Hi folks,
Welcome back to another elimination round for the 2018 TOA Book Of The Year Award. Today, we’ll knock out two books from contention to bring the shortlist down to four.
February - Tenth of December by George Saunders
First, we tip our cap to George Saunders’s short story collection, Tenth of December. Though I’m sure the man has plenty more writing left in him, it does feel likely that I will someday look back on this collection as his best work. I enjoyed every story in this book (a rare response for me to a collection) and I still find myself, occasionally, thinking back to the title story whenever I find myself near a frozen body of water.
Parting thought: Take notes for fiction.
I went back into my reading notes in preparation for this post and was surprised to find that I had written down nothing at all for these stories. The revelation served as a grim reminder of my misguided past, a dark time when I treated fiction differently from nonfiction (at least in terms of how I took notes). In a broader sense, this also reinforces my thought that every book or story I read will have something I can learn from it as long as I put in the work.
June - The Mother of All Questions by Rebecca Solnit
We here at the TOA Book of the Year selection committee also bid adieu to Rebecca Solnit’s Mother of All Questions. I’ve enjoyed reading a number of her works over the past couple of years and I’m probably gearing up for a fully focused reading of all her work sometime in the next year or two. I suppose in some ways, this book’s inclusion on this list is a reflection of what I think about the author rather than this specific book.
However, as I reviewed my reading notes for this book, I noticed a number of thoughts that echoed my own thinking and writing over the past year. Solnit notes, for example, the importance of telling the truth about things and specifically cites calling things by their names as a critical application of this principle. She also writes that the powerful are served whenever a witness cannot speak up and that the failure to listen to or give voice to the stories of our lives is the silence that breaks down our shared humanity. Finally, she points out the danger of categories and explains that a world comprised of neat little groups is the breeding ground for more serious problems like racism.
Parting thought: Great books lift people out of their own categories and challenge them to extend identity out into the world.
Not that we lack good reasons to read, of course…
