NOTABLE READS OF 2012: Your favorite literary offerings of the past year

Getting close to the end of the year, time to submit your list of favorite books and stories, poetry volumes, etc. that caught your eye in 2012.

Favorite novel of the year for me would have to be A MOMENT IN THE SUN by John Sayles.

Favorite non-fiction offering was INTO THE SILENCE by Wade Davis.

I see Ian Sales has his year end up and posted:

http://iansales.com/2012/12/17/best-of-the-year-2012/

--now let's hear from everyone else.

That reminds me, I have to get a Best Of ... year list ready for CCLaP.

I'd have to say William Trevor's Selected Stories. Head and shoulders over the other things I read.

Best Non Fiction: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. Honorable mentions to Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable and Zeitoun by Dave Eggers.

Best Poetry Collection: The Enlightened Heart by Stephen Mitchell

Best Graphic Novel: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Best Fiction: Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

I tried and failed to get one per category. Alas.

Best novel: One Hundred Bottles by Ena Lucía Portela
Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Sing by May Sarton

Best short story collection: Family Ties by Clarice Lispector

Best essay collection: Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen

Best poetry collection: The Collected Poems: 1956-1998 by Zbigniew Herbert
Selected Poems, 1946-68 by R.S. Thomas

Best nonfiction: The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology by Simon Critchley
The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism by David Theo Goldberg
Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion by Jeremy Carrette and
Richard King

In haste . . . let me speak only of new or comparatively new stuff. It's not just Vermont pride which leads me to mention Howard Frank Mosher's THE TRUE ACCOUNT. Then too, Vermont's Sheila Post has leaked her YOUR OWN ONES to some of us: ideally, the rest of you should be able to share the love soon. Jack Wennerstrom (see jackwennerstrom.com) started my year with yet another remarkable and troubling tale, PHEASANT ALLEY, and ended it with his long-incubated NEW MILLENNIUM JOURNAL; CONFESSIONS OF A DOUBTER. All four of these are excellent in their own right, but extra-fine for me in a year when the reading-worthiness per page was the lowest I can recall in sixty-some years of reading. I must add -- in the interest of fairness and Full Disclosure -- that that condemnation covers several Vermont authors (whom, from general benevolence, I will not name here). Happy times to all, -- Goddard

Best fiction: Les Miserables towers above everything. Justine as the runner-up. The Rainbow gets third place.

Special mention to Decline and Fall for best comedy.

Best nonfiction: The essays of William Gass, Finding a Form.

I'd have to second William Trevor. Along with Elizabeth Taylor, one of my real finds for the year with the promise of much future enjoyment.
Memorable non-fiction: How Children Succeed, Some of my Best Friends are Black and Iron Curtain.

Four more titles that should have been included on my 2012 "Best of" roster (3 of them non-fic):

BLUE REMEMBERED EARTH by Alastair Reynolds
TRUMAN by David McCullough
A FAN'S NOTES by Frederick Exley
CHEEVER: A LIFE by Blake Bailey

& I'll add Ian Sales' smart novella ADRIFT ON THE SEA OF RAINS as an "Honorable Mention" because if I tack it onto my main list he'll think I'm sucking up to him.

I recognize your brilliance and yet I don't love you: The Heart of the Matter, Waiting for the Barbarians

You disappointed me, now go to your room: A Confederacy of Dunces, Seize the Day

You are one weird little book, ain'tcha? : The Lost Estate, Black Elk Speaks

I kind of felt uncomfortable reading you during the Sandusky affair: The Counterfeiters

My favorites this year, pared down as much as possible:

Fiction
1. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
2. The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman
3. An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

Science
Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science - Atul Gawande
Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance - Atul Gawande

Other
Codex Seraphinianus - Luigi Serafini

Usually I have a section for History favorites, but this year, none really wowed me. I really really loved Eighty Days from Early Reviewers, but it somehow wasn't a 5 star favorite.
It was a close tie between Penman and Pears.

What's good readin' for Ignatius Jacques Reilly, is damn good readin' for me: The Consolation of Philosophy

Saint Dawkins couldn't have written a better one: The Bible: a Biography

Best Stoic, Beta-Male Character since Hemingway's Jake Barns: Stoner

Phunniest account of the Phony War: Put Out More Flags

The AV Club has a nice round up of the year's best comics and graphic novels:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-best-comics-of-2012-graphic-novels-art-comics...

Oh boy, my tip top 2012 read was The Bone People by Keri Hulme. That one thwacked me up side the head.
Also in the top four were Shipwrecks by Akira Yoshimura, The Lighthouse by Alison Moore and The Pearl by Steinbeck. Three short ones, now that I look. The Garden of Evening mists I also loved. Yes, I have been on a Booker Bender.

>11 jordantaylor: I read both the books in your science category, I loved Complications and thought a lot about infection thanks to it when I had surgery 3 weeks ago....but I have followed the surgeons orders and have so far kept infection at bay.

Favorite book covers of 2012:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/12/19/books/20favorite-book-covers.html

I wouldn't call comic books or graphics literature.

16: Why not? Building Stories by Chris Ware is probably the most daring in terms of stylistic formalism and narrative deconstruction than whatever tripe Jonathan Franzen is blathering forth these days. Furthermore, "Building Stories" does more to advance narrative than anything since Finnegans Wake and Gravity's Rainbow Then again, this is stories with pictures, so the entire thing can be disregarded? Right? Is that what you want to say? What are your thoughts on hip hop and electronica "as music"? The art form of comics has advanced and diversified in the past few decades, at least to anyone who cares about storytelling.

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

Best Fiction: Là où les tigres sont chez eux by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès
Best Non-Fiction:David Mitchell: Critical Essays by Sarah Dillon
Best SF: The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang
Best History Book: Balkan Journal by Laird Archer
Author whose whole bibliography I read inside 2012: David Mitchell
Best book by author new to me: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Special Weirdo Award: Cataclysm Baby by Matt Bell
Best Online Resource: https://www.pynchon.net/owap

Book of the year: Là où les tigres sont chez eux by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès

I've spent the year trying to write more than read. But I felt like a lot of what I read didn't quite blow me away. For all the BIG names that published this year, I don't have much positive to share. So forgive me for accentuating the negative.

Best Really Really Late Discovery: Richard Stark's (Donald Westlake's) Parker novels. They are fabulous. A golden template for the loner-outlaw. Reacher-Parker? Parker-Reacher?
Most, After I Thought About It a While, Disappointing Novel: Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore
Book Where A Hero Let Me Down: Peter Carey's Chemistry of Tears. Good, not great.
Book that Made Me Laugh and Then Really Didn't: Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis
Book I Most Want to Read But Am Afraid to Read Because I Didn't Like His First Two "Conventional" Books: Telegraph Avenue by M Chabon

The Best Novel of All Time (400+ years and counting): Don Quixote

20: Interesting that Don Quixote was one of the books on the list of Greats we Hate posted by Nymith in the Points to Ponder topic.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8788711/the-greats-we-hate/

I've never read it, so can't comment.

21: Never read DQ either, but why the hate? Or is this more hipster posturing because Cervantes's work is popular and enduring?

Additional: My Year's Best picks will be on the CCLaP website January 7th. I'll post the link when it goes live.

One of my favorite lines from a laugh-riot, meta-fictional party of a book:

"Ah, senor!" said the niece, "your worship had better order these to be burned as well as the others; for it would be no wonder if, after being cured of his chivalry disorder, my uncle, by reading these, took a fancy to turn shepherd and range the woods and fields singing and piping; or, what would be still worse, to turn poet, which they say is an incurable and infectious malady."

Don Quixote is hated, perhaps, because it is difficult for the modern audience to read. But then, so are the Russians. And DQ is repetitive.

But DQ is also great, as is Crime and Punishment, and Moby Dick, and all the other books people complain about.

I was dipping into DQ just last night. Don Quixote is supremely relevant today. After all, it concerns a man who, having spent too much time reading heroic tales, has lost the ability to tell fact from fiction and so arms himself and travels the land prepared to fight imaginary enemies. You can't read someone like Lt. Col. Dave Grossman without noting a striking parallel, especially when Grossman starts babbling about "the knights of old." America today is filled with woeful knights, each ready to shoot at windmills.

24: After all, it concerns a man who, having spent too much time reading heroic tales, has lost the ability to tell fact from fiction and so arms himself and travels the land prepared to fight imaginary enemies.

Sounds a lot like Decision Points and Atlas Shrugged, which is also repetitive, albeit poorly written by someone who should have justifiably ended up in a gulag.

Here are my picks for Best Books of 2012:

http://www.cclapcenter.com/2013/01/the_year_in_books_2012_karl_wo.html

Very interesting list. Nice to read about good fiction that is off the radar.
The Chris Ware book sounds like an illustrated cousin of Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec.

Ah, Georges Perec. There's a name that doesn't get cited often enough.

#26 Gotta say, the Chris Ware and Philippe Claudel books look very enticing...and I'd love to lay my hands on the latest installment of Caro's LBJ series.

By-Liner editor picks the "Best Journalism" of 2012:

http://byliner.com/spotlights/102-spectacular-nonfiction-articles-2012

(Another gem from Gord.)

2012 notable reads:

Fiction: Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton Yeah, I know, I should have read this years ago.
Non-fiction (science/history): Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution by Rebecca Stott
Non-fiction (history/politics): The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss
Non-fiction (politics/history): Our Divided Political Heart by E.J. Dionne
Hist-fiction: Bring Up the Bodies by Hillary Mantel
Philosophy/Theology: Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr
Illustrated: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, illus. by Iassen Ghiuselev (peek at these illustrations at Ghiuselev's website)

s.

Edited for format and to add the last entry

>27 SethKaufman:
Perec's "Life: A User's Manual". It's time I read that again. Replaced my old paperback with a hardcover edition in 2012. Does that count?

Os.

This has been a year dominated by less-than-cheerful chunks of German Lit: after years of trying I finally struggled through Doktor Faustus, and went on to read Berlin Alexanderplatz and Malina, whilst still working my way through Thomas Bernhard's memoirs. That, cumulatively, should have been enough to make me want to go out and shoot myself, but oddly enough I enjoyed all of them. Weird, or what?

Book that I should have read years ago (in order to re-read it frequently): Lebensansichten des Katers Murr by E.T.A. Hoffmann
Book that I should have read years ago (because it felt as though its moment has passed): The golden notebook by Doris Lessing

Best Swiss travel book: L'usage du monde by Nicolas Bouvier
Best sixties-nostalgia hit: La longue route by Bernard Moitessier

Most unlikely non-fiction read of the year: Les Appareils transporteurs mécaniques de bureau by J. Jacob — a splendid 1920s survey of what we did at work before we had email.
Second-most unlikely: Sous Lénine by Odette Keun — Mitfordesque/Kafkaesque view of Russia just after the revolution

Happy to see a couple people above list Les Miserables as a favorite. Ranks up there in my top ten all time. Disappointed by the movie-musical from late last year, though. Here's my notables, revised from another thread, from 2012.

Battleborn ~ Claire Vaye Watkins
I've a strong affinity for stories set in deserts. Most collected here occupy Death Valley and Vegas environs. Her stories are generally good and sometimes genuinely great, but she falls flat a few times too. More here.

Black Light: A Novel ~ Galway Kinnell
Another desert story, this time half a world away in Iran. A man named after Persia's mythological king, Jamshid, so fed up with his nowhere life, lashes out in an instant and flees his mistake for the rest of his life, assuming a nomad's existence on the run is a "life". The version I read was altered by Kinnell in 1980, following the Iranian revolution. Originally publication: 1966. Kinnell, being a poet, had a distinct advantage over Claire Vaye Watkins in expressing the physical and metaphysical realities existing in the desert wilderness. More here.

Blue Nights & Salvador ~ Joan Didion
The desert-like desolation of a mother's grief, having lost her only (adopted) child w/in eighteen months after losing her husband. The desert that is aging. Devastating. From the 60s - 90s, Didion made understated art (Play it as it Lays) or artful understated outrage (Salvador) or understated artful disillusion (take your pick from any of her essay collections; I'd pick The White Album), but now for the last decade she's been making art out of her personal pain.

The Book of Fantasy ~ Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, Adolfo Bioy Casares, editors
Fabulous anthology of "fantastic" literature. More here.

Destination: Void by Frank Herbert
In prose that's terribly dense as lead, with science and speculation now proven fantasy, Herbert nonetheless prefigured here many of the ideas and images made iconic by the first Matrix, and its publication predated that rogue HAL9000 series' appearance by two years. More here.

Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone
Brief review here.

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace ~ D.T. Max
Longwindy review here.

Masks of the Illuminati ~ Robert Anton Wilson
Works as a nice introduction to thinly veiled fictionalized versions (RAWs visions) of secret societies and what "illumination" might mean in an esoteric context, mixing psychology, philsophy, literature, eastern religions and mysticism into a stew of arcane knowledge. A mystery detective story backlit by gnosticism. More here.

Outer Dark ~ Cormac McCarthy
Pages permeated with an eerie otherworldliness reminiscent of the forests surrounding Chateau 'd Argol. Similar discordant notes inhabit the shaky relationships among the novel's main players.

Place Last Seen ~ Charlotte McGuinn Freeman
A child w/Down syndrome gets lost in Desolation Wilderness west of Tahoe. Few first time novelists looking to sell their first novel (and hopefully make some sales thereafter) would dare the devastating denouement that Freeman accomplishes here.

Rubicon Beach ~ Steve Erickson
Mystifying to me that a writer as imaginative as Erickson still remains largely unread. More here.

So Far Gone: A Novel ~ Paul Cody
Mental illness and mass murder. The Death penalty for a perpetrator who was grotesquely victimized by those he murdered. Is it seriously possibly to ever empathize with a man who killed his grandmother and parents? Paul Cody gives a nod to Denis Johnson's first novel, Angels, and to Joan Didion, quoting both to begin his novel, and while he's not as good a writer as either, his novel still resonates. Its realities are damnably uncomfortable to contemplate.

Good post, sound choices.

My triumphs for 2012 were Gravity's Rainbow, Tristram Shandy, and Plato's Symposium (in the Greek).

Other notables:
The Land of Green Plums by Herta Müller (she definitely deserved the Nobel)
The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum by Böll
Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson
Fagles' translation of the The Aeneid

I guess I didn't read many books that were actually published in 2012.

>36 inaudible: I guess I didn't read many books that were actually published in 2012.

I didn't understand the OP to mean publiched in 2012, but just favorite reads for 2012. If I got it wrong, then my list (post 31) doesn't fill the bill.

Os.

Yeah, definitely--what you loved in 2012, regardless of its year of publication.

my 2012 top reads...

The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass

An odd and sometimes eerie and disturbing tale of a boy who stopped growing at three, could shatter glass with his voice, and control people with his drum. One of the earliest ‘magic realism’ novels (before that phrase was even thought of), the whole book is drenched with symbolism, most of which I probably wasn’t able to catch. Yet the grotesque story of Germany and Poland during WWII as seen through Oskar Matzerath’s eyes is freakishly gripping.

Dubliners - James Joyce
Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson

I’m not much of a short stories person, but both of these collections really struck a chord with me. They chronicle those small moments in the lives of everyday people. We may not get what a person’s entirely about, but we can learn much from them in the ten to twenty pages they exist for us. The closing story of Dubliners, “The Dead,” is possibly the best short story I’ve ever read.

The Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe

This was actually a series of four books, telling the tale of Severian the torturer’s journey through a barely recognizable Earth - see, it’s a million years or more in the future, and the sun is dying. The world is waiting for a savior, someone who can ignite the new sun and bring Earth back. Not your average sci-fi hero’s journey, I’ll say that much - and don’t trust a word that Severian tells you.

Middlemarch - George Eliot

I tried reading this a few years ago, and it simply defeated me. I couldn’t get invested in the prissy Dorothea and her marriage to Mr. Casaubon, and I put it down after 50 pages. Returning to it, I made it past those two bores and found that the book extended far beyond them - in fact, it encompassed the entire town, from rich to poor, and gave each of these characters a voice and breath. It’s hardly a moralizing tale, either - some do good, some do bad, but fate doesn’t hand fortune to the good and disaster to the bad. A truly complex book, maybe the most complex I’ve ever read out of the 19th century.

Earthly Powers - Anthony Burgess

Most people know Burgess from his dystopic masterpiece A Clockwork Orange, but I always find it interesting to delve into authors’ back catalogues and find a few gems. This hefty tome follows Kenneth Toomey, famed novelist (and somewhat notorious homosexual) and Carlo Campanetti, a priest who would eventually rise to the office of pope. Their stories criss-cross over the course of 20th century history - Prohibition, World War II, and so on - but what really won me about this book was its interesting take on good and evil, coming from a narrator (Toomey) who has little to love about the church.

Bleak House - Charles Dickens

I’ve made it a project to read every book by Chuck D and this was his biggest and most intimidating. Centered around the court case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce, Bleak House has several plot threads and many, many, many characters to keep track of, but it wasn’t a drag. Esther, one of the narrators, is somewhat annoying (as many Dickens ‘faultless angel’ heroines tend to be) but the mysteries surrounding the Dedlock family and the enormous cast snared me quickly and I enjoyed this as much as David Copperfield or Tale of Two Cities. Not sure which Dickens I’ll read next, but Bleak House was worth the time and effort I put in.

Wolf Hall/Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

These are kind of the “it” books of the literary crowd nowadays, and their reputation isn’t undeserved. Taking on the complex history of Henry VIII and his wives, Mantel tells the story through Thomas Cromwell, notorious wheeler and dealer on the king’s behalf. She brings historical figures such as Anne Boleyn and Thomas More to life, and Cromwell himself is a compelling figure - generous at times, ruthless at others, and always thinking one step ahead of everyone else.

Shame - Salman Rushdie

I’m a pretty big Rushdie fan, and read a few of his books this year (including his unfortunate memoir, Joseph Anton - in which I would have appreciated more insight into his writing and less snippy celebrity sniping) but Shame was the clear standout of the year. If Midnight’s Children was his India Novel - big, sprawling, messy, but full of life - Shame is Rushdie’s Pakistan treatment, about how shame and shamelessness (or at least the appearance of such) governs life in fundamentalist nations. Its two “heroes” - Iskandar Harappa and Reza Hyder - mirror the two rulers of Pakistan in its early days, Zulkifar Ali Bhutto and Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. This prompted me to read deeper into Pakistan’s history as well - interesting stuff. Through works such as this, I’ve learned more about the world - shown through the kaleidoscopic writing of Rushdie.


Wool pt 1-5 - Hugh Howey

Post-apocalyptic sci-fi is so ubiquitous these days that it’s hard to find good new stuff. Enter the internet and self-publishing! Hugh Howey published his series as e-books first, and after I’d heard a great deal of the hype I luckily found a copy of the omnibus at the library. I can’t say too much - part of what makes it such a good read is going in knowing very little. Suffice to say the story revolves around the population of a silo buried underground, surrounded by a vast wasteland on the surface. Tensions rise as the people find that their leaders may be pulling the ‘wool’ over their eyes.

Bridge of Birds - Gary Hughart

This is a hidden gem that I think a lot of people would like. Based on “an ancient China that never was”, Bridge of Birds is an adventure story starring Master Li, a genius who has a minor flaw in his character, and the narrator, Number Ten Ox (named thusly because he was the tenth child of a family, and he’s large and does a lot of the heavy lifting). These two follow a trail of clues to try to discover how to cure the sick children of their village, leading them to an ancient curse (of course!) and the villainous Duke of Ch’in. I can’t stress enough how fun this book is, and I think everyone could find something to like about it.

Ghostwritten - David Mitchell

I’ve become something of a David Mitchell fanboy in the past few years - from his brilliant coming-of-age novel Black Swan Green to his genre-spanning epic Cloud Atlas, he’s one of the best writers I know. Ghostwritten is his first book, and it often doesn’t seem to be a novel ait all, but a series of somewhat related short stories. There’s a bit of a theme tying them together, but much like Cloud Atlas, the real pleasure is seeing Mitchell take on almost a dozen individual stories and voices and nailing it with each one.

The Instructions - Adam Levin

On the surface, it seems overwhelming - a thousand-page novel about a young Jewish scholar who leads the misfits of his school in a rebellion against the system. But Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee is one hell of an interesting and violent little dude, and I found myself drawn in to his struggle. His best friend Benji Nanamook, his girlfriend Eliza June Watermark, and his nemesis Bam Slokum are only a few of the brilliant characters of this novel. It owes some debt to DFW’s Infinite Jest, but it’s its own creature - and a great deal easier to read, at that.


The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

i hated Ethan Frome. Hated hated hated every bit of it. Age of Innocence, on the other hand, was a brilliant book - the story of Newland Archer, a young man of the upper crust of New York in the 1870s, a society that valued propriety over all else. When Archer meets Ellen Olenska, a divorcee who has recently returned to the States from Europe, he finds himself questioning the social order that was as natural to him as breathing. It may sound all a bit stuffy, but Wharton skewers the New York scene as brilliantly as Jane Austen took on regency England. The prose is to die for, and the humor is subtle and genius.

(nonfiction next!)

Nixonland - Rick Perelstein

Richard Nixon was a unique President, that’s for certain - paranoid and manipulative unlike any other chief executive we’ve ever had. Nixonland follows his rise from a fairly blue-collar background to the highest office in the nation, but also turns a sharp eye on American culture and how it changed over the course of Nixon’s career, slowly becoming the bitterly partisan America we know now, If nothing else, this book makes me worry a great deal less about America’s future, debt ceiling and all, because it was a hell of a lot worse back then.

The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright

9/11 was the defining event of my generation, I would say, and for all it came out of the blue for a lot of us, there was a hell of a lot of build-up towards it. Lawrence Wright covers the events leading up to the attack on the Twin Towers from an Arab perspective - following the lives of Osama Bin Ladin and Zawahiri - and from the American intelligence perspective - a total clusterfuck, by the way. It’s not all dry facts, as it gets into the personalities of the men who would make these events come to play. Did you know that as a kid, Bin Ladin loved American westerns like Gunsmoke and Bonanza? How about the guy who was in charge of American security, who (while married) was carrying on affairs with three different women in three different cities, and who took a job in the WTC right after he was fired - and right before the attack came? A great look at modern history and how the world we know now came to be.

Hi everyone, I already love this group ^^ here's my personal top 5:

1) David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
2) Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
3) Dave Eggers - An Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
4) Jennifer Egan - A Visit from the Goon Squad
5) Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

And by the way, the top three books probably are my favorite books at the moment. I mean, in general. 2012 has really been an awesome year for my readings.
Here's the video with my full top 10 and some thoughts on each book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5y-jonfngQ