Exotic and irrational entertainment: Favorites of 2010-2019: Books

FICTION

For my favorite fiction first read in the past decade I couldn't bring myself to limit the choices to a mere ten. So what follows are my favorite 15, all of which are from the 18th or 19th centuries, plus five more from the last 100 years. In alphabetical order by author:

	Jane Austen: Mansfield Park (first published 1814) While my favorite Jane Austen novel is Persuasion (1818), I didn't encounter it (or Mansfield Park) for the first time in the past decade. But I thought Mansfield Park deserved a place on this list because my understanding of it was transformed when I re-read it as part of my "Six Months with Jane Austen" project. I learned that its heroine Fanny Price may have been based in part on Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of a slave who was raised as a gentlewoman; that the very name of the Mansfield Park estate derives from William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, who as Lord Chief Justice presided over two key legal cases involving the rights of slaves; and that Mansfield Park has been built with the wealth produced by slaves owned by Sir Thomas Bertram on his Antigua sugar plantation. Fanny Price is one of Austen's most affecting heroines and Mansfield Park one of her most underrated novels.
	Charlotte Brontë: Villette (first published 1853) Based on Brontë's experiences during her two years spent at a boarding school in Belgium, Villette tells the story of the ill-fated loves of its quiet heroine, Lucy Snowe. Despite her name, Lucy is only outwardly cool; inwardly she is warmly passionate. But the constraints which forbid her to express her feelings openly, as men in her society are allowed to, lead to desperate unhappiness—which must, like her love, remain concealed.
	Fanny Burney: Cecilia (first published 1782) Cecilia is a young woman trying to make her way through the hypocrisies, trivialities and unwritten constraints of the social world. Burney's heroines, like those of her admirer Jane Austen, are not always unblemished paragons of virtue and good sense, but instead experience uncertainty and occasionally make mistakes. Burney's books also share the same kind of clear-eyed view of the allurements and perils of the marriage market that distinguishes Austen's novels. And if one of the pleasures of reading Burney is to be immersed in the social mores of the distant 18th century, another (as it is with Austen) is to discover just how contemporary her characters can seem.
	Pierre Choderlos de Laclos: Les liaisons dangereuses (first published 1782; translated by P. W. K. Stone, Penguin, 1961) Les Liaisons dangereuses is told in letters mainly between the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil as they plot to debauch the innocent Cécile Volanges and the virtuous Madame de Tourvel. Of course, these ruthless libertines are also scheming against one another. The novel has lost none of its power to shock and seems only to gain in relevance with the passage of time. It was impossible to read in 2019 without thinking about recent public revelations of women's sexual exploitation by powerful men. The Marquise de Merteuil's account (Letter 81) of the stratagems she has learned to adopt in order to survive in a man's world is as searing today as when it was written.
	Charles Dickens: Bleak House (first published 1853) The endless case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce pits family members against one another, souring natural affections and drawing even those with good intentions into obsession and self-destruction. A harrowing vision in which the all-enveloping miasma of the legal conflict is reflected in the murk of fog-bound London, where the air is full of "flakes of soot. . .as big as full-grown snowflakes" which have "gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun." In 2005 Bleak House was made into an excellent BBC series written by Andrew Davies and featuring Gillian Anderson and E & I favorites Carey Mulligan and Anna Maxwell Martin.
	George Eliot: Middlemarch (first published 1872) Eliot writes with an almost painful psychological acuity and unsparingly dissects the emotional dynamics of love and marriage. The characters of Middlemarch are so fully realized that readers will recognize in them their neighbors, relatives and friends—and especially, parts of themselves that usually remain unacknowledged.The 1994 BBC adaptation of Middlemarch was listed in my Favorites of 2010-2019: Movies and TV.
	Susan Ferrier: Marriage (first published 1818) The Scottish writer Susan Ferrier shares many of the virtues of her near-contemporary, Jane Austen: dry wit, vivid characters, and sympathetic young heroines negotiating the perilous marriage market. Ferrier not only shares Austen's virtues, she also borrows and reworks some of her characters and plots. In Marriage, rather than marry a man she doesn't care for, the young, beautiful but heedless Lady Juliana elopes with her penniless lover Henry Douglas. Quickly disillusioned, they soon separate, but not before Lady Juliana gives birth to twin daughters, Adelaide and Mary. Adelaide grows to young adulthood in London under her mother's influence; she is beautiful, but selfish and vacant. The unwanted Mary is left with Henry's brother and his wife in Scotland, where she is taught by precept and example to be kind, thoughtful, selfless and devout. Adelaide faces the same fateful choice as her mother: marriage to a handsome but impoverished lover, or to an elderly, dull, but fabulously wealthy duke. Will she repeat her mother's mistake, or make her own? Meanwhile, Mary falls in love with Colonel Lennox, a gentleman of small fortune, but her mother strenuously opposes her choice. Will Mary be able to find happiness with the man she loves?
	Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary (1857; Eleanor Marx, translator, 1886) Her money spent, and feeling disgraced and abandoned, Emma Bovary takes poison. Her money spent, and feeling disgraced and abandoned, the first English translator of Madame Bovary, Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor, took poison. Eleanor Marx felt deep empathy with Flaubert's heroine. As she wrote in her translation's introduction (which is omitted from most later reprints), Her life is idle, useless. And this strong woman feels there must be some place for her in the world; there must be something to do—and she dreams. Life is so unreal to her that she marries Bovary thinking she loves him. Where a man would have been taught by experience, the woman with like passions, like desires, is left ignorant. She marries Bovary. She does her best to love "this poor wretch." In all literature there is perhaps nothing more pathetic than her hopeless effort to "make herself in love." And even after she has been false, how she yearns to go back to him, to something real, to a healthier, better love than she has known. . .In a word, Emma Bovary is in search of an ideal. She has intellectuality, not mere sensuality. It is part of the irony of fate that she is punished for her virtues as much as for her vices. Into Emma Bovary Flaubert put much of himself. He too dreamed dreams that ended in nothingness; his imaginings were ever brighter than the realisation of them. . .Both strained after an unattainable heaven. Eleanor Marx, too, strained after an unattainable heaven, and saw her hopes crushed—which makes her translation of Madame Bovary almost unbearably poignant.
	Elizabeth Gaskell: Wives and Daughters (first published 1866) Wives and Daughters is Gaskell's greatest achievement: it follows the fortunes of Molly Gibson, a young woman whose widowed father makes a sudden decision to remarry and discovers the painful truth of the proverb about repenting at leisure. With its close observation of the social world of a small English village and its touching portrait of the shy, sensitive and steadfast Molly, Wives and Daughters deserves to be placed in the company of the work of Austen, Brontë, and George Eliot—that is to say, some of the greatest novels ever written. The 1999 BBC adaptation of Wives and Daughters was listed in my Favorites of 2010-2019: Movies and TV.
	Charlotte Lennox: Henrietta (first published 1758) Charlotte Lennox was most famously the author of *The Female Quixote* (1752), a parodistic novel about the dangers of too much novel-reading. Henrietta (1758) is about dangers of a different kind. Henrietta, an orphan, travels to London, where she is made the object of multiple unscrupulous schemes on her body and her reputation. She must rely on her wit and steadfast principles to escape the many traps set for a young woman living in the city without family protection or fortune. Henrietta was clearly a strong influence on Jane Austen, and particularly on Pride and Prejudice.
	Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis: Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (first published 1881; translated by Gregory Rabassa, Oxford University Press, 1997) The appealing narrative voice of Machado's great novel is lightly ironic, but the novel illustrates the limitations of approaching life ironically. While passion and commitment are shown to be absurd—delusional when not hypocritical—the alternative is a life of detached bemusement. Like Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the Posthumous Memoirs calls attention to its own constructedness as literature—the narrator refers to previous events in his life by chapter number, for example, or engages in self-conscious typographical experiments. Chapter CXXXIX, "How I Didn't Get to Be a Minister of State," for example, consists entirely of a lengthy ellipsis. The next chapter—titled "Which Explains the Previous One"—begins, "There are things that are better said in silence. Such is the material of the previous chapter." But apart from his wit, what makes Brás Cubas such an enjoyable companion is his unflattering honesty about himself and his motives—greed, fear, lust, envy, indolence, boredom, a desire to avoid difficulty and embrace immediate pleasure. Motives which, on reflection, are uncomfortably familiar.
	Alexander Pushkin: Eugene Onegin (first published 1833; translated by Charles Johnston, Penguin, 1979) Alexander Pushkin has roughly the same stature in Russian literature that Shakespeare does in English, and his novel in verse Eugene Onegin is his greatest work. Onegin, wealthy, disdainful and a bit smug, is able to skate through life, and does (sometimes with tragic consequences for those he encounters)—until he comes face-to-face with lost opportunities. Pushkin's masterwork has inspired many other artists, including Tchaikovsky, Vladimir Nabokov, and Vikram Seth. Like Seth, I recommend Charles Johnston's faithful, readable and elegant translation.
	Charlotte Smith: Celestina (first published 1791) Like Fanny Burney and Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith was another influence on Jane Austen. In Celestina the heroine is an orphan raised by a wealthy family whose son falls in love with her. His name, perhaps familiar to readers of Sense and Sensibility, is Willoughby. There are many other parallels to Austen outlined in the full post linked above, but Smith's novels can be read for pleasure on their own terms.
	William Thackeray: Vanity Fair (first published 1847) This "Novel Without a Hero" follows two heroines, the good-hearted Amelia Sedley and the delightfully unscrupulous Becky Sharp. Becky is the orphaned daughter of a disreputable artist, and—realizing that the game is rigged against those of her parentage, class and gender—uses all her wiles to make her way in society among the wealthy and socially connected. Meanwhile, the sincere Amelia marries for love, only to discover the shallowness of her husband and the depth of her own self-deception. The fates of many of the characters as well as that of nations will be decided at the battle looming near a Belgian village named Waterloo. . .
	Anthony Trollope: Can You Forgive Her? (first published 1864) It's extraordinarily difficult to pick a favorite Trollope novel because the quality of his work is so consistently high. If I were to recommend a place for someone to start I might choose The Way We Live Now for its still-trenchant story of financial and political corruption, or Barchester Towers for its depiction of the fierce power struggles occurring beneath the apparently placid surface of a quiet English town. But I chose Can You Forgive Her? not only because it was the first Trollope novel I read, and inspired me to go on to read another two dozen or so, but because it introduces Lady Glencora Palliser. Before her family intervened to compel her marriage to the emotionally reticent politician Plantagenet Palliser, Lady Glencora loved the unworthy but alluring Burgo Fitzgerald. Their mutual attraction persists even after her marriage, and Fitzgerald makes plans to run off with her on the night of a gala party. As Lady Glencora dances in his arms she finds herself faced with making a final, fateful choice. '. . .But why have I been brought to such a pass as this? And, as for female purity! Ah! What was their idea of female purity when they forced me, like ogres, to marry a man for whom they knew I never cared?' (Ch. 47) Lady Glencora is one of Trollope's most compelling characters—headstrong, willful, with a delightfully witty tongue. She is not always wise, but somehow always manages to engage our sympathies.

Plus five novels published within the last 100 years:

	Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca (Victor Gollancz, 1938) The producer David O. Selznick wrote in a memo to the director Alfred Hitchcock that "every woman who has read it has adored the girl and has understood her psychology, has cringed with embarrassment for her, yet has understood exactly what was going through her mind." I would expand Selznick's observation by noting that anyone who has ever felt the awkwardness of entering a social situation governed by unstated rules that everyone else seems to know instinctively—and that's pretty much all of us—will feel a deep sympathy with Du Maurier's nameless heroine. My post linked above includes a defense of Hitchcock's adaptation, which I've come to feel is among his best films.
	Emil Ferris: My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book One (Fantagraphics, 2017) In Chicago's gritty Uptown neighborhood in the late 1960s, 10-year-old horror comics fan Karen Reyes begins to discover some of the secrets of the adults around her—and to harbor a few of her own. Rendered as Karen's sketchbook diary, My Favorite Thing is Monsters is a strikingly drawn and vividly imaginative graphic novel that is part coming-of-age story, part cancer memoir, and part murder mystery, while every page is an homage to the saving (and disturbing) power of art. Be forewarned: once you read this you will be desperate to read Book Two, which is not scheduled for release until September 2020.
	Javier Marías: The Infatuations (Knopf, 2013) A man is murdered on the street in an apparently random act of violence. But then it turns out that perhaps the violence wasn't so random; and then, that the murdered man may have been harboring a secret. As the narrator María explores further, the motives and culpability of the man's wife, his best friend, the mentally disturbed murderer, and the victim himself become ever murkier. The only clarity is that, when it comes to the human heart, nothing can be certain.
	Orhan Pamuk: The Museum of Innocence (Iletişim, 2008; Knopf, 2009) Kemal begins a passionate affair with his beautiful 18-year-old niece Füsun that shatters his complacent existence. After the affair ends abruptly, Kemal turns the apartment where he and Füsun had their afternoon trysts into a shrine to their brief time together. Over the years, he accumulates a museum's worth of emotionally-charged objects touched in some way by her presence: earrings, toothbrushes, barrettes, cigarette butts with traces of her lipstick. In a real-life extension of the novel, Pamuk has opened an actual Museum of Innocence in Istanbul; every copy of the novel comes with an admission ticket (printed on page 520 of the paperback edition). The Museum of Innocence attempts to reclaim everyday objects from the oblivion to which time, changing fashion and our indifference generally consign them by allowing us to see them through Kemal's haunted eyes. Pamuk has also published a catalog to his museum, The Innocence of Objects (Iletişim, 2012; Abrams, 2012).
	Arundhati Roy: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Knopf, 2017) This, only Roy's second novel after 1997's Booker-Prize-winning The God of Small Things, is almost Dickensian in its outrage at injustice. Roy peoples her story with striking characters, such as Anjum, a Hijra who raises an abandoned child and makes her home in a graveyard, and Tilo, a woman who, caught up in larger conflicts, tries to remain true to herself. The unhealable wound at the novel's center is Kashmir, a beautiful land where thousands of people have died and no side can claim the moral high ground. But it is not only in Kashmir that there is injustice and violence. The title of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is not entirely ironic. There are moments of joy and of human connection and solidarity. A community of misfits, of the rejected and the rejecting, forms in spite of the relentless social, political and economic pressures that pit people against one another. Roy's clear-eyed and dispassionate dissection of the hypocrisies, deceptions and brutalities practiced even by those who claim to be fighting for justice makes for harrowing but urgent reading; her powerful prose and vivid characters make her work emotionally compelling as well.

NONFICTION

Ten of my favorite works of nonfiction first read in the past decade, in alphabetical order by author or (in the case of biographies) subject:

	Paula Byrne: The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things (HarperPress, 2013) The Real Jane Austen is a fascinating (and very entertaining) examination of a series of objects—among them a family silhouette, an Indian shawl, and a pair of topaz crosses—that illustrate key aspects of Austen's life, work and world. While Byrne has a tendency to write "must have" and "certainly" where she should have written "may have" and "possibly," her engaging book inspired me to spend a richly rewarding six months with Jane Austen.
	Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning: Letters (first published 1899) At half-past three on Saturday afternoon, September 19, 1846, Elizabeth Barrett left her family's house in Wimpole Street, London, to go to Hodgson's bookshop around the corner in Great Marylebone Street. Barrett, who suffered from chronically poor health, had spent most of the past six years in virtual seclusion in her bedroom, seeing only a few regular visitors and venturing out of her room infrequently. As usual on her rare expeditions outside the family home she was accompanied by her maid, Elizabeth Wilson, and her dog Flush. She never returned. Barrett was secretly meeting Robert Browning, who had been corresponding with and visiting her for the past two years, and who, a week earlier, had married her in a clandestine ceremony. After meeting in Hodgson's bookshop, the couple left together for Paris. While back in London Barrett's dictatorial father raged at the news of their elopement (he disinherited Elizabeth and never spoke to her again), the couple travelled on to Italy, where they were separated only by her death 15 years later. It's an astonishing story, told through the letters Browning and Barrett exchanged almost every day during their courtship. Their letters, together with incidents from their twice-weekly personal meetings, became the basis for one of the most beloved sonnet sequences in English literature, Sonnets from the Portuguese.
	Elizabeth Gaskell: The Life of Charlotte Brontë (first published 1857) Elizabeth Gaskell knew Charlotte Brontë personally, and her friendship with Charlotte gives this biography an intimacy that is rarely achieved between biographer and subject. And while it's fascinating to learn of the real-life people and events that were transmuted into Charlotte Brontë's fiction, the chief interest in Gaskell's biography, at least for me, is its liberal quotation from Charlotte's letters. In particular, Gaskell was given access to Charlotte's extensive correspondence with her former school friend Ellen Nussey. Charlotte's letters are frank, open, and sometimes painfully revealing, as when she wrote to Ellen, "Don't deceive yourself by imagining I have a bit of real goodness about me. . .I am not like you. If you knew my thoughts, the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up, and makes me feel society, as it is, wretchedly insipid, you would pity and I daresay despise me."
	Frances (Fanny) Burney: Journals and Letters (Penguin, 2001) On her 15th birthday, Fanny Burney, conscious of her father's (and her society's) disapproval of women authors, burned every scrap of her writing: poems, plays, stories, and a full-length novel. But nine months later she picked up her pen again and began writing a journal that she dedicated to Nobody: . . .to whom dare I reveal. . .my own hopes, fears, reflections & dislikes?—Nobody! To Nobody, then, will I write my Journal! since To Nobody can I be wholly unreserved—to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my Heart, with the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting sincerity to the end of my Life! Burney indeed kept the journal until the end of her life as a record of her thoughts, feelings and sensations. It was also a record of her keen observations of the literary and aristocratic worlds into which she was unwillingly thrust by the success of her first novel, Evelina (1778). Burney's fame brought her into intimate contact with figures such as Samuel Johnson, Hester Thrale, and Queen Charlotte, in the service of whom the shy, sensitive Burney spent five miserable years as the Second Keeper of the Robes. In the 19th century the posthumous publication of her journals eclipsed her novels. But it's not just the famous people she knew or the compelling story of her life (a late-blooming love, forced exile with her French husband during the Napoleonic Wars, her horrifying experience of a mastectomy without anaesthesia) that made her journal so popular; it is her forthright, perceptive and deeply appealing voice. In essence, the publication of the journals made Fanny Burney her own greatest character.
	Jane Glover: Handel in London: The Making of a Genius (Pegasus Books, 2018) Though born in Saxony, George Frideric Handel composed most of the works by which he is known today in London. The English capital was, as Jane Glover's subtitle has it, the making of a genius. Glover is a well-known conductor specializing in the music of the Baroque. Her discussions of Handel's operas and oratorios offer insights that come from deep exploration, made accessible for readers (like me) who lack a musicological background. She makes the offstage drama affecting Handel's opera companies and the political upheaval in Hanoverian Britain admirably clear, but always keeps the focus on Handel's magnificent music.
	Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) There are two modes of thought that we each employ: we use the fast "System 1" for things like emotional responses, intuitions, or snap judgments, and the slow "System 2" for things like calculation or logical argument. But this division of mental labor often leads us into error when we use System 1 for tasks that really require System 2. We confuse familiarity with truth, allow random suggestions to affect our judgments, assume small samples are representative, and focus on the details of a problem to the exclusion of important information from its larger context. And advertisers, politicians, and others who want to manipulate us take full advantage of these cognitive failings. After reading Thinking, Fast and Slow you'll never look at apparently simple choices in the same way again—and that's a good thing. This very entertaining book is a must-read for anyone who thinks.
	Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Selected Letters (selected and edited by Isobel Grundy, Penguin, 1997) Lady Mary eloped with a man she tolerated to avoid a forced marriage to a man she despised; travelled with her husband and children to Turkey, where she learned of smallpox inoculation, went to the public baths, and was entertained in a harem; may have had love affairs before and after her marriage with both women and men; and in her late forties left her husband, home and country to follow the man she loved to Italy, only to discover that he did not love her in return. Her introduction of smallpox inoculation to Britain saved thousands of lives. She was also an acclaimed poet, a woman noted for her learning and wit, and the first Western woman to give an account of Ottoman culture. Her letters are emotionally revealing, sometimes uncomfortably so, and her adventures read like a novel. Also recommended as a companion to the letters: Isobel Grundy's excellent biography of Lady Mary (Oxford University Press, 2001).
	*Michael Reynolds: Creating Der Rosenkavalier: From Chevalier to Cavalier* (Boydell Press, 2016) Michael Reynolds shows that the Richard Strauss-Hugo von Hofmannsthal opera Der Rosenkavalier owes its existence to a third, uncredited collaborator, Count Harry Kessler. In co-writing the scenario for the opera, Kessler drew extensively on his memories of a little-known French operetta, L'ingénu libertin (The young libertine, 1907), itself based on Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray's risqué eighteenth-century novels about the amorous adventures of the youthful Chevalier de Faublas. Reynolds has uncovered a treasure trove of production photos, programs, scores, and other materials that illuminate the opera's sources and the contributions of Kessler. If you love Der Rosenkavalier, Reynolds' book is essential—and fascinating—reading.
	Patti Smith: Just Kids (Ecco, 2010) In the summer of 1967 the 20-year-old Patti Smith arrived in New York City with $32 and a battered copy of Rimbaud's Illuminations in her pocket. By chance she encountered Robert Mapplethorpe, and the two began a romantic and artistic partnership that transformed both of their lives. Just Kids is written in an autodidact's style which is direct, genuine, unsentimental, at times incantory, and like her music, utterly compelling.
	Zadie Smith: Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (Penguin, 2009) In her essay "Dead Man Laughing" Zadie Smith affectingly describes her relationship with her father and her inherited love of British comedy (The Goon Show, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and a name new to me, Tony Hancock—"a comic wedded to despair"). As her father lies dying in a hospital, I did all the usual, banal things. I brought a Dictaphone to his bedside, in order to collect the narrative of his life (this perplexed him—he couldn’t see the through line). I grew furious with overworked nurses. I refused to countenance any morbidity from my father, or any despair. The funniest thing about dying is how much we, the living, ask of the dying; how we beg them to make it easy on us. "Dead Man Laughing" is gently but keenly observed, sad, and very funny. It's collected here, along with many more of her smart, insightful and beautifully written pieces, including her appreciation of George Eliot's Middlemarch. Smith writes of the importance for Eliot of the moment "the scales fall from our eyes": how we can achieve what we think we most want, only to realize that we've mistaken our own desires. Perhaps the highest praise I can give this essay is that it made me urgently want to read Middlemarch, which you'll find enthusiastically recommended in my "Favorites of 2010-2019: Fiction" list above.