Monday, December 22, 2008
Books Year End Listapalooza
Posted by Paul Constant on Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 1:48 PM
The Millions asks David Ebershoff and Charles D'Ambrosio what the best books they read in 2008 were.
Ebershoff's answer is just fine: For fiction, he likes Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife, for non-fiction, he likes White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and for a classic, he likes James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce. I've written about how much I love David Ebershoff in the past, and this list makes me love him more.
But Charles D'Ambrosio, whose Orphans is one of my all-time-favorite non-fiction works, and whose short stories are among the best being written today, is a disappointment, reading-wise. The best books he's read this year? A book by David Shields called Reality Hunger that will come out in 2009, The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames, which I was thoroughly unimpressed with, and Slash's memoir. I can't remember ever being so disappointed by an author's reading list. Still and all, if reading and liking junk leads to a book like D'Ambrosio's Dead Fish Museum, then somebody get him a library of Danielle Steel novels immediately.
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