Liz’s Top 5 Reads of 2012

Liz is a member of BookPeople’s event staff—you may have seen her at various readings, dressed up as Amelia Bedelia in a giant be-flowered bonnet or, once, with her face painted like a weird jungle cat. She’s primarily a reader, writer, and lover of short fiction, but her favorite books from 2012 span a few different genres:

1. Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

If all magazine articles were written the way John Jeremiah Sullivan writes magazine articles, I would read nothing but magazines. All day, every day. Just thinking about his description of Michael Jackson’s moonwalk in this book gives me goosebumps. The essay topics in this engaging collection range from a Christian rock festival to Axl Rose to Bunny Wailer, and they’ve been published in places like GQ, The Paris Review, and Harper’s. Sullivan is just amazing. He writes some of the most dazzling sentences I’ve ever read; he makes me laugh hysterically; and he does it all with a thoughtful honesty that is flat-out fun to read.

2. Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead

I’m already realizing I’m going to talk a lot about authors’ word-usage in these reviews, but so be it. I’m head over heels in love with Maggie Shipstead’s prose. Her debut novel, Seating Arrangements, about a privileged family falling apart at the seams over the course of a summer wedding, impressed me in so many ways: it’s full of wonderfully flawed and complicated characters; it has a crazy, tangled web of a plot; and it mesmerized me with its beautiful, booze-filled, Nantucket- esque setting. But her words! And her sentences! And her paragraphs! Reading this book is not just entertaining, but also an exercise in watching a young, master-craftswoman at work.

3. This Is Not Your City by Caitlin Horrocks

I want to call this a charming collection of stories because there’s a snow globe on the cover and because I think Caitlin Horrocks herself is so charming, but really her stories are sometimes strange and often surprising and even, occasionally, a little jagged. The pieces in this debut collection take place in a fantasy world created by girlhood best friends, on an awkward booze cruise to Estonia, and in a backyard full of stolen dogs. They are very sad, very lovely, and very well-written. I think Horrocks is a terrific new writer to keep an eye on.

4. The Awakening by Kate Chopin

How does a person graduate from college with a major in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies without once reading this book? This is a question no one can answer. Still, somehow, I read The Awakening for the first time this year, and I immediately understood why it carries the literary weight it does. Love, lust, apathy, ambition, societal restraints, and the sea—what more can a reader ask for?

5. Blue Nights by Joan Didion

I spent a portion of this year learning more about Didion than I ever thought I would, and I find her an endlessly fascinating writer. While her early collections of essays are insightful in a sharp, snarky way, Didion reveals her insights more wistfully and beautifully in Blue Nights. Her reflections on love and death and aging are just devastating. For fans of her earlier work: I truly believe she has only gotten better, as the years have passed, at using images and repetition to evoke emotions in her readers.