2014: My Year in Books

[A wall in my office]

I started keeping a reading list in 1997 when I began commuting by train to work. I've been keeping a list ever since.

Because I rarely remember what I've been reading once I've gone on to the next book, the list comes in handy whenever someone asks, "So, have you read any good books lately?"

Yes, of course. Here is a short list of my favorites from this year, in order from the ridiculous to the sublime:

What I read

Jeanne Ray, Calling Invisible Women, is a delightful comic novel in which a middle-aged woman becomes literally invisible, and her family doesn't notice. The author, a retired nurse, is author Ann Patchett's mother. She was in her 60s when she wrote her first novel, Julie and Romeo. I love Patchett's novels, but Ray's are more fun.

Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry (newly published in paperback) is a comic novel likely to appeal to my friends in the book business and other bibliophiles. It features a curmudgeonly bookstore owner, a publisher's sales rep, a book tour that goes hilariously wrong, and a precocious child who loves to read.

Laura Lippman has written a slew of detective stories based in Baltimore, my new home. I began reading her in Illinois in preparation for my move and kept on reading her once I got here. Lippman's detective, like Lippman herself, formerly wrote for the Baltimore Sun; her books might appeal to readers of Sue Grafton's alphabet series.

When a new Baltimore friend told me Lippman is married to David Simon, creator of The Wire, I ordered a copy of his nonfiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. First published in 1991, Homicide reads like fast-paced detective fiction. This means I do a double-take whenever I hear the name of Jay Landsman, my local police captain, the real-life son and namesake of one of the book's main characters who was transmuted into a fictional character in The Wire.

If you are planning to visit me, however, and want to bone up on Baltimore, it might be more reassuring to skip Lippman and Simon and go directly to Anne Tyler. Before moving here, I reread my old favorite Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Once installed in Baltimore, I got a review copy of Tyler's forthcoming novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, which takes place in a Baltimore neighborhood only 10 minutes from my house. I love Tyler for her unsentimental yet kindly way of describing family life. And even though all her books are set in Baltimore, her characters do not generally get murdered.

Ellen Harmon White: American Prophet, edited by Terrie Dopp Aamodt, Gary Land, and Ronald L. Numbers, is a fascinating collection of articles about probably the most important female 19th-century religious leader and reformer you've barely heard of--unless, like me, you were raised Seventh-day Adventist. Here's my review in the September/October issue of Books and Culture.

Finally, here's the book I've recommended to more people this year than any other: Atul Gawande's Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. Gawande, a surgeon, has written an impassioned plea for how end-of-life medicine and end-of-life care in general should be practiced. Gawande is also a regular contributor to New Yorker magazine, which tells you something about the quality of his writing.

Why I read

Like everyone else I read Marilynne Robinson's Lila, just as in earlier years I read Housekeeping and Gilead and Home. Robinson is brilliant at character portrayal, and she knows how to turn a phrase. She's also gifted at stuffing her books with Christian theology and still gathering accolades from the New York Times (by Diane Johnson, author of Le Divorce, no less). I recommend her to all my friends whose brows are higher than mine.

But I guess this year I was just more interested in invisible middle-aged women and the floundering publishing industry and my present life in Baltimore and my past life as a Seventh-day Adventist and my future life as it winds down. Which leads me to think about the books I've loved at any given time.

2014 was stressful: I sold a house I'd lived in for 26 years, moved into an apartment, bought a house, moved into it, and lived through renovations. In the midst of all that change, I preferred books that closely connected to some aspect of my life--past, present, or future.

In more humdrum years, I've chosen books that took me out of my environment and introduced me to new times, places, and ideas. Three years ago when recovering from open-heart surgery, I read dozens of completely mindless but diverting mysteries.

I thought I just liked to read, but apparently I also use books as therapy. (I'm sure there's a reason that no matter what kind of year I've had, I adore Harry Potter.) What books did you read this year? Do your selections say anything about the kind of year you had?

FOR SALE: the American free press

(Where print publishing is headed)

My husband has spent over 30 years editing magazines. His company now publishes fewer than half the number of magazines they did a decade ago, and the number of employees has been significantly reduced. He feels some sympathy for the situation described in a recent New York Times article, "Sponsors Now Pay for Online Articles, Not Just Ads," "if the articles are clearly marked," he said, "and they don't promote the companies' products." Right, I said, and the camel's nose under the tent flap isn't hurting anybody.

I understand why magazines are turning to sponsored articles. Most of us would rather read our magazines online, though we have no intention of paying for the privilege of doing so. Unfortunately, advertisers are not willing to pay as much for online ads as they once did for print ads, possibly because consumers have learned how to block them. (I use Adblock Plus, which is great for now, but they're starting to let "more useful and pleasant" ads past their censors, which may soon render them useless to ad-avoiders like me.) With dropping revenue from consumers and advertisers, magazines have a hard time paying for original research, reporting, writing, and editing. The temptation to use sponsored articles is strong.

It's good for spouses to have common interests, so my husband and I both chose careers in a doomed industry that pays poorly. What could possibly go wrong? My work has been in book publishing, which has its own share of problems. A decade ago my little college town had a Borders and a Barnes & Noble. Now we have to get our books from Amazon or, more often, from the public library. Read another recent New York Times article, Scott Turow's "The Slow Death of the American Author," and weep.

Turow, who is president of The Authors Guild, is not complaining about his remuneration: his books have sold over 25 million copies. He simply notes that authors of e-books earn "roughly half of a traditional hardcover royalty"--unless they are pirated, lent, or re-sold, in which case they earn nothing at all. And since an e-book never wears out, why would anybody pay for a new one?

I didn't put a newspaper in my toilet photo, because I don't have an actual newspaper. We stopped subscribing to the Chicago Tribune about the time a good friend of mine, seeing the handwriting on the wall, took early retirement. She's glad she did: during the last decades, hundred of editors, writers, and reporters have been laid off, and pension benefits have dramatically decreased. Like everyone else, I read my news online now. As my mother once asked under other circumstances, why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?

But what's going to happen now that we all expect to get our news, our magazine articles, and our books free of charge? If newspapers can't afford to hire good reporters and editors, news will deteriorate into shouting matches based on uninformed opinion. If magazines can't afford to pay their writers and editors, they will first try to turn into advertising delivery systems and then, failing that, go out of business. If book publishers lower royalty rates and refuse to take a chance on new or little-known authors (i.e., authors who are not yet "brands"), careful thinking and writing will be replaced by self-published schlock. Oh, right... those aren't predictions. They're descriptions of what has actually happened over the last decade.

Q. So where will our reading material come from? 
A. From businesses with products to sell, of course.

It's an American tradition. The current Supreme Court has decided that businesses have the right to sponsor political candidates. For many years cigarette makers sponsored the research that found no link between smoking and cancer. Nowadays manufacturers of sugary products sponsor dubious nutritional research. Why shouldn't businesses sponsor news, commentary, and entertainment, not only by advertising, but also by providing content? Especially if they're not specifically mentioning their own products in the articles they supply?

Well, one wonders how much of the camel will follow his nose into the tent. And one thinks of the old adage that he who lies down with dogs (or camels) gets up with fleas. For a fascinating first-hand look at how advertising influenced women's magazines before 1990, read Gloria Steinem's (possibly pirated) article "Sex, Lies & Advertising." For a fascinating first-hand look at how advertising is influencing all forms of media today, just stay online.

THE BEGINNER'S GOODBYE by Anne Tyler

Dorothy keeps popping up unexpectedly. Aaron, her husband, first sees her at the house the oak tree fell on. She then starts joining him at random times and places: in the grocery store check-out line, in the street near his office, in Belvedere Square. One day she appears just outside his office window, by the trash cans.

The odd thing is, Dorothy has been dead for nearly a year.

Aaron is neither romantic nor religious. He's the dutiful, unimaginative editor at the family-owned vanity press, publishers of a Beginner's series--"something on the order of the Dummies books, but without the cheerleader tone of voice," thin books to get you started:

Anything is manageable if it's divided into small enough increments, was the theory; even life's most complicated lessons. Not The Beginner's Cookbook but The Beginner's Soups.... Not The Beginner's Child Care but The Beginner's Colicky Baby.

But how can Aaron apply this wisdom to grieving? How can he begin to say goodbye to Dorothy, his wife of ten years?

The Beginner's Goodbye includes everything you'd expect in an Anne Tyler novel (it's her 19th): Lovable, socially awkward characters. Family ties that sometimes bind. Writing that is at once accessible and literary, comic and profound. Baltimore.

It's not as rich as Tyler's magnificent Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, but then a Beginner's guide is just meant to get you started. This one could start a lot of conversations, not only about grief but also about communication in marriage, and how we sabotage our own happiness, and whether marriage partners can ever really know one another.

Should you publish your own book?

Google "self-publish" and you'll find countless websites exhorting you to become your own publisher. Self-publishing is quick. It's easy. It can be cheap. Best of all, you are in total control. No more wasting time with publishers or agents who just don't get it.

For a different opinion, read Melissa Foster and Amy Edelman's op-ed piece, "Why Indie Authors Don't Get No Respect", first published, ironically, on IndieReader.com ("a venue for discriminating book-lovers to find and purchase books published by the people who wrote them."). Publish your own book, these authors say, and you're likely to get bad editing and crappy covers. By bypassing the "gatekeepers," you will release your book into a vast pool of unfiltered and usually inferior content. That's no doubt why the New York Times will not review self-published books, and it's why I duck and run whenever I see one coming my way.

But I may have to change my opinion.

Last week I reviewed (not for this blog) two books published by small but conventional publishers. One  was so unattractively designed outside and in that at first I assumed it was self-published, or perhaps a galley. But no. This was the final copy.

The other book looked somewhat better, but the copyediting and proofreading, if any had been done, was abysmal. The text was sprinkled with typos, of course, but it also featured misused apostrophes, incorrect capitalization, dangling modifiers, faulty parallelism, misspelled words and names, incorrect punctuation, homonym faults, misused words, incorrect citations, mistakes in subject-verb agreement--and even a running head that actually dips down and interferes with the first line of type.

Sheeeeesh.

As I was recovering from these two books--both of them worth reading, by the way, and certainly worthy of better treatment than they got from their publishers--I got an over-the-transom request to look at a self-published book. I was heading into my instinctive crouch when I suddenly thought: How could it be any worse than the books I'd just reviewed from conventional publishers? So I checked out the author's website. Hey, not bad! Good design. Good marketing. Much better than the publishers' web pages for the two authors I'd just read. I may regret this, but I agreed to look at her book. I hope she used a competent editor.

I still agree with Foster and Edelman, at least on principle. Gatekeepers, editors, and designers can vastly improve the quality of published material. Most self-published books interest few people beyond their authors. But you know, if publishers think they can no longer afford expert designers and editors, then why would any author in his or her right mind want to accept their lower royalties?

Should you publish your own book? Probably not, unless you're willing to hire a team of professionals to ensure a good product which even then will be rejected by most book stores and reviewers. But before offering your proposal to a publisher, be sure you're dealing with a house that still places high value on design and editing. When publishers stop doing that, they make themselves irrelevant.