Jenn is in her third year here at BookPeople. She also works at the Harry Ransom Center, where she solves tiny mysteries for people.
In no particular order…
1. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1980)
This is by no means a new book, but I came to it this year and it pretty much knocked me flat. Ruthie grows up in the haunted landscape of Fingerbone, Idaho and has to adapt to the unconventional lifestyle of her drifter aunt Sylvie. At a certain point, there’s really nothing left for them to do but burn the house down and make tracks…
2. The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño (2011)
I read this book in installments as it was published in The Paris Review, and I highly recommend the experience. No one can write suspense like Bolaño. What starts off as an idyllic getaway in a sleepy Spanish town descends quickly into mystery, disappearance, and unexplained violence. The protagonist, meanwhile, carries on playing his war game, unaware of its influence on the world around him.
3. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (2011)
Now that the buzz has died down, it’s high time to dig into Wallace’s last work. While everyone was obsessed with the fact that the book is “unfinished,” I find that it reads as a pretty satisfactory set of linked stories. The style is more lyrical, more mythical than most of his stuff; parts are deep in conversation with one William Faulkner. He writes about an IRS center in rural Illinois—which might not grab ya—so I’ll let the opening speak for itself: “Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.”
4. Blue Nights by Joan Didion (2011)
“Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.” This little book gave me the shakes. Following in the vein of The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion addresses a mother’s grief over her child in prose that leans toward poetry. I think this is Didion’s most honest book; in a writer known for her frankness, that’s saying something.
5. Underworld by Don Delillo (1997)
This book consumed a large chunk of my life in 2011. It’s one that has been on my list for awhile; I’m so glad I finally got around to tackling it. The hunt for a baseball turns into the hunt for America in the Cold War years. This book captures a time, a place, and its language so vividly—you’ll forget what year you’re living in while you read it.
*Honorable mentions (that others have mentioned):
Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife
John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead
Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84
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