Immediately after I made my favorite fiction list of 2011 a month ago, I read two more books that demand places on that list.
The first is Justin Cartwright’s Other People’s Money, a razor-sharp tale centering on the very rich people who broke the global economy because they think they’re better than everyone else. Its protagonists are the owners of a 300-year-old English bank that has gotten severely burned by their forays into sub primes and collateralized debt instruments.
It would’ve been easy to people this story with caricatures like in some highbrow telenovela—the incoherent patriarch, his much younger wife, his eldest son, the slightly cuckoo explorer and so on—but Cartwright gives us complex characters who emerge as human beings. If you’re still trying to understand how the global financial meltdown happened, I recommend that you watch Charles Ferguson’s excellent documentary Inside Job, read Other People’s Money, and finish with J.C. Chandor’s feature film debut Margin Call, set on the last trading day of a Lehman Brothers-like firm.
The other book is The Angel Esmeralda, the first collection of stories by Don De Lillo. Do you notice that there are writers who make no impression on you initially, and then years later hit you like a lightning bolt? In my case it’s DeLillo. These stories are so electrifying, I felt as if my brain had been rewired and I was seeing the world in an entirely different way.
One week into 2012 and I’m already behind on my reading. The backlog includes books that have figured in many Best-of-2011 lists: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (I don’t get baseball or Brad Pitt, but I enjoyed the movie Moneyball and in it Brad looks exactly like Robert Redford in The Natural), and 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami.
One book I was really looking forward to but ended up hurling across the room: The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Clunky and belabored, it is Mills and Boon for the academic set.
Most important discovery of 2011: Immediately after you read anything by P.G. Wodehouse, especially the Jeeves stories, you will write better. (Obviously I didn’t read Wodehouse right before this.)
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Jaime Augusto Zobel’s List
“Winner of the Booker Prize in 2011, The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes is a wonderful novel on adolescence, aging, memory, love and friendship. It has an English sensibility (it is set in England with all its many particular characteristics) but remains universal in its bigger themes. It contains some mysteries and a second reading is recommended.
“Snowdrops by A.D. Miller is set in an amoral Moscow; the snowdrop of the title refers to the dead bodies that appear when snow thaws. A middle-aged lawyer leaves London for the fast-paced deal-making of Russia. The descriptions of a Moscow filled with double-dealing, crime, oligarchs, fast money and loose women is masterful. The novel shines though when you see the protagonist slide, almost helplessly (despite his training and background), into the same vortex of deceit that seems to swallow almost everyone in the city. His almost willful decline into being duped is made human and interesting by the frankness of his retrospection.
“I have read most, if not all, of Robert Harris’s books. The Fear Index by Robert Harris is as entertaining as the rest. A financial thriller that weaves in and out of settings ranging from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland to the quants running hedge funds in financial centers. It clearly has traces of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the creation of a monster that you can no longer control. The variables that have driven the capitalist system, and the financial institutions that drive it, to partial ruin are eloquently described. At another level it is a satisfying thriller and mystery.
“Vintage Sacks by Oliver Sacks. Combining medicine and psychology, Oliver Sacks takes you on a wonderful ride through the idiosyncracies and fascinating twists of the brain. At a time when we are discovering new elements of neurobiology and continuing to pull apart the little understood layers of cognitive function, these stories, and his human ability to capture them for the layman, make fascinating reading.
“The Good Life by Peter Gomes. Rev. Professor Peter J. Gomes was the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard Univerisity. He died in 2011. He is Christian in his outlook on life but beyond his biblical references, he was an astonishingly erudite speaker who left any individual, from any background and religion, always inspired by his words. He was an extraordinary human being who was at his best lifting students (and all who listened to him, for that matter) to a higher level of introspection on the bigger questions that life poses.
“Stephen Hunter’s books are not a great contribution to literature. However I have to admit that after reading Dirty White Boys many years ago, I was hooked. You can find him on the mass-market shelves; turn to his books if you like fast-paced thrillers, lone heroes and military jargon.