The last day of the year, certainly the traditional point where nearly everyone looks back and reflects on the past 364 days. Even those who lead unexamined lives might have that rare moment of introspection on this day.
Another of the more frequent indulgences is to create “best of…” lists. The newspapers and cyber space are teeming with pundits extolling the virtues of their list. In keeping with that idea, here are my thoughts about the best books and movies of the year.
Our children, Justin and Liz, visited over Christmas and both are voracious readers. Of course, you might say, as those who know me know also that I read and listen to well over a hundred books each year. Both kids, however, came into their reading phase rather late in their short lives. Justin once wrote an English class them on Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy without reading the book. I am still uncertain that he has ever read John Le Carre’s best.
I mention the progeny because without them I would have a rather slim list of best books. At Christmas 2010 I received a copy of Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart. A satiric view of a world where social networking has run amok, where everything is know about you to everyone, where bloggers are the new rock stars, and it takes an advanced degree to work in retail. More school does not, in Shteyngart’s imagined world, equal more knowledge, let alone wisdom. Mixed in with the baby boomers’ collective, ongoing battle against aging, maybe even maturing, and you have an incredibly funny, yet super sad, love story.
In a visit to the Bay Area, Justin handed me another book, Ron Rash’s Serena, a tale set in a logging camp in North Carolina. In the opening scene, encouraged by his new wife, George Pemberton kills the father of a young girl, a girl Pemberton has impregnated. Serena Pemberton, though, is the true face of evil in this novel. Strong willed, sexually dominant, ruthless, she manipulates those around her to acts of mayhem and murder. The most evil woman character since Annie Wilkes, Stephen King’s less-than-angelic nurse in Misery.
Let the Great World Spin allows me to give Liz more than a nod. Colum McCann takes Phillipe Petit’s incredible tightrope walk across the chasm of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in August 1974 and weaves tales of those who have witnessed the event or whom the event has impacted. A pair of Irish brothers, one of them a priest living among whores on the East Side, the judge who arraigns Petit and his wife, a wealthy woman who has joined a group of mothers grieving the loss of their sons in Viet Nam, recovering drug addict artists living in the 1920s, and a photographer whose oeuvre is the graffiti on New York subways.
It was slim pickings cinematically as well. Good, not great movies, or as pal Jerry Warren and I judge: Movie or Film?
2011 was the year of Mad Men, as we watched all four seasons thanks to Netflix. That’s 52 episodes if you’re counting. The best film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Also getting a nod, Moneyball.
