Let’s start this little trek down memory lane with a look at my favorite books of 2006. (And, to state the obvious, not all were published in 2006; that’s just when I read them.)
I start here because I had a wonderful year of reading. When I anally add a title to my list(s), I give it a simple A-C listing (I suppose I could go below C, but the chances of my finishing something that wasn’t even worth a C are slim). At the end of the year, I try to stick with the contemporaneous rating, even though I sometimes feel I’ve been rather harsh—or perhaps it’s that I get more generous as the memory fades. This year, of the 57 titles that I read, I only awarded one C—to Piers Morgan’s The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade—and really, the failing grade was awarded to the odious Mr. Morgan; the diaries themselves, although clearly bogus in that they were written long after the events occurred, were hideously compelling. I also only gave five B- ratings, along with 29 B’s, 20 B+s, and two well-deserved A’s.
Not necessarily in order of preference, 10 (more or less) favorites from 2006:
Arguments With England: A Memoir, by Michael Blakemore. I have to admit, I didn’t know who Michael Blakemore was when I first came across this book, but the copy that came to the office included the glowing review Simon Callow wrote for the Guardian, which convinced me to give it a whirl. What a fantastic book! Blakemore is a wonderfully evocative writer—about acting (both doing it and witnessing it), family, promiscuity, relationships, leaving home, England in the 1950s and ‘60s. Ach, he’s great about pretty much everything, actually. It’s one of those memoirs that feels honest (how can we ever really know?) because he doesn’t pretend that he didn’t fail at some things or that he wasn’t sometimes a bit silly or pompous, but he also avoids that annoying memoirist’s trick of pretending that everyone got along wonderfully and life was always peachy. The young Blakemore is often broke and feuding (most entertainingly with Peter Hall) and involved in messy love triangles (most entertainingly with Vanessa Redgrave and Peter Hall), but by the end of the book, he’s starting to have some success as a director. I hope he’s working on another volume right now, because after spending nearly 400 pages on his early stumblings, I want to know what happened as he became more sure-footed. (His novel Next Season is also very entertaining. Read it after you’ve read the memoir, so you recognize the real folks behind the fictional characters.)
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel If there’s a You Say Tomato books of the year list, there’s an Alison Bechdel title onit. After more than 20 years and at least 11 volumes of Dykes to Watch Out For, her intricately detailed (and very funny) social history that sparkled in relative obscurity, the wonderful Fun Home—a graphic memoir—got the plaudits and attention that Alison has always deserved. (Time magazine’s book of the year, Entertainment Weekly’s nonfiction book of the year, and a million Top 10 lists.) Still, I can’t help wondering if a) the word “dykes” hadn’t been in the titles; b) there’d been a man at the center of those earlier books, she might’ve avoided all those years of obscurity.
Obedience, Struggle and Revolt, by David Hare. I know, it sounds like a report from the B&D committee of a Spartacist splinter group, and no one could accuse David Hare of being a comedian, but there’s some wonderful stuff in this collection of lectures. (Yes, lectures.) I could’ve done with a little less John Osborne worship (Sir David, baby, make your case and move on), but Hare is a clear thinker and (sometimes) a devastating case-maker.
Primo Time, by Antony Sher. Obviously, a lot of this year’s reading was focused, in one way or another, on the theater. Of the “actorly” books that I took in, I particularly enjoyed Sher’s account of developing his one-man show Primo—fashioned from Primo Levi’s writings about his time in Auschwitz. It seems silly to complain about the author being self-absorbed—that’s kind of the point of the book—but if any of my friends were contemplating becoming involved with an actor, I’d get a copy of this book into their hands, stat! Years ago, I read Sher’s wonderful novel Middlepost. I’m not sure if it was in Primo Time or Year of the King that Sher talks openly about his frustration at the low effort-to-response ratio of fiction-writing and his hopes that his diaries might be a profitable side line (I’m being much more crass about it than he was). I hope they do—like Simon Callow (with whom he has a ton in common and with whom, I understand, he has quite a rivalry)—it’s astonishing that such a talented actor would be such an excellent writer.
Fifth Row Center: A Critic’s Year On and Off Broadway, by Benedict Nightingale, and The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway, by William Goldman. Nightingale comes across as the nicer chap (or perhaps it’s my soft spot for writers who confess their flaws) and Goldman is the more astute phenomenon-namer, but both these books taught me a lot about commercial theater, New York, and the life of the theater critic.
Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq, by Rory Stewart. It was a bit of a year for memoirs for me. I also enjoyed Stewart’s The Places in Between, but this account of his time as vice-governor of the Iraqi province of Maysan is astonishing. The conflict in Iraq has brought us some great books (The Assassin’s Gate, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, to name but a couple), but Stewart wasn’t a journalist or an academic (like Larry Diamond, whose Squandered Victory is also about how bureaucracy and meddling politicians made a tough challenge impossible); he’s a traveler who wants to make a difference by listening to people and taking account of history and trying to do the right thing. He doesn’t have a career to make or points to score, and he has to admit defeat pretty early. (Read excerpts from the book at Slate.)
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright. The chapters about the philosophical origins of al-Qaida and Osama Bin Laden’s path to infamy are fabulous. As interesting as the latter sections on flawed FBI agent John O’Neill are, that part of the book felt overpowered by the brilliance of the al-Qaida section. Still, as everyone says, it’s a total page-turner.
The Q Guide to Broadway, by Seth Rudetsky. I bought this book to give to a musical-theater-loving British friend who’s coming to New York in the spring. In the end, I had to buy a new copy to give away, because I couldn’t bear to part with it. It’s a small, unpretentious book, and Rudetsky wears his expertise lightly. Not only does he have musical-theater trivia down flat, he really knows music and does a great job of explaining why some songs or musicals work while others don’t. It’s also laugh-out-loud-on-the-subway funny.
What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal, by Zoe Heller. I picked up the novel, which I’d been wanting to read for a while, in anticipation of the movie. I inhaled the book—it’s smart, it’s beautifully observed, and it’s deliciously creepy—but having finally seen a trailer for the movie and read some reviews, I won’t be seeing it, as much as I love Dame Judi and Dame-to-be Cate. The book is a classic example of an unreliable narrator, which I guess you have to clarify when making a movie, but making a predatory friend into a predatory lesbian is not cool.
The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuscinski. If the beginning of the year was all about theatrical tomes, the last month or two has been dominated by Africa. In January, I’m off to Nigeria, so I’ve been boning up by reading books with such cheery titles as The Open Sore of a Continent, This House Has Fallen, and Where Vultures Feast. Someone recommended Kapuscinski, and all I can say is, “Why haven’t I read him before?” I immediately ordered four other collections—and have loved Shah of Shahs, about Iran. Wonderful writing, and a great translation by Klara Glowczewska.
The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud. It’s been a while since I read the big novel of the moment and truly enjoyed it. Hideous and yet irresistible characters, a relentless narrative, and lovely observation. I haven’t had a chance to listen to the Slate Audio Book Club discussion of the book yet, but I will, very soon.
The final rundown on my 2006 reading was: 57 books, of which 22 were works of fiction (including four young-adult novels), 28 were nonfiction (including two works of graphic nonfiction), and seven were plays.
As I said about this time last year, I’m more than a little embarrassed by my habit of making compulsive lists of the movies and plays that I see and the books that I read. (Actually, I’ve only been keeping a list of the plays that I see for a couple of years now—I wish I had a better record of what I’d seen in London, Madrid, Seattle, and on my quick jaunts to New York when I still lived on the West Coast.)
Anyhoo, what’s the point of feeling self-conscious about my anorak tendencies, may as well just revel in them and reveal them. (And it’s not like I’m providing a pivot table or offering any complicated correlations.)
In 2006, I saw 71 plays (confession: this does count five constituent plays of Druid/Synge separately; second confession, yes, five, I left before the last one!); I saw 22 movies; and I read 57 books.
Movie-going has taken a huge hit since we moved to New York. I saw 106 movies in 2004, my last full year in Seattle; then 42 in 2005; then 22 in this first full year here. New York is a great movie city—but so is Seattle. There’s nothing like the magnificent SIFF on my New York cultural agenda, nor is there anything like the Warren Report —at least that I’m aware of. (The one time I went to a New York ObserverCinema Club screening, the line was ridiculous. We didn’t make it into the movie, despite arriving early—I decided right then that it wasn’t worth saving the price of admission.) But the biggest reason for the low movie count, of course, was that I spent more than 65 afternoons and evenings in the theater.
I don’t think I’ll do a series of Top 10 lists or anything quite so formal, but check back over the next couple of days for my thoughts on the most memorable—and sometimes disappointing—plays, books, movies, TV shows, and music of 2006.
Last week I read David Hare's amazing collection of lectures (that's right, lectures), Obedience, Struggle & Revolt.
I'm not usually the kind of person to copy things out of books, but this collection had me reaching for pen and paper every few pages.
I definitely, and unfortunately, recognized myself in this:
To an extent the theater will always be a magnet for hobbyists, people who are drawn like trainspotters or matchbox fans to compare different performances of Hamlet. They form, if you like, a core audience, who survive over the years. Their overriding interest is in the maintenance and improvement of their collections, and so they will direct their attention not so much at what is said, as to the skills which are being used to say it.
My favorite books of 2005, in no particular order:
Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders, by John Mortimer I’ve been reading Rumpole since I was skiving off school more than 30 years ago. In the early—it now seems glory—days of British daytime television, they mostly ran old films, nostalgic TV shows that might appeal to old folks (Sam, World at War, that kind of thing) and mysteries—including the fabulous Crown Court and Rumpole of the Bailey. Even though Leo McKern has left the Bailey, when I’m reading these books, I still see his crumpled old one-eyed face in Rumpole’s, the second Hilda, and the haughty Patricia Hodge as Phyllida Erskine-Brown, “the Portia of our chambers.” What’s the sports cliché—we shouldn’t have gotten this far, so the rest is just gravy. But such tasty gravy! (On another note—I was shocked to learn recently that Emily Mortimer, one of my favorite actresses, is John Mortimer’s daughter. And that he had a son with Wendy Craig of Butterflies fame!)
The Strange Death of Tory England, by Geoffrey Wheatcroft The very beginning is rather hard going, but once he’s established his theme, it’s terribly readable and extremely interesting. Wheatcroft sure has a way with a sentence. I still can’t really tell where his sympathies lie—which is a good thing, I suppose.
Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America, by Sarah Schulman This book had been sitting on my shelves for years, and as the movie version of Rent neared, I thought I’d better read it for research purposes. What an amazing exposé of homophobia in culture and commerce. Utterly convincing and utterly devastating.
Popco, by Scarlett Thomas Popco started off wonderfully—full of ideas about the way girls play and learn, codes, parenting, work, etc.—and buckled under the weight of too many ideas/plot strands about halfway through. That first half was really exciting, though!
Incendiary, by Chris Cleave Incendiary got a bad rap (but a lot of attention) because of timing—it’s a book about terrorism (a woman who has lost her husband and son in a terrorist attack writes a letter to Osama Bin Laden), and its pub date was July 7, the day of the London subway and bus bombings. The publicity campaign (complete with posters in the Underground) got canceled, the New York Timescalled the book “a case of simple tastelessness,” but I really enjoyed it. At first I was suspicious—it’s a book by a man (and my guess is a middle-class man) in the voice of a working-class woman. I’m not sure that American readers will get the cultural references—OK, the class references—but the book’s publisher told the Guardian that more than half of the 25,000 copies sold have been to the export market, which “perhaps confirms that distance has enabled people to read this brilliant debut novel on its own terms."
Invasion of the Dykes to Watch Out For, by Alison Bechdel Another series that has become part of my life. This is the 11th installment in a series that I hope will go on forever. Mo, c’est moi, even if we have less and less in common, at least politically. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to go Log Cabin, but my views on the Iraq war have little in common with Mo’s.) I love all the little details and jokes in the drawings—you have to read each panel at least five times to experience the five stages of DTWOF appreciation.
The Night Watch, by Sarah Waters Shockingly, perhaps, this is the first Sarah Waters novel I’ve read. It’s a story about World War II, more or less, and it’s told backward, in three sections set in 1947, 1944, and 1942, respectively. Waters is clearly a fantastic writer, and she was able to make me think about a well-trod subject, the war, in new ways. My only frustration is that about three-quarters of the way through, you realize that you’re never going to know how the various characters resolved their lives—you’ll be able to explain their behavior in 1947, but not how they’re going to move on. It’s funny how much messing with the traditional conflict/resolution arc frustrates a reader (this one, anyway).
The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, by George Packer The first draft of history, only this one’s almost perfect. Packer is tremendously thoughtful, a remarkable reporter, and a beautiful writer. A fantastic portrait of what the administration did in Iraq after the war “ended.”
"I Didn't Do It for You": How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation, by Michela Wrong I hate the title of this book—it doesn’t even mention Eritrea, the small nation under discussion, but I loved the content. After you read this book, it’s tempting to look at every news event and wonder how exactly Eritrea is going to be dragged into it—because history suggests it eventually will.
And one I didn’t like at all:
A Necessary Spectacle: Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs, and the Tennis Match That Leveled the Game, by Selena Roberts It’s really too bad Roberts used the word “necessary” in the title, because that’s the last thing this book is. Its publication is inexplicable to me—there’s no anniversary, there’s no new insight into the match, into women’s tennis, and certainly not into Billie Jean King. If there’s one person I’d like to read a good biography of—one that really explains her personality and motivations, it’s BJK, but this book provides absolutely nothing that we haven’t known for decades.
The complete list. Breakdown: Fiction 11; Nonfiction 13; Comic 2; Play 1; Hybrid (the utterly misbegotten Hotel Babylon) 1.
