My Top Books of 2013

It wouldn't be overstatement to say I got lost in December. I got busy doing things I needed to do instead of things I want to do, like this mess of a blog. However, since there have been inquiries as to my whereabouts and to my top book recommendations for the past year, well, here goes:

Tenth of December by George Saunders

Battleborn by Clare Vaye Watkins

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

NW by Zadie Smith

Norwegian by Night by Derek B. Miller

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

I Shudder by Paul Rudnick
Ready, Steady, Go by Shawn Levy

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

The Answer to the Riddle is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia by David McLean

Three striking fiction debuts (Watkins, Marra, Miller), two brilliant YA novels (Green & Zusak), Saunders at what could be the peak of his career (though I hope not), and Smith making certain I don't forget how great she is. 

In non-fiction, Rudnick made me roar with laughter, Hillenbrand made me feel despair and triumph, Levy thoroughly entertained me, and McLean scared the shit out of me (the book pubs January 14th so go buy it). 

In all, I finished 35 books and read some or most of another 15. There were some books I read that I never posted about--some were good enough and others were disappointments. A few made me angry for wasting my time and others I'd re-read if I could find the time because they gave me such joy. Looking over my blog and my master list, it was a fiction-heavy year and my choices lean just a little more heavily that way. 

You can read more about all these titles on the blog. I hope you manage to avoid the post-holiday doldrums but if you don't, the titles here may help get you through. 

As always, special thanks to friends in the book biz who still keep me in the pipeline, to authors who have been kind enough to contact me after reading my posts, and to you, my regular readers. Happy new year. 

I Shudder by Paul Rudnick

At least a year ago I ran into my friend, Janet, the Grand Dame of Bookselling. She always has more than a few suggestions for me and told me how I must read I Shudder by Paul Rudnick. She thought it was my kind of humor. Dutifully, I added it to my list of books to be purchased. It was several months before I found a beautiful hardcover at my favorite used book grotto and, as usual, she was right. 

Rudnick is best-known as a playwright (I Hate Hamlet, Jeffrey) and has had some Hollywood successes (Addams Family Values, In & Out), as well.  Sub-titled And Other Reactions to Life, Death and New Jersey, I Shudder is a series of rollicking personal essays interrupted by the fictional diary entries of Elyot Vionnet, a persnickety aesthete and substitute teacher. 

The essays are sprightly personal pieces describing friends, family and experiences. His reminiscense of the Chelsea Hotel and it's merry mess of oddfellows only adds to my fascination with 1970's New York, an age when people could actually afford to live in Manhattan. The opening piece, The Sisters, a fond though stinging look at his mother and aunts not only had me laughing and nodding but imagining my mother and sisters behaving the same way had they lived in the same city. Enter Trembling, his piece about Hollywood exec Scott Rudin brings warmth and humanity to a ruthless Type-A type. 

There are five pieces billed as excerpts "from the Most Deeply Intimate and Personal Diary of One Elyot Vionnet" and they were far and away my favorites. I found both the character and how Rudnick writes these pieces very reminiscent of the hilarious minutiae of S. J. Perelman entwined with the haughtiness of a Thurber man. 

To give you a taste of what I found so funny, here Vionnet describes his underwear:  "...my intimate apparel is manufactured from a Swiss cotton of such whisper-soft resilience that it is normally used only to wrap the painfully sensitive faces of the world's wealthiest women as they recuperate from acid peels in private clinics. Unlike these women's jowls and browlines, however, my undergarments require mending only once per decade, when I mail them to a Long Island convent, where the nuns compete to gently darn and patch my private attire because, as Sister Herbert Elizabeth once wrote to me, in her own blood, "Mr. Vionnet, your boxer sorts and undershirts do not merely speak to me. They sing.'"

Needless to say, when I read this, I awakened Mrs. Next with my howls of laughter.