The Wuthering Expectation Best Books of 2015 - the noodles they make for me

Last post for a while, until January, so it had better be a list of books.

Four Best Books of 2015 that are actually more or less from 2015.

1.  John Keene’s Counternarratives.  I wrote an oblique post mostly about a story telling, from Jim’s point of view, what happened after Huckleberry Finn, which I predict will someday be a famous, much taught story.  And it isn’t even the best story in the book.  If I had spent the year reading new books, I do not think I would have read a smarter one.

2.  Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (2013 in French), another counternarrative, The Stranger from the perspective of the brother of the murdered man.  Or at least he thinks the Camus novel is about his brother.  Maybe he is wrong.  The idea of the novel is so obvious I am shocked it had not been done, but the execution of the idea is full of surprises.  This one will also be much taught.

3.  César Aira’s The Musical Brain (stories originally from 1987-2011 or so), filling a big hole in English.  More is more with Aira, and this book has more more than most.  “Cecil Taylor” is a masterpiece.

4.  Carola Dibbell’s The Only Ones.  A post-apocalyptic future with a teenage hero, oh no, but what looks like (and is) a science fiction novel is actually or also a moving study of motherhood about a single welfare mom in Queens.  The mother’s voice is worth hearing for its own sake.

Some especially useful second-rate books

1.  Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of an Italian, also new to English this year.  The novel mapped out a history of Italian literature I did not know existed, stretching from the 18th century to Italo Calvino.  Hugely helpful.

2.  Henry James, The Europeans, The American, “The Passionate Pilgrim,” “The Pension Beaurepas,” etc.  No one needs to read a previous word of James to read The Portrait of a Lady, but it was instructive to watch him work his way up to it. James was deliberately working his way to a major work, refining and discarding ideas and characters.  Really interesting to follow along with him.

3.  British poets of the 1890s: William Butler Yeats,  Lionel Johnson,  Francis Thompson, Robert Bridges, John Davidson, Ernest Dowson (and I could add some who were first-rate: Hardy, Housman, Kipling, and Yeats will graduate in a decade or two).  Many of these poets were part of a semi-coherent movement, others just lumped in by temporal coincidence.  Reading them in bulk, I began to have doubts about their good taste and good sense, but they made sense together, which is what I was hoping.

The best of the best

Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education; A Shropshire Lad, A. E. Housman; Little, Big, John Crowley; Life Is a Dream, Pedro Calderón de la Barca; Germinal, Émile Zola.  The confusion of the two dinners at the end of the first act of Richard Bean’s and Carlo Goldoni’s One Man, Two Guvnors; Rosso Malpelo digging for his buried father in Giovanni Verga’s “Rosso Malpelo”; Richard Jefferies falling in love with a trout; Mark Twain getting his watch fixed; John Davidson on the beach with his dogs; Lizzie Eustace trying to memorize Shelley in The Eustace Diamonds; the scene in Marly Youmans’s Thaliad where the little kids in the van drive away from the little boy – no, even better, when they go back for him; and the end of “All at One Point” in Calvino’s Cosmicomics when Mrs. Ph(i)Nk₀ creates the universe in an act of generosity – “Boys, the noodles I would make for you!” – which may perhaps be an allegory for what all of these writers were doing for me this year.