Even in the weakest years, trying to keep up with the flood of new books hitting the market can be like trying to drink from a fire hose. The Onion A.V. Club's book reviewers can't claim to have read everything that hit the shelves this year, but they can claim to have searched high and low for the year's most interesting, eclectic releases. Here are some of the books they enjoyed most in 2004:
Andy Battaglia
1. David Foster Wallace, Oblivion: Stories (Little, Brown)
With his compulsive store of observations and merciless attention to behavior both bad and worse, David Foster Wallace is an electrifying prose writer whose live wire can sometimes snap and burn. In his typically discursive story collection Oblivion, characters squirm in their own self-conscious finger cuffs, trying, with different degrees of success, to figure out what it means to simply try to get by. It’s grim, occasionally suffocating subject matter, but Wallace gains an oddly comforting vantage by following it out well past the decimal point.
2. Brian Greene, The Fabric Of The Cosmos: Space, Time, And The Texture Of Reality (Knopf)
An inviting treatment of the ideas imbedded in space and time—two concepts that rarely shake out with much ease—The Fabric Of The Cosmos guides a giddy tour through scientific disciplines fingered to do the math for pretty much everything in the world as it stands at any given time. Brian Greene writes for a general-interest audience, winding asides about scientific rigor into illustrative examples that tighten the rope between quantum mechanics and The Simpsons.
3. Tim Lawrence, Love Saves The Day: A History Of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-79 (Duke University Press)
An accomplished history of a movement most often written off as a blight, Love Saves The Day tells the story of disco as a music, a lifestyle, and an industry, mostly in that order. More concerned with underground lofts than anywhere Bianca Jagger might have wandered into, Tim Lawrence traces disco’s rise from jerry-rigged dance catalyst to suburbs-storming phenomenon, staying true to the best and worst excesses of both the music and the people who gave it life.
Donna Bowman
1. Paul Collins, Not Even Wrong: Adventures In Autism (Bloomsbury)
Any number of books recount the trials of living with autistic children or adults. Paul Collins, a McSweeney's writer and author of the charming booklust memoir Sixpence House, attacks the wrenching, triumphant story of his son Morgan by melding it with his research into Peter The Wild Boy, a feral child who became a sensation in King George I's court. Collins captures the poignant gap between a parent's assessment of his child and the trained eyes that pediatricians, psychologists, and neurologists bring to Morgan's quirks and accomplishments. Autism, while undeniably real as a cluster of symptoms, is also a matter of perception, and Collins takes his new awareness into history and culture, finding autists clogging the hallways at Microsoft and haunting galleries of outsider art. To those who see only idiosyncrasy, not pathology, in these children—commonly, relatives and the parents' friends—Collins' journey into his son's mind provides rich, literate, humane answers.
2. Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club (Marian Wood)
Don't be fooled by the chick-lit title. Fowler's untidy comedy of manners perfectly captures the Austen-esque marriage market of a group of women in various states of coupledom and singlehood. While perfect for Austenites, it's also liable to make Austen fans out of unwary readers.
3. Michelle Hunseven, Jamesland (Knopf)
William James' The Varieties Of Religious Experience hovers over this plainspoken novel, in which one of the philosopher's descendents undergoes a reluctant spiritual quest in her Los Angeles neighborhood. At once deeply metaphysical and remarkably down-to-earth, Hunseven's story captures the unironic search for hope and belief in an age with too much information to allow blind faith.
Noel Murray
1. McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Issue Number 13 (McSweeney's)
For up-to-date comics fans, McSweeney's anthology of cartooning—edited by Chris Ware—might seem redundant, since large portions of the book reprint readily attainable work by Seth, Chester Brown, Los Bros Hernandez, and Adrian Tomine. But the collection works as Ware's idiosyncratic case for the maturation of his chosen art form. Over the course of 264 arrestingly designed pages, he yokes together Rodolphe Töpffer, George Herriman, Charles Schulz, R. Crumb and Kim Deitch, text pieces by comics-damaged literati like John Updike, Michael Chabon, and Glen David Gold, and the next wave of alternative cartoonists—like Jeffrey Brown, David Heatley, and Ron Regé,—whose crude styles and open emotional expression show a necessary return to a punk aesthetic in a medium where superior draftsmanship often obscures meager content.
2. Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (Simon & Schuster)
In this memoir, Bob Dylan reinvents himself as an old college buddy with a brand new blog, eagerly sharing fragments of his life story and pausing frequently for comments on what he's been reading lately.
3. Laura Shapiro, Something From The Oven: Reinventing Dinner In 1950s America (Viking)
Laura Shapiro investigates how a handful of influential women changed the way America ate in the '50s and early '60s, both by embracing the new wave of dry mixes and frozen foods, and by bucking against them.
Tasha Robinson
1. Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Bloomsbury)
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is a terrifically ambitious book that mixes British fact with a fanciful storyline about magicians clashing through magic and monographs circa the Napoleonic Wars. Initially disguised as something halfway between a Jane Austen drawing-room comedy and a dry, scholarly text, it gradually opens up into a roaring adventure about two British gentlemen who, between them, help restore magic to an England that's committed it to myth. A solid historical background, nearly 200 footnotes citing nonexistent works of magical scholarship, and a dense, compellingly formal writing style all helped Jonathan Strange win mainstream approval from audiences who might never admit to liking a mere fantasy novel. Call it "magical realism" if necessary—either way, it's a fantastic book.
2. David Sedaris, Dress Your Family In Corduroy And Denim (Little, Brown)
When David Sedaris became a highly successful full-time writer, he unfortunately limited his access to the terrible bottom-feeder jobs and desperate experiences that fueled some of his most hilarious personal essays. Undaunted, he delved into family stories for his latest collection, which is more hushed, more personal, and more thoughtful, but still riotously funny. Sedaris has matured without losing his wry charm, and the results are terrific.
3. Neal Stephenson, The System Of The World (William Morrow)
Neal Stephenson's fast-moving, brilliant-but-erratic early novels often read like the work of a man with more ideas than attention span. But Cryptonomicon brought him powerfully down to earth, and his "Baroque Cycle"—a trilogy completed by The System Of The World—fused his interest in everything from finance to etymology to chemistry to calculus to cryptography with a vast, complicated, thoroughly entertaining yarn.
Scott Tobias
1. Edward Conlon, Blue Blood (Riverhead)
The title of Edward Conlon's memoir predicts an exposé about the corruption and insularity of the New York Police Department, but his sprawling account of life on "the Job" proves considerably more nuanced and unpredictable. Descended from four generations of proud NYPD stock, Conlon works family and institutional history into his anecdotal accounts of the strange, funny, menacing, and ultimately rewarding duty of patrolling the streets and working in a narcotics unit. Though he criticizes the petty conflicts and procedural issues that dog some of the top brass, Conlon closes ranks whenever the institution itself comes under fire, but not before arguing persuasively for the public trust.
2. T.C. Boyle, The Inner Circle (Viking)
Coming right on the heels of Drop City, his affectionate critique of commune living, T.C. Boyle's evocative Alfred Kinsey study The Inner Circle left many wanting. But the two books have more in common than Boyle's usual dexterity with the pen. Kinsey's work made way for the hippie notions of free love, but both novels understand the human animal well enough to know the tragicomic consequences when such radical ideals get put into practice.
3. Seth Mnookin, Hard News: The Scandals At The New York Times And Their Meaning For American Media (Random House)
The fallout of the Jayson Blair scandal prompted endless hand-wringing over racial advancement and journalistic integrity, but Seth Mnookin focuses on the institutional problems that allowed Blair's rampant abuses to go unchecked for so long.