Top-10 Reads of 2011

One of my favorite things about the New Year’s season is the banished-words list, which this year includes such overused and obnoxious words as “amazing,” “occupy,” and “ginormous.” I also like reading various favorite-book lists. And because there aren’t enough New Year’s lists on the internet, I am posting my Top-10 Reads of 2011.

At the beginning of 2011, I set a goal on Goodreads to read 100 books from cover to cover. Articles, excerpts from books, and judicial opinions would not count toward the total. I finished the year with a total of 116. From that pool, here are the 10 I most enjoyed.

1. Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Mosley. This is series of short stories about aging ex-con Socrates Fortlowe. There are so many good things to say about this book. Mosley is a master stylist who writes pitch-perfect dialogue. The characterization in this book is particularly good. For whatever reason, when I read Mosley I find myself meditating on honor — his characters never talk about it, but they always make me think about it.

2. A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition by Ernest Hemingway. Another short collection of loosely connected chapters by a master stylist. This is the posthumously published memoir of an old, successful writer looking back on his early years as a young, struggling writer in Paris during the 1920s. I alternated reading chapters of this book with reading sections of In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises — the fiction that young Hemingway was writing back in Paris.

3. The Godfather by Mario Puzo. I finally read this crime classic. Better than the movie.

4. Jurismania: The Madness of American Law by Paul Campos. This is a well-written and persuasively argued tract on why the American legal system requires lawyers to be at least a little bit crazy. There is a lot of good material on the role of “reason” in the law and the role of legal thinking in our society. I will definitely read this book again.

5. Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler. A murder mystery that I’ve been meaning to read for awhile. I’m glad I did.

6. The Sherlockian by Graham Moore. It’s like The Da Vinci Code, but instead of paintings I’ve never seen, the murder mystery involves literature I adore.

7. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. This rich, complex novel plays to my bizarre love of conspiracy theories and esoterica. As the characters struggle to hold myriad contradictory conspiracy theories in their heads at once, the book plods relentlessly further until it positively sags under the weight of centuries of mystic tradition. I’m sure I missed hundreds of obscure literary, historical, and religious references in this novel, but I got enough of them to appreciate Eco’s craftsmanship. If I were to ever learn Italian, it would be for the sole purpose of reading Eco in the original language.

8. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. Wolfe’s style sometimes irks me: it’s repetitive, hyperbolic, and flashy. But in this book he has a fascinating subject and ready-made characters. The movie has been one of my favorites for years, but I’m glad I didn’t read the book until this past year. Now that I actually know some military aviators, I was able to appreciate the book so much more than I would have otherwise.

9. The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll by H.G. Wells. This is a charming, funny novel about an English shopkeeper’s vacation spent bicycling in the countryside. The hapless cyclist peddles from one misadventure to the next until his holiday comes to a bittersweet but inevitable end. This is another one that I will definitely read again.

10. A Bell for Adano by John Hersey. A comic novel about cross-cultural relations and military bureaucracy. At least, I think it was supposed to be comical. For all their absurdity, the sections about military bureaucracy actually rang very true.

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