2006, In Review: Books

Mothers lock up your daughters.

It's that fearful time of year again when I unleash my woeful end of the year opinions onto my disinterested audience.

One of the benefits of spending most of the year as an underemployed hack was having the time to keep relatively abreast of recent books. And as a Man of Letters who likes his literature dead, white and male, I must admit that 2006 has provided some works of considerable quality.

My humble picks for the five best of the year:

Fiction

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The bleakest novel of the year, but also the best. The book's existential leanings should be apparent from the title, but the terseness of McCarthy's prose belies the book's poetic structure and its stunning moments of fleeting beauty.


The Emperor's Children by Clarie Messud

It's hard for me to write about The Emperor's Children without referencing Meghan O'Rourke's wonderful review in which she manages to perfectly capture the distinct tone and the syntactical complexity of Messud's writing. Simply a joy to read.


Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon

Okay. This is cheating because I am only 200 odd pages through this 1,085 behemoth. But somewhere between the army of Arctic subterranean gnomes with laser crossbows and the Russian captain Igor Padzhitnoff who drops Tetris blocks on his foes, I decided Pynchon was quite possibly my favorite author.


Non-Fiction

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

"The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and the passive" -- William Ralph Inge. Pollan employs the old Sartrean trick of inverting the subject and object to reveal all that is absurd and abhorrent in our daily consumption habits. This should be required reading for every American.

Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins

Jenkins supplies the analytical tools to comprehend the social ramifications of information communities in the age of New Media. The six case studies, which range from Survivor Spoiler Message Boards to corrupt Cyberelections in The Sims, are both enlightening and enormously entertaining.