Favorite Books of 2016

Illustration by Laurent Cilluffo

Here are my three favorite books of 2016:

Ian Frazier’s Hogs Wild – A wonderful collection of Frazier’s reporting pieces, including “Hungry Minds,” “Back to the Harbor,” “Form and Fungus,” “Hogs Wild,” “The March of the Strandbeests,” and “Blue Bloods.” In my opinion, Frazier is The New Yorker’s top writer. This is one of his best collections. See my posts here, here, and here.

Jill Lepore’s Joe Gould’s Teeth – A bravura piece of writing by one of The New Yorker’s finest stylists. It’s a revisionist portrait of the homeless Harvard-graduate Greenwich Village fixture, Joe Gould, subject of Joseph Mitchell’s famous “Professor Seagull” and “Joe Gould’s Secret.” See my post here.

Geoff Dyer’s White Sands – Contains, among other brilliant pieces, two travelogues – one on a trip that Dyer made to the site of Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field, near Quemado, New Mexico, and the other on a trip he made to see Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, at Great Salt Lake, Utah, both of which appeared in The New Yorker under the title “Poles Apart.” See my posts here and here.

Best of 2012

Here are my “Top Ten” picks of 2012:

FACT PIECES 

1. Raffi Khatchadourian, “Transfiguration” (February 13 & 20, 2012)
2. Robert A. Caro, “The Transition” (April 2, 2012)
3. Nick Paumgarten, “Deadhead” (November 26, 2012)
4. Ian Frazier, “Out of the Bronx” (February 6, 2012)
5. Jill Lepore, “Battleground America” (April 23, 2012)
6. Dexter Filkins, “Atonement” (October 29 & November 5, 2012)
7. Ian Parker, “High Rise” (September 10, 2012)
8. Lauren Collins, “Bread Winner” (December 3, 2012)
9. Keith Gessen, “Polar Express” (December 24 & 31, 2012)
10. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Recall of the Wild” (December 24 & 31, 2012)

CRITICAL PIECES

1. James Wood, “Late and Soon” (December 10, 2012)
2. Dan Chiasson, “The Body Artist” (November 12, 2012)
3. James Wood, “Broken Record” (May 21, 2012)
4. James Wood, “Total Recall” (August 13 & 20, 2012)
5. Dan Chiasson, “The Child In Time” (October 8, 2012)
6. Peter Schjeldahl, “Young and Gifted” (June 25, 2012)
7. Anthony Lane, “Out of the Frame” (September 3, 2012)
8. Lorrie Moore, “Canada Dry” (May 21, 2012)
9. Joanna Kavenna, “Things Fall Apart” (September 3, 2012)
10. Dahlia Lithwick, “Extreme Makeover” (March 12, 2012)

TALK STORIES

1. Lizzie Widdicombe, “Rush” (September 3, 2012)
2. Rebecca Mead, “Right-Hand Man” (September 3, 2012)
3. Alec Wilkinson, “Indigenous” (October 1, 2012)
4. Nick Paumgarten, “Hello, Dolly” (October 1, 2012) 
5. Ian Frazier, “Lost and Found” (July 23, 2012)
6. Alec Wilkinson, “Tag Team” (July 23, 2012)
7. Ian Frazier, “Bunkers” (January 9, 2012)
8. Ian Frazier, “Neighbors” (October 1, 2012)
9. Ben McGrath, “Zone A-Plus” (November 12, 2012) 
10. Tad Friend, “Hit Parade” (December 24 & 31, 2012)

Credit: The above artwork is by Laurent Cilluffo; it appears in The New Yorker (November 26, 2012) as an illustration for “On The Horizon.”

Mid-Year Top Ten (2011)

A dazzling river of New Yorkers flows through this blog – twenty-six so far this year – and since we’re now half way through 2011, it’s as good a time as any to pause, look back, and pluck a few favorites from the magazine’s exhilarating current of prose. Here’s my “Mid-Year Top Ten New Yorker Stories for 2011”:

1. David Grann’s “A Murder Foretold” (April 4, 2011)
2. Elif Batuman’s “The View from the Stands” (March 7, 2011)
3. Philip Gourevitch’s “Climbers” (July 11 & 18, 2011)
4. Ian Frazier’s “Back to the Harbor” (March 21, 2011)
5. Raffi Khatchadourian’s “The Gulf War” (March 14, 2011)
6. Geoff Dyer’s “Poles Apart” (April 18, 2011)
7. Mike Peed’s “We Have No Bananas” (January 10, 2011)
8. Jeffrey Toobin’s “Madoff’s Curveball” (May 30, 2011)
9. Keith Gessen’s “Nowheresville” (April 18, 2011)
10. Gabrielle Hamilton’s “The Lamb Roast” (January 17, 2011)

Credit: The above artwork is by Laurent Cilluffo; it appears in the May 16, 2011 issue of The New Yorker as an illustration for "On The Horizon."

May 16, 2011 Issue

This week’s New Yorker brims with inspired details, e.g., Laurent Cilluffo’s ingenious “On The Horizon” illustration for The New York Philharmonic concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, David Remnick’s Talk piece “Exit Bin Laden” that reprises the unforgettable “severe clear” opening line of his great “September 11, 2001” (The New Yorker, September 24, 2011), the closing sentence of Nick Paumgarten’s brilliant “The Names” (“A graphic representation of the computational armature, color-coded on a laptop screen, brings to mind Tetris, but the sight of the names themselves, inscribed in bronze, linked together by happenstance and blood, calculus and font, is a little like the faint silhouette of a cosmic plan, or else the total absence of one”), John Seabrook’s Proustian moment in his excellent “Snacks for a Fat Planet,” when the taste of a potato chip triggers a childhood memory (“For some reason, the taste reminded me of the chips my mother sometimes packed in my lunchbox when I was a little kid”), the erotic jolt of Judith Thurman’s “bare-breasted disheveled girls staggered down the runway in gorgeously ravaged lace, sooty tartan, and distressed leather” (“Dressed To Thrill”), the amazing final line of Joan Acocella’s Paula Fox book review “From Bad Beginnings” (“I think she needed to be, and that these repellent creatures – the warty snake, the tapeworm coiling to the very rim of the toilet bowl – may be images of how, after becoming the little gray ghost that she learned to be as a child, she finally extruded that, with horror, and moved forward, empty at first, into art”). The whole magazine is a feast for the eye and the mind. I devoured it. And when I finished, I thought, How incredibly lucky we are to have a magazine that contains such felicities! New Yorker without end, amen!