My Favorite Books of the Decade

I hate choosing favorites. Especially when it comes to books…which is why I am just going to list these things alphabetically. I hope you'll ask about some of these choices in the comments section; I also hope that you will pick some of these titles up if you haven't read them. There are some great authors here, but before I reveal the list there is one caveat: my tastes unabashedly lean towards the British writers. Sorry Chuck Palahniuk and Don DeLillo fans (although I do love White Noise and Mao II…I just didn't think DeLillo did anything great in the 2000's). There are a few American authors on here – my favorite being Rick Bass, the best naturalistic writer since Thoreau, and his brilliant collection of short stories The Hermit's Story – but you'll mostly find British authors who either write classically (McEwan, Coetzee and Waters) or sardonically (Barker, Amis, and Rushdie). Because my tastes lean towards the British you could say my tastes are a bit aesthete. I don't mind sounding pretentious here. I get a lot of enjoyment out of postmodern takes on classical tropes likes a WWII story (Atonement), the detective novel (The Light of Day), or just a good old fashion love story (The Powerbook).

If I had a gun to my head I guess I could name a favorite amongst these twenty selections…that would have to be Ian McEwan's Saturday…probably the finest novel about September 11^th to be written. It was also interesting to see Martin Amis go to a more classical style of storytelling with House of Meetings after his failed attempts at a September 11^th novel, Yellow Dog. Meetings is like Dostoevsky lite…which is a compliment. It's a tightly packed novel with a lot of wonderful Amisisms in it. Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown is brilliant novel, too. Rushdie floods his story with usual pop culture allusions and at the end succeeds at flipping the end of The Silence of the Lambs and making the male the hunted. It's his most impressive and his most garish novel since Midnight's Children. Finally I want to give a shout-out to Nicola Barker's fascinatingly absurd novel Darkmans. It's audacious (800+ pages) and sardonic (it reminded me of Will Self and Martin Amis), and it's not all together a success; however, it's ambition gets you through the rough patches, and by the end of the novel – a hilariously dark and irreverent flip on Bergman's moment of Death playing chess (for Barker Death is more of a jokester, and instead of chess he flips a coin) – I found myself to have laughed more than I did groan throughout the novel. It's really one of the standout works of the last ten years.

Onto the list…

Atonement  

by Ian McEwan

The Book of Illusions  

by Paul Auster

The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

Darkmans

by Nicola Barker

 

Dead Air

by Iain Banks

Elizabeth Costello

by J.M. Coetzee

Fury 

 by Salman Rushdie

The Hermit's Story

by Rick Bass

House of Meetings

by Martin Amis

How the Dead Live

by Will Self

The Light of Day

by Graham Swift

Never Let Me Go

by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Night Watch

by Sarah Waters

On Chesil Beach

by Ian McEwan

The Plot Against America

by Philip Roth

The Powerbook

by Jeanette Winterson

Saturday

by Ian McEwan

The Sea

by John Bannville

Shalimar the Clown

by Salman Rushdie

White Teeth 

 by Zadie Smith

When Worlds Collide: Toby Young’s First-Meeting Faux “Pads”

So, possums, want to know what happened the first time the 28th Most Beautiful Lady in the World met the man whose shtick is How to Lose Friends and Alienate People?

From the October 3, 2008, edition of The Scotsman:

“I recently boarded a flight from New York to London with my family and noticed that Salman Rushdie was on the same plane…I thought to myself that the last person you’d want on a flight from JFK to Heathrow when your wife and four children are on board is one of the biggest terrorist targets in the world. The next day I happened to be introduced to Padma Lakshmi [Rushdie’s estranged wife] at a party. And I thought it would be funny to tell her the story.” How did she respond? “She just sort of smiled and nodded.” Does he get that a lot? “Um, yes.”

Ah, possums, isn’t that eloquent response typical of our dear Pads?

Amuse-Biatch Heterosexual Tuesday: Nips and Buds, or Nipping in the Buds: A Tribute to Padma Lakshmi

"Padma…is sulking magnificently. (She…, like all fish-lovers, dislikes other people knowing anything she doesn’t. Padma: strong, jolly, a consolation for my last days. But definitely a bitch-in-the-manger.)…. ‘But what is so precious,’ Padma demands, her right hand slicing the air updownup in exasperation, ‘to need all this writing-shiting?’….Poor Padma. Things are always getting her goat. Perhaps even her name: understandably enough, since her mother told her, when she was only small, that she had been named after the lotus goddess, whose most common appellation amongst village folk is ‘The One Who Possesses Dung.’

….

[P]erhaps our Padma will be useful, because it’s impossible to stop her being a critic. She is particularly angry with my remarks about her name. ‘What do you know, city boy?’ she cried—hand slicing the air. ‘In my village there is no shame in being named for the Dung Goddess. Write at once that you are wrong, completely.’ In accordance with my lotus’s wishes, I insert, forthwith, a brief paean to Dung.

Dung, that fertilizes and causes the crops to grow! Dung, which is patted into thin chapati-like cakes when still fresh and moist, and is sold to the village builders, who use it to secure and strengthen the walls of kachcha buildings made of mud! Dung, whose arrival from the nether end of cattle goes a long way towards explaining their divine and sacred status! Oh, yes, I was wrong, I admit I was prejudiced, no doubt because its unfortunate odours do have a way of offending my sensitive nose—how wonderful, how ineffably lovely it must be to be named for the Purveyor of Dung!"


From pages 26 and 36 of the Everyman’s Library edition of Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize-winning Midnight’s Children, published 18 years before Sir Salman met the future Lady Rushdie in, of all places, Liberty Island. Oh the prophecies of art, possums!

Amuse-Biatch Quote of the Week: Padma Lakshmi

"In southern Spain, they made me eat a bull's testicles. They were really garlicky, which I don't like. I prefer to take a bull by the horns, not by, um..."

--Padma Lakshmi

Uh, perhaps some (totally not scruffy!) people would beg to differ?

Padma’s Ex: Nobody Calls Me “Scruffy” Without Getting Sued!

Oh, possums, the unkempt fur is flying in England, and The Guardian has all the details.

Apparently, On Her Majesty's Service, a book by one of Salman Rushdie's ex-bodyguards and set to be published this week, claims that during the years that Padma Lakshmi's ex lived under police protection because of the fatwa issued against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini, the British "police nicknamed Rushdie [']Scruffy['] because of his unkempt appearance."

This allegation has made Rushdie's hair stand on end: "I had a lot of sympathy and understanding from the police. Our relationship was the exact opposite of what has been written. I never heard myself called by the name Scruffy in nine years."

Of course, the book discusses a lot more than Rushdie's grooming. In response, Padma's ex says, "[The ex-bodyguard] is portraying me as mean, nasty, tight-fisted, arrogant and extremely unpleasant. In my humble opinion I am none of those things."

And now, Rushdie is set to sue to prove that it ain't so. Ah, the beauty of British libel law.

(If you want to hear from Mr. Scruff, click the vid.)

Amuse-Biatch Photoessay: Gail Simmons Asks Padma Lakshmi for Wedding-Night Advice: “Wait, How Does the Peacock’s Foot Go Again?”

For your reference, possums.

Salman Rushdie: Padma Lakshmi Dumped Me by Email!

To which we say, oh buck up, possum; it might have been worse. She could, for example, have dumped you via text message.

But we have to hand it to her; she's a sly one, that Padma. (Still, we wonder whether telling him by email, rather than in person, was at least in part responsible for his response: issuing a press release and throwing her out of his house.)

At any rate, though the emailed "Dear John" is possibly the most interesting tidbit in the piece published by The New York Times over the weekend, the author of the piece also engages in a little biographical criticism of his new novel, The Enchantress of Florence, that is most suggestive:

Beauty and betrayal are both elements of “Enchantress.” “That a woman so beautiful should not be tender, this I did not expect,” says the lover of the mysterious Qara Köz when she leaves him. “I did not expect her to turn away from me so casually, as if she were changing a shoe.”

“I did not expect her to break my heart.”

Even more suggestive is another nugget dug up by Joyce Carol Oates in her review of Enchantress:

She was adept at the seven types of unguiculation, which is to say the art of using the nails to enhance the act of love.... She had marked him with the Three Deep Marks, which were scratches made with the first three fingers of her right hand upon his back, his chest, and on his testicles as well: something to remember her by.... She could perform the Hopping of the Hare, marking the areolas around his nipples without touching him anywhere else on his body. And no living woman was as skilled as she at the Peacock's Foot....

If you are suitably intrigued, then, possums, you should know this, straight from the horse's mouth: “I’m totally eligible, single and available.” So, ladies, start reaching for those nail clippers now.

Sari Excuse: Padma Lakshmi’s Ex-Husband Says Women Only Marry for the Wedding Dress

‘Tis a pity, possums, that Top Chef chose not to do Restaurant Wars this season, else whoever was running front of the house could have said, of Sir Salman Rushdie, “Bitter, party of one.”

You see, possums, just in time for the broadcast of Wedding Wars (and the new Sex and the City film), Padma Lakshmi’s ex-husband is accusing women of Rushdie-ing into marriage:

“It’s strange, given that I’ve been married four times, but I actually don’t think marriage is necessary….Girls like it, especially if they’ve never been married before – it’s the dress. Girls want a wedding, they don’t want a marriage. If only you could have weddings without marriages.”

Let’s see now, possums. Whom could Sal be thinking of? Ah yes. Before Salman Rushdie, Padma had “never been married before.”

Well, that makes sense. Padma married him because she wanted to wear a wedding dress! Of course. Because when you’ve been married four times, it is indisputable that it’s not you who’s at fault; it’s the women, of course.

So let’s take a look at photos from Padma’s wedding, and you tell us, possums, if the schmatte was worth the marriage to her “distant uncle.”

Book of the Month, May 2008: Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

Now, I must say that in my prepubescent stage of literature knowledge I am certain there are thousands upon thousands of people more qualified to talk about literature in an engaging way than I could ever hope. My degree is in Literature, so I have four years of digging through weighty tomes and literary theory under my belt (postmodernism being the one I am well versed in), but I am not much of a writer, and I fear that writing about such literary giants is out of my league. I am only 26 and have evolved from The Hardy Boys to John Grisham and James Patterson to Ernest Hemingway and Elmore Leonard to Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman to Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. All are books that I look at through different lenses, and in now way am I saying that one is better than the other (although I guess I am, since this evolution of literary tastes is shown in an order that can be easily deconstructed as “what I liked when I was too young to know better” to “what I know is good right now”), but I am hoping to highlight some books each month that showcase some of my favorite authors and what it is that they do so well. I will mostly be able to convey how the novel affected me emotionally and the obvious elements of why I think it is a great book, not just based on its technical accomplishments, but also its readability. I hope that comes through as I do these but we’ll see…let’s give it a go shall we?

It is hard to fathom the genius of Salman Rushdie. I have never encountered anything like him before; and that goes for any medium, be it film, art, music, or whatever. He is the Quentin Tarantino of literature (even though some would argue that is Elmore Leonard, but bear with me here) a genius who writes grandiose novels with oddball characters and situations that deal with supernatural and irreverent to the seriously political and historic. He dabbles in postcolonialism, feminism, postmodernism, and an uncanny ability of bringing India to life. He is extremely referential, conjuring up images of pop culture and Bollywood to make a serious point by implementing elements of the artificial and absurd. He is a cinematic writer, everything you read you feel as if you could see it unfolding in front of you as if he were showing the storyboards to his latest film project. He is postmodern to the core, yet he is not, as many anti-postmodern literature lovers would say, irresponsible. His postmodern elements exist for a reason. They always add to the story and heighten the emotion, they are never the story (say like a Dave Eggers novel) and they exist only as unconventional rebuttals to an all too serious worldly debate.


That debate is usually about the calling into question of politics and love and religion and history; which in postmodern terms are what Jean-Francois Lyotard called ‘the grand narrative.’ Rushdie wrestles with ‘the grand narrative’ in a lot of his novels, mostly by using the fantastical to make his points. In Midnight’s Children, his second novel, he tackles the heavily emotional and tumultuous theme of postcolonial India in the moments before, leading up to, and during her independence. Rushdie likes to undercut a lot of the uber serious themes that plague the front pages of our daily news, but again, he is not childish or irresponsible, but rather by tackling these elements of ‘the grand narrative’, he is allowing the reader to enter a world where flying carpets are normal and invites the reader to cross that threshold which allows them to put on a different lens and see what things look like through cracked and smudged glasses.


I don’t know if I will ever read a novel as brilliant as Midnight’s Children. There is a reason is won the “booker of booker’s” (the best novel in the last 25 years, essentially) as it is a novel that revolves around the most formidable time in India’s history all told by one unreliable narrator Saleem Sinai. Saleem is like most postmodern narrators, the relayer of information for us not in the know, he is a narrator who forgets facts is unsure of exact moments in time, and as we come to see, isn’t even really who he says he is (which is a brilliant touch by Rushdie, because when this information is sprung upon the reader it forces them to re-imagine how the previous 300 or so pages went). Always morphing like the snakes that Saleem references throughout, the novel is a beautiful allegory for life with one simple truth: life has its ups and downs. Saleem plays a game called Snakes and Ladders and the metaphor is clear: for every up there is a down, and for every down there must be an up. Never before have I been touched by a novel in so many different ways.

I googled Midnight’s Children so that I could put a good plot synopsis up here, and I found a really good example from Mac Fenwick of Trent University from the Literary Encyclopedia webpage. In no way did I write any of what is below (I always have problems summarizing things which I explain in my post for “Snow Angels”):

Midnight’s Children has been compared in its scope and execution to works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Like them, Rushdie’s novel presents an encyclopaedic exploration of an entire society through the story of a single person. It is able to do this, in part, by merging with the novel form a number of non-Western texts such as the Sanskrit epics, The Ramayana, The Mahabharata and, most consciously (and not unproblematically) The 1,001 Nights. The narrative takes the form of fictional autobiography as Saleem Sinai, born at the precise moment of Indian Independence at midnight on 15th August 1947, reflects upon his life and the history of his “twin”, the newly formed nation of India. In order to do this he constructs a narrative that is a heterogeneous mixture of the different traditions from which it takes its inspiration. Throughout the story, Saleem seeks to uncover or discover the connections between the personal and the national, the individual and the societal, as he strives to “give meaning” to his life and, somewhat more problematically, to the history of India from the period between World War I and the Indian Emergency (1975-1977) when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended the Constitution and democracy all but collapsed in the country. This connection between Saleem and his national “twin” is a difficult one, and from the outset of the narrative Saleem feels that he has been “handcuffed to history” rather than liberated.

(Me again) This theme of being ‘handcuffed to history’ is throughout Midnight’s Children, and even though it may sound like it is too daunting of a task to read this book, I implore you to not be turned off by the historical data. In no way is Rushdie’s account of India’s history banal, but rather (surprisingly for me since I am not a history buff) by placing this unreliable narrator smack in the middle of India’s most crucial moments, Rushdie actually heightens the interest one might not normally have in such historical information. The reader becomes somewhat of a detective themselves, trying to piece together the truths and non-truths of Saleem’s story, as he mentions that he is ‘literally’ falling apart. He has cracks all over his body and his limbs are close to falling off. This coincides with another major postmodern theme: fragmentation. All through the novel there are characters seeing things through slits or holes or just certain body parts, and of course, the obvious example just mentioned, Saleem’s cracks on his skin. This all leads to the one moment where Saleem, handcuffed to history and cracking and breaking apart will be trampled to dust…he will become one with history and embedded into the dirt of Bombay. Like Whitman who told the reader to look under their boot to find him because he was in the ground and all around (that’s a paraphrase, hehe) so too does Rushdie invoke this kind of imagery, because since Saleem is the child of India, then it is only appropriate that he literally become a part of India.

Midnight’s Children is a book that is all at once spiritual, philosophical, absurd, grotesque, vulgar, metaphysical, magical, and just plain perfect. Rushdie slides these themes in place like he’s Tom Cruise solving a case in "Minority Report." At any given moment the novel can make you laugh out loud with its absurdest postmodern elements, or make you cringe with its graphic details of a society brutalized by colonialism. It also has wonderfully comic and sweet moments between the women and the men which shed humorous light upon its more serious postmodern feminist theories. Midnight’s Children is a book that is 100% satisfying to the intellect and is also 100% emotionally satisfying. The novel is heavy in theme (and weight, the book is 560 pages) and 75 pages should be your daily limit, but that is not to say that the novel is not a great entertainment. There are many moments where you will want to keep reading, no matter what time of night it is, and there are others where you will feel so weighed down by the sheer force of Rushdie’s brilliance (not to mention all of the information about India he throws at you) that you must simply take a break from the memorization of dates, figureheads, and character names.

You don’t have to be as enamored with the literary theory as I am to enjoy this book. It works on both levels and there is a reason why it is my inaugural Book of the Month selection. The novel is insanely popular with both casual readers and literary nerds such as me, and I really hope you run out and give it a shot. I am reading it for the second time right now, and am enjoying it even more the second time around. It has taken me awhile to revisit the novel because of how emotional the ending of the book is. It’s a novel that contains magic carpets and stark realism, children born at midnight with extraordinary powers like telepathy and mind reading to documentary like dealings of a postcolonial India. For all of the great literary devices Rushdie uses and for all of the postmodern, postcolonial, and feminist theories one can excavate from the novel, the only thing I can think of to describe this book to new readers is something so cliché that it works because this novel puts me at a loss for words: it’s a page turner.