Besties

The day after the day after tomorrow is certainly the last day of the year, and, according to most, the last day of the decade. Because it is fun, this has got people to wonder what the Best (Book/Movie/TV Program/Album) of the arbitrary period of time has been. And, in just before the gate closes, it's time to do just that here at unpacking my library.

First, the best book of the year was, I have no idea. I have read I think two and a half books published this year, and they were fine. I think that the larger commitment of time and mental energies that books demand results in their being less plausible than movies and music to being the accoutrements of a particular year. Everybody listened to Funeral by Arcade Fire in 2004, because that's when it came out; but everybody read the Time Traveler's Wife when it came out, or when it came out in paperback, or when it was optioned for a movie or after they saw the movie or when they had time to kill at Logan Airport on Christmas Eve 2007. It's just a more drawn-out thing. The only book I can at all remember associating with a particular time is The Corrections (on which more below!), which was a Big Deal in pre-September 2001, and even that was more to do with a television hoopla than with the book itself. So the best book of the year is best talked about not the way we pick a Best Picture, but more as a sort of suggestion: the best thing that I happened to have read this year rather than another year. For me, that was probably the Sound and the Fury. Boring, but oh well.

Decades, on the other hand, are long and slow enough to let books be the kind of thing that, retrospectively at least. It makes sense to try to order how we understand the past by awarding some books The Book of the Decade status. Infinite Jest, for example, jumps out as The Book of the Nineties; maybe On the Road or the Catcher in the Rye for The Book of the Fifties? The Dudebrodogman has even suggested that books can be The Book of a Decade without even being published in that decade, in which case his vote for American Psycho would beat out mine for Bright Lights Big City as The Book of the Eighties. So maybe the Book of the Aughts won't get written for another five years or so; but until then, who are our contenders? Here are my ideas, in no particular order.

1) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao -- this got the vote of New York Magazine, and one can see why. Of the books I've thought about, it has the form best suited to a claim of representing, somehow, the millennial attitude toward the presentation of information.

2) The Corrections -- this one was the best book of the Aughts according to themillions, and, again, it has a lot of prestige and such. I personally was underwhelmed by the whole thing, but am willing to hear arguments contra.

3) The Road -- this is one of the two Gloom and Doom contenders, because really, the decade was pretty gloomy and more than a little doomy. It's a spare kind of g&d, as many of you know, since it was our ill-advised first pick for Book of the Book Club.

4) 2666 -- and here's some of the other kind of Gloom and Doom. I actually think this would be a better Book of the Aughts than the Road, because its sense of vaguely defined menace also has the decade's particular style of overinformation and overdetermined connections that's on display in the less apocalyptic Oscar Wao.

5) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay -- and one for the optimists. I think that this could make its case for being the Book of the Aughts the same way in which Gravity's Rainbow could make a case for being the Book of the Seventies. They both use raw matter from actual history, refashioned in their own time.

6) The Tipping Point -- this is probably really the Book of the Aughts, because the most people read it, and it gets taught in seminars and such and isn't fiction. I guess I spent too little time reading non-fiction in the past ten years; I guess I'll have to shape up.