Best of 2014

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.’ ”)

8. Tad Friend, "Rembrandt Lighting," November 10, 2014 (Gilroy is “as thin and pale as dental floss”)

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”)

3. James Wood, "The World As We Know It," May 19, 2014 (“as in Naipaul’s work, the pages seem scarred with remembered wounds”)

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.”

Mid-Year Top Ten (2014)

July is here - time for my annual Mid-Year Top Ten. I like making this list. It helps me take stock of my New Yorker reading experience. Valley fever, Barack Obama, a nautical nightmare, nuclear fusion, Muslim Brotherhood court cases, Berlin techno, horseshoe crabs, Stonehenge, life aboard an aircraft carrier, extreme cavers, Soylent, Ukraine, William S. Burroughs, archeophonists, emotional memory – these are just some of the fascinating subjects covered so far this year. The payoff has been immense reading pleasure. From a rich mid-year harvest, here are the pieces I’ve most enjoyed.

Fact Pieces

1. Ian Frazier’s “Blue Bloods” (April 14, 2014)

2. Tad Friend’s “Thicker Than Water” (February 10, 2014)

3. Burkhard Bilger’s “In Deep” (April 21, 2014)   

4. Raffi Khatchadourian’s “A Star in a Bottle” (March 3, 2014)

5. Nick Paumgarten’s “Berlin Nights” (March 24, 2014)

6. Lizzie Widdicombe’s “The End of Food” (May 12, 2014)

7. David Remnick’s “Going the Distance” (January 27, 2014)

8. Laura Miller’s “Romancing the Stones” (April 21, 2014)

9. Peter Hessler’s “Revolution On Trial” (March 10, 2014)

10. Keith Gessen’s “Waiting for War” (May 12, 2014)

Critical Pieces

1. Peter Schjeldahl’s “The Outlaw” (February 3, 2014)

2. James Wood’s “The World As We Know It” (May 19, 2014)

3. James Wood’s “The Punished Land” (June 23, 2013)

4. Dan Chiasson’s “Mother Tongue” (June 2, 2014)

5. Christine Smallwood’s “Ghosts in the Stacks” (June 9 & 16, 2014)

6. Jill Lepore’s “Away From My Desk” (May 12, 2014)

7. Joanna Biggs’s “We” (January 27, 2014)

8. Alex Ross’s “Blockbuster” (June 23, 2014)

9. Anthony Lane’s “Road Trips” (May 12, 2014)

10. Judith Thurman’s “Dressing Up” (May 5, 2014)

Best Talk Story

Sophie Brickman’s “Say Cheese” (January 6, 2014)

Best Short Story

Roddy Doyle, “Box Sets” (April 14, 2014)

Best Poem

Justin Quinn’s “Recession Song” (April 28, 2014)

Best Blog Post

Casey N. Cep’s “A Thousand Words: Writing From Photographs” (February 26, 2014)

Best Cover

Bruce McCall, “Polar Bears on Fifth Avenue” (January 13, 2014)

Best Issue

April 21, 2014 (The Journeys Issue), containing three enormously enjoyable pieces – Laura Miller’s “Romancing the Stones,” Geoff Dyer’s “Shipmates” (which just missed making my Top Ten), and Burkhard Bilger’s “In Deep”

Best Illustration

Riccardo Vecchio’s wallpaper-and-naked-old-ladies illustration for Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s “The Fugitive” (May 12, 2014) (see above artwork)

Best Photograph

Grant Cornett’s portrait of Jason Mleczko, illustrating Tad Friend’s brilliant “Thicker Than Water” (February 1o, 2014)

Best Sentence

If you feel like eating a carrot-and-black-trumpet-mushroom salad with your second tequila cocktail, you’re in luck, and perhaps it’s the right call—the windows frame an obnoxiously bright Equinox gym, where Lululemoners reading Us Weekly on the elliptical pedal through the night in silent rebuke. - Amelia Lester, “Bar Tab: Wallflower” (March 31, 2014)

Best Paragraph

The third huge wave came early and from a new angle, surging toward their port stern. With no time to turn into it, Jason shouted, “Hold on!,” and pinned the throttle to outrun it. But at the Shallow Spot there was no deeper water to escape to. The wave caught them from behind and lifted them until they were surfing its face. 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. Jason still believed that they’d shoot the barrel and make it out. Then the starboard gunwale hit sand, and with fantastic power the wave lifted the boat and hurled it onto the sandbar upside down. All that was visible of Jabb from above was a strip of maroon-painted hull. – Tad Friend, “Thicker Than Water” (February 10, 2014)

Best Description

Armed with an ant’s perspective and a technology titan’s resources, Myhrvold captures the swirling magma of a blueberry’s interior and the translucent reptilian juice sacs of a grapefruit. – Sophie Brickman, “Say Cheese” (January 6, 2014)

Most Memorable Image

When I climbed up on the riprap wall, I saw throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs lying in the interstices among the rocks. The carnage stretched into the distance and had a major-battlefield air, reminiscent of the Mathew Brady photograph of the dead at the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg. Some of the horseshoe crabs seemed to be moving feebly. The ones on the road had evidently managed to make it past the rocks. – Ian Frazier, “Blue Bloods” (April 14, 2014)

Most Inspired Detail

When the other bird-watchers called back, the ring tones were birdcalls. – Ian Frazier, “Blue Bloods” (April 14, 2014)

Credit: The above artwork is Riccardo Vecchio’s illustration for Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s “The Fugitive” (The New Yorker, May 12, 2014).

January 6, 2014 Issue

The first 2014 issue of The New Yorker is here. I scan it for thisness, the quality I most crave when I read. As defined by James Wood, thisness is “any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion” (How Fiction Works, 2008). Wood appreciates thisness in fiction; I appreciate it in factual writing. Perusing the current issue, I find only one instance of thisness, but it’s a beauty: Sophie Brickman’s “Armed with an ant’s perspective and a technology titan’s resources, Myhrvold captures the swirling magma of a blueberry’s interior and the translucent reptilian juice sacs of a grapefruit,” in her wonderful Talk story, “Say Cheese.” That “swirling magma of a blueberry’s interior” is marvelously fine, and the “translucent reptilian juice sacs of the grapefruit” is brilliant. The new year is in it’s infancy, but already a “Best of 2014” candidate has emerged – Sophie Brickman’s terrific “Say Cheese.”