The following list was decided after consultation between California Review of Books co-editors David Starkey and Brian Tanguay and the journal’s most frequent reviewers, Walter Cummins and George Yatchisin. As always when creating year-end lists, we could have easily generated another one that included an additional 10 or 20 or 50 outstanding books. However, we believe a reader who dives into these particular volumes will find work that is stimulating, provocative, deeply memorable — and in some cases quite unexpected. CRB‘s famous eclecticism is on proud and full display in this list. (The books are presented in alphabetical order by author’s last name.)
What Is It Like to Be Alive? Fourteen Attempts at an Answer by Chris Arthur (Eastover)
An immediate reaction to Chris Arthur’s title may lead a potential reader to expect a physiological study, but Arthur is really interested in considering how humans live their lives as historical beings in particular places in association with other people and other creatures. As his prize-winning essays always do, these start with a small specific like a photograph or a plaque on a bench and end up connecting with the largest of our questions as a species to demonstrate that “… we’re part of one story, the human saga, written on Earth in the syllabary of individual lives.” Ultimately, that is what it is like to be alive. (Read Walter Cummins’s full review here.)
The Glutton by AK Blakemore (Scribner)
A shocking fairy tale as vivid as a Breughel or Bosch, AK Blakemore’s novel The Glutton, based on a wisp of a fantastical, 18th-century real person, takes us on an imaginative, despairing ride through the French Revolution. Her peasant with perpetual hunger Tarare is both believable and mythic, therefore a political emblem for his cruel age and our own. Plus, everything is leavened by the care of Blakemore’s poetic prose. (Read George Yatchisin’s full review here.)
The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet by Brett Christophers (Verso)
We have been conditioned over the past half-century to put our faith in markets and private enterprise, but Christophers demonstrates that this faith is suspect when it comes to electricity. Generating electricity produces the most CO2 emissions, which is why decarbonizing electricity is so critical. An important warning about the global economic structure and how it will continue to prioritize fossil fuels for the simple reason that they’re more profitable than renewables. (Read Brian Tanguay’s full review here.)
James by Percival Everett (Doubleday)
Everett’s reframing of Mark Twain’s novel involves a radical perspective shift, creatively filling in narrative gaps along the way, but for the most part it follows the structure of the original. One of the most anguishing aspects of the novel is the power of slavery not only utterly to disempower the enslaved, but in some instances to convince them that their situation is not entirely miserable, yet the protagonist is never less than certain of his own worth and humanity. The transition from Jim to James is a profound one, and when a white man asks him to state his last name, the book’s hero replies: “Just James.” The novel feels like a cinch to win all the big awards this year, and deservedly so. (Read David Starkey’s full review here.)
My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine by Sami Hermez, with Sireen Sawalha (Redwood)
Palestinian perspectives are sorely lacking in the West. Books like My Brother, My Land humanize the Palestinians and place their long struggle against dispossession in context, though I found the book difficult to read at a time when Gaza is under ferocious military assault that could render this frequently devastated sliver of land unrecognizable and uninhabitable. Palestinians have dreams, hopes and aspirations for a homeland that are as legitimate as those of the Israelis, and their endless struggle for autonomy reminds the world of the transcendent universal human longing for recognition and dignity. (Read Brian Tanguay’s full review here.)
New and Selected Poems by Marie Howe (Norton)
Over the course of 37 years, Howe has published just four books of poetry, along with the 20 new poems in this collection, and yet, like Elizabeth Bishop, that scarcity of output has made each poem its own little treasure. Howe’s work is deceptively simple, and individual sentences may seem unremarkable. Yet each poem displays a deep concentration and often a deep, barely concealed sorrow. The poems in What the Living Do about the AIDS-related death of her brother John are wrenching, and in “The Copper Beech,” she writes: “Immense, entirely itself, / it wore that yard like a dress, // with limbs low enough for me to enter it / and climb the crooked ladder to where // I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.” (Read David Starkey’s coverage of the year in poetry here.)
Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York (Columbia)
Kosut’s villains in Art Monster are the smug successes of the art world, the owners of the big celebrity-friendly galleries who may charge a 50 percent commission, and the uber-wealthy artists — think Jeff Koons, for example — who may never be physically involved in the creation of their own work, but simply come up with ideas for others to execute. If you’ve ever had a friend who is brilliant, super-sarcastic, notices everything, can be incredibly mean but always employs that anger in service of some greater ideal, then you will recognize the authorial voice of Marin Kosut in Art Monster. Books about art that are both insightful and compellingly readable (not to mention funny) are exceedingly rare, but Kosut has written just such a work. (Read David Starkey’s full review here.)
My Beloved Life by Amitava Kumar (Knopf)
Beautifully written and full of intelligence, this is the story of one man’s life and political awakening, and a father’s relationship with his daughter. Kumar seamlessly juxtaposes historical events with the everyday concerns of his characters — illness and loss, personal tragedies, failed loves, regrets — and renders it all in such masterful prose that the ordinary becomes extraordinary. “I believe strongly that we are in touch with a great astonishing mystery,” he writes, “when we put honest words down on paper to register a life and to offer witness.” It’s India in all its tumult and turbulence. (Read Brian Tanguay’s full review here.)
1974: A Personal History by Francine Prose (Harper)
Francine Prose’s memoir — a Blakean tale of innocence succumbing to experience, of the passion and desire for change of the 1960s sliding into the conformity and a collusion with capitalism of the 1970s — examines her relationship with Tony Russo, who, with the much more famous Daniel Ellsberg, helped bring the notorious Pentagon Papers to light. It’s thrilling to follow a mind as keen as Prose’s as she explores what it means to mature as a person, writer, citizen, nation. (Read George Yatchisin’s full review here.)
The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019-2022 by Peter Schjeldahl (Abrams)
Peter Schjeldahl ends his title essay “The Art of Dying” — written when he was well aware of his terminal lung cancer — with a recognition that “Dying is my turn to survey life from its far — now near — shore.” This collection can be read as a companion to Chris Arthur’s What Is It Like to Be Alive, but from the perspective of one man on his own quest to find meaning for his existence. For Schjeldahl, this quest centers on his analysis of works of art and on his career as a writer, finding words to bring the visual to life on the page. That he does, with great success. (Read Walter Cummin’s full review here.)
This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books.