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A Year in Reading: New Yorker Fiction 2008

Looking back through old posts at The Millions, one of my favorites is my post going through every New Yorker story in 2005. It was a somewhat grueling post to compile, but in the spirit of recent New Year's resolutions, also very rewarding. I spend a lot of time each year reading the New Yorker and so it seems fitting that I might reflect on that time spent and revisit some of what I read. As perhaps the most high-profile venue for short fiction in the world, taking stock of the New Yorker's year in fiction is a worthwhile exercise for writers and readers alike.

As with my effort a few years ago, what you'll find below is more an exercise in listing and linking than any real attempt at summary, but hopefully some folks will enjoy having links to all of this year's stories on one page. I've also included some links to people who talked about New Yorker stories during the year. I'll include Perpetual Folly here rather than with the stories below since it reflected on every story in the New Yorker over the course of 2008.

In revisiting all of the stories, one major over-arching theme emerged for me, the conflict between stories that center on what I call "suburban malaise" (born out of "The Swimmer" and "What We Talk about When We Talk about Love" among many others) and those that don't. The former are what I think of as the base condition for New Yorker (and indeed all of contemporary American and UK short fiction) and the latter are the departures from that. The departure can be one of character, theme, setting, or style. The distinction is, of course, imprecise, and there are many riveting, impeccable examples of the "suburban malaise" story on offer from the New Yorker. The departures, meanwhile, can serve as a breath of fresh air and when done well, expand the boundaries of short fiction for the reader.

January 7, "Outage" by John Updike - The New Yorker kicked off the year with old standby John Updike offering a story that begins somewhat quaintly with protagonist Brad being thrust into a reverie by a storm-caused power outage. The story continues on quaintly as Brad wanders through his darkened town, but changes tone when he encounters a similarly dazed neighbor Lynne and the plot shifts to one of more typical New Yorker-esque suburban malaise and infidelity. Updike's The Widows of Eastwick was published in October. Links: Jacob Russell, Richard Larson

January 14, "Wakefield" by E.L. Doctorow - Speaking of suburban malaise, Doctorow takes it to the next level in this long story of a disaffected husband and father who hides out in his garage attic, letting his family believe he's gone missing. Like a stowaway on his own property, Howard Wakefield scavenges for food and spies on his wife as she steers the family ship. The central drama of the story hinges on how long Howard will keep up his ruse and the story's end is tantalizing. This one, interestingly, is a retelling of a Nathaniel Hawthorne story of the same name. Docotorow has a new, as yet untitled novel coming out late this year. Links: One Real Story

January 21, "Ash Monday" by T. Coraghessan Boyle - Like many Boyle classics, this one is set in California where the fear of natural disaster is always present in the background. On the surface, this story is one of neighbors doing what neighbors sometimes do: hate each other. Though it is the New Yorker's third story in a row about the suburbs to lead off 2008, this one, with its west coast focus, is far from typical for the magazine. Boyle, who knows how to end a story, closes this one out in a blaze of glory. Boyle's new book The Women comes out soon.

January 28, "The Reptile Garden" by Louise Erdrich - Goodbye suburbs. Erdrich's story is about dreamy Evelina in North Dakota who is not adjusting to college life very well. She obsesses over Anais Nin and eventually ends up taking a job at a mental hospital where she meets Nonette, who, like Nin, is French. The type of friendship that could only bloom inside the confines of a mental hospital ensues. Eventually, Evelina makes the transition from staff to patient. The story is excerpted from Erdrich's novel Plague of Doves.

February 4, "Friendly Fire" by Tessa Hadley - Hadley, like the four preceding writers, is a favorite of New Yorker fiction editors. Her stories seem to exude the grayness of lower middle-class English towns. This one is about a pair of women who do cleaning jobs. Pam owns the little business and Shelly helps out. Shelly's son Anthony is in Afghanistan and this fact lends some definition to her otherwise mundane life. This is a story of dialog and exposition, not plot. It's funny in parts and looks in on a life. Hadley's The Master Bedroom was published last year.

February 11 & 18, "Free Radicals" by Alice Munro - Munro is a favorite of mine, though I've preferred several of her stories from over the years to this one. Still, it's quite good and even gripping in parts. Even just now, skimming through it, I'm getting sucked back in. It's about recently widowed Nita. Munro sets the stage with a lengthy introduction to Nita, her life proscribed and seemingly shrinking following the death of her husband. With a knock at the door and an unexpected visitor, however, the story takes an abrupt and darker turn. Munro's most recent collection is 2006's The View from Castle Rock. Links: Armenian Odar, Lemon Hound

February 25, "Shelter of the World" by Salman Rushdie - Channeling the "The Emperor's New Clothes," Rushdie introduces Akbar the Great who has "an imaginary wife," Jodha. Akbar being who he was, "no man dared gainsay him." Akbar's people build him a city, he employs an "Imperial Flatterer First Class," and he speaks in the royal "we." Akbar's inability to say "I" is a symptom of the great solitude that results from his great power and feeling experimental he tries referring to himself as "I" with his imaginary wife. As you can imagine, the story has the qualities of a parable. It's also quite funny in parts. "Shelter of the World" is an excerpt from Rushdie's novel The Enchantress of Florence. Links: Jacob Russell, N+1

March 3, "Leaving for Kenosha" by Richard Ford - Fresh off finishing up his Bascombe trilogy, Ford offers up a story about another divorced father, this one in New Orleans. "It was the anniversary of the disaster." and Walter Hobbes is spending the day with his teenage daughter Louise who wants to say goodbye to a classmate who is leaving the city for good, part of the ongoing, post-Katrina exodus. While Louise is at the dentist, it's up to Walter to find a card for the occasion, "There was simply nothing he could do that was right here, he realized. The task was beyond his abilities." The story offers up ample amounts of patented Richard Ford suburban malaise and the meeting at the story's end - Walter and Louise and the departing family - manages to capture a certain feeling about what has happened in New Orleans. Ford's most recent book is 2006's The Lay of the Land. Links: Jacob Russell

March 10, "Raj, Bohemian" by Hari Kunzru - A very quirky story. The narrator travels in rarefied social circles, attending high concept dinner parties in spectacular, rent-free lofts, that sort of thing. The circle is infiltrated by Raj, who photographs one such party and uses the pictures in an ad. The narrator gets ticked off, the party's host says, "That's so Raj." Another says, "Get over yourself, man. You're acting so old-fashioned, like some kind of Communist." The narrator begins to suspect that all of his friends are trying to sell him something, that their "coolness" has become a marketable commodity. An interesting paranoia sets in, but Kunzru doesn't take the concept as far as he might have. Kunzru's most recent book is last year's My Revolutions

March 17, "The Bell Ringer" by John Burnside - In Scotland, Eva's father dies, "still, the fact was that in the aftermath of the funeral, when it had seemed as if the whole world had fallen silent, what had troubled Eva most was her marriage, not her father's absence." Her husband is the distant Matt. To escape her solitude, Eva signs up for a bell-ringing club, out of which a love triangle of sorts emerges. The story fits into the modern British and Irish short story tradition of William Trevor, Roddy Doyle, and Tessa Hadley and is a decent example of the style. Burnside has a new novel, The Glister, coming out in March.

March 24, "The Region of Unlikeness" by Rivka Galchen - The narrator insinuates herself into the odd friendship of Jacob and Ilan. The two men are talkers, name-dropping intellectuals who delight in both low and high culture. The narrator is mesmerized by them and they see her as a sort of "mascot." Then she gets caught between the two men. They seem to be quarreling initially, but a mystery emerges, something involving time travel and all sorts of odd meta-physics. This one is an excerpt from Galchen's debut, Atmospheric Disturbances.

March 31, "Great Experiment" by Jeffrey Eugenides - This is a memorable story, one that seems even more timely now than when it was published. Kendall is a poet with a day job working for eighty-two-year-old Jimmy Dimon's boutique publishing house, helping Dimon publish whatever strikes Dimon's fancy, an abridged edition of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America in this case. Kendall is bitter, underpaid, and unsupported by his equally bitter wife making him easy prey for Dimon's crooked accountant, Piasecki, who ropes Kendall into an embezzlement scheme. Eugenides strikes a nice balance in this one. The reader feels sympathy for Kendall's predicament but also a loathing for his tendency to blame all his ills on others. Eugenides hasn't had any new books out in a while, but he recently edited the anthology My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead. Links: Good Readings

April 7, "The House Behind a Weeping Cherry" by Ha Jin - Awkward, innocent Wanren is living in a rooming house for prostitutes in Flushing, Queens. Short on rent, Wanren is pushed into service as a driver by the landlady (and madame) Mrs. Chen. Wanren becomes like a brother to the three girls he lives with, but falls for one of them, Huong and hatches a plan to start a new life with her. Jin offers up an engaging peek into a hidden subculture of illegal immigrants, sweatshops, and sex workers. Another memorable story from the magazine this year. Jin's most recent book is last year's A Free Life.

April 14, "The Lie" by T. Coraghessan Boyle - Boyle was the New Yorker's first repeat visitor to the fiction department last year, and by mid-April no less. This story offers a somewhat more generic vision of suburban malaise than is typical of Boyle (again in California), but it also goes for the gusto. Like Wakefield of Doctorow's story in January, Boyle's Lonnie plays a sort of disappearing act, not with himself, but with his baby instead. Unable to stop himself, Lonnie dismantles his life almost in slow motion and it's hard to look away, though you want to. No natural disasters here, though.

April 21, "The Repatriates" by Sana Krasikov - Grisha and Lera spent a decade in America finding opportunity but Grisha, though he finds plenty of success and remuneration, becomes disillusioned and has visions of greater things back in Russia. As the title indicates, this is a story of repatriation, rather than the expatriation that has been an inspiration for so many expats writing in America. That unique element, plus the exotic locale of Russia (I'm a sucker for exotic locales), made this one a winner for me. This story appeared in Krasikov's debut, One More Year. Krasikov also appeared in our Year in Reading and penned a guest post for us.

April 28, "Bullfighting" by Roddy Doyle - British suburban malaise takes wing to Iberia. In this very memorable story, Donal and his middle-aged buddies plan a guys' trip to Spain, where Doyle serves up a compelling mix. The guys all have fun, getting away from the families and all that, but Doyle also makes clear how circumscribed their lives really are and how finding real joy and escape is a near impossibility. Doyle's latest is a collection of stories, The Deportees.

May 5, "Them Old Cowboy Songs" by Annie Proulx (registration required) - This was a very affecting story that stayed with me a long time and that I still remember vividly eight months after first reading it. Proulx captures the frontier, Western spirit as well as any writer ever has, but she certainly doesn't romanticize it. The hardships and loneliness faced by homesteaders Archie and Rose McLaverty are unfathomable to us today. A must read. This story appears in Proulx's most recent collection, Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3.

May 12, "A Man Like Him" by Yiyun Li - This is a strange story with a surreal quality that seems common in contemporary Asian fiction. At its heart though, the story is about an older generation being bewildered and wounded by the younger. In China, where the story takes place, modernization has come quickly, and one imagines that the older folks must look upon the younger ones like aliens. In Li's story, an allegedly unfaithful father has been publicly pilloried on his daughter's popular blog and become something of a national scapegoat. Teacher Fei is sympathetic and tracks down the man, as much to commiserate with him as to try to understand. Li's debut novel The Vagrants comes out in February.

May 19, "East Wind" by Julian Barnes - Another entry in the British suburban malaise column (though technically the malaise is felt by the seaside). Vernon lives in a small beach town. "He'd moved here to have no weather in his life." He isn't looking for love but unexpectedly finds it (or something like it) with Andrea, an immigrant waitress with East German roots. She's got a skeleton in the closet, one that was particular appropriate for an Olympic year. Barnes' latest is his memoir Nothing to be Frightened of.

May 26, "The Full Glass" by John Updike - Updike makes his second appearance of 2008, and he's feeling old in this one, kicking off with the senior citizen narrator's pharmaceutical regimen. It's not long before he's reminiscing about growing up during the Great Depression and then alighting from one reminiscence to another with the notion of his various habits tying the memories together. A solid story that has a very different narrative arc from most of what appears in the magazine. Links: Ward Six

June 2, "A Night at the Opera" by Janet Frame - This brief story was a previously unpublished piece by the late writer from New Zealand. It is essentially a reverie - a distant memory - that bubbles up in the mind of an institutionalized woman as she watches a Marx Brothers film. Another more "experimental" piece than is typically seen in the magazine. Frame wrote Faces in the Water and several other novels.

June 9 & 16, The Summer Fiction issue: "Natasha" by Vladimir Nabokov - A lovely line: "With a pout, Natasha counted the drops, and her eyelashes kept time." Last year, Verses and Versions, a collection of poetry translated by Nabokov was published. "Tits Up in a Ditch" by Annie Proulx (registration required) - Proulx paints tough life for Dakotah, born to a teen-aged mom, raised by her cruel grandparents. She gets married, has a baby, the marriage falls apart, and she joins the Army. The tragedies are laid on thick from there, but it's a vibrant, gripping read. "Don't Cry" by Mary Gaitskill (registration required) - This has a very "issues of the day" feel to it. Janice goes with her friend Katya to Ethiopia where Katya is looking to adopt a child. There are roadblocks both bureaucratic and emotional and all in all it's a solid story. The rendering of Ethiopia is nicely done. This is the title story in Gaitskill's forthcoming collection.

June 23, "The Headstrong Historian" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - A sweeping story about a woman named Nwamgba, almost epic in its scope, and in following her life, we are witness to the many changes over the decades that overtake her land and people. Nwamgba bears a son Anikwenwa after many miscarriages but then is widowed. She sends Anikwenwa to school where he learns English. Adichie explores the distance that grows up between Nwamgba and Anikwenwa, she knowing only the old ways, he becoming steadily assimilated by the new. By the time Grace, Nwamgba's grand-daughter is born and comes of age, the generations are separated by a gulf, and the story itself becomes an intriguing parable of the changes that came to Africa in the 1900s, what many things were altered and what few things nonetheless endured. Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun won much praise when it was published.

June 30, "Deep-Holes" by Alice Munro - Munro makes her second appearance of 2008. This story, like the prior week's story, covers decades. In this one, a family disintegrates and then two of its members come back into contact. It's not quite as good as "Free Radicals," but, being an Alice Munro story, it's still quite good.

July 7 & 14, "Thirteen Hundred Rats" by T. Coraghessan Boyle - With the year only half over, Boyle logs his third appearance in the magazine. There are few "literary" writers that can base a story around the outlandish and pull it off. Were Boyle's stories to actually take place in real life, the climactic moments would be fodder for those "strange but true" stories that get forwarded to everyone's email inboxes. It's a quality that not all readers appreciate. This story, as the title suggests, involves quite a few rats. In my opinion Boyle pulls it off. But then, I'm a Boyle fan. Links: Too Shy to Stop.

July 21, "Yurt" by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum - A very fun read. This story takes us into an elementary school, among harried, altruistic teachers and their petty gossip. I loved how Bynum adopts the proscribed vocabulary of the elementary school, referring to all her characters as Ms. or Mr. The big news in the teachers' lounge is that the flighty Ms. Duffy has returned pregnant from a long trip overseas. There's much to love here. It doesn't have the ponderousness of emotion that so many New Yorker stories bear. The story is an excerpt from the novel Ms. Hempel Chronicles.

July 28, "The Teacher" by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - A rather strange story and fairly memorable, though we're getting into the last half of 2008 here, so I suppose I didn't read this all that long ago. This one could have been tightened up a bit, but I loved the off-kilter characters: the narrator, two spinsters, and some sort of latter day mystic. I have no real-life analogs for them, yet they leaped off the page for me. The plot was less intriguing to me, however. A little tighter, and this story would have been a favorite. Jhabvala won the Booker Prize in 1983 for Heat and Dust. Links: Emdashes

August 4, "Clara" by Roberto Bolaño - 2008 was the year of Bolaño, and the New Yorker took part in the surge of interest surrounding the late author. This brief story seems almost in a dream. The narrator is in love with Clara. They write letters to each other and talk on the phone from afar. The distance between them seems more than just physical. It's as if the universe has willed it. Bolaño's 2666 was published in translation to much acclaim last year.

August 11 & 18, "The Dinner Party" by Joshua Ferris - More suburban malaise. This time of the variety that takes place in Brooklyn. But it's not about a dinner party so much as waiting for a dinner party to occur. The dinner party is one of the mundanities of life - the couple hosting the party clearly thinks so - but much as we rebel against these mundanities it doesn't take much to make you realize that bitching and moaning isn't rebelling. This story has suspense and a very nice narrative arc that I won't ruin by divulging its details. Ferris' debut Then We Came to the End was a National Book Award finalist. Ferris appeared in our Year in Reading in 2007. Links: Too Shy to Stop, I Read A Short Story Today

August 25, "Awake" by Tobias Wolff - This tiny story is a well rendered little sketch. Wolff takes us into the head of Richard, lying awake in bed, musing on various things and wanting to put the moves Ana, his girlfriend, lying next to him. The story captures well the competing influences in the mind of the young man: sex and all the complications that come with the pursuit of it. Wolff's Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories came out last year. Links: Under the Midnight Sun, One Real Story, Too Shy to Stop

September 1, "Gorse is Not People" by Janet Frame - This is the second story by the late Frame in the magazine in 2008 and this one is pretty mind blowing. Written in 1954, it's about a dwarf named Naida, who, living very much in her own head, believes that she will be released on her 21st birthday from the institution that houses her. She also believes that she will get married and live some kind of glamorous life. It's clear that Naida is mentally disturbed and that she would likely not fare well on the "outside," but she is also incredibly sympathetic. Frame captures Naida's odd mindset that fuses child-like thoughts with adult desires. It's a powerful, affecting story that is a major departure from what is typically found in the magazine.

September 8, "Face" by Alice Munro - Munro lands in the magazine for a third time in 2008. Like "Deep-Holes" from earlier in 2008, "Face" covers almost a whole lifetime in a short story. The narrator has a troubling childhood featuring a cruel father and a large birthmark on his face. The narrator grows up and becomes a successful radio actor and announcer ("He has a face for radio" was the juvenile thought that crept into my head) and in his old age is reminiscing about a childhood event that haunts him, when his birthmark came into focus for him and when his life was seemingly set on the course that has taken him through the decades. Munro makes one think that many novels might be better served as short stories, particularly in the hands of a master like her. Links: I Read A Short Story Today

September 15, "A Spoiled Man" by Daniyal Mueenuddin - I found this story to be irresistibly charming because its protagonist was so irrepressible. Rezak insinuates himself into a job among the large staff on the estate of a man and his American wife. He lives in a home of his own construction that might be best described as a crate and breaks it down and moves it with him wherever he goes. Much time is spent describing Rezak's ingenious modifications to the crate. Rezak is, it seems, a man who would be happy almost no matter what. He even finds himself a wife. But the realities of Rezak's circumstances eventually close in on him. Mueenuddin's debut collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders will be published in February. Links: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was one of Manil Suri's Year in Reading picks.

September 22, "The Noble Truths of Suffering" by Aleksandar Hemon - I'm generally a big fan of Hemon's work though I'll acknowledge that it seems like he goes back to the same well for all of his fiction, plumbing his own experience of leaving Bosnia before the war and trying to assimilate into American life (and particularly American academic and literary life). In this story Hamon's narrator is back in Bosnia, returned from the U.S., but he is still at prey to the awkwardness of his double life, illuminated when through a confluence of events, a famous American author visiting the country ends up joining him at his parents' house for dinner. There is a neat story within a story element to this one as well (another hallmark that crops up in Hemon's work). Hemon's latest is 2008 National Book Award finalist The Lazarus Project. Links: Under the Midnight Sun.

September 29 "Three" by Andrea Lee - Three vignettes about three people who died. This story didn't do much for me. Even though I read it just three months ago, I had trouble remembering it. Did I inadvertantly skip this one? Could be. Lee's latest is Lost Hearts in Italy

October 6, "The Idiot President" by Daniel Alarcon - Alarcon appears in the New Yorker fairly frequently. This story, like his others, takes place in Latin America. In this one, the narrator expects to be leaving for America soon, but in the meantime he has joined an acting troupe, traveling around. They put on a memorable performance in a mining town for the workers there. There's not much drama here. It's mostly a tale of the narrator's stasis. Alarcon's most recent novel is Lost City Radio. Links: Under the Midnight Sun.

October 13, "Gold Boy, Emerald Girl" by Yiyun Lee - The second story by Li in 2008 and this one is also very good. It is about a middle-aged, unmarried man, Hanfeng, and woman, Siyu. Hanfang's mother, Professor Dai, was Siyu's teacher. Dai is the formidable sort and would like to see the two married, less out of compassion that out of a desire to see the two of them squared away. Siyu and Hanfeng pursue the relationship in order to please Professor Dai, but the pleasure in the story is the way Yi explores the relationships and teases the back story out of the various interactions.

October 20, "Sleep" by Roddy Doyle - This is Doyle's second story of 2008, and it's a snack of a story filled with musing and reminiscing. In some ways the story is about being with someone and what you think about while they sleep - when you are alone, but not really because that person is right next to you - but the story is about a lot more too.

October 27, "The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea" by J.M.G. Le Clezio (registration required) - Le Clezio raised his profile quite a bit in the U.S. this year with his surprise Nobel Prize win, but I regret to say that this story was a major dud for me. There's just nothing to hang your hat on in this one. Daniel is the boy of the title, and though he has never seen the sea, he is obsessed with it. So he leaves his boarding school and heads to the water. I didn't enjoy the thoroughly dreamy language in this one, nor the lack of specifics. It was told like a myth or parable but for no reason that I could discern. It was as if Le Clezio was using the dreamy style to excuse himself from the constraint of constructing a believable narrative. Links: After Le Clezio won the big prize, we heard from one of his American publishers.

November 3, "The Fat Man's Race" by Louise Erdrich - The New Yorker continues to go back through its roster of writers as Erdrich makes a second appearance on the year. This one is the magazine's most bite-sized of the year, an amuse bouche as all eyes turn to the election. It's about a woman who is sleeping with devil, which maybe makes it fitting for election week. This story may or may not be in Erdrich's new collection The Red Convertible.

November 10, "Leopard" by Wells Tower - A very inventive story from Tower whose fiction and non-fiction I'd love to see more of in the New Yorker. This one is told in the second person about (by?) an unpopular eleven-year-old boy. Tower gets into the boy's head incredibly well - the perpetually wounded pride, the outlandish fantasies that punish those who have wronged him. This story appears in Tower's excellent forthcoming collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Links: Sana Krasikov picked Tower's collection for her Year in Reading and Tower appeared in our Year in Reading as well.

November 17, "Lostronaut" by Jonathan Lethem - This story was pretty awesome. It was the only speculative fiction to land in the New Yorker this year, not quite making up for the absence of Murakami and Saunders from the magazine's pages. This story is told in the form of letters from Janice, a "Lostronaut" aboard some sort of space station, to her "Dearest Chase." She and her fellow astronauts are trapped in orbit by Chinese space mines and that's not even the worst of it for poor Janice. While the premise and epistolary style are intriguing, Janice's unique, irrepressible voice really carries the story. Lethem has an as yet untitled novel slated for September. Links: Discover

November 24, "Ghosts" by Edwidge Danticat - This story takes us way out of the New Yorker comfort zone to the rundown neighborhoods of Haiti. It looks at Pascal, a young man who occupies two worlds. His parents run a fairly upstanding restaurant but Pascal has been befriended by the gang members who patronize the place. Pascal gets in a bit too deep with them and the result is quite gripping. Danticat's most recent book is her memoir Brother, I'm Dying.

December 1, "In Other Rooms, Other Wonders" by Daniyal Mueenuddin - It took me a while to get into this very long story but in the end I liked it quite a bit. It basically chronicles the relationship between an old Pakistani patriarch Harouni and his young mistress Husna. Husna is not of the same social standing as Harouni but her proximity to him allows her to experience an extravagant life. She seems to understand the trade-off, but not enough to maintain her position once Harouni's daughters appear on the scene. This story, along with Mueenuddin's earlier in 2008, shows off an expansive, almost lyrical style. This is the title story in Mueenuddin's forthcoming debut collection.

December 8, "Waiting" by Amos Oz - This was an engaging story about a daily routine interrupted. There is a bit of mystery behind it. Instead of meeting small-town Israeli bureaucrat Benny Avni for lunch as she always does, Avni's wife has sent him a cryptic note. Avni is very rigid in his ways and so we follow him through all of his perfectly sensible rationalizations for Luda's sudden change in behavior. The enjoyment (if that is the right word) comes in watching a sense of concern creep into the actions of this otherwise aloof man. Oz has a new book Rhyming Life and Death coming out in April.

December 15, "The Woman of the House" by William Trevor - Trevor, perhaps the most frequent fiction contributor to the New Yorker over the last decade, makes his first appearance of 2008. I'm not a huge fan of Trevor's gray, damp landscapes and characters but he is no doubt a masterful storyteller and a genius with the British version of suburban malaise. This one is unique in that it places a pair of itinerant, immigrant painters at the center of the action. Told partly through their eyes, the story of the woman living as caretaker for her crippled cousin is seen from an outsider's perspective. The prolific Trevor's most recent collection is Cheating at Canasta.

December 22 & 29 - The year closes out with the annual winter fiction issue (slimmer than usual this time). There were four stories in this one. Here they are in order from my most favorite to least: "Another Manhattan" by Donald Antrim, "Some Women" by Alice Munro (a fourth New Yorker appearance in 2008!) (registration required), "The Gangsters" by Colson Whitehead (registration required), and "Meeting with Enrique Lihn" by Roberto Bolaño.

And to wrap up this already overlong exercise, my favorite New Yorker stories of 2008 were "Wakefield" by E.L. Doctorow, "Free Radicals" by Alice Munro, "The Lie" by T. Coraghessan Boyle, "Them Old Cowboy Songs" by Annie Proulx, "Yurt" by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, "The Dinner Party" by Joshua Ferris, "Gorse is Not People" by Janet Frame, "Leopard" by Wells Tower, "Lostronaut" by Jonathan Lethem, and "Another Manhattan" by Donald Antrim.

Bonus Link: The 2008 Year in Reading series

Remembering Glenn Goldman and Book Soup

Glenn Goldman, founder and owner of Book Soup, an independent book store in West Hollywood died yesterday. Goldman died of pancreatic cancer, an illness that came on suddenly, and he leaves behind two sons and his store. Glenn created, almost out of nothing, a great treasure of a book store that has meant a lot to me, and I'll always be thankful to him for that.

I started working at Book Soup in late 2001. I needed money and jobs were tough to come by, and I had been fairly discouraged by what I'd been doing in Los Angeles to that point.

Book Soup became special to me for three reasons. First, almost immediately it broadened my reading horizons. I'd always been an active, curious reader but within weeks of working at Book Soup, I realized how proscribed my knowledge of books had been. Despite growing up in a house full of books and despite taking more than a few literature classes in college, my true introduction to the world of literature and publishing was being surrounded by books for three years and meeting dozens of writers who stopped by the store. Glenn handled all the book ordering at the store, and every book I read during that time was at my fingertips because of him.

Secondly, I met a bunch of amazing people, several of whom I'm still in touch with today (including Edan, who writes for this blog, and her husband Patrick who used to). Los Angeles isn't exactly the intellectual wasteland that east-coasters (and San Franciscans) make it out to be, but the concentration of wonderful minds and vibrant personalities at that store was a very special thing, particularly in that city, but anywhere really. However different we all were, we shared a love for books and an appreciation for the sublime wackiness inherent in a book store on the Sunset Strip. I met a lot of smart people in Los Angeles, but the bookstore that Glenn built was the intellectual center of the city for me. Right there, in the neon, limousine wasteland of the Sunset Strip were thousands of books. It was a crazy, brilliant idea.

Finally, looking back, it seems clear to me that my job at Book Soup was one of those pivotal experiences that set my life on a certain course.

More than five years ago, I decided to use this blog to write about books, and that decision was almost solely based on my experience working at Book Soup and wanting to bring it home with me. The blog and what I learned from running it, propelled me to go to graduate school for journalism and it introduced to me to hundreds of new people. I was able to put this great team of writers together and I landed on the radio and have seen my name in newspapers and magazines.

The point is: I owe quite a lot to this blog. This blog owes everything to Book Soup. And Book Soup owes everything to Glenn Goldman. He will be missed.

More: The LA Times obit, Edan remembers, Patrick remembers

R.I.P., Glenn Goldman

Glenn Goldman, the owner and founder of Book Soup in West Hollywood, California, died yesterday from complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 58 years old.

I first worked at Book Soup when I was nineteen, and I returned after graduating from college. I loved the place, and I still do; it's my favorite book store in all the world, with its towering shelves packed with books, and books behind books, and ladders to get to those books. Glenn started it all, in 1975, when my parents still lived in New Jersey, long before their lives in Los Angeles had even been conceived of. Sometimes I like to think that Book Soup was waiting, all along, to give little writer me some shelter, and an education. I am grateful to Glenn for this.

Here's some of what I learned about at Book Soup:

Le Corbusier, Andreas Gursky, Jane Jacobs, Maseratis, Georges Batailles, David Sedaris, Patricia Highsmith, equestrian porn, Boris Vian, Gammahydroxybutyrate (GBH), Paul Bowles, Donna Tartt, Ina Garten, Joan Didion, blogs, Guy Debord, Julius Shulman, James Ellroy, wedding stylists, personal assistants, Breathless, Schlitz beer, Robert Caro, Robert Evans, Robert Greene, Helmut Newton, Paulo Coelho, the reading habits of certain celebrities, how big books can be, and how expensive, how sought after, and cool.

I met a guy named Patrick at Book Soup, and I married him.

Outside of Book Soup there are trashy girls from the Inland Empire, heading with arms crossed to a nearby club, and raving homeless men, and at the newsstand an actress is reading about herself in the tabloids. A man walks by selling puppies, maybe a waterproof radio. Inside of Book Soup there are highly opinionated, supremely well-read booksellers who want to know what five books you'd take with you to a desert island, go, and what your favorite Morrissey song is, and how many people you've slept with, and don't you think I need another tattoo? Inside there are books, so many books.

And through it all, there was Glenn - shy and notoriously stubborn, but devoted to the store, his store. He couldn't stop ordering books, even though we couldn't fit them anywhere. But God bless him for that, because we always had what you were looking for, what I was looking for.

Glenn will certainly be missed, and his legacy, as a bookseller to the great and infamous, will continue.

More: Max remembers

Michael Lewis Takes the Stage

As we adjust to new economic realities, Michael Lewis is emerging as the financial meltdown's most important voice. His Portfolio piece "The End" told us how we got here but it also illuminated his own failure, in the 1980s, to get the point across with his book Liar's Poker. Meant to be a cautionary tale, it became instead an inspiration.

But Lewis appears unwilling to let "The End" be his final, confessional comment on the matter. This weekend, as a new year and new administration are gearing up, Lewis has delivered another far more aggressive piece, this time in the New York Times (Part 1, Part 2). In it, he calls out, more strenuously than before, the fraud, incompetence, and willful ignorance behind the financial crisis and makes it clear that this fall's efforts to resolve it were flawed at best. He also makes several direct, clear-eyed proposals to set things back on the right course. One hopes Obama is watching. One also notices that Lewis, in these pieces, is no longer acting as a journalist or even a columnist. He has thrust himself into the center of this issue, as if looking to finish what he tried to accomplish more than 20 years ago.

But Lewis has grown up too. Liar's Poker didn't wake up the world to Wall Street's ills because its tone was too glib and too incredulous. We were meant to marvel at the goings on at Solomon Brothers just as the young Lewis had. That tone is gone now, and Lewis has returned to the task with a fierce seriousness. Whether or not you agree with everything that Lewis is writing in these pieces, his tone, backed up by his more than 30 years of writing about Wall Street, will give even the most optimistic observers pause.

Interestingly, Lewis' co-author for the two New York Times pieces is David Einhorn, a hedge fund manager who doesn't exactly have a pristine reputation. Einhorn heads up Greenlight Capital, which racked up average annualized returns of 25.5% from May 1996 through mid-2008, according to New York Times, though his funds, like many on Wall Street, have struggled since. He's also a serious poker player. In 2006, he placed 18th in the World Series of Poker's main event, winning more than $650 thousand that he donated to charity.

Einhorn made headlines this year for his very vocal bearish stance on now defunct investment bank Lehman Brothers. Einhorn eventually went public with discrepancies that he and his analysts had found in Lehman's numbers. Believed to be short (i.e. placing bets that the stock would go down) Lehman and other financial names, Einhorn was excoriated in a war of words on Wall Street as regulators targeted short selling among financial stocks. Lewis and Einhorn make it clear where they stand on that issue, calling short sellers, "the only market players who have a financial incentive to expose fraud and abuse."

After much confusion as the crisis played out in 2008, it may be that we are seeing whistle-blowers like Lewis and Einhorn emerge from the mess to take control of the discussion. In time we will see if they have the ear anyone in power.

Appearing Elsewhere

Millions contributor Emily's award-winning review of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale has been posted by VQR. Check it out.

Millions Meta-Data 2008

Before we get too far into 2009, let's take a look at what was keeping readers interested on The Millions in 2008. This year, I'll divide the most popular posts on The Millions into two categories, and we'll start with the "evergreens," posts that went up before 2008 but continued to interest readers over the last year:

1. Hard to Pronounce Literary Names Redux: the Definitive Edition: Our "definitive" literary pronunciation guide continues to bring people to The Millions. I guess people really do want to know how to pronounce Goethe.
2. Hard to Pronounce Literary Names: Underscoring the interest in pronunciation, even our first, aborted attempt at the pronunciation post remains popular.
3. Food Fight: Anthony Bourdain Slams Rachael Ray: For whatever reason, there remains an abiding interest in the bad blood between these two food (and publishing) celebrities.
4. A Year in Reading 2007: 2007's series stayed popular in 2008.
5. The World's Longest Novel: Ben's profile of this work of record-breaking performance art continues to fascinate.
6. Why Bolaño Matters: 2008 was the Year of Bolaño, but Garth's 2007 piece helped set the stage.
7. The Reading Queue Revisited: My goofy way of picking books to read.
8. Reading List: World War 2 Fiction: There are a few books still on my wish list as a result of this post.
9. A Year in Reading: New Yorker Fiction 2005: My ridiculous attempt to catalog all the New Yorker fiction in 2005. Will I ever do it again? Maybe.
10. A Rare Treat for Murakami Fans: Pinball, 1973: Ben dug up a link to a "lost" Murakami novel, and the post has remained a constant draw for his fans.

And now for the top posts written in 2008:

1. A Year in Reading 2008: It was a big hit this year.
2. The Best Sports Journalism Ever (According to Bill Simmons): This fruitful list of sports writing links hooked a lot of fans.
3. Big in Japan: A Cellphone Novel For You, the Reader: Lots of big-name outlets covered the cell phone novel story in 2008, but only The Millions had a translated excerpt.
4. Haruki Murakami in Berkeley: A rare American appearance by Murakami generated many memorable quotes.
5. David Foster Wallace 1962-2008: Few did a better job of trying to make sense of the literary world's great tragedy in 2008 than Garth did with his compassionate piece.
6. The Most Anticipated Books of 2008: Books we all looked forward to.
7. On Our Shelves: 45 Favorite Short Story Collections: Short story fans can get lost in this one.
8. The Most Anticipated Books of the Rest of 2008: More books we all looked forward to.
9. Obama and the Faulkner Quote: In the most memorable election year in a generation, politics crept in everywhere. Even at The Millions.
10. Google Settlement Could Change the Literary Landscape: Google continued to roil the publishing world in 2008.

Where did all these readers come from? Google sent quite a few of course, but many Millions readers come from other sites too. These were the top 10 sites to send us traffic in 2008:

1. Conversational Reading
2. kottke.org
3. The Elegant Variation
4. mimi smartypants
5. The Morning News
6. The Complete Review
7. Marginal Revolution
8. Maud Newton
9. The New York Times Lede Blog
10. Nathan Bransford

Finally, we can look at our Amazon stats to see what books Millions readers were buying in 2008. Here are the top-10 books bought by Millions readers over the last year.

1. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
2. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
3. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
4. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
5. The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty
6. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
7. Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami
8. Lush Life by Richard Price
9. The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis
10. The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

A Reading Resolution

I don't put much stock in the New Years resolution - I don't think you need the calendar to dictate self-improvement - however, I will acknowledge (and have acknowledged in the past) that the dawning of a new year does seem like an opportune moment to try out something new. In fact, The Millions was the offspring of a New Years resolution in 2003.

As 2002 drew to a close, I bought myself a Moleskine notebook and resolved, as I had many times in the past, to begin keeping a journal. It started off reasonably well, but it was soon clear that this resolution was taking the trajectory of so many others: strict adherence to the plan at the outset followed by swiftly plummeting interest. One thing I did keep up with, in this little journal of mine, was making note of the books I'd been reading.

I eventually switched from writing in the journal to writing for the blog to see if that would motivate me (after fits and starts, it did). But it was the idea of keeping track of and reflecting on what I read that helped inspire The Millions and gave purpose to what I read. It also made me a much better reader.

The obvious reading-related resolution is to read "x" number of books this year or to finally tackle Proust or Pynchon, but committing yourself to just keep track of what you read and trying to jot down a few words about each book may have a longer lasting impact on who you are as a reader. It all goes back to the notion that we can only read a finite number of good books in our lifetime, so we may as well make the most of them, even if that means just keeping a list so you can jog your memory and recall the experience of reading this or that book. At its best, reflecting on what you read better enables you to take what is essentially a solitary pastime and use it to build a library of knowledge to mull over and share. Happy New Year, everyone!

Amazon Launches Author Stores

In its never-ending roll-out of new features and incremental redesigns, Amazon has introduced "Author Stores," which Amazon calls "new corners of our bookstore dedicated to offering customers a new way to browse and shop favorite authors, discover new books, and more."

Basically, Amazon has created dedicated pages for several hundred authors. It's a nice little navigational upgrade since it is sometimes difficult to get a sense of an author's oeuvre using Amazon's search, though for Author Stores to be a truly useful navigational tool, Amazon would need to create them for many thousands more writers.

The Stores themselves are moderately interesting. At their most bare bones, Sherman Alexie's, for example, the Stores offer just a list of the books the author has written. Stephen King's, on the other hand, offers more substantial diversions including a video of the author himself. It will be interesting to see how much Amazon expands these stores and whether the features Amazon promises to add "in the months to come" will be genuinely unique or just more repackaging of content.

Meanwhile, LibraryThing's author pages are far cooler, with lots of meta-data and interesting tidbits supplied by LibraryThing's active community. By way of comparison, here is David Mitchell on LibraryThing and on Amazon.

The Front Table, Online

I have written in the past about the importance of a bookstore's "front table."

The idea is that one should be able to walk into the bookstore and be able to grasp, based upon which books are on display and based upon conversations with staff and fellow customers, what matters at that moment both in the wider world and in the neighborhood.

To me, this epitomizes what separates the engaging indie from the faceless chain, but this selling point has not helped indies win out in a climate that has been tough for all book retailers. Among the many struggles indies have faced is how to translate the relevance and ambiance described above to the internet, where a large portion of book buying, selling, and discussion now takes place.

2008's launch of IndieBound, an aggregated indie web presence that is a vast improvement over its precursor BookSense, shows that the indies are hard at work trying to unlock the online conundrum.

Recently, Scott pointed to another far smaller but particularly resonant example of online experimentation by an indie bookstore. The Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago has started replicating its front table on its blog. This book curation done by a knowledgeable staff rather than the chains' corporate number crunchers, fulfills the bookstore mission that I noted above, giving readers "what matters at that moment both in the wider world and in the neighborhood." (This notion of curation is important. In many ways, I'd argue that it's a key mission of The Millions. Our "staff" selects and sheds light upon certain books at the exclusion of others, bringing to bear our different areas of expertise, interest, and taste.)

The front table alone, however, is not enough to make a bookstore. A truly great bookstore and its front table will inspire conversation in the aisles among patrons and staff. Seminary Co-op is part of the way towards making its front table live on its web site, but, as the "comments are closed" message at the bottom of the page indicates, it's not all the way there. However, the sight of all those covers, laid out neatly, makes me think that we may not be far from an indie bookstore website that makes you feel like you are walking into the store itself.

See also: Niche Bookstores: A Dying Breed, Islands in the Stream: A Walking Tour of New York's Independent Booksellers

New Yorker Wraps Up 2008 with Austere Fiction Issue

As has been the tradition for the last several years, The New Yorker closed out 2008 with a fiction double issue. But astute readers may have noticed that this year's installment was markedly slimmer than that of years' past.

Perhaps it is common knowledge, but I was surprised to discover a few years back that it is not the amount of "news" that principally determines the length of individual issues of newspapers and magazines. The length is actually determined by the amount of advertising that's been sold. This is why, for example, issues of dot-com-focused Wired magazine were nearly as fat as phone books at the turn of the millennium but slimmed down considerably soon after.

The New Yorker is one of the enduring success stories of magazine publishing and is generally able to command attractive advertising rates only dreamed of at other publications, thanks to its affluent and "thought-leading" mix of subscribers, but even The New Yorker may be feeling the ad spending pinch that is impacting the entire media industry right now.

This year, the year-end fiction double issue came in at 120 pages. That's noticeably smaller than the 154 pages in 2007 and 2006 and the 152 pages in 2005.

The New Yorker has been exempt from the barrage of negative headlines about the news business, but in 2009, readers used to a hefty helping of long-form journalism and fiction may find themselves with a slimmer serving each week.

The Whole Truth or Anything But

This guest post comes to us from Anne Yoder. Anne is the former books editor of KGB Bar Lit. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, BlackBook, PopMatters, and elsewhere. She moonlights as a pharmacist in the West Village.

In Bomb magazine's interview with Aleksandar Hemon following the publication of his book of short stories The Question of Bruno (2000), Hemon speaks at length about the similarities between the novel and the history book - "both provide models to organize the practice of human life... the only question being what details are chosen" - as well as the tendency to read his fiction autobiographically, since he often crafts fictional yarns that include details from his remarkable life. This interview precedes the notable memoir scandals of recent years, where authors had the opposite problem: their "true" stories veered too far into invented territory, and many of the significant details they chose to include never really happened at all. A recent occurrence, this time involving the entirely fictionalized memoir Love and Consequences by Margaret B. Jones (aka Margaret Seltzer), caused Patrick Lane of the Missouri Review to speak against the furor, pointing out that "the cries of outrage at a memoirist's 'lies' bespeak a general distrust of or even disdain for fiction."

Vladimir Brik, the narrator of Hemon's recent novel, The Lazarus Project, would likely agree with Lane's assertion. Brik, who like Hemon was born in Sarajevo and now calls Chicago home, takes note of the high regard Americans hold for stories that contain facts and concrete details. In Sarajevo, the function of story-telling was far different: amusement and pleasure outweighed veracity; a boring tale would be judged more harshly than one that takes great liberty with the truth. Vladimir grows nostalgic for Sarajevo where, "If someone told you he had flown in a cockpit or had been a teenage gigolo in Sweden or had eaten mamba kebabs, it was easy to choose to believe him; you could choose to trust his stories because they were good."

In Chicago, Vladimir disappoints his wife with his missteps in American-style storytelling. Whereas their friends give mundane accounts of the ways they fell in love, he fails to provide the details of their own romance. Instead, he attempts to inject levity by telling a tale of lust-filled rabbits separated by the Berlin Wall, who would fall in love with the scent of rabbits on the other side, and how during mating season they would congregate at the wall's base, issuing "pining rabbit sound[s]" and making the guards on both sides "very trigger happy."

Playful exaggeration like this rubs up against the dour insistence on the real time and time again. Telling stories in America requires a certain propriety of not straying too far from expectations. And so, it seems that Hemon attempts to respond to these expectations in the novel's two narratives, both of which find a basis in real-life stories. The first concerns the death of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, who was killed by the Chicago chief of police in 1908. Lazarus shows up at Chief Shippy's house with nothing but an empty envelope, but Shippy believes Lazarus is an anarchist who intends to do him harm and shoots out of fear. The murder is covered up by the police, who introduce fictional details to corrupt the investigation.

The second thread mirrors Hemon's life, as Vladimir researches the life and death of Lazarus Averbuch in order to write a book. The story follows Vladimir's grant-funded journey through Eastern Europe with his good friend Rora, a photographer, ostensibly to learn more about Lazarus. Hemon doesn't attempt to mask the many ways that Vladimir is a stand-in for for himself and Rora for his childhood friend Velibor Božović. Like Vladimir and Rora, Hemon and Božović traveled through Eastern Europe funded by a fellowship in order to research this book. And Božović's photos from this trip are interspersed between Hemon's chapters. In essence, Hemon embraces the real in order to exaggerate and manipulate it, irretrievably blurring the distinction between real and invented, autobiography and fiction.

John Edgar Wideman's latest novel, Fanon, is close kin to The Lazarus Project. It too deals with a novelist who researches the past - in this case the Martinique-born psychiatrist, activist, and revolutionary Frantz Fanon (1925-61) - in order to write a book about Fanon's life, an undertaking he uncannily refers to as "the Fanon project." The narrator is a novelist by the name of John Edgar Wideman, with Wideman's mother and his incarcerated brother, Robby, playing lead roles. Despite the invented circumstances, one gets the feeling that these characters remain true to the identities of their real-world doppelgangers. The Fanon narrative, which reads more like a reflection on his life, acts to anchor the sprawling, sometimes-surreal encounters that include a conversation between Wideman and Jean-Luc Godard. With little in the way of transition, the scenes skip from the narrator's walks along New York's East River, to Wideman's mother gazing over the streets from her balcony, to visits with his imprisoned brother, and to the hospital where Wideman's mother finds Fanon on his deathbed. Wideman muses on the hierarchy of fact versus fiction more openly than Hemon, and speaks directly of his desire to defy categorization. He sets fiction against nonfiction in a struggle for dominance: "Stipulating differences that matter between fact and fiction--between black and white, male and female, good and evil--imposes order in a society. Keeps people on the same page. Reading from the same script. In the society I know best, mine, fact and fiction are absolutely divided, one set above the other to rule and pillage, or, worse, fact and fiction blend into a tangled, hypermediated mess, grounding being in a no-exit maze of consuming: people a consuming medium, people consumed by the medium."

What does it mean when, in the same year, two of our country's gifted fiction writers publish novels preoccupied with reality? Is this a triumph of the dominant form, evidence of a weakened imagination, or a response to our culture's hyperawareness of the division between fact and fiction, reflected in the outrage at memoirs outed as fictitious and the obsession with reading "true" stories. I suspect it's a combination of all three, even though both authors, I imagine, would defend their novelistic ideals. The very fact that our fiction writers consciously confront the real is evidence of nonfiction's influence; we can no longer ignore the gray sea between. Or perhaps the answer lies in admitting that this sea exists.

In Fanon, Wideman writes about his frustration with categories - "fiction or nonfiction, novel or memoir, science fiction or romance, hello or goodbye... those categories one might say, are what I've been writing about, or trying to write my way out of, not only the last few years, but since the beginning." In Fanon and The Lazarus Project, both Wideman and Hemon realign the boundaries of fact and fiction, and in the end make them more elastic. With book reading on the wane, one wonders if the tizzy made about such distinctions isn't just an anxious distraction from the greater underlying issue of who will read these books, regardless of the content, as Wideman's brother, Robby, states: "I don't know why you keep beating yourself up trying to write intelligent shit. Even if you write something deep, you think anybody wants to hear it. Everybody out there just likes the guys in here. Everybody just wants out. Out the goddamn slam. Quick. Why they gonna waste time reading a book... So when I think about it, big bro, I give you credit for being an intelligent guy, but, you know, I got to wonder if writing an intelligent book's an intelligent idea."

A List With A Twist Revisited

In the spring, we reported on an unusual event unfolding in the Books pages of The Globe and Mail. Each week, through 2008, someone - typically a published author or an academic - would write an essay for the Globe championing a book. Fifty books in total. They were not ranked in any order, and in reality they form a jumping-off point into a world of knowledge and literary imagination.

About a third of the books championed were novels, from such usual suspects as War and Peace, Don Quixote, and Middlemarch, through Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

More interesting were the non-novels on the list. There were collected shorts from Borges, Kafka and Chekhov, and collected poems from Eliot and Yeats. There was Dante's Divine Comedy, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the Decameron, and The Mahabharata, a 2000-year-old verse from India. Lady Murasaki's 1000-year-old The Tale of Genji pops up. Plays by Becket and Goethe were also championed.

The King James Bible is there; as is the Koran. Books of philosophy by Plato and political economy by both Adam Smith and Karl Marx made the list.

Darwin's Origin of Species is there; so is Diderot's Encyclopedia, Herodotus' Histories, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and Rachel Carson's proto-environmental Silent Spring. Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her 300-year-old rebel yell, is there, as are St. Augustine's Confessions, and de Montaigne's Essays, his 16th-century invention of a genre.

Beside each essay are links to all the essays that came before it. So you should go to the 50th essay, championing Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, to get easy links to the other 49. Thank goodness for that, because there doesn't seem to be a central web page listing all 50, and I advise against trying to search through the Globe and Mail's Books section archives unless you want to get a blinding headache.

Curiosities: The Case of Rudolph

• Roberto Bolaño's "Beach," the story that has been the source of the notion that the late author was a heroin addict (since debunked in a fairly convincing fashion) has been translated into English.
• "Science Fiction Authors That Lit Geeks Think It's Cool To Read"
• "Top 10 US out of print books of 2008" and the heartening news that three of the books on the list will be brought back into print in 2009: Once a Runner, A Lion Called Christian, and Comanche Heart.
• Google now has 7 million books scanned.
• Put this instant classic in your stocking and save it for next year: "A hearing into the case of Rudolph, a reindeer"

Wrapping Up A Year in Reading

With the year drawing to a close, so too is our Year in Reading series. We at The Millions would like to thank all of those who contributed to the series as well as all the helpful folks who assisted us in putting together such a great group of participants.

Though we are undoubtedly biased, it was a thrill to watch the series unfold this year. We discovered that Joshua Henkin liked a book by Charles D'Ambrosio, who liked a book by Nam Le, who liked a book by Toni Morrison. We discovered that two highly regarded authors (named Charles) were fans of Slash's memoir this year. And we saw that many of our most admired writers were rediscovering (or discovering for the first time) literary legends like Saul Bellow, James Cain, Richard Brautigan, Anthony Trollope, Dostoevsky, Melville, and the aforementioned Toni Morrison.

We'd also like to thank all of our readers for a great year at The Millions. It was another year with more visitors than we've ever had before, but the numbers alone shed little light on the best aspects of The Millions this year, which came through in the edifying and enlightening discussion spearheaded and spurred on by our readers, guests, and regular contributors.

We'll do a little roundup of some of the best posts at The Millions this year in a few days, but in the meantime, we're going to take a breather from the breakneck pace of A Year in Reading.

As we enjoy the last few days of 2008, we invite all of you to take part in A Year in Reading by finishing this sentence in the comments or on your own blog: "The best book I read all year was..."

A Year in Reading: Nikil Saval

Nikil Saval is an assistant editor at the journal n+1.

One of the notable events in recent literary history was a modest bump in the number of novels about white-collar work. The two most heralded were, significantly, debuts: Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End and Ed Park's Personal Days. Both young authors, possessed of little experience besides what their cubicle daydreaming and job insecurity had supplied, they exploited the potential of office spaces to their extreme, and the immediate response these novels elicited from reviewers was: "more!" We needed more novels about bagel brunches, useless meetings, excessive coffee drinking, awkward exchanges, e-mails and layoffs. We were to re-experience what so many of us went through every day, to know it as pain, to see the expression of that pain among others as a form of solidarity.

One recent book suggests a different approach to the question of the office novel: Christian Jungersen's The Exception, an oblique entry into the genre. Its main characters work at the Danish Center for Information on Genocide (DCIG), where they begin to receive death threats on their e-mail. Death threats turn to grim pranks: the office librarian knocks over a bucketful of blood secreted on her bookshelves. Initially, suspicions fall on a Balkan war criminal residing in Denmark, whose crimes the researchers have exposed; Jungersen's twist (one of many in the novel) is to reverse the outward search back into the office, where the already heated interpersonal dynamics curdle into distrust. Jungersen manages these various strands appallingly well with a minimum of artifice (his prose is unadorned, almost to the point of being slack and lackluster). He heightens the sense of entrapment by drastically limiting the perspectives to three principal characters for most of the novel, each of whom is possessed and blinded by a different variety of paranoid reasoning. Even better is Jungersen's recreation of the longueurs of white-collar existence: the dramatic pacing is deliberately slowed by painstaking evocations of chilly office lunches and competitive meetings. This combination of office life and the generic conventions of a thriller produces a book unlike anything I have read before. At the heart of The Exception is a peculiarly European meditation on the nature of evil, and the banal way that one's office life can dissipate and create human solidarities, pitting one artificial network against another. In Jungersen's novel, the office is not a place where you go to work; it is a structure in your head, watching you, directing and corroding your thoughts well after you have left it. I read no better novel this year, and it is one of the best I have read in several years.

More from A Year in Reading 2008

A Year in Reading: Roland Kelts

Roland Kelts is the author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the US. He is a contributing writer and editor at A Public Space literary journal and Adbusters magazine, and a columnist at Japan's Daily Yomiuri. He is also the editorial director of Anime Masterpieces, a screening and lecture series, and a professor at the University of Tokyo and Sophia University. His work appears in numerous publications in the US and Japan, and his forthcoming novel is called Access. He divides his time between New York and Tokyo.

Just before I left Tokyo for another round of book tour events in the US this past summer, my friend Yuko handed me a copy of Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. Ostensibly a memoir, it's one of those books I had subconsciously avoided in the past for reasons I suspect are entirely personal. I knew it had been critically lauded, and I'd even glanced at a few pages in a bookstore aisle, finding the prose fresh, arresting.

I also knew that Flynn was chronicling in its pages a life of muted disappointment - and the deeper pain that comes with a trail of persistent bruises as opposed to a knockout punch. I knew the father was an alcoholic, a failed writer, and like most pretenders, increasingly pathetic. And I knew the son was shadow-boxing, cowering in an effort to find strength, and a self.

I think I was afraid of reading it for the risk of recognition.

But I finally did, thanks to Yuko. I read the book on planes, in hotel rooms, in taxis to and from airports. Each time I opened its pages, I did so with the admixture of helpless hunger and foreboding that is the condition of the addict. Flynn's writing somehow captures the low-lidded wariness, the willful half-seeing yet all-knowing suspicion of a soul perpetually on the verge of tragedy, dangling from its ledge even, but never having the luxury of the fall's full embrace.

I finished the book with a queer sense of awe and trepidation. I was not comforted, but I felt like I'd survived. Even now, it's hard for me to return to its pages.

More from A Year in Reading 2008

A Year in Reading: Kevin Hartnett

Kevin Hartnett is a regular contributor to The Millions.

2008 was a year in which the country was looking for a story, and the same impulse directed my reading. On the campaign trail "narrative" was the analytic frame of choice. Hillary Clinton's candidacy failed because she could never establish one. John McCain's failed in part because the story that lent itself most directly to his biography - war hero, country-first corruption buster - was not what America was looking for. In Barack Obama, though, voters found the perfect confluence of his biographic arc and our hopes for our own national narrative arc. We wanted to be the country that matched his story, and by electing him president we established a momentous symbiosis between the rise of a man and the resurrection of a country.

The Bush years were depressing in many ways. Worse though for me, than the acute pain of any specific policy, or the sense of alienation from half the country, was the feeling of narrative disruption. The themes we'd always held to be true about our country - that we are meritocratic, virtuous, and ascendant - fell apart like loose nuts and bolts dropping from a moving car. We were not who we thought we were, or at least we were not that country anymore, and in place of a strong narrative direction, a cynical equivalence took hold. If we were not virtuous, at least we would not be duped. I found that I was often as disoriented personally as the country was as a whole.

My favorite book of 2008 was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun. It was not necessarily the best book I read this year but it was, start to finish, the most moving ride. The novel begins in the gentile tranquility of post-colonial Nigeria and ends amidst the barren wasteland of a civil war. Adichie loses touch with her characters somewhat along the way, but for its depiction of the precariousness of human life, her book is among the most vivid I have ever read.

Its failure to establish a convincing narrative was the main reason that I dissented from 2008 favorite Netherland. The novel is about the post-9/11 dislocation of cosmopolitan Dutch banker Hans van der Broek, suddenly alone in New York after his wife decamps to London with their young son. Hans floats through an ethereally drawn New York and at one point a woman who creates photo albums for a living says to him, "People want a story. They like a story," to which he replies, "A story. Yes. That's what I need." It is a pregnant point, but also one that leads to the ultimate limitations of Joseph O'Neill's novel. A metaphor, no matter how lushly and beautifully drawn, is no substitute for the real thing.

My other favorite books of 2008 are all from the canon. I revisited Rabbit, Run and found that the book had improved considerably since I first read it in high school. Even then I could not help but notice Updike's virtuosity with words, but this time around I took the most joy in the many, sparkling moments when Rabbit's character, so perfectly rendered, seems almost to poke through the page. Elsewhere, Levin's angst in Anna Karenina, which I read back in February, is still with me, and I don't expect to soon forget the dramatic reckoning in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych.

My only reading regret for 2008 is that there was not more of it, which leads me into the new year excited to read more and with a list that is already longer than the hours I know I'll have. I take such optimism, particularly as it concerns the book, to be a good thing.

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A Year in Reading: Joshua Furst

Joshua Furst is the author of The Sabotage Cafe. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has been the recipient of a Michener Fellowship, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and Ledig House. Furst is also the author of the story collection, Short People, as well as several plays that have been produced in New York, where for a number of years he taught in the public schools. He lives in New York City.

Peter Handke's A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, which I read this past summer in an out-of-print Collier edition called 3 X Handke, but which I've since learned is back in print thanks to the crusading efforts of the New York Review of Books, is the most searing example of prose literature doing what no other art form can do - engaging the conflict between thought and emotion, building a narrative out of the intersection between ideas and lived experience - that I've come across in years. It's a hybrid form - not quite memoir, but not exactly fiction either - about the life and suicide of his mother, written in the months immediately following her death. Handke struggles with whether or not it's possible to fully comprehend and articulate her experience, given the depth of feelings this event triggered in him. But this makes the story sound dry and academic. It's not. It's shattering, one of those books that invade your consciousness and forever alter your reality.

The most interesting work of new fiction I've read this year is also a hybrid form. Mike Heppner, the author of The Egg Code and Pike's Folly, has been carrying out a literary experiment of sorts. He's written a series of short fictional pieces questioning the role art plays in the world and the relationship between artists and their own work. Each of these pieces has been brought to the public via a different mode of dissemination. The first, Man Talking, about a mid-career writer's loss of faith in his ability to communicate, can be downloaded from his website, which also explains the project in depth. The second, Talking Man, about a young child being lectured by his scientist father about all the reasons he shouldn't waste his life making art, has been published as a chapbook by Small Anchor Press. The third, Man, is a fictional biography of a failed writer named Mike Heppner. If the means of production were the only thing of note about this project, I'd be tempted to call it a clever trick. It's not though. Word for word, sentence for sentence, these novellas come closer to rendering what it's like to live right now than most anything else out there.

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A Year in Reading: Hugo Hamilton

Hugo Hamilton is the author of the New York Times notable memoir The Speckled People and its sequel The Harbor Boys. His most recent book is the novel Disguise. He has been awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, France's Prix Femina Etranger, and Italy's Giuseppe Berto Prize. He lives in Dublin.

It's always fascinated me how history is used in order to accommodate the present. For years we heard the maoning in Ireland about Eamon De Valera - freedom fighter, treaty-opponent, head of state in the fledgling Irish state whose vision of the Irish future was derided for so many years after his death as a home-spun mess. At last, we have a biography of the man which gives a deeper understanding of his character and his time. Judging DEV by Diarmuid Ferriter examines history from a new perspective, with a touch of sociological instinct at the core of his thinking.

The Shores of Connemara by Seamas Mac an Iomaire (translated by Padraic de Bhaldraithe) Imagine Darwin arriving on the shores of Connemara. This small account of a local fisherman off the coast of Connemara, places us back in time almost a hundred years to a vision of the sea and the land in an innocent state. It is seen not by a professional marine biologist or botanist, but a local expert who observes everything he sees with great curiosity. In his descriptions of sandhoppers, for instance, and why they hop on a fine evening, is always a mixture of scientific enquiry, folklore, religion and childish delight. His book, above all, reduces the pace of change and gathers up all the qualities of time, the absence of hurry, in the landscape of the west of Ireland.

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A Year in Reading: Pablo De Santis

Pablo De Santis was born in Buenos Aires, studied Literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and subsequently worked as a journalist and comic-strip creator, becoming Editor-in-Chief of one of Argentina's leading comics magazines, Fierro. De Santis is the author of the novel The Paris Enigma. He lives in Buenos Aires.

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead. This is just such an incredibly original novel. It's bordering on a detective story and fantasy; it's set in the 1970s and tells the story of the first black woman elevator inspector. From the narrative's fantasy perspective, the novel's elevator inspectors are divided into two groups: the pragmatic inspectors that strictly adhere to the study of an elevator's mechanics and engineering, and the intuitionists, who rely on their sixth sense to diagnose the health and safety of each elevator. The novel's protagonist is faced with the breakdown and fall of one of the elevators she had previously inspected and approved as safe. The elevator's failure drives her to question her intuitionist methods. I read an interview where Colson Whitehead, who is still quite young, said that he started to write because he loved old Stephen King novels, which I could identify completely with.

Literati by Barry McCrea. This is a fantastic novel set in Trinity College in Dublin, where a student discovers the sortes method: a guessing game that uses a randomly chosen page from any book as the oracle for any given situation. The game quickly becomes an obsession for those in the novel. It reminds me of another equally engrossing novel: The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison.

Beltenebros by Antonio Muñoz Molina This is one of this Spanish author's best novels. The primary narrator travels to a city to kill a man, and as he makes his way toward his victim, he begins to recall his own past and the choices he's made with such force, that we as readers experience his destructive mission from multiple perspectives. Other novels to read by Muñoz Molina are Winter In Lisbon and Full Moon.

Three Musketeers by Marcelo Birmajer and The Book of Murder by Guillermo Martinez. These two excellent novels by Argentine authors have been published in English this year.

Three Musketeers by Marcelo Birmajer narrates a detective story where the key to the novel's mystery lies in Argentina's violent past. Set in the 1970s, and centered around Buenos Aires' Jewish population, many of whom formed guerilla organizations, the novel's caustic yet melancholic humor makes this novel a superb read. Javier Mossed, the novel's journalist narrator guides us through the novel.

The Book of Murder by Guillermo Martinez is the story of a delayed act of revenge. It's a great read with a philosophical edge. The author (who is also a mathematician) also wrote The Oxford Murders, which was made into a feature film by Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia.

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