Unlike lists of the past years (Best Books Read 2017-2022), this year’s offerings concentrate on little books – the in-between-ers, the interstitials. These books are like Wordles between the Sunday crossword puzzles. In my book group-duo The Gravity’s Rainbow Support Group, we have read some colossuses this year and they have been quite good, but sometimes they make my head hurt (Laurence Stern’s Tristam Shandy comes to mind). So don't you agree it is equally important to read a “breather” once in a while?
The Best Books Read 2022 edition have provided quality respite and they deserve some kind of honorable mention. They – in the order they were read – are:
Josef Škvorecký, Two Novellas* (1977 - 208 pages). When I went to the former East Germany near the Czech border last, it reminded me of this writer Škvorecký who left Czechoslovakia and resettled in Toronto. The three pieces in this book, the Preface on Red Music, and the two novellas Emöke and The Bass Saxophone were all good reads. The latter demonstrates how art (jazz music) became a "resistance" in the face of authoritarian regimes like the Nazis in World War II followed by the Soviet occupation afterwards.
Lee Smith, Blue Marlin: A Novella* (2020 - 136 pages). My longtime partner Denise has always admired Lee Smith (especially her novel Fair and Tender Ladies) and she convinced me to read the book. In a tight, elegiac story, the narrator, a thirteen-year-old girl reflects on a trip to Florida she makes with her parents – who are struggling with their marriage. They are on vacation in Key West, staying at the Blue Marlin Motel. Their trip coincides with the filming of the 1959 movie "Operation Petticoat" starring Cary Grant and Tony Curtis. The girl and the mother even became extras in the movie. (Smith calls the book autobiographical fiction, with an emphasis on fiction.)
Hilary Mantel, Learning to Talk* (2022 - 176 pages). I read this collection of stories about her growing up in Ireland in the 1950s just before Mantel died. Mantel’s very precise and understated emotional writing is powerful. You can see why she went on to win all those Booker Prizes. (I may have not read her most well-known work Wolf Hall, but I did watch the five-part series starring Mark Ryland, Claire Foy and Damian Lewis. The novel was set the time of Henry the VIII and Thomas Cromwell – when the British royalty played for keeps.)
Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poiter (2009 - 272 pages). Speaking of Tony Curtis, he “appears” in Everett’s novel about a black man who resembles Sidney Poiter, but his mother gives the birth name of I Am Not Sidney Poiter. Everett mixes the plot of various Poiter movies into the short novel, including "Lillies of the Field", "Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner" (with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy), "Buck and the Preacher" (with Harry Belafonte) and of course, "The Defiant Ones"starring Tony Curtis.
Jimmy Breslin, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game (1963 -126 pages). A fellow bookseller gave me this tattered copy of the history of the inaugural 1962 season of the New York Mets “led” by Marvelous Marvin Throneberry and their future Hall of Famer manager Casey Stengel. Breslin’s had a long, often controversial career as a New York journalist and columnist. In this excerpt, the Giants superstar Willie Mays gets in a fight with Met second baseman after a hard slide at the bag, which escalates into a fracas. Breslin writes:
"[ San Francisco first baseman Orlando] Cepeda promptly charged [Met pitcher] Roger Craig throwing punches. For baseball players, who can’t fight even a little bit, it turned into a pretty good show. Much throwing of batting helmets and charging from the bench and the like. Stengel who knows that baseball players look like girls when they try to fight, remained on the bench. It was bad enough people called him an old man. He sure as hell wasn’t going out and let people say he looked like an old lady."
I realize this is not your normal Best of List, curated to impress, but you can read anyone of these books in just a few hours. Doesn't that count for something?
* available on the Destination: Books Best of the Bookshopper online store.
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