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| Tony Cenicola/The New York Times |
The
Italian writer Italo Calvino defined a classic as “a book that’s never finished
saying what it has to say.” This year, The Times’s daily critics reviewed
nearly 250 titles. What follows are their lists of the fiction and nonfiction
books that most moved, excited and enlightened them in 2016 — books that, in
their own ways, are perhaps not finished saying what they have to say.
The
New York Times has three daily book critics: Michiko Kakutani, Dwight Garner
and Jennifer Senior. Because they review different titles, it is impossible for
them to compile a single unanimous Top 10 list. They have favorites, however,
and are happy to have a chance to list them here. There is also a list from
Janet Maslin, who has stepped down from full-time reviewing but remains a
frequent contributor of reviews to The Times.
The
critics have presented their lists in rough order of preference.
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| Tony Cenicola/The New York Times |
Michiko Kakutani
‘MOONGLOW’ By
Michael Chabon (Harper). Told as a faux memoir, this moving novel
recounts the story of the narrator’s grandfather: a larger-than-life, Augie
March-like hero — a former soldier who’s also a dreamer, roughneck, pool shark
and jailbird, by turns naïve and proud, impulsive and romantic. Mr. Chabon is
one of the most gifted prose stylists at work today, and he writes here with
both easy lyricism and caffeinated ardor, capturing his hero’s love affair with
a French refugee (who becomes his wife), and his growing obsession with the
moon shot and the space race. Through the lives of these two World War II
survivors, he gives us an indelible portrait of one family and America’s
lurching progress through the 20th century. (Read the review.)
‘HITLER: ASCENT, 1889-1939’ By Volker Ullrich (Alfred A. Knopf). How
did a man described as a “half-insane rascal” and “pathetic dunderhead” rise to
power in the land of Goethe and Beethoven? Why did millions of ordinary Germans
embrace him and his doctrine of hatred? How did this “most unlikely pretender
to high state office” assume complete control of a once democratic country and
set it on a monstrous course through history? In this insightful and revealing
biography, Mr. Ullrich shows how Hitler used an arsenal of demagogic tools
(lies, fake promises, theatrical rallies, mantralike phrases) to exploit a
“constellation of crises” in post-World War I Germany, including economic woes,
unemployment and political dysfunction. He argues that Hitler’s rise was not
inevitable but that his domestic adversaries failed to appreciate his
ruthlessness, while foreign statesmen naïvely believed that they could control
his aggression. His book shows just how the unthinkable can happen. (Read the review.)
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‘NIGHT SKY WITH EXIT WOUNDS’ By Ocean Vuong (Copper Canyon Press). These
fierce, startling poems capture the history of prejudice in America (where
“trees know/ the weight of history”) and the hopes and fears that bring
immigrants to its shores. Mr. Vuong — who was born on a rice farm outside
Saigon in 1988 and was the first in his immediate family to learn to read —
writes with a musical appreciation for the sound and rhythm of words. He has a
talent for capturing stories and memories (like those of his grandmother, who
remembers the fall of Saigon) in unexpected and searing images, and uses the
magic of language here to turn “bones to sonatas” and by pressing pen to paper,
to touch his family “back from extinction.” (Read the review.)
‘LAB GIRL’ By
Hope Jahren (Alfred A. Knopf). The geobiologist Hope Jahren possesses
the two attributes Nabokov deemed essential to the writer: “the precision of a
poet and the imagination of a scientist.” Her memoir communicates the electric
excitement of a scientific discovery; the discipline and tedium involved in
conducting long-term experiments; and the arduous, sometimes thrilling
experience of fieldwork. The volume is, at once, an enthralling account of her
discovery of her vocation, and a gifted teacher’s guidebook to the secret lives
of plants — a book that should do for botany what Stephen Jay Gould’s writings
did for paleontology, and what Oliver Sacks’s essays did for neurology. (Read
the review.)
‘THE NORTH WATER’ By
Ian McGuire (Henry Holt). This novel about a 19th-century whaling
expedition is as gory as Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd,” as darkly melodramatic as a
classic Jacobean drama. Its villain, Henry Drax, is a monster, reminiscent of
the demonic Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s operatic masterpiece “Blood
Meridian” and the sadistic bully Wolf Larsen in Jack London’s “The Sea-Wolf”;
and its action-stuffed plot reverberates with echoes of “Moby-Dick,” “Lord Jim”
and “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.” Thanks to its author’s
gifts as a writer, however, the novel never reads like a patched-together
literary homage, but instead emerges as a gripping and original act of bravura
storytelling that immerses us in a Darwinian world that is as unforgiving as it
is bloody. (Read the review.)
‘BORN A CRIME: STORIES FROM A SOUTH AFRICAN
CHILDHOOD’ By Trevor Noah (Spiegel &
Grau). Best known as the host of “The Daily Show,” Mr. Noah brings to
his comedy an outsider’s gift for observation and an instinctive radar for the
absurdities of life. His sense of humor was forged during his childhood in
South Africa, where he grew up the son of a Xhosa mother and a Swiss-German
father — a relationship whose very existence violated that country’s racial
laws during the apartheid era. Mr. Noah gives us a harrowing understanding of
what it was like to grow up in a society where questions of race permeated
every aspect of daily life, and at the same time has written a deeply affecting
love letter to his mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, a remarkable woman who
was determined that her son “be free to go anywhere, do anything, be anyone.” (Read
the review.)
‘THE RETURN: FATHERS, SONS AND THE LAND IN BETWEEN’By Hisham Matar (Random House). The author’s father, Jaballa Matar, a leading
Libyan dissident, was kidnapped in 1990 by agents for that country’s dictator
Muammar el-Qaddafi, and sent to the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli. In
this beautifully chiseled book, the younger Mr. Matar chronicles his Telemachus-like
search for his missing father, whose absence has haunted him for decades. It’s
a detective story of sorts, with Mr. Matar trying to piece together what
happened to his father after his arrest. It’s also a story of exile — how the
author, his brother and their mother tried to invent new lives for themselves
abroad — and a story of what’s happened in Libya and the Middle East, as hopes
fostered by the Arab Spring crashed and burned in one country after another.
(Read the review.)
‘NUTSHELL’ By
Ian McEwan (Nan A. Talese). It sounds like a ridiculous premise: a
novel narrated by a talking fetus who’s a kind of Hamlet in utero — a baby-to-be
(or not-to-be, as the case may be), who eavesdrops on the affair between his
mother, Trudy, and his Uncle Claude. It’s a tribute to Mr. McEwan’s
inventiveness and sleight of hand that he turns this incongruous setup into a
small tour de force that showcases his gifts as a writer — his authority, his
imaginative verve, his sly delight in the gymnastics words can perform — while
conjuring the uncertainties of a contemporary world, troubled by social
upheaval, new and old inequities and unexpected political change. (Read the review.)
‘THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD’ By Colson Whitehead (Doubleday). In
this haunting novel, Mr. Whitehead turns the Underground Railroad from a
metaphor into an actual train that ferries fugitives north. In doing so, he’s
written a potent, hallucinatory novel that leaves us with a devastating
understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery. He’s found an elastic
voice that accommodates both brute realism and fablelike allegory, the
plain-spoken and the poetic — a voice that enables him to convey the emotional fallout
of slavery with raw, shocking power, reminding us, in Faulkner’s words: “The
past is never dead. It’s not even past.” (Read the review.)
‘THE REVENGE OF ANALOG: REAL THINGS AND WHY THEY
MATTER’ By David Sax
(PublicAffairs). In this captivating book, the reporter David Sax
provides an entertaining account of how analog technologies are enjoying a
spirited revival: vinyl record sales are booming, Polaroid-like cameras have
caught on among millennials and their younger siblings, and old-fashioned paper
notebooks and erasable whiteboards have become a go-to option in many Silicon
Valley offices. In an increasingly digital age, Mr. Sax reminds us of the human
craving for tactile, physical things, and the persistence of the real. (Read
the review.)
Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani