stumbling virtue

The 9 Best Books I Read During 2010

 

Sorry this is so late this year (and I make that apology with the full knowledge that I am the only one who noticed or cared). But at long last, here it is, my list of the 9 Best Books I Read During 2010 (here are the previous lists: 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006).

This was not a banner year for books for me. First of all, when I look at the titles I wrote about here, I'm embarrassed to see how few books I actually read; I do also suspect that I missed writing about a few, so maybe the final total is a little higher, but probably only a little (there were extenuating circumstances to account for my poor showing, but I won't bore you with them). Second, while there were books that I admired or respected, I don't think there were any that really stick with me, or haunt me, or make me wish they had gone on longer. There weren't any that I loved, or that had a big impact on my life. I know, that's a lot to ask of a book isn't it? Yet I continue to ask and hope and wish. I am an optimist at heart, I'm afraid.

The order, as always is pretty loose; they're close enough that most could switch places with each other and I'd still feel the list was a fair assessment of my feelings.

9. The Colony, by John Tayman. The horrifying story of the lepers banished to the desolate island of Molokai. A sad case of good intentions gone horribly wrong.

8. The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York, by Stephen Duncombe and Andrew Mattson. It lacks some scope and context, but this tale of the gun-toting girl robber who became a national celebrity and an unwitting symbol of "everything that is wrong with young people today/women today/and our uncaring society today" is an extremely entertaining read.

7. Operation Mincemeat, by Ben MacIntyre. The story of one of the most elaborate hoaxes of World War II proves, once again, that when it comes to tales of espionage, the true stories are always stranger than the fictional ones.

6. Get Capone, by Jonathan Eig. Crime-ridden, corruption-riddled Prohibition-era Chicago comes vividly to life here. As for Capone? He's just a simple guy trying to run a few (illegal) businesses.

5. K2: Life and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain, by Ed Viesturs and David Roberts.  The history of people's fascination with climbing K2, and the dangers and death that seem to accompany almost every attempt. Viesturs does not suffer fools, an attitude that makes him an amusing narrator.

4. The Immortal Lives of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. The author searches for the true story of the woman whose cells, taken from her dying body, contributed to much of the great medical research of the 20th century--and likely beyond. Along the way, Skloot contends with the prickly, suspicious family of Lacks, and their own questions about what happened to their mother.

3. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes. The passionate scientists of the Romantic era become living, breathing individuals in Holmes's book. Great people make great characters.

2. Pearl Buck in China, by Hilary Spurling. This book concentrates on the childhood and early adulthood of Buck, an author whose popularity has waned considerably, but whose prize-winning book "The Good Earth" sold millions of copies in the 1930s. Beautifully written, especially in its evocation of the challenges and enchantments Buck found as the child of missionaries in early 20th century China.

1. The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, by Jane Leavy.   Many books have been written about Mantle, but Leavy, a tenacious and dizzyingly thorough researcher, debunks many of the myths that have ossified into legend after all these years. She finds the true story of a man who millions of little boys wanted to be but who barely even wanted to be himself.

China Girl

 

 

Pearl Buck stood out in China for looking too western, and in the US for being too Chinese.

Some of my favorite books when I was little were written by an author named Eleanor Frances Lattimore. They were about little children living in a magical, timeless kind of China that could have been set in 1900 or 1400. The stories were about kids who got into the kind of trouble kids always do, which is why the setting and its realism, or lack of, didn't matter much. There were beautiful line drawings, though, with images of pagodas and elegant low trees that made me think this must have been a beautiful place, not very different from Oz. Somewhere along the line I found out that Lattimore had actually grown up in China in the early 20th century. This doubly impressed me, as I was young enough not to think that a book written in English by a person with an Anglo sounding name could have grown up in China and written about Chinese children (don't snark--I was that young).

My older sister had a book called "The Good Earth," which she was reading for school. The main thing I noted about that book was that I could read the one syllable words of the title myself, as well as the name of the author, Pearl Buck. I think I vaguely expected that someday in school I would read it as well, but by the time I got to junior high and high school, Buck's work was out of fashion. I came to associate her with the film of "The Good Earth," something that in my late 20th century mindset I could disdain for its all Aryan stars dressed in Chinese drag, and with the "China Lobby" of the 1930s--the Americans who were determined to "save" China. I assumed she was one of them, a well-meaning American woman who tried to capture the cause of the moment safely from western shores.

I have been wrong about many things, and this idea about Buck is one of my wronger (it also betrays an astonishing laziness, that I never bothered to check out the truth on even the most minimal level--Wikipedia, for example). It turns out that Buck spent most of her life in China, spoke Chinese, and knew well the type of peasants she wrote about later in life.

Remember This

 

Here's to bad ideas, good ideas that weren't as good as they seemed at the time, and wildly inaccurate misreadings.

She thought she knew. She wasn't sure. She was wrong.

Merry Sunflower

 

The Official 2010 Sunflower Holiday Picture. Gosh darn it, she's a cute pup.

The Harder They Fall

 
Mickey Mantle at his best, 1951.

I'm a lifelong Yankee fan. No, I didn't just jump on the bandwagon when they started winning World Series again in the 1990s, and I'm not a "follow the winner type" (my favorite NBA team is the woebegone Nets. Sigh.). It actually began when I was maybe seven or eight years old. I had gotten the distinct impression that my grandfather didn't like me. I can  understand why--he had had two daughters, and then his oldest daughter (my mother) had three daughters, with me being number three, the last in a long line of disappointments. I think he was exasperated and annoyed by the fact that he couldn't get the much yearned for boy in his family. To top it off, I was neither pretty nor charming, not the kind of girl who could make a cranky old man forget that he thought he should have had a son or grandson. I thought, though, that if I tried to be interested in things he was interested in, he would be less gruff and critical. When he came over to our house during the summer he would turn on the TV and watch the Yankees game. I sat with him and he did not teach me about the game, nor did he steep me in Yankees lore, or tell me anecdotes about his own visits to the stadium (I never found out if he actually saw a game in person or not, but I suspect he did, because my mom's now 90 year old cousin has told me about going to Yankee games in the 1930s and '40s). He mostly yelled at the screen when someone got thrown out while stealing, popped out, or struck out. I realized after a while that I was wasting time with him and instead devoted all my time to my grandmother, who taught me how to play poker and whist, and was all around wonderful. She liked to watch old movies on TV that she remembered seeing in the theater, and I liked watching them with her. It couldn't have been easy being married to my grandfather, who mostly expected a wife to wait on him (he was apparently spoiled rotten by his mother and sisters), but my dad always said that the one thing in life that really made her happy was her grandchildren. I'm glad I was able to help a little bit. But though I gave up on my grandfather, I didn't give up on baseball.

(I know, too much about me.)

All this leads me to Jane Leavy, who was a baseball crazed little girl growing up in New York in the 1950s, whose beloved grandmother aided and abetted her Yankee addiction, which was much worse than mine, and included a huge crush on the big star of the period, Mickey Mantle. She became a sportswriter, and got the chance to meet her idol, which was not...well, not the way I'm sure she dreamed of it when she was a little girl and a big fan. He was rude and crude to start with, then drunk, and ended the event by hitting on her and passing out. Aren't you glad now that you never met your childhood hero (or if you did, I hope it went a little better)?

Leavy includes this story in her new book about Mantle: The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood. I'd read her earlier book on Sandy Koufax, so my expectations for this book were high. They were met.