The Best Books We've Read This Year

The best books we've read in the first half of this year are:

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning, by Jonathan Mahler - New Yorkers of a certain romanticize the 1970's, when men were men, and women were scared to walk alone at night. The New York of Annie Hall and Taxi Driver would be almost unrecognizable to anybody who moved to the city in the past ten years - a felony was committed every minute, trash filled the streets, infrastructure crumbled, the NYPD and sanitation departments were enormously understaffed, ten-foot potholes lined the West Side Highway, and there were now-trendy neighborhoods in Manhattan where taxis then refused to drive. This New York reached its nadir in 1977, the same year that the seeds of its renewal were planted. That summer, arson brought entire neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx to the ground, a Con-Edison blackout led to 24 hours of urban terror and vandalism, the serial killer dubbed the Son of Sam terrorized the city's women, Studio 54 reached an apex of decadence, and Mario Cuomo, Ed Koch, Bella Abzug and Abe Beame waged an epic campaign for the Democratic nomination for mayor. The bickering New York Yankees, who seemed to play out all of the city's ethnic, racial, and class problems in the dugout all summer long, came together that fall to give the city something to root for, and its complicated, oft-criticized star, Reggie Jackson, hit three home runs on three swings of the bat in the deciding game six of the World Series. Not only is it the most convincing portrait of life in New York in the late 70's that I've ever read, it is one of the more convincing portraits of life in New York in any decade that I have ever read.

Novel About My Wife, by Emily Perkins - Of all of the books I have read so far this year, Novel About My Wife is the one most likely to be in heavy circulation fifty years from now. Two underemployed artists - she a sculptor and he a writer- living in a gentrifying section of London meet, fall in love, move in together, get married, and get pregnant. The husband is madly in love with his wife, and suspects that she is too good for me. Then, she tells him that a homeless man has been following her around, from work to to the Tube, for the past couple of weeks. They make a police report, and take all of the necessary safety precautions, but nobody other than his wife ever sees him, but its London and she's a beautiful woman - who's to say she's not being followed? She becomes increasingly moody, begins to smell odors nobody else can detect, and her art becomes increasingly weird, but she's pregnant - who's to say that isn't normal? Over 300 pages of torturous slow burn, the reader feels a tragedy coming, but that doesn't make the ending any less devastating, or the events that preceeded it anything less than completely understandable.

This Song Is You, by Arthur Phillips - This novel, about an advertising executive/music afficianado who falls in love with a local rock singer and shapes her career, from a distance, over the internet and through intermediaries, as she goes from nightclub favorite to a major label's rising star, is beautifully written, populated by fully realized characters, and grounded in real-world Brooklyn scenery. As a novel about how music manipulates our emotions and informs the emotion we call 'love,' comparisons to High Fidelity are inevitable, but Phillips' novel is darker, creepier, and more cynical - what Rob Gordon would look like with fifteen years and a profoundly broken heart.

Lush Life, by Richard Price - Its cliche to call Price's writing "Dickensian," but his stories, regardless of the medium in which they are told, portray realistic characters in every social strata, and show how a single event effects different communities in different ways. Fans of The Wire, for which Price also wrote, should love it. See the full CSD Review, May 4th.

Chronicles, Volume 1, by Bob Dylan - Chronicles is about how the Minnesotan named Rob Zimmerman became the New Yorker named "Bob Dylan" in fits and starts, and the very particular artistic choices Dylan has made over the years do not always correspond to the political stances others attribute to them. Its also the best book about music that I've read in a long time. CSD review, March 20th.

White Teeth, by Zadie Smith - Everything you've read about this novel is true. It is to London in the 90's what The Bonfire of the Vanities is to New York in the 80's, a huge novel about class, race, ethnicity, and, to use a cliche, how the melting pot we would all like to believe in is really, at best, a chunky stew. Coincidences and fortunate timing bring these larger-than-life characters together in unexpected ways.

Dear American Airlines, by Jonathan Miles - CSD review, June 30th.