It’s been a good year for books. I’ve been glutting myself on them for months: reissued forgotten classics with sentences so crisp you can hear them ringing out through the decades, sprawling new novels that made me laugh and sigh and weep, philosophical nonfiction that has me reaching for my pencil to scrawl thoughts and addenda in the margins. As I’ve read my way through, I have saved the very best just for you.
I already pulled out my favorites from the first half of the year for you in July, and I invite you to revisit it now to make this list comprehensive. For the second half of the year, just start scrolling. I’ve selected books about love stories from 50 years ago and 100 years into the future; books written in conversation with ChatGPT and hand-drawn in painstaking analogue detail; funny books and sad books and thoughtful books. These are the stories that have brought me the most joy over the past six months, and I hope that they will do the same for you now.
The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine
This year’s National Book Award winner, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible is also one of the most purely charming books I’ve read this year. It tells the story of Raja, a 63-year-old gay English teacher who lives in Beirut with his overbearing 85-year-old mother in a tiny apartment. Raja wrote one book 25 years ago, and as his true (true) story opens, he’s confused to find he’s being offered a writing residency in America on the strength of that one book. He’ll explain the problem with that, he assures us, but he’s got to tell us just one or two stories first…
Over the rest of the book, Raja loops back and forth from memory to memory, telling us the story not just of his own coming of age and the forging of his bond with his mother, but also the history of Beirut. Raja talks us through the civil war, during which he experienced his sexual awakening; the 2019 collapse of the economy, during which his mother became best friends with the local gangster; the Covid years; the 2020 port explosion. From time to time, he assures us he’ll come back to that residency — but just one more story before he does!
Alameddine’s prose is winsome, warm-hearted, and very funny, but it is still sophisticated in its evocation of the trauma Raja suffers. At the heart of the novel is the mother Raja keeps trying to consign to parentheticals, who, with indomitable spirit, refuses to be consigned. This book is a treat from beginning to end.
Disinheritance: The Rediscovered Stories by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is the kind of writer you don’t read much anymore, and I mean that in the sense both complimentary and derogatory. Reading her collected short stories in the new volume Disinheritance feels like communing with the ghost of a strange and shimmering past.
Jhabvala thought of herself as a permanent exile. Her father was a Polish Jew who fled to Germany during World War I to escape military conscription. Jhabvala herself was born in Germany in 1927 and fled to England with the rest of her family in 1933. In 1951 she married an Indian man, and she went with him to India, she writes in the essay that serves as the prologue to Disinheritance, “blind. If my husband had happened to live in Africa, I’d have gone there equally blindly; asking no questions and in fact fearing no fears.”
Jhabvala lived in India for 25 years, writing Booker-winning novels and Oscar-winning screenplays for Merchant-Ivory films. In 1975, she relocated again for the last time, to New York, that city of exiles, where she lived until her death in 2013. Most of the stories in Disinheritance, though, are informed by India. A few are about English exiles in India, but most of them are about Indian people: married couples struggling with their extended families, class friction, adultery.
Jhabvala has little sympathy for the marriage-minded bourgeoisie of any nation, who she renders with satirical bite. Her sympathy she saves for the victims: the free spirited young woman who cheats on her older husband, but not the social-climbing neighbor who betrays her; both the woman trapped in a loveless marriage and the husband’s mistress, but not the husband himself. She is impatient with Westerners who romanticize India, but she doesn’t seem able to stop herself from romanticizing Indian women into either bright-eyed romantic beauties or into exotic grotesques.
Nonetheless, these stories are strange and beautiful to read. The sentences are affectless and curiously polite, as though to mask the irony and the fury running below them. Here’s that officious social climber who betrays her adulterous neighbor: “I didn’t cry long, for I knew that I had acted rightly in every way, and that if Lekha had been a person of principle, she would have understood that and felt grateful toward me. At any rate, I had nothing to reproach myself with. It was not my fault that Lekha chose to take this attitude. I had only done my duty.”
That crisp ratatat rhythm! The rage and self-pity and self-comfort running under those nice middle-class sentiments! What a strange book to read. I’m so glad that I did.
Heart the Lover by Lily King
Heart the Lover is the kind of immersive, overwhelming novel that makes you want to live inside it for days. It’s both prequel and sequel to King’s 2020 novel Writers and Lovers, but it stands on its own perfectly well if you haven’t read its predecessor. (I haven’t, and now I’m longing to.) Be warned: Once you’ve opened the covers, you aren’t putting it down until you have to.
Heart the Lover has two halves: one blazing hot with youthful passion, one drowning in cold middle-aged regret. In the first half, we watch a 1980s college love triangle first tantalizingly build itself up, and then spiral down into heartbreak. In the second half, we watch the lovers meet again decades later, this time in a hospital room.
It’s juicy stuff, but King’s work is so specific and grounded that it doesn’t feel prurient. She’s excellent on the tender trivialities of first love: the awkward conspiring of ways to be alone with your crush, the fixation on meaningless images. In one scene, two kids flirt by stealing their professors’ pipe stash. He lights the pipe for her, and when she accepts it, she notes that “the stem is a little wet from where [he] put his lips.”
“You knew I’d write a book about you some day,” the narrator remarks to a not-yet-revealed person in her first line, in the intimate confessional register that she maintains for the whole novel. Aren’t the rest of us all glad she finally did it?
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos
When Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was first published in 1925, it was met with an ecstatic highbrow reception. James Joyce, William Faulkner, and H.G. Wells all professed themselves fans, and Edith Wharton — tongue slightly in cheek — called it “the great American novel.” From there it drifted gently into obscurity, survived by the better-known 1953 Marilyn Monroe musical. But this year it’s been reissued by Modern Library, and what fun it is.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is the misspelling-ridden diary of one Lorelei Lee, a beautiful blonde flapper who makes her way from New York across the Atlantic and through Europe on the dime of her many diamond-toting suitors. Lorelei presents herself in her diary as a naive waif who always takes her suitors at their word, but the more she tells us about all the ways she’s gotten ahead in the world on the strength of her own charms, the more we begin to wonder. The great pleasure of this book is watching Lorelai reveal exactly how in control of her own powers she really is — and woe betide all the fine gentlemen who think they can take advantage of her. This book is frothy and giggly as a coupe full of champagne.
What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
The quality of each new Ian McEwan novel has traveled precipitously up and down since he scaled the glorious heights of Atonement in 2001. I admired 2022’s Lessons, but I didn’t care at all for 2019’s Machines Like Me, and I will decline entirely to discuss 2016’s Nutshell, out of respect. What a relief, then, that McEwan’s latest novel, What We Can Know, is up there — not at Atonement heights, but certainly well above the sexy robot/talking fetus days of yore. It’s enormously, deceptively fun to read.
What We Can Know takes place in 2120, after the floods have come to decimate the world. Our narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is an English scholar profoundly nostalgic for those heady days of the early 21st century, just before the crisis came. He is particularly fixated on a lost poem that was read only once, at a dinner party in 2014, before apparently disappearing from the earth. Thomas, though, has recreated the scene of the dinner party in detail, restoring it piece by piece from the digital detritus of the attendants’ lives. All that’s missing — Thomas thinks — is the poem itself.
“We have robbed the past of its privacy,” remarks one of the scholars of McEwan’s water-logged 22nd century. All the secret social network accounts, the incognito mode searches, the deleted emails — they have all been tidily restored and logged, maintained on a server farm in Nigeria, where the heart of human civilization now lies. Anyone can recreate to minute accuracy a digital day in the life of whomever they choose from our own moment: the moment of crisis when, to the great confusion of our descendents, we all absolutely failed to act.
But this is an Ian McEwan novel, so of course you know that there’s a twist coming. In the novel’s final third, McEwan gives over the narrative to a lost manuscript, apparently by one of the attendees at the fateful dinner party in question. The revelations contained therein will lace everything we read before with a thrilling retrospective horror.
Do Admit! The Mitford Sisters and Me by Mimi Pond
The Mitford sisters, the fashionable bright young things of England’s inter-war heyday, have been going through a revival lately. In the era of fretful think pieces about how to talk to your Trump-supporting relatives at the holiday table, who can resist the story of the Mitford nursery, where precocious young aristocrats used their diamond rings to carve Nazi swastikas and Communist sickles into the windows?
There were six Mitford sisters all together. One of them became a communist and investigative journalist, one became a satirical novelist, one of them became a fascist, and one of them fell in love with Hitler. (The one who became a duchess and the one who became a lesbian are usually considered the duller Mitfords.) Telling the story of the Mitfords means telling the story of the 20th century, which means they are catnip to biographers.
Over the past few years, there have been Mitford TV shows, Mitford biographies, and TV adaptations of the Mitford novels. Mimi Pond’s new graphic biography Do Admit! is to my mind the most playful and delightful of them all.
Pond draws the Mitfords in punchy Prussian blue ink, cheeky and whimsical. In her hands, people become goddesses, bookends, roast turkeys. When they’re being bitchy (and if no one’s being bitchy, it ain’t a Mitford book), their eyebrows arch like gleeful little devil’s horns.
Part of the appeal of the Mitford story is that it brings the enormous horrors of the 20th century into a human scale. Pond’s version of the story is the most human one of all.
The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron by Roger Shattuck
In the year 1800, a wild boy appeared in a village in the south of France. He looked to be about 12 years old, almost naked, and was unable to speak. He had, researchers would later determine, lived at least half his life in the wild, completely alone.
That made this wild boy an enticing prospect: a natural experiment. He was the closest scientists would ever come, they thought, to observing man in a state of nature, before civilization and its corrupting forces. They ensconced the boy in a school for deaf-mutes, named him Victor, and set to work observing him.
As Roger Shattuck recounts in this insightful account, originally published in 1980, the experiment of the wild boy was in many ways accounted a failure. Victor never learned to speak, and he never revealed any profound truths about pre-modern history. Instead, the heart of this slim and surprisingly tender volume is Victor’s relationships with the people who cared for him, who he clearly came to love. In one passage, he’s held in jail for two weeks before being reunited with his governess, at which he “expressed his joy in shrill cries, convulsive movements of his hands, and a radiant expression on his face,” so that onlookers thought him “an affectionate son who of his own accord throws himself into his mother’s arms.”
When Victor first appeared after six years without human interaction, philosophers of the time thought he represented a pure human, unsullied by social politics. But read today, Victor’s story seems instead like a treatise on how fundamental social behavior is to human nature. A man in a state of nature is not a man walking alone through the forest, but a man surrounded by friends.
Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart
In 2010, Gary Shteyngart published Super Sad True Love Story, a dystopian novel that foresaw influencers and corresponding by voice memo a solid eight years early. Vera, or Faith is his first dystopia since then, and it shows off the restraint that made Super Sad True Love Story so compelling. No one would call Shteyngart a subtle writer, exactly, but he has the sense to keep his politicking in the story’s background, where it belongs.
Vera, or Faith takes place in a post-democracy America, where certain states track women’s periods and the cars report to the government. But we learn this fact slantwise, mostly through the schoolwork of 10-year-old Vera, our protagonist. Anxious, precocious, and ambitious, Vera is a triumph of a child character. She is convinced that her bickering parents will divorce, so to forestall such an event, she is terminally nosy. She laces her inner monologue with quotes she’s borrowed from the adults around her, so that when she gets a B on a math quiz she announces herself horrified: “Now she would never be a ‘woman in STEM.’”
Vera, whose Korean-born birth mother is long gone, is trying to figure out her place in a mixed-race family whose dynamics she can’t always navigate. She’s also trying to make her way through the brutalities of elementary school as a weird anxious kid with few friends. And she’s trying to find her way in a country that has never been kind to weird anxious brown kids, and has only become less so in Vera’s lifetime. In Shteyngart’s characteristic shaggy-dog style, the resulting story is surprisingly gripping and deeply sweet.
Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor
Brandon Taylor has turned out two novels and a book of short stories since his debut in 2020, all with impeccable sentences. I’ve admired them all, but Minor Black Figures is the first book of Taylor’s I’ve felt the urge to keep on my own bookshelf, so that I can return to it whenever I like. It is also, perhaps not coincidentally, the first book of his to leave behind the sometimes airless atmosphere of the university campus.
Instead, Minor Black Figures takes place over the course of a single Manhattan summer, sweaty and smelling of cigarette smoke. Our protagonist, Wyeth, is a young Black painter who spent most of grad school painting scenes from old European art films, with Black people taking the place of the white actors. This was not, Wyeth tells us, a political statement about the importance of representation: It was just what he liked to paint. But in 2020, he painted a scene from Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light that went viral after social media picked it up as a commentary on the death of George Floyd, “back-doored,” Wyeth thinks, “into a dead Black boy painting.”
As Minor Black Figures opens, Wyeth is painting in a New York studio, trying to do something urgent and modern about the protests he sees all around him. But he’s not really all that interested, aesthetically speaking, in the protests. What interests Wyeth is the lapsed Catholic priest Keating, a new hookup he can’t get off his mind, and all the questions Keating brings with him about God and religion and what it stands for.
Minor Black Figures is an elegant, funny, sexy novel about the problems of making art in a political moment, about trying to engage with ideas beyond race when observers always want to make your race the center of your art. And as you’d expect by now: The sentences are gorgeous, too.
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara
In 2021, the novelist and technology reporter Vauhini Vara published an essay called “Ghosts,” about her sister’s death, in partnership with the AI chatbot GPT-3. Line by line, Vara feeds lines into the bot, and GPT-3 completes them. The essays it generates are banal at first — in one version, the sister gets better and they play lacrosse together; in another Vara meets a boyfriend — but the more of her own voice Vara feeds the AI, the more specific and interesting its suggestions get.
“Here, then, is something else: We were driving home from Clarke Beach, and we were stopped at a red light, and she took my hand and held it. This is the hand she held: the hand I write with, the hand I am writing this with,” the handless, sisterless GPT-3 wrote in one draft. That line, Vara writes in the fraught, ambivalent Searches, was, for her, the best line in the essay.
“Here was as nuanced and profound a reference to embodiment as I’d ever read,” she writes. “Artificial intelligence had succeeded in moving me with a sentence about the most devastating experience of my life.” But the moment that it was describing had never happened, she adds. She and her sister would never actually have done something as sentimental as hold hands.
Searches is also, in a way, written in collaboration with AI. Chapter by chapter, Vara goes through the great tech companies that have emerged over the past thirty years: Google, Facebook, Amazon, OpenAI. She describes what they’ve given us and what they’ve taken from us, too; how they snuck their way into her life and why she still uses them, if she does. Then she feeds the chapters into ChatGPT and asks for its reactions. How, she asks, does it think about the rhetorical strategies it uses as a chatbot to gain its users’ trust?
“Insightful and important to consider,” chirps ChatGPT in response. It generates a neatly outlined list: inclusive language, authoritative tone, flattery, implied objectivity. “That makes sense,” replies a deadpan Vara.
Searches makes for a compelling read alongside the McEwan novel from further up this list. Like McEwan, Vara is interested in what we can tell about ourselves from the digital detritus we leave in our wake, about how much of our privacy we’ve given up to technology. She’s making a case for the idea that human beings have yet to become obsolete — but the possibilities for what technology can bring us too, she suggests, cannot be overlooked.
