Besties forever

I am unable to resist best book lists of almost any form so I’ve been keeping an eye on the usual end of the year productions. I’m not as into it as some others, like the blogger Largehearted Boy, who amasses a giant list of best lists, or the librarian/bloggers at the Williamsburg Public Library, who take all those lists and turn them into one mega-list (though that list is broken into different categories, mostly for fiction).

Mostly, I keep an eye out for the lists compiled by the sources I rely on most for book reviews — The New York Times and Salon (which has separate lists for fiction and nonfiction). But I have to admit this year my favorite list came from Lev Grossman at Time magazine (which also had separate fiction and nonfiction lists). Perhaps it’s Grossman’s unapologetic appreciation of genre fiction — which was an awful lot of my fiction reading this year. Or, in a related angle, it’s his noticing books that are not the usual suspects — two graphic novels (The Death-Ray and Hark! A Vagrant!) became Christmas gifts in my house this year after I saw them on the list.

My best list consists of books I read this year, whenever they were published — though a large number were indeed new this year (one of the many benefits of working at a library is access to advanced review copies and awareness of newly published works). I chose my favorites with flat-out enjoyment as my only criterion, realizing that many factors go into that.

Fiction: A Song of Ice & Fire, books 1-3, George R.R. Martin (That’s A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords)

Nonfiction: Rin Tin Tin, Susan Orlean.

Teaser Tuesdays: Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard

I am definitely on a nonfiction jag these days — punctuated by bouts of mostly trashy fiction — and the current one is Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard. I’m a little over halfway through and it’s great so far — I’m fond of 19th century American history, especially about lesser known figures, and of historical true crime. This fits both categories. What I’ve learned so far is fascinating though heartbreaking: James Garfield, assassinated a few months into his unlikely presidency, was a good man who would have been a real asset to the nation in the middle of its Gilded Age excesses. And Charles Guiteau, the assassin, was even more of a wackjob than I realized after reading Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation.

Anyway here’s the teaser:

To submit your own teaser, post two sentences (spoiler free, please!) and submit your blog post in the comments section of Should Be Reading. Don’t have a blog? Then post the teaser itself in the comments.

 

“To Americans in 1881, the principal danger their presidents faced was not physical attack but political corruption. With a determination that shocked even the most senior politicans, they turned their wrath on the spoils system, the political practice that had made Garfield the target of the delusional ambitions of a man like Guiteau.” — p. 249