LiteraryTraveler.net

Jeffrey Eugenides, Artwork by Dan Park

There are a heck of a lot of “Best of 2011″ lists coming out this week. There’s the best music, the best films, and, of course, the best books. But with so many “best of” lists, put out by practically every blog, magazine, and newspaper around, it’s hard to tell which books really came out on top.

But fear not! After combing through some well respected sources’ “best of” lists, it was clear which books were the real winners. The lists consulted included those compiled by Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Review, National Public Radio, Barnes & Noble, The Economist, Paste Magazine, Slate Magazine, Goodreads, the Washington Post, the Washington Examiner, the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Public Library, The New Republic, Amazon, The Horn Book, Esquire, and The New York Times.

There were, of course, books that made it onto just one or two lists, but to really be the best of the year, a book’s got to make a bigger splash than that. Therefore, the books that made it onto three or more of these lists are posted below on this compilation of what may as well be called “The Best of the Best Books of 2011″:

The Top 15 Fiction Books:
1. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
2. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
3. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
4. Open City by Teju Cole
5. The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht
6. A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin
7. Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
8. 11/22/63 by Stephen King
9. The Submission by Amy Waldman
10. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
11. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
12. The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips
13. Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
14. The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
15. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

The Top 13 Nonfiction Books:
1. Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
2. Blue Nights by Joan Didion
3. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
4. Bossypants by Tina Fey
5. Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III
6. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson
7. Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson
8. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
9. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
10. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
11. Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie
12. 1861: The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart
13. Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

The Top 11 Young Adult Books:
1. Divergent by Veronica Roth
2. The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater
3. Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
4. Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys
5. Blink & Caution by Tim Wynne-Jones
6. Beauty Queens by Libba Bray
7. Anya’s Ghost by Vera Brosgol
8. The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler
9. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente
10. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
11. Chime by Franny Billingsley

The clear favorite of critics is The Marriage Plot, which shows up on seven different lists. Additionally, 1Q84, Divergent, and Blood, Bones, and Butter all made it onto six. It goes to show how diverse readers’ (and editors’) tastes are across America. Clearly, though, there’s still common ground, and if you’re looking for a good book to devour this holiday season, chances are you’ll find plenty of worthwhile material on this list.

The National Book Awards are a pretty big deal. They may not be as publicized as the Grammys or as glamorous as the Oscars, but on the American literary scene, there are few greater honors.

The National Book Award is given to writers by writers, recognizing the best of American literature since 1950. This coveted award has advanced the careers of both emerging and established authors, and many past winners have become staples of American literature, including William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Rachel Carson, and William Carlos Williams – just to name a few.

Each year, the National Book Foundation receives many entries, but to be eligible, a book must be written by an American citizen and published by an American publisher between December 1 of the previous year and November 30 of the current year; no entry can be self-published. This year, 1,223 books were submitted to the foundation, which were then narrowed down to only twenty finalists, or five finalists per category: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature. Judging each category are five reputable authors who are doing great work in their genre, and who are sometimes past finalists or winners themselves.

Although there has always been a ceremony to announce the winners of the award, for the first time in history, the 2011 award ceremony will be webcast live from New York City tonight at 8 pm EST.  There is no registration necessary: the broadcast will be featured on the foundation’s homepage, www.nationalbook.org. Here viewers can watch, in real time, the winners in each of the four categories accept their awards, and see Mitchell Kaplan (co-founder of Miami Book Fair International) and John Ashbery (National Book Award and Pulitzer-winning poet)  receive their lifetime achievement awards. If that’s not exciting enough, the host of the event will be John Lithgow, a talented author, actor, and musician who has written ten books and acted in films and television shows such as Dexter, the Shrek franchise, Terms of Endearment, and Dreamgirls.

This year boasts an incredibly talented group of finalists, all of whom are after the hefty $10,000 prize, a bronze sculpture, and the respect of writers and readers all over the country. These finalists are:

For Fiction:

-       Andrew Krivak,  HE SOJOURN (Bellevue Literary Press)
-       Téa Obreht, THE TIGER’S WIFE (Random House)
-       Julie Otsuka, THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC (Alfred A. Knopf)
-       Edith Pearlman, BINOCULAR VISION (Lookout Books)
-       Jesmyn Ward, SALVAGE THE BONES (Bloomsbury USA)

For Nonfiction:

-       Deborah Baker, THE CONVERT: A TALE OF EXILE AND EXTREMISM (Graywolf Press)
-       Mary Gabriel, LOVE AND CAPITAL: KARL AND JENNY MARX AND THE BIRTH OF A REVOLUTION (Little, Brown, and Company)
-       Stephen Greenblatt, THE SWERVE: HOW THE WORLD BECAME MODERN (W.W. Norton)
-       Manning Marable, MALCOLM X: A LIFE OF REINVENTION (Viking Press)
-       Lauren Redniss, RADIOACTIVE: MARIE & PIERRE CURIE, A TALE OF LOVE AND FALLOUT (It Books)

For Poetry:

-       Nikky Finney, HEAD OFF & SPLIT (TriQuarterly)
-       Yusef Komunyakaa, THE CHAMELEON COUCH (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
-       Carl Phillips, DOUBLE SHADOW (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
-       Adrienne Rich, TONIGHT NO POETRY WILL SERVE: POEMS 2007-2010 (W.W. Norton)
-       Bruce Smith, DEVOTIONS (University of Chicago Press)

For Young People’s Literature:

-       Franny Billingsley, CHIME (Dial Books)
-       Debby Dahl Edwardson, MY NAME IS NOT EASY (Marshall Cavendish)
-       Thanhha Lai,  INSIDE OUT AND BACK AGAIN (Harper)
-       Albert, Marrin, FLESH AND BLOOD SO CHEEP: THE TRIANGLE FIRE AND ITS LEGACY (Alfred A. Knopf)
-       Gary D. Schmidt, OKAY FOR NOW (Clarion Books)

Tune in to the live feed now to see which four finalists walk away with the prize!

Everyday the price for flying and additional fees slightly increases. Baggage fees, pet fees, and airline meals are greatly overpriced. As a traveler, I would rather spend my money on exploration and spontaneity. So I choose driving across country instead.

As you explore the depths of the road, the act of traveling becomes part of the vacation and not something to simply endure. Traveling by car allows for the journey and the destination to be the vacation.

I drove across country this past summer, and one of the many reasons why I prefer to travel by car compared to by plane is because of the spontaneous stops.

As I traveled the country, I decided to cross into Missouri from Illinois via the Mississippi River. I stood on the Ste. Genevieve ferry and reminisced about the story of Huck Finn and his adventures along the Mississippi River. As I watched the twigs float by and felt the cool breeze wisp across my face, I pictured Huck Finn on his raft drifting across the river beside me.

Take it from a traveler that often takes the wrong turn, spontaneity is freeing.  It presents a new layer of traveling. As I took unintended turns, I instantly rerouted myself along another path towards my destination. Every unintended turn became a spontaneous new adventure and a shift in a new direction.

Reading this week’s feature article, on Edward Gorey’s creepy Cape Cod, I was put in mind of a book I once saw during one of my many trips to upstate New York.

I first went to visit the Clermont mansion in Germantown, New York in the winter of 2008.  I had gone to see the impressive grounds, which boast a beautifully manicured garden and a breathtaking view across the Hudson River.  Unfortunately, the weather was not amenable to strolling around, so I wound up being forced inside to examine the relics of a family long dead.

This turned out to be an unexpected blessing.  The old house was filled with fascinating artifacts, including a very old, very famous portrait of Andrew Jackson.  My favorite item, however, was (naturally) a large, leather-bound book.  Kept safe under its layer of glass, the book was opened to a page depicting a small girl in several different situations.  In the first, she tucked a poker into the fire.  In the second, she leaned closer.  In the third, she ran as her dress spread out behind her, ablaze with orange flames.  The moral?  Don’t play with fire.

This was, surprisingly, a children’s book.  Back when it was written, childhood was seen as a dangerous time, filled with unexpected perils.  Death was always around every corner.  Nowadays, we tend to favor happy books with happier endings, though this was not always the case.

Perhaps this is why Edward Gorey is one of my favorite children’s authors, along with Roald Dahl.  Both realized that childhood was not always fun and games; sometimes it felt dark and dangerous.  Their works don’t coddle children or shelter them from the world.  Instead, they recognize the weirdness of being a kid, the sense that everything is bigger and more threatening than most adults would like to admit.

Join us this week as we examine the life and works of Edward Gorey in our latest feature article, A Brief History of Edward Gorey’s Creepy Cape Cod, part two of our Dark New England series.

(An LT extra, check out a review of the Hudson Valley’s Pumpkin Blaze!)

When I read Katy’s post about LT’s Dark New England theme, I thought of centuries-old stories set in a wilderness that no longer exists, Hawthorne’s characters tempted by the devil in the woods.

Then, last weekend, on the drive to his late godfather’s place in Maine, my boyfriend me told a story that hit a little closer to home.  His mother had recently stumbled across an old family Bible in the attic.  Inscribed in it was the name of a distant great aunt who was accused of committing withcraft in Marlborough, Massachusetts in the early 1700s.

More interesting, though, was a letter folded in the Bible, recounting the experience of another Marlborough aunt.  She started in an idyllic domestic setting, singing in the kitchen as a pie baked in the oven and her sister’s children made God’s Eyes on the floor.

Then the tomahawks came out, the arrows flew through the air, and, in a few minutes time, everyone but the singing aunt was slain where they stood.  Enraptured by the beauty of her song, the invading tribe decided to take her as a captive instead.  They brought her back to Marlborough four years later.

I haven’t heard many more details — I do know that she married her fiance when she came back to town — but until I get them, I like to hope that the letter is a concise, Quaker variation on Mary Rowlandson’s The Soverignty and Goodness of God, with sheet music of the melodies she dreamt up on the frontier.

I scoured the internet, just in case, but I couldn’t find any such music, or even an operatic captivity narrative.  (His mother’s a writer and his grandmother was an opera singer; I thought they might appreciate the connection.)  No such luck, but I did find a blogger/musician who wrote a song inspired by Rowlandson’s experiences.  Listen at your own risk.

In the rich literary tradition of America, tales of the supernatural have always occupied a special place. Stories of the fantastic and the unreal have not only entered our imaginations, tainting the way we think about the very ground below us, but also the cannon of great literature. From Washington Irving to Edgar Allan Poe, we have always celebrated the authors that have the power to make our skin crawl and our nights restless.

This fall, Literary Traveler will feature a new theme for our feature articles: Dark New England. As the days lengthen, and All Hallows Eve approaches, we will be publishing several articles that center around some of America’s best horror writers, including Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe. We will also highlight one of our favorite underrated writers: Shirley Jackson, author of The Lottery fame.

Join us as we journey to Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts in search of what makes New England so uniquely suited to images of ghosts and specters, stories of hauntings and awakenings.

In high school, my favorite teacher, Miss Reynolds, once told our class that F. Scott Fitzgerald was famous for writing “the perfect sentence.”  I knew immediately what she meant.  While some authors are masters of the paragraph, and others shine most strongly with a single phrase, Fitzgerald’s majesty lay between two periods.  He has the rare ability to capture an image – or a feeling – completely within these bounds of punctuation.  Unlike Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s writing tends more towards prolix than terse, yet it is possible to get a real feel for his writing by reading just one of his immaculately-crafted sentences.

I have always felt that Edith Wharton came from the F. Scott Fitzgerald school of writing.  Like Fitzgerald, Wharton uses words to the utmost advantage; she does not let the reader guess at her meaning, but rather paints with phrases, colors and tints our view with her writing.  She has the ability to transport a reader back in time, to the Age of Innocence, or move us through place, to the winding streets of Morocco.

In our newest feature article, writer Inka Piegsa-Quischotte travels through Fez, searching not only for the Morocco of Wharton’s description, but also for a house. She is looking to purchase a mini-palace; a burrow of tiny bedrooms and storage spaces that she can call home.  Like me, Piegsa-Quischotte has been seduced by Wharton’s perfect sentences and her ability to conjure up an entire world through a single phrase.  Clip-clopping on the back of a mule through the covered alleys and tented streets, Piegsa-Quischotte can’t help but remember the poetry of Wharton’s language, and the aptness of her descriptions.

This week, join us in Morocco, where we ride on colorful saddles and smell the many scents of Fez in Pink Saddles & Djellabas, Edith Wharton’s Fez In Morocco. Allow yourself to be guided by Piegsa-Quischotte and her new-found friends as they work their way through a foreign land, searching for beauty and something far more lasting: a room of one’s own.

I am, it must be said, a good patriot.  I love my country and adore all things American.  However, America, beautiful as it may be, lacks a certain something. We might have wilderness and amber waves of grain, but our melting pot mentality makes a unified national character somewhat harder to obtain.

Not that I am complaining; I am thoroughly convinced that the United States is one of the most wonderful places in the world.  However, I occasionally feel a certain twinge of jealousy when reading about the historic centers of the so-called Old World.  As much as I adore our purple mountain majesty, I sometimes suspect that Europe has cornered the market on majestic.  There is a grandeur conferred on buildings and squares by age and the slow weathering of time that no amount of modern mechanics can ever recreate.

Today Literary Traveler has added a new feature article to our website, titled Sun & Moon in Montepulciano, Under The Tuscan Sun & New Moon Film Locations. In this piece, writer Deborah Downes journeys to a hill town in southern Tuscany to see the sights immortalized in two famous films.  Both movies (and both books) center around an American woman visiting Italy, traveling through the crowded city streets and learning her way around the new landscape and culture.  Although very different, New Moon and Under the Tuscan Sun share more than just a setting – they also share a sense of adventure, the over-brimming of excitement that comes with the exploration of an ancient place, and the somewhat contradictory feeling that stems from the discovery of something new.

Join us in Italy this May Day by taking a look at our newest feature article.  Not only did Downes teach me a thing or two about Italian history, but she also takes her readers on an imaginative journey through the snaking alleyways and winding streets of Montepulciano.  For those of us unable to travel across the Atlantic, this is the perfect weekend getaway.  Just try not to get lost.

Every Friday, the staff at Literary Traveler gathers up relevant book news from around the web, bringing it together in a handy post for book lovers to peruse.  Enjoy!

• Let’s start off with the biggest story of the week: the iPad.  Now that it’s here, what can it do for us?  Well, according to the reviewers at Salon, it offers a “serene” reading experience, perfect for getting lost in a text.  And although the iBooks store is rather anemic right now, Amazon is offering an app to download Kindle books to the iPad, which might just be the best of both worlds.
• And for even more on e-readers, check out the series of essays on the new medium over at Critical Mass.   “I prefer paper for everything,” writes columnist Martha Cornog.
• Also trendy: Vampires.  It seems that the blood-suckers aren’t going away any time soon, so educate yourself on the “ethical” breed of domesticated monsters with Emily Colette Wilkinson’s fascinating take on our modern vampire romance.  If that whets your appetite for blood, The Guardian has a few great book recommendations for horror fans.
• Margaret Atwood is on Twitter!  And she is very appreciative of her followers, who have sent her “many interesting items pertaining to artificially-grown pig flesh, unusual slugs, and the like.”  She also includes one of the most flattering descriptions of Twitter we’ve ever read: “It’s something like having fairies at the bottom of your garden.”
• Preeminent Twain scholar Laura Skandera Trombley appeared yesterday on the Leonard Lopate Show to talk about Mark Twain’s “other woman,” Isabel Lyon. “Twain in effect made her his substitute wife,” she explains.  Trombley also suggests that Lyon always hoped Twain would marry her, but she was happy to work for “the most famous man in the world.”
• And finally, take a moment to ponder the tragedy of so-called “lost literature.” There are many great pieces that time – and the general reading public – forgot, including the works of Ukrainian writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky and Russian author Danill Kharms.   Perhaps it’s time to celebrate some of our favorite, lesser-known authors before it is too late.

Reading our newest feature article, on Henry Miller’s Paris, I couldn’t help but feel that it had been written just for me.  I am sitting on my roof as I write this, soaking in the early spring sun.  Today the streets of Cambridge are rife with sandals, shorts, and other vestiges of summer, donned a little early out of optimistic excitement.

I think we get this way every spring – something about the hard winter wakens a desire for debauchery in all of us, no matter how slight.  Miller, with his graphic awareness of the human body, speaks to this new-found sensuality, a desire to eat, drink, and above all, be merry.  We have not yet reached the balmy days of June (which, I have been told, is named after the goddess of marriage because it is so perfect for weddings), but we certainly can dream.

However, one of the most distinguishing features of the dream is the surreal mixture of beauty and fear.  Like most major metropolises, Paris is a city of contradictions.  But Paris is set apart, distinguished by its uncanny beauty and history of decadence.  At the time he wrote Tropic of Cancer, Miller was, like many other great intellectuals, an American in Paris.  He was an expatriate, and as such, able to see the city for what it was, warts and all.  His Paris is not one of blossoms and romance and impressionist painting, but rather the earthly delights so powerfully captured by Hieronymus Bosch.  Yet as unsavory as this may seem at times, there is a powerful sense that Miller is truly alive in his works.

Writer William Caverlee drives home this point in our newest piece, in which he recalls two separate trips to France: one, taken in the 1970s when he was a young man, in love with Miller’s profanities and audacity, and a far more recent voyage.  Through his wanderings, Caverlee comes to see that there are several different ways of looking at Paris – and more than one way of reading Miller.  Cities, like books, are different the second time around, and not always in a good way.

But as for Miller, he’ll always have Paris.  Take a moment out of your busy spring cleaning schedule to read Henry Miller in Paris, the Mean Streets of the Tropic of Cancer and visit the so-called City of Light.

It seems that March is monastery month here at Literary Traveler.  With the weather starting to warm ever so slightly, there is a breath of spring in the air, which has always felt more like renewal to me than any January 1^st resolution.

But with renewal also comes return, and that is exactly what William Caverlee does in our newest feature article.  Caverlee writes about a trip he took almost thirty years ago to the Gethsemani Trappist monastery near the aptly named Bardstown, Kentucky.  He samples life at the monastery, and finds himself a little closer to understanding the works of Thomas Merton.

Merton spent much of his life traveling, searching for a place that felt right.  On December 13^th, 1941, Merton was accepted into the monastery as a postulant.  It is here that Merton wrote his autobiography at the age of 31.  The Seven Storey Mountain went on to become one of the most important Christian books of the century, a fact that Caverlee does not dwell upon.  The strongest memory Caverlee imparts centers around the friendly monks and the incongruousness of an old-world institution dropped into modern America.  Yet this is the beauty of our unique culture: the comfortable mixture of old traditions, kept alive by the faithful, and the seductive pull of technology and progress.

Join us in marveling at the wonderful strangeness of the American landscape and reveling in the continual process of return and renewal by checking out Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain at the Abbey of Gethsemani.