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Books: Best of 2010

Can a book bring you solace? Zachary Mason’s “The Lost Books of the Odyssey” was a comfort to me. Everything about this slender tome — its tone, its elegant paper cover — soothed me during a physically trying time earlier this year. It’s small and slender, even in hardback, so I could easily carry it with me. Waiting for doctors or waiting for the bus I’d open its pages to Mason’s ingenious “what if” retelling of the Odyssey. What if Odysseus never returned home? What if Penelope remarried? What if they gave up, and left Helen in Troy? Beautiful, smart, witty, moving. Made me cry.

I spied a friend waiting for a parent evening to begin reading Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom.” So heavy! How was she hauling it around? I had to keep my copy at home, where I lapped up every one of its 562 pages. My favorite read of the year: full-bodied, funny, wise, sad. A story of turn of-this-century America, Franzen’s characters engage, enrage, endear. I was sorry to reach its end.

Call it fluff, Cathleen Shine’s “The Three Weissmanns of Westport” cheered me when I most needed to be. I laughed so hard reading this I cried, publicly, on the #151 bus. A smart, breezy read about New Yorkers displaced to a Connecticut beach town.

“Star Island” has a lip-synching pop star, her body double, a pathetic and fat paparazzo, a one-eyed vigilante, a body guard with a chain-saw prosthesis, and a thieving real estate developer. Twists, turns, and finally, justice. Carl Hiaasen always delivers jaw-dropping satire. Thanks for the gift, Georgia.

Speaking of Georgia, I’m a sucker for literature set in the Hudson River Valley. Blame it on Edith Wharton novels and Georgia Dent’s delicious hospitality: this place feels like a second home to me. “Man in the Woods,” by Scott Spencer, plays out in this lush area. It’s a beautifully crafted thriller, a wonderful read.

How does an author keep a couple apart, but interested, for 20 years? I had to read “One Day” by David Nicholls to see how he pulled it off. The answer: brilliantly. Read this book before it’s the movie.

Having put down ”Portnoy’s Complaint” over and over, I was pleased to find myself quickly and firmly hooked by Philip Roth’s “Nemesis.” He grounds his story in Newark during a summer polio epidemic; heat and fear rise from its pages. There’s no joy in polio, but it’s a fine thing to be caught in Roth’s carefully wrought world.

Finally, Rose Tremain’s “Trespass.” It’s not a thriller, but the situation she sets up nabbed me. It’s about an estate in France: its owners, its buyers, its end.

Also in the blog

Books: New and old reads

A long holiday weekend gave me time to lounge outside in the sun — take that eternal winter! — with Edward St. Aubyn’s latest, Lost for Words. It’s delicious: a satire of a famous book contest. Witty, withering, sexy. Yes, he gives us too many characters, none of whom we get to know deeply. Still,

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Life: My head outside a book

Gail Levin’s magnificent Lee Kranser biography was hard to give up and now I know why. Three disappointing reads in a row? John Steinbeck’s “The Winter of Our Discontent” was engaging but cartoon-y, a precursor to all things Updike. Adam Gopnik’s “Winter” essays are — I can’t believe I’m going to use this word for

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Reading: A balm in Gilead

My mind is a jumble: more than one war, migration, building and preservation, what to make for dinner… Reading is a balm. The Postcard, by Anne Berest This autobiographical novel is the story of a family in France undone by the Holocaust.  Our narrator Anne receives a postcard oddly inscribed with four names: Ephraïm, Emma,

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