Well, the end of the year approaches. Time now to compile my
“Best of 2014” list. I know there are skeptics who consider such lists
pointless. But I enjoy the process. It’s a way of deliciously prolonging my
2014 New Yorker reading experience.
Here then is a selection of my favorite 2014 New Yorker pieces (with a choice sliver
from each in parenthesis):
Talk Stories
1. Sophie Brickman, "Say Cheese," January 6, 2014 (“He was
trying to capture the perfect shot of a pumpkin muffin with his Nokia phone”)
2. Nick Paumgarten, "Reunion," February 3, 2014 (“His upper
lip was mottled, like a bruised fruit – a life in brass”)
3. Lizzie Widdicombe, "Table Talk," March 17, 2014 (“ ‘If I
talk, you gotta drink the vodka’ ”)
4. Ian Frazier, "Bus Ride," April 14, 2014 (“To ride the
B-46 north on Utica Avenue is to feel the city accumulate and intensify on both sides”)
5. Ian Frazier, "Do Not Cross," June 2, 2014 (“but give
these objects a few minutes of contemplation and a minor visitation of the
sublime may occur”)
6. Mark Singer, "Risky Business," July 21, 2014 (“ ‘As soon
as they started moving the bulls out of the pens into the bucking chutes, I
could see Bushwacker go from docile to this’ – he pantomimed a bull pawing the
ground – ‘and I thought, This bull knows’
”)
7. Mark Singer, "Meritorious," August 11 & 18, 2014
(“Afterward, Angell says softly, ‘Jim Leyland coming by. That’s really
something.’ ”)
9. Ian Parker, "Oldies But Goodies," November 10, 2014 (“As
Thiebaud put it, there are still mornings that start with the thought: This morning,
I’d like to paint a pie”)
10. Oliver Sacks, "Night of the Ginkgo," November 24, 2014
(“tough, heavy Mesozoic leaves such as the dinosaurs ate”)
Reporting
1. Tad Friend, "Thicker Than Water," February 10, 2014
(“They hung there for five seconds – their port gunwale tilting overhead, the
Yamaha outboard whirring in the air – as if time were taking a breath”)
2. Raffi Khatchadourian, "A Star in a Bottle," March 3, 2014
(“I put on goggles and looked at the cylindrical reactor core, its dense crush
of parts, rendered in bright colors, seeming to float in a vast gray
horizonless space”)
3. Peter Hessler, "Revolution On Trial," March 10, 2014 (“I
was sitting next to the cage, and after a while Mohamed el-Beltagy, one of the
accused, began gesturing to me through the bars”)
4. Nick Paumgarten, "Berlin Nights," March 24, 2014 (“The
music was churning, hypnotic, almost psychedelic, and I abandoned myself to
it”)
5. Ian Frazier, "Blue Bloods," April 14, 2014 (“throngs of
stranded horseshoe crabs lying in the interstices among the rocks”)
6. Burkhard Bilger, In Deep," April 21, 2014 (“Now he
stood at the shore of a small, dark pool under a dome of sulfurous flowstone”)
7. Lizzie Widdicombe, "The End of Food," May 12, 2014 (“With
a bottle of Soylent on your desk, time stretches before you, featureless and a
little sad”)
8. Dana Goodyear, "Paper Palaces," August 11 & 18, 2014
(“He looks clicked together, like a Lego figurine”)
9. Richard Preston, "The Ebola Wars," October 27, 2014 (“By
looking at a few genomes of Ebola, the scientists hoped to grasp an image of
the whole virus, which could be conceived of as a life-form visible in four
dimensions, as vast amounts of code flowing through time and space”)
10. Ben McGrath, "The Ice Breaker," December 15, 2014 (“Slow
it down now, and watch carefully: Subban’s skate blades reëstablish contact
with the ice a second before he one-times a laser beam into the upper right
corner”)
Criticism
1. Peter Schjeldahl, "The Outlaw," February 3, 2014 (“But
there’s no gainsaying a splendor as berserk as that of a Hieronymus Bosch
painting”)
2. Louis Menand, "Imitation of Life," April 28, 2014 (“Updike is a highly literate illumination
of a supremely literate human being”)
4. Dan Chiasson, "Mother Tongue," June 2, 2014 (“the book’s
strong effect of having been written, unlike most prior poetry about having
kids, under the conditions it describes”)
5. Alex Ross, "Blockbuster," June 23, 2014 (“Plaintive
strands of near-tonal melody floated in an eerie, wide-open space defined at
its edges by groaning bass timbres, wayward piano figures, and the rustlings of
maracas, vibraslap, snare drum, and other percussion. It felt like an
encampment encircled by watchful eyes”)
6. Anthony Lane, "Balancing Acts," July 21, 2014 (“We happen
upon ourselves when nothing much happens to us, and we are transformed in the
process; that is why the Mason with the earring from whom we take our leave, on
his first, blissed-out day of college, both is and is not the affable imp of
seven, or the mumbler who bumped his way through puberty, and that twin sense
of continuity and interruption—of life itself as tracking shot and jump cut—applies
to everyone. Just like the final fade.”)
7. James Wood, "Away Thinking About Things," August 25, 2014
(“His experiments in vernacular Scots push and twist the language, sometimes to
breaking points”)
8. Alex Ross, "Under the Stars," August 25, 2014 (“One great
pleasure of the Bowl is the sense of a spell being cast, and it happened here:
in the third movement of the Mahler, when a ghostly klezmer band files by,
seven thousand leaned in, their red wine and grilled chicken neglected, their
motionless heads etched by the light pouring off the stage”)
9. David Denby, "Lasting Impressions," September 1, 2014 (“But
the ‘plot’ is no more than the men’s thorny emotional connection and their
mutual fixation on death”)
10. James Wood, "Fly Away," December 8, 2014 (“Within a
paragraph or two, the reader senses an attentive purity in the narrator’s
prose. She seems alert to everything”)
Thank you New Yorker
for another great year of blissful reading.
Postscript: Today (January 3, 2015), I amended the above
list, deleting Dana Goodyear’s “Élite Meat,” and inserting her "Paper Palaces."
Goodyear had a great 2014, producing four wonderful pieces, all of which
could’ve made my list. I decided to go with one. I’ve finally settled on “Paper
Palaces” as my favorite.
Credit: The above
artwork is by Jacob Escobedo; it appears in the March 3, 2014 New Yorker as an illustration for Raffi
Khatchadourian’s “A Star in a Bottle.”
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