For the fourth year, I’m home for Christmas, sitting in front of the fire here in a particularly snowy Vermont, and recapping what I read this year. After a couple of years heavily filled with policy-reading as research for “The First Campaign,” I got to have a year of a lot of fiction in 2008. I’m also generally a believer that books shouldn’t exceed 350 to 400 pages, though the number of books on this list that weigh in at 700 pages-plus show there can be value beyond that point.
Here’s my top ten:
1) Heyday :: Kurt Anderson’s novel about the joy and wonder of the U.S. circa 1848 was great, filled with historical nuggets about the characters who inhabited the era of Manifest Destiny.
2) The Forever War :: The memoir of the NYT’s Dexter Filkins’s coverage of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan was strikingly good and has been compared to many reviewers to Michael Herr’s Dispatches from the Vietnam War-era, although to Filkins’ credit (?) there are many fewer mind-altering drugs involved.
3) Team of Rivals :: I never tire of reading about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, at any time, I have a half-dozen such tomes in my reading pile by my bed. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s now-famous Cabinet-focused opus was a particular treat after the first third, which was as good a sleep aid as I’ve found.
4) America America :: Ethan Canin’s novel about a New York politician’s fictionalized 1972 presidential run is loosely based on Ted Kennedy’s career, though it’s worth reading more for the portrait of political hope found and lost.
5) The Best and the Brightest :: Too often when this phrase is used today it’s forgotten that David Halberstam’s classic is an indictment of the best and brightest rather than a celebration thereof. It’s amazing telling of the descent into Vietnam is all about the small decisions with outsized consequences and how we stumbled into something we didn’t really think about.
6) Nixonland :: I just finished this a few days ago here at home and am again impressed with Rick Perlstein’s ability to tell history. Following on the heels of his Goldwater history, he traces how we as a nation went from an overwhelming Lyndon Johnson victory in 1964 to an overwhelming Richard Nixon victory in 1972.
7) The Race Beat :: Looking at this third consecutive book about the ’60s and ’70s, I seem to, without realizing it, seemed to have spent a good chunk of this year reading about that period. This history of the Civil Rights movement through the eyes of the reporters who covered it is half-journalism story, half-social history and a great all-around education of the period.
8 ) The Looming Tower :: One of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books I read this year as part of my budding 9/11 research (the other was the also excellent “Ghost Wars” by Steve Coll), this was a fascinating history of al Qaeda’s rise and the missed opportunities we had to stop it.
9) God Is Not Great :: I spent a week in 2006 drinking my way through Scotland with Christopher Hitchens and he convinced me then, despite his famous propensity for drink, that he was a tremendous scholar. His treatise on the ways that God is corrupted on Earth was really influential in my still-evolving faith.
10) Here Comes Everybody :: Clay Shirky’s new(ish) book on social media helped refocus my teaching and thinking on the subject and has now become a central part of my class.
For 2008, I also need to give a nod to two friends who had books out this year. My college newspaper editor/mentor, Sugi, had her first novel published, Love Marriage, which draws on her Sri Lankan heritage to tell a great love story. Meanwhile, the debut novel, Blood Kin, of another college classmate, Ceridwen Dovey, reminded me of Anne Patchett’s Bel Canto, one of my favorite books of all time.
As I continue my way through all of Graham Greene’s canon, I had a number of strike-outs this year before I landed on “A Sense of Reality,” his collection of short stories, that renewed my faith in him as my favorite writer.
[Check here for my past lists: 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004.]
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