
A beautifully written and necessary book about the West and its mid-to-late 20th century literary tradition. Comparing and contrasting this enchilada to The Education of Henry James might make your coconut explode! (Oh, but where is Bruce Berger?!)
The Western Paradox
by Benard DeVoto
Edited by David Brinkley and Patricia Nelson Limerick with a foreword by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Crunchy! (I still have all my teeth, though!)
(7) Tie:
Lone Star Mind
by Ty Cashion
Professor Cashion articulates the kooky contradictions and tectonic shifts in both popular and academic versions of Texas history. A landmark work in Texas historiography.
God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State
by Lawrence Wright
An Austinite literary light’s take on the Lone Star State. (Are you moving to Texas from California? This might be just the book for you! And I mean that nicely. I mean, like, totally unironically! P.S. Go ahead, get the ostrich leather.)
Giant: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Edna Ferber, and the Making of a Legendary American Film
by Don Graham
I will be writing about this work at some length in my book on Far West Texas. At first glance, for the splashy photos of the stars on its cover, it might appear to be the usual intellectually nutritious-as-a-Ding Dong film history book. But no! Graham knew Texas like almost no one else, and for Texas, Giant, based on the novel by Edna Ferber, was a film of profound cultural importance.
(8) Tie:
On the Landing: Stories by Yenta Mash
by Yenta Mash, Translated from the Yiddish by Ellen Cassedy
A very special discovery. Read my Q & A with translator Ellen Cassedy here.
The World As Is: New and Selected Poems: 1972-2015
by Joseph Hutchison
So beautiful.
Read my Q & A with Joe here.
(9) Tie:
In the Land of the Temple Caves
by Frederick Turner
Read my post about this book here.
The Aran Islands
by J.M. Synge
Travels with Herodotus
by Ryszard Kapuscinski
(10) Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology
by Cal Newport
My guru is Cal Newport. You can read my latest noodling about Newport’s works, including Digital Minimalism, here.
(11) Trauma: Time, Space and Fractals
by Anngwyn St. Just
This one will make your head go pretzels. I read this just as I was finishing my essay “Miss Charles Emily Wilson: Great Power in One,” and found it uncanny how many aspects in the history of Wilson’s people, the Black Seminoles, suggested the fractal nature of time and space.
P.S. Anngwyn St. Just was recently interviewed by Jeffrey Mishlove for New Thinking Allowed:
Time, Space, and Trauma
Perpetrators and Victims
Trauma and the Human Condition
(12) The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom
by Simon Winchester
That would be Joseph Needham (how bizarre that his name is not in the title of his own biography). Indeed, a fantastic story.
(13) The Chrysalids
by John Wyndham
I’m not a fan of sci-fi novels; I read this one about post-nuclear apocalypse Canada only because my book club chose it. I found it to be a page-turner with splendid prose throughout (although I did some eyerolling at the end when it did get a little “inner most cave-y” and “Deus-ex-Machine-y”). I can appreciate why it remains in print, and beloved by many, more than six decades after it was first published in 1955.
P.S. I can also warmly recommend the books by authors featured in my monthly Q & As.
Top Books Read 2018
Top Books Read 2017
Great Power in One: Miss Charles Emily Wilson