Like most scholars, I have a passion for books. Having enjoyed putting together two posts (here and here) on my favorite books from last year, I’ve decided to begin a semi-regular feature of discussing books I’ve found rewarding that I think other cultural anthropologists (or anyone else) might also find engaging, interesting, provocative, or otherwise worth reading.
The Riddle of the Dinosaur, by John Noble Wilford, Knopf, 1986.
I read this book when I was just beginning to organize the writing of my dissertation. I was reading a wide variety of non-fiction pertaining to an array of topics and disciplines to get a sense of the diversity of ways of organizing the presentation of a topic (a strategy I’d recommend for anyone now writing theses or dissertations). This book didn’t particularly influence my writing in any formal way. Instead it influenced my thinking about my relation to ethnographic data. (It’s also a fun read for anyone with a fascination for dinosaurs.)
You’ll learn a lot about dinosaurs from this book, but you’ll also learn much about the history of the paleontology of dinosaurs. Wilford’s account is essentially an epistemological history, tracing the history of the development of conceptualizations of dinosaurs and methods for studying them (I tend to think of methodology as applied epistemology – and I’ve found thinking about research methods a lot more interesting ever since I started thinking about it that way).
In most ways, paleontology and ethnography have little in common. In reading Wilford, I realized that one thing they have in common, albeit for different reasons, is that they’re both scholarly endeavors that tend to foreground epistemological concerns, if not to exist in a perpetual state of epistemological crisis. As I said the reasons for this are different: with paleontology, one is faced with a paucity of information and a real concern about what can legitimately be reconstructed about the anatomy and physiology, much less lifeways, of these creatures from 65+ million years ago with in most cases minimal and highly fragmented information; with ethnography, the researcher is generally overwhelmed with data, but with concerns about the effects of the researcher’s own prejudices and predilections on interpretations and even observations, and the reader is left with the task of attempting to discern the merits of the ethnographer’s text with no ability to engage in anything like laboratory replicability.
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Pantheon, 2003, and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, Pantheon, 2004, both by Marjane Satrapi.
Although I’m no expert on the Middle East, much less Iran or Persian culture specifically, I’ve read quite a few books about Iran in recent years, several of them excellent, including Fredrik Barth’s minor class Nomads of South Persia (an ethnography from the 1950s), Michael Fischer’s Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (an ethnography written right after the revolution, and one of the more insightful accounts of it), and Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi’s Small Media, Big Revolution: Communication, Culture, and the Iranian Revolution (another insightful account of the revolution focusing on the use of media technology by the revolutionaries).
Satrapi’s two volume graphic memoir (probably already familiar to fans of graphic novels and non-fiction, and recently made into a movie) is the one thing I’ve read, though, that gave me a sense of growing up and being in contemporary Iran (not that the memoir is confined to Iran alone – it also entails an account of Satrapi’s years in a European boarding school, for example).
Reading Satrapi’s memoir, as well as other graphic non-fiction, such as the various works of graphic journalist Joe Sacco, makes me wish I could draw. I don’t think any particular medium is the best way to write or present culture, but the form used here does have the unique ability to draw on the strength of the word and the image and to avoid to an extent some of the pitfalls of each, e.g. the way in which so much ethnography feels enervated, missing so much of the sensual reality of culture (though of course even here, the sounds, smells, and even colors [it’s in black and white drawing] are still missing), or the ambiguous quality of many images – lacking in context and conceptualization without commentary, yet coupled with an often overbearing sense of reality deriving from their visual impact.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
I may be one of the few cultural anthropologists who likes this book. Many cultural anthropologists have criticized this book, mostly as being geographically determinist (which is an incomplete charge at best, given the importance of the availability or absence of domesticated animals to societies in Diamond’s argument) or for reducing the highly various tapestry of cultural diversity to a simple narrative.
If you take Diamond’s account as a sufficient explanation of everything cultural, then it’s a disappointment, because it doesn’t do that, as if any theoretical framework could. Perhaps I’m overly charitable, or just plain wrong, but I don’t think Diamond claims to have explained everything in any case, but just to have laid out a set of arguments that explains much about human cultural history in general.
Insofar as Diamond draws our attention to factors many anthropologists might have otherwise not considered, such as the presence or absence of domesticated animals, directional orientation of trade and other cultural contact networks, or relative ease of transportation over long distances in different world areas, Diamond’s account is useful in making us aware of patterns that over long stretches of time have significant impact on the particular histories of specific societies.
Part of many anthropologists’ resistance to Diamond probably stems from the longstanding particularist bent of American cultural anthropology, the important emphasis on detail on cultural uniqueness, but also a sometimes corresponding resistance to identification of general patterns. (See Kerim’s post on the Savage Minds blog on this topic from about two months ago.)
Part of the resistance likely also stems from an academic turf-war mentality and a resistance to non-anthropologists poaching on anthropological territory. (There’s reason to be wary of the variety of sociobiologists, chaos theorists, meme theorists, economists, etc., who attempt to explain better than anthropologists the topics conventionally seen as anthropologists’ own. [If it makes any difference, Diamond, trained as a geneticist, is also poaching on geography’s turf.] Still, poaching doesn’t always make them wrong.)
There’s also a bit of internecine anthropological squabbling in disguise going on here. Though Diamond’s synthesis is highly readable and insightful, it is ultimately a synthesis of a lot of many scholars’ work from the previous few decades, notably William McNeill’s The Rise of the West, as well as Europe and the People without History by anthropology’s own Eric Wolf. I suspect a lot of the anthropological resistance to Diamond comes from anthropologists opposed to the more generalist approaches within the discipline, whether in the form of political economy, cultural materialism, or structuralism and their various progeny.
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
My Favorite Books of 2007 (and One of 2008 So Far), Part II
11. Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos, Europa Editions.
This is my favorite of the books I’ve read in 2008 so far. It’s the first of three books in a crime/mystery series set in Marseilles. The genre is not one I usually go in for, but the writing propels one forward through the text. It also contains some of the best writing about food I’ve encountered in a work that wasn’t dedicated to food writing.
12. Etgar Keret, The Nimrod Flipout, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
One blurb writer, Gary Shteyngart, writes of this short story collection that it is “The best work of literature to come out of Israel in the last five thousand years – better than Leviticus and nearly as funny.” Probably a bit much, but this is an entertaining collection of surreal stories featuring memorable characters such as the beautiful woman who transforms into a fat, hard-drinking, male soccer fan at night.
13. Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt, New York Review Books.
One of the finest and most memorable pieces of surrealist writing I’ve encountered, made the more surreal because of the fact that it’s a work of non-fiction, by the Italian journalist Malaparte writing during World War II. Two mental images from the work will always stay with me: one of German tank drivers in Ukraine swerving in panic to attempt to avoid a pack of dogs running toward them across an open plain, dogs apparently trained to run underneath armored vehicles and strapped with magnetic bombs dooming dogs and tank crews alike; the other of horses driven by forest fire into a Finnish lake in winter, frozen solid by the onset of a winter storm, and their frozen, contorted heads remaining above the frozen lake and serving occasionally as benches for occupying soldiers throughout the winter. His account of occupied Poland is heartrending, the superficial gentility of Polish nobles and occupying Germans alongside the horrors of the Jewish ghettoes.
14. Cormac McCarthy, The Road, Knopf.
This novel was highly hyped, with reviews of the novel in practically every publication that regularly reviews fiction, and with almost universally glowing reviews at that. It’s one of the few novels I’ve read that was so universally acclaimed that I felt lived up to its promise.
This was actually the first McCarthy novel I had read, and at the time I read it, it was probably the bleakest work of fiction I had ever read.
While it’s good enough to transcend genre, it can be placed into a genre of post-apocalyptic fiction.
Most post-apocalyptic fiction, whether in literature or movies, is set either just after a cataclysmic event (think The Day After Tomorrow or Alas, Babylon), with initial survivors coping with the immediate, and sometimes horrific aftermath, but without a sense of the long term consequences of cataclysm, or set long after the apocalypse in question (think about the Mad Max films, particulary The Road Warrior), with human societies having had some time to adapt to the changed circumstances (I wouldn’t want to live in the world of The Road Warrior, but it’s a world in which people could live).
The Road is different in this respect. Some major catastrophe has occurred, with nuclear winter like effects (possibly nuclear attack or major meteor impact, the latter not explicitly indicated in the text but indicated by McCarthy in a recent article in Rolling Stone). The catastrophe has occurred long enough ago that there is a sort of winding down of initially surviving society – no food will grow, there’s essentially nothing wild to forage, and all the easy pickings of grocery store canned goods are long gone – but not long enough ago for anything to have seriously begun any process of natural recovery. It’s a novel set in the lowest point for life following an earth-changing catastrophe.
The novel is also bleak in McCarthy’s pessimism about human nature. Most people in the book are vicious survivors, as ready to kill and eat other survivors (as just about the only food source left) as anything else. Still, there is a tender and redemptive quality (even without anything resembling a clearly happy ending) to the relationship between the two main characters, a man and his son on the road traveling, hoping to find a better place.
15. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, Vintage.
The Road had been the bleakest piece of fiction I had read until, after reading it, I picked up this older McCarthy novel. It’s set in the American West of the 19th Century, and is a novel with little intimacy and much casual brutality and violence that still manages to be poignant and even beautiful. McCarthy’s pessimistic view of human nature is clearly on display here. Part of me wants to reject this pessimism, but I know enough of the history of human interactions of the past few centuries (for just a few highlights, think about the 19th Century Indian Wars of the American West, American slavery and the Civil War, the Armenian genocide, the trench warfare of WWI, the Holocaust, the various gulags, great leaps and cultural revolutions, and killing fields of the Soviet Union, China, or Cambodia, the Nanjing massacres, the fire bombings of WWII, Rwanda, Darfur) to realize that McCarthy’s pessimism is at least as valid a perspective as any other.
16. Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
I previously wrote about this book (see “Comments on Ben Ratliff’s Coltrane”). This is the best book about music I read last year. Not a Coltrane biography so much as a “biography” of his sound, I found this to be a “delicious” read. It was one of those books I found hard to set down, but that I forced myself to ration because I knew that I’d be sad when I finished it.
17. Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992 – 95, Fantagraphics Books.
Sacco is a journalist who works in an unconventional medium – graphic art, or more prosaically: comics. Sacco’s presentation of a community under siege in desperate circumstances is, of course, heart-rending for its content alone. His work has some of the same type of impact that good photo-journalism can have, perhaps even more so in that he is able to design and construct his imagery with even freer reign than a photographer in order to have maximum effect upon the reader.
18. Albert Sánchez Piñol, Cold Skin, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
The protagonist is dropped off on a small, lonely island in the southern ocean around Antarctica, well off normal shipping lanes, to serve as a weather observer for a year, only to be continuously besieged by sea monsters. If that sort of thing interests you, this is a great novel. Even if that sort of thing doesn’t interest you, this is a great novel, but you probably wouldn’t like it.
19. José Saramago, Blindness, Harcourt.
One of those “what if” novels I mentioned liking in the introduction to the first part of this list, in this case the premise being “What if everyone went blind at once?” The novel can, of course, be read as allegory – what screams out more for allegorical interpretation than everyone being blind (other than perhaps a plague of zombies) – but I found the novel more interesting and engaging simply as a logical exploration of its starting premise – what would likely happen if everyone (or at least nearly everyone) went blind at once, if everyone lost what is for us humans a primary sense for experiencing the world.
20. Reginald Shepherd, Fata Morgana, University of Pittsburgh Press.
I have to like this book. It’s written by my partner. It’s dedicated to me, as are many of the poems contained therein. Still, even if I weren’t required to love it, I’m confident I would have found this poetry collection to be one of my favorite books of the year. I’m always struck by and fond of the vivid imagery of Shepherd’s poetry. His poetry is lyrical and fearlessly explores feeling and sentiment, something missing from much contemporary poetry that revels in irony, while never devolving into “sentimentality.”
20 1/2. By the way, Shepherd’s most recent book, a collection of essays, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, has just been published by the University of Michigan Press. I’ve read all of the powerful essays in this essay collection, and considered adding it also to this favorite books of 2007 list. However, I realize that I’ve not yet sat down and read the essays as a collective work yet, so instead I look forward to including it a year from now on my favorite books of 2008 list.
This is my favorite of the books I’ve read in 2008 so far. It’s the first of three books in a crime/mystery series set in Marseilles. The genre is not one I usually go in for, but the writing propels one forward through the text. It also contains some of the best writing about food I’ve encountered in a work that wasn’t dedicated to food writing.
12. Etgar Keret, The Nimrod Flipout, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
One blurb writer, Gary Shteyngart, writes of this short story collection that it is “The best work of literature to come out of Israel in the last five thousand years – better than Leviticus and nearly as funny.” Probably a bit much, but this is an entertaining collection of surreal stories featuring memorable characters such as the beautiful woman who transforms into a fat, hard-drinking, male soccer fan at night.
13. Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt, New York Review Books.
One of the finest and most memorable pieces of surrealist writing I’ve encountered, made the more surreal because of the fact that it’s a work of non-fiction, by the Italian journalist Malaparte writing during World War II. Two mental images from the work will always stay with me: one of German tank drivers in Ukraine swerving in panic to attempt to avoid a pack of dogs running toward them across an open plain, dogs apparently trained to run underneath armored vehicles and strapped with magnetic bombs dooming dogs and tank crews alike; the other of horses driven by forest fire into a Finnish lake in winter, frozen solid by the onset of a winter storm, and their frozen, contorted heads remaining above the frozen lake and serving occasionally as benches for occupying soldiers throughout the winter. His account of occupied Poland is heartrending, the superficial gentility of Polish nobles and occupying Germans alongside the horrors of the Jewish ghettoes.
14. Cormac McCarthy, The Road, Knopf.
This novel was highly hyped, with reviews of the novel in practically every publication that regularly reviews fiction, and with almost universally glowing reviews at that. It’s one of the few novels I’ve read that was so universally acclaimed that I felt lived up to its promise.
This was actually the first McCarthy novel I had read, and at the time I read it, it was probably the bleakest work of fiction I had ever read.
While it’s good enough to transcend genre, it can be placed into a genre of post-apocalyptic fiction.
Most post-apocalyptic fiction, whether in literature or movies, is set either just after a cataclysmic event (think The Day After Tomorrow or Alas, Babylon), with initial survivors coping with the immediate, and sometimes horrific aftermath, but without a sense of the long term consequences of cataclysm, or set long after the apocalypse in question (think about the Mad Max films, particulary The Road Warrior), with human societies having had some time to adapt to the changed circumstances (I wouldn’t want to live in the world of The Road Warrior, but it’s a world in which people could live).
The Road is different in this respect. Some major catastrophe has occurred, with nuclear winter like effects (possibly nuclear attack or major meteor impact, the latter not explicitly indicated in the text but indicated by McCarthy in a recent article in Rolling Stone). The catastrophe has occurred long enough ago that there is a sort of winding down of initially surviving society – no food will grow, there’s essentially nothing wild to forage, and all the easy pickings of grocery store canned goods are long gone – but not long enough ago for anything to have seriously begun any process of natural recovery. It’s a novel set in the lowest point for life following an earth-changing catastrophe.
The novel is also bleak in McCarthy’s pessimism about human nature. Most people in the book are vicious survivors, as ready to kill and eat other survivors (as just about the only food source left) as anything else. Still, there is a tender and redemptive quality (even without anything resembling a clearly happy ending) to the relationship between the two main characters, a man and his son on the road traveling, hoping to find a better place.
15. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, Vintage.
The Road had been the bleakest piece of fiction I had read until, after reading it, I picked up this older McCarthy novel. It’s set in the American West of the 19th Century, and is a novel with little intimacy and much casual brutality and violence that still manages to be poignant and even beautiful. McCarthy’s pessimistic view of human nature is clearly on display here. Part of me wants to reject this pessimism, but I know enough of the history of human interactions of the past few centuries (for just a few highlights, think about the 19th Century Indian Wars of the American West, American slavery and the Civil War, the Armenian genocide, the trench warfare of WWI, the Holocaust, the various gulags, great leaps and cultural revolutions, and killing fields of the Soviet Union, China, or Cambodia, the Nanjing massacres, the fire bombings of WWII, Rwanda, Darfur) to realize that McCarthy’s pessimism is at least as valid a perspective as any other.
16. Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
I previously wrote about this book (see “Comments on Ben Ratliff’s Coltrane”). This is the best book about music I read last year. Not a Coltrane biography so much as a “biography” of his sound, I found this to be a “delicious” read. It was one of those books I found hard to set down, but that I forced myself to ration because I knew that I’d be sad when I finished it.
17. Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992 – 95, Fantagraphics Books.
Sacco is a journalist who works in an unconventional medium – graphic art, or more prosaically: comics. Sacco’s presentation of a community under siege in desperate circumstances is, of course, heart-rending for its content alone. His work has some of the same type of impact that good photo-journalism can have, perhaps even more so in that he is able to design and construct his imagery with even freer reign than a photographer in order to have maximum effect upon the reader.
18. Albert Sánchez Piñol, Cold Skin, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
The protagonist is dropped off on a small, lonely island in the southern ocean around Antarctica, well off normal shipping lanes, to serve as a weather observer for a year, only to be continuously besieged by sea monsters. If that sort of thing interests you, this is a great novel. Even if that sort of thing doesn’t interest you, this is a great novel, but you probably wouldn’t like it.
19. José Saramago, Blindness, Harcourt.
One of those “what if” novels I mentioned liking in the introduction to the first part of this list, in this case the premise being “What if everyone went blind at once?” The novel can, of course, be read as allegory – what screams out more for allegorical interpretation than everyone being blind (other than perhaps a plague of zombies) – but I found the novel more interesting and engaging simply as a logical exploration of its starting premise – what would likely happen if everyone (or at least nearly everyone) went blind at once, if everyone lost what is for us humans a primary sense for experiencing the world.
20. Reginald Shepherd, Fata Morgana, University of Pittsburgh Press.
I have to like this book. It’s written by my partner. It’s dedicated to me, as are many of the poems contained therein. Still, even if I weren’t required to love it, I’m confident I would have found this poetry collection to be one of my favorite books of the year. I’m always struck by and fond of the vivid imagery of Shepherd’s poetry. His poetry is lyrical and fearlessly explores feeling and sentiment, something missing from much contemporary poetry that revels in irony, while never devolving into “sentimentality.”
20 1/2. By the way, Shepherd’s most recent book, a collection of essays, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, has just been published by the University of Michigan Press. I’ve read all of the powerful essays in this essay collection, and considered adding it also to this favorite books of 2007 list. However, I realize that I’ve not yet sat down and read the essays as a collective work yet, so instead I look forward to including it a year from now on my favorite books of 2008 list.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
My Favorite Books of 2007, Part I
Since it’s still pretty early in the year, I decided to reflect on my year in reading for 2007 and compile a list of my favorite books of last year. The books I’ve included are my favorites of the books I read in 2007. This is not a list of what I think are the best books of 2007: some had been sitting on my book shelves for a few years waiting to be read, and no doubt some of my favorite books that came out in 2007 will be my favorite reads of 2010 or so. These books are favorites in different ways – some were fun, entertaining reading, others the sorts of books I’ve found myself repeatedly thinking about ever since, some profoundly moving – but they’re all books I’m passionate about in one way or another.
In reflecting on my favorite books of the year, I’m struck by several things:
1. There’s a lot of fiction on my list. The novels and short fiction I enjoy most provide much more than escapism, but there’s no doubt that like many readers, one of the things I enjoy about fiction is the temporary reprieve from whatever I’m stressed or worried about. I suspect so much fiction shows up on my list this year in part because I’ve been stressed and worried about some major things this year, most notably my grandmother’s long battle with throat cancer, and ultimately her death in late November, and a series of episodes of illness and serious pain for my partner, and ultimately his own diagnosis with cancer, surgery, and continuing chemotherapy.
2. Most of my favorite books last year were written by men. I’m not quite sure what’s up with that. It does not fit my long term reading patterns and likes. Certainly, if I think of the ethnographies (as a cultural anthropologist, probably the type of book I’ve read the most of over the course of many years) that have been my favorites or most influenced my thinking (not necessarily the same things), the majority have been by women writers, even if I’m not really sure why that’s the case, either. One conjecture is that I read not just a lot of fiction last year, but a lot of male-written fiction, and I think you could argue (though you could also very easily over-generalize) that male written fiction is often more escapist than female written, and maybe that’s appealed to me over the past year without my quite realizing it. Or maybe it’s just the sort of random pattern that can crop up whenever you’re dealing with small samples. Even though I read considerably more books in any given year than the average person (as I would presume would be true for any academic), the set of books I read in a given year, much less my favorites among them, is too small a sample to make much of in terms of quasi-statistical generalization.
3. There’s not much anthropology on the list. Only three books were written by anthropologists (Asad, Dumont, and Sánchez Piñol), and one of those, Sánchez Piñol’s Cold Skin, was a novel, and only one, Dumont’s Under the Rainbow was an ethnography.
This is not a statement on my part about the state of the discipline. I read several ethnographies that were good, but didn’t quite grab me as favorites. (I’m not going to list them – I at least know better than to piss people off by listing books that I thought were bad, mediocre, or okay but not great.) Most of my reading for pleasure was devoted to fiction this year, as noted above. I also had quite a kick during part of the year reading books that were not strictly speaking anthropological ethnographies, but were in one way or another “writing culture,” and several of those works do show up on my list below.
4. Most of my favorite novels have one or two things in common. I’m not a huge fan of science fiction, although I’ve read a lot of it, and some of my all-time favorite books fit into the genre. For a genre based on the notion of wholesale imagining of alternate realities, I tend to find most science fiction shockingly conventional.
Most of my favorite fiction does tend to share with science fiction the imagining of alternate realities, that things could be significantly different than in my own particular situation. (This is not, at least at this point in my life, because I’m particularly unhappy with my life, but more because I find it intellectually engaging.)
Most of my favorite fiction tends to do this in one of a couple ways, either by having some of the qualities of magical realism or surrealism, where the reality depicted is in many, if not most, ways congruent with our “real” world, but functions, and in a matter of fact way, in significantly different ways in some respect, or by taking the world as we tend to know it and spinning out the ramifications of “what if” questions (What if everyone went blind at once? What if a plague of zombie-ism broke out around the world?).
Without any further adieu, the first half of my favorite books of 2007 (in alphabetical order):
1. Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing, Columbia University Press.
Not exactly a fun read, but a thoughtful rumination on terrorism, suicide bombing, and reasons for a sort of Western preoccupation with suicide bombing.
2. Alessandro Baricco, An Iliad, Knopf.
I’ve discussed Baricco’s version of the Iliad on two occasions on this blog: “Uses of Myth” and “Myth, Mythic Literacy, and Contemporary Culture.” It’s a nicely done telling, not quite a translation, of Homer’s classic.
3. Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Crown.
This is one of the “What if” novels I mentioned above, and I think it’s apparent from the title what the “what if” is. In addition to being an entertaining zombie yarn, this novel is also formally interesting, as it is presented as if an actual oral history collected among survivors of the Great Zombie War.
4. Octavia Butler, Fledgling, Seven Stories.
The only vampire novel on my favorite books of the year list (and yes, I did read other vampire works). Everything I’ve ever read by Butler, including Fledgling, has been smart and what I’d describe as “light” – not light in the sense of fluff or lacking substance, but in the sense of being fleet, with its prose providing for a fluid, quick read. (Although in other ways being extremely different from each other or from Butler, two other favorite writers that have this quality, at least for me, are Ismail Kadare and Imre Kertesz. For all three, I’ve had the experience of surprising myself by reading long, substantive works in quite short periods of time, in contrast to the “heaviness” or density of prose of some other favorite writers. For example, I find myself not so much bogged down [that would imply something unpleasant] but considerably slowed by the prose of Orhan Pamuk or José Saramago.)
5. Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek, and other stories, Vintage.
I can’t put my finger on exactly what I found so engaging about this story collection, but it’s quite good. Not having something more substantive to say, I’ll engage here in non sequitur and note that the title story’s title refers to one of my favorite place names: Woman Hollering Creek near San Antonio, Texas. (Another favorite place name that I tend to associate with it is Hungry Mother State Park in Southern Virginia.)
6. Joan Didion, Salvador, Lester & Orpen Dennys.
Published in 1983, this is a beautiful and extremely unsettling account of an unsettling place in the early 1980s.
7. Jean-Paul Dumont, Under the Rainbow: Nature and Supernature among the Panare Indians, University of Texas Press.
The only ethnography on my list, I had been meaning to read this older work from the 1960s ever since I picked it up in a used book shop in Boston a few years ago. It has one of the coolest chapter titles ever, “Time and Astrosexuality,” has plenty of wonderfully baroque structuralist diagrams, and does what many of my favorite ethnographies do – it vividly characterizes a particular culture that is fascinating in its complexity (and really it is complexity of both the Panare and Dumont’s text that is fascinating).
8. Sesshu Foster, Atomik Aztex, City Lights.
This is the “trippiest” novel I’ve read in a long time. (William S. Burroughs’ The Western Lands, which involves Billy the Kid and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, is perhaps more “trippy,” but I read that probably 15 years ago when I was on a brief Burroughs kick.) The main character is an Aztec warrior in an alternative universe/time line in which Aztec ritual and magic had enabled the survival of that empire, and in which the protagonist aids the Soviets in the defense of Stalingrad against the Germans in WWII, and in which he is destined ultimately to be sacrificed atop a pyramid. At the same time, the main character is in our universe, or at least one very like our own, a Mexican-American slaughter house worker in Southern California.
9. Jean Hatzfeld, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, Picador.
I previously wrote of Hatzfeld’s book (“A Typology of Genocide”). This is an important book, both in shedding light on one of history’s worst genocides through the voices of some of the killers themselves and in its analysis of genocide and other ethnic violence.
10. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, Vintage.
Some reviews critiqued and/or dismissed this book as a conservative revision of the Enlightenment. Certainly, Himmelfarb offers a conservative perspective on the Enlightenment, e.g. in her emphasis on the importance of religious writers in the American strain of the Enlightenment, but unlike Fox News, this careful and often insightful book is fair and balanced. For example, it makes equally clear the role of those same religious writers in contributing to the separation of church and state in the U.S., and Himmelfarb’s book makes more clear than anything else I’ve read how liberal Adam Smith could be (in both the sense of classical economic liberalism and the contemporary sense of social liberalism), and how different he could be from contemporary neo-liberals and neo-conservatives who so often invoke him.
In reflecting on my favorite books of the year, I’m struck by several things:
1. There’s a lot of fiction on my list. The novels and short fiction I enjoy most provide much more than escapism, but there’s no doubt that like many readers, one of the things I enjoy about fiction is the temporary reprieve from whatever I’m stressed or worried about. I suspect so much fiction shows up on my list this year in part because I’ve been stressed and worried about some major things this year, most notably my grandmother’s long battle with throat cancer, and ultimately her death in late November, and a series of episodes of illness and serious pain for my partner, and ultimately his own diagnosis with cancer, surgery, and continuing chemotherapy.
2. Most of my favorite books last year were written by men. I’m not quite sure what’s up with that. It does not fit my long term reading patterns and likes. Certainly, if I think of the ethnographies (as a cultural anthropologist, probably the type of book I’ve read the most of over the course of many years) that have been my favorites or most influenced my thinking (not necessarily the same things), the majority have been by women writers, even if I’m not really sure why that’s the case, either. One conjecture is that I read not just a lot of fiction last year, but a lot of male-written fiction, and I think you could argue (though you could also very easily over-generalize) that male written fiction is often more escapist than female written, and maybe that’s appealed to me over the past year without my quite realizing it. Or maybe it’s just the sort of random pattern that can crop up whenever you’re dealing with small samples. Even though I read considerably more books in any given year than the average person (as I would presume would be true for any academic), the set of books I read in a given year, much less my favorites among them, is too small a sample to make much of in terms of quasi-statistical generalization.
3. There’s not much anthropology on the list. Only three books were written by anthropologists (Asad, Dumont, and Sánchez Piñol), and one of those, Sánchez Piñol’s Cold Skin, was a novel, and only one, Dumont’s Under the Rainbow was an ethnography.
This is not a statement on my part about the state of the discipline. I read several ethnographies that were good, but didn’t quite grab me as favorites. (I’m not going to list them – I at least know better than to piss people off by listing books that I thought were bad, mediocre, or okay but not great.) Most of my reading for pleasure was devoted to fiction this year, as noted above. I also had quite a kick during part of the year reading books that were not strictly speaking anthropological ethnographies, but were in one way or another “writing culture,” and several of those works do show up on my list below.
4. Most of my favorite novels have one or two things in common. I’m not a huge fan of science fiction, although I’ve read a lot of it, and some of my all-time favorite books fit into the genre. For a genre based on the notion of wholesale imagining of alternate realities, I tend to find most science fiction shockingly conventional.
Most of my favorite fiction does tend to share with science fiction the imagining of alternate realities, that things could be significantly different than in my own particular situation. (This is not, at least at this point in my life, because I’m particularly unhappy with my life, but more because I find it intellectually engaging.)
Most of my favorite fiction tends to do this in one of a couple ways, either by having some of the qualities of magical realism or surrealism, where the reality depicted is in many, if not most, ways congruent with our “real” world, but functions, and in a matter of fact way, in significantly different ways in some respect, or by taking the world as we tend to know it and spinning out the ramifications of “what if” questions (What if everyone went blind at once? What if a plague of zombie-ism broke out around the world?).
Without any further adieu, the first half of my favorite books of 2007 (in alphabetical order):
1. Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing, Columbia University Press.
Not exactly a fun read, but a thoughtful rumination on terrorism, suicide bombing, and reasons for a sort of Western preoccupation with suicide bombing.
2. Alessandro Baricco, An Iliad, Knopf.
I’ve discussed Baricco’s version of the Iliad on two occasions on this blog: “Uses of Myth” and “Myth, Mythic Literacy, and Contemporary Culture.” It’s a nicely done telling, not quite a translation, of Homer’s classic.
3. Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Crown.
This is one of the “What if” novels I mentioned above, and I think it’s apparent from the title what the “what if” is. In addition to being an entertaining zombie yarn, this novel is also formally interesting, as it is presented as if an actual oral history collected among survivors of the Great Zombie War.
4. Octavia Butler, Fledgling, Seven Stories.
The only vampire novel on my favorite books of the year list (and yes, I did read other vampire works). Everything I’ve ever read by Butler, including Fledgling, has been smart and what I’d describe as “light” – not light in the sense of fluff or lacking substance, but in the sense of being fleet, with its prose providing for a fluid, quick read. (Although in other ways being extremely different from each other or from Butler, two other favorite writers that have this quality, at least for me, are Ismail Kadare and Imre Kertesz. For all three, I’ve had the experience of surprising myself by reading long, substantive works in quite short periods of time, in contrast to the “heaviness” or density of prose of some other favorite writers. For example, I find myself not so much bogged down [that would imply something unpleasant] but considerably slowed by the prose of Orhan Pamuk or José Saramago.)
5. Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek, and other stories, Vintage.
I can’t put my finger on exactly what I found so engaging about this story collection, but it’s quite good. Not having something more substantive to say, I’ll engage here in non sequitur and note that the title story’s title refers to one of my favorite place names: Woman Hollering Creek near San Antonio, Texas. (Another favorite place name that I tend to associate with it is Hungry Mother State Park in Southern Virginia.)
6. Joan Didion, Salvador, Lester & Orpen Dennys.
Published in 1983, this is a beautiful and extremely unsettling account of an unsettling place in the early 1980s.
7. Jean-Paul Dumont, Under the Rainbow: Nature and Supernature among the Panare Indians, University of Texas Press.
The only ethnography on my list, I had been meaning to read this older work from the 1960s ever since I picked it up in a used book shop in Boston a few years ago. It has one of the coolest chapter titles ever, “Time and Astrosexuality,” has plenty of wonderfully baroque structuralist diagrams, and does what many of my favorite ethnographies do – it vividly characterizes a particular culture that is fascinating in its complexity (and really it is complexity of both the Panare and Dumont’s text that is fascinating).
8. Sesshu Foster, Atomik Aztex, City Lights.
This is the “trippiest” novel I’ve read in a long time. (William S. Burroughs’ The Western Lands, which involves Billy the Kid and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, is perhaps more “trippy,” but I read that probably 15 years ago when I was on a brief Burroughs kick.) The main character is an Aztec warrior in an alternative universe/time line in which Aztec ritual and magic had enabled the survival of that empire, and in which the protagonist aids the Soviets in the defense of Stalingrad against the Germans in WWII, and in which he is destined ultimately to be sacrificed atop a pyramid. At the same time, the main character is in our universe, or at least one very like our own, a Mexican-American slaughter house worker in Southern California.
9. Jean Hatzfeld, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, Picador.
I previously wrote of Hatzfeld’s book (“A Typology of Genocide”). This is an important book, both in shedding light on one of history’s worst genocides through the voices of some of the killers themselves and in its analysis of genocide and other ethnic violence.
10. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, Vintage.
Some reviews critiqued and/or dismissed this book as a conservative revision of the Enlightenment. Certainly, Himmelfarb offers a conservative perspective on the Enlightenment, e.g. in her emphasis on the importance of religious writers in the American strain of the Enlightenment, but unlike Fox News, this careful and often insightful book is fair and balanced. For example, it makes equally clear the role of those same religious writers in contributing to the separation of church and state in the U.S., and Himmelfarb’s book makes more clear than anything else I’ve read how liberal Adam Smith could be (in both the sense of classical economic liberalism and the contemporary sense of social liberalism), and how different he could be from contemporary neo-liberals and neo-conservatives who so often invoke him.
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