Best books read in 2005

-Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series: I'm through the tenth book in what a Times reviewer called "the best historical novels ever written." They deserve all the superlatives they get--nominally they're about a British captain and ship's doctor during the Napoleonic wars (early 1800s), but really they're about men, friendship, art/science, politics, love....

And despite mostly taking place on ships in Her Majesty's Royal Navy, O'Brian books reminds me of Jane Austen's: both create a cozy, sharply-defined world within which they set loose interesting people. The musings and conversational asides of the characters and the author are often pithy, you find yourself reading and then laughing as you get it, or thinking wow, that's really it exactly. I actually prefer O'Brian to Austen--her world, perhaps because I'm a guy, reads like a long narrow hallway after a while, whereas his feels wide as the real world.

-Ann Patchett's Bel Canto: Every so often you read a book that everyone else has read and wonder if everyone else enjoyed it the way you did, or if for them it's just the latest Tuesdays with Morrie. The plot, based on true events, revolves around a South American revolutionary group taking an assortment of glittering elites hostage at an embassy party. There's a renowned soprano, a Japanese industrialist, an essential interpreter, and a pretty revolutionary--the plot bringing such different worlds in one space is interesting, but Patchett's prose, her ability to convey things like longing and telling mannerisms makes Bel Canto.

-Christopher Paolini's Eldest: He's barely 21, but Paolini is already one of the better fantasy writers out there. His first book, Eragon, set up the world of a boy and his dragon; I didn't have the same feeling of amazement reading the second book, but I did love reading it, it's an interesting world he's created and I'm impatient for the final book. It's more Harry Potter (you see the strings being pulled but can't wait to turn the page) than Urusla LeGuin (wow prose you reread and roll around in your head). But the home-schooled Paolini knows his stuff.

-Philip Roth's The Plot Against America: I'd never finished any novels by Roth/Bellow/Updike/Mailer; but I can see why Roth is in the modern pantheon (my own would include Rushdie/Hemingway/E.B. White/Nabokov). PAT imagines the fascist Charles Lindbergh beating FDR in 1940, from the point of view of a Jewish boy growing up in New Jersey. It's a "big" book--you could see it as a gloss of post-9/11 America, but I think Roth would find that too limiting. He's looking at the impact of fear on society, whether Weimar Germany or Caesar's Rome or Hobbes' England. But his ideas don't come at the price of story and character, PAT could just as easily be read as a classic American coming-of-age tale.

Photo of Patrick O'Brian from W. W. Norton & Company.

Times Travel

The New York Times has posted its annual 100 Notable Books of the Year online, a week before it'll appear in print form.

Yet the upper left corner of the online page bears the tag, Published: December 4, 2005.

So for the next six days, you, too, can marvel at the Times, a paper so mighty it warps time-space.

Incidentally, I find I've only read two of the books on the list:
-Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, it wasn't bad, but it feels like since Goblet of Fire the books have just been marking time; and
-1776, David McCullough's account of year two of the Revolutionary War--it's interesting how close America came to losing early.

Graphic by Jules Feiffer, New York Times, November 23, 2005

Upon the waters

If abortion--the ending of a fetus' life before it comes to full term--is murder, then shouldn't all miscarriages be investigated as possible homicides?

Or manslaughter or negligent homicide?

By right, shouldn't cities be hiring detectives to comb hospital records and track down the (crocodile?) tearing would-be-mothers?

NIH numbers show "among women who already know they are pregnant, nearly 15 percent will have a miscarriage," so there would have to be a lot of detectives.

'Ma'am, I'm going to have to ask you a few question. About your diet, level of exercise, work habits. Also, as in any other police investigation, I'm going to need contact information for your husband/parents/neighbors/coworkers.'

I think like much that is ugly in our society, the rhetoric of strident pro-lifers is made possible by perceived distance and a worldview of us/them.

As Christians, they've always been uncannily comfortable leading, teaching and--ultimately and always--in frustration proscribing for heathens the world over.

They're raised clear-eyed on their hill, grounded by faith and guided by the book. How else could 19-year-olds become missionaries and tell 91-year-olds (often through interpreters) the life they and all their ancestors lived is dead wrong.

This sense of us: grace/you: dark is sometimes tested for pro-lifers when a daughter or fellow church-goer chooses to have an abortion.

But if pro-lifers start inviting the government into their bedrooms whenever their wives or daughters miscarry, they could put to rest charges of hypocrisy a lot more frequently.

There's plenty of room in the ark, come on in.

Painting is from the Zubdat-al Tawarikh miniatures, via Dr. G’nsel Renda of Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey.