Dec 8, 2008

Best Books 2008

I had a high-fibre year — not much fiction, a lot of history and politics, although Rick Perlstein's Nixonland felt like fiction, as did Nicholson Baker's pointillist-peacenik WWII history Human Smoke, both of which I loved. Thurston Clarke's The Last Campaign about Bobby Kennedy, was great election-year popcorn. I read The Dark Side, Jane Mayer's grave, humane book about Bush's torture program, in one horrified sitting, and subsequently found myself unable to recommend it to anyone. Russell Brand's My Booky Wook made me laugh and then exhausted me, much like the man. David Carr's Night of the Gun turned the addiction memoir genre on its head. The best biography I read was David Michaelis's Schulz & Peanuts closely followed by Neal Gabler's Disney. The Schulz gets my book of the year, though — a brilliant human being, brilliantly rendered. 

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