Favorite books of 2009

Let’s knock this out real quick. These weren’t released in 2009, but that’s when I read them.

Honorable Mention: Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner
This book gets only an honorable mention because I’m still working my way through it. It’s a startling read, though. Honest to God, this book has made me wonder how this country managed to survive with such an inept intelligence agency. I knew about the high-profile CIA failures over the years (the Bay of Pigs, not foreseeing the fall of the Soviet empire, 9/11), but I always assumed there were some successes mixed in there as well. I was wrong. They’ve been wrong about damn near everything over the years. They assured Truman that the Chinese weren’t going to intervene in the Korean War, even as hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers massed along the borders. They ruined Eisenhower’s chance at detente with the Soviet Union by insisting on a U2 spy flight that was shot down in Soviet airspace. They were infiltrated by Soviet spies at the highest levels. It’s straight up appalling. And that’s without even going into the disastrous covert operations record. So far, I’ve made it from the Truman years through the LBJ presidency, and what’s really interesting is that every president over that 20+ year period hated and distrusted the CIA, but none of them could figure out how to fix it or kill it. Doesn’t really inspire confidence.

3. Serena, by Ron Rash
I love books that feature fierce, intimidating female characters, and they don’t come tougher than Serena. She is the wife of a logging magnate in Depression-era North Carolina, and she’s so bad that not only does she quickly gain the respect of the local lumberjacks, but she becomes the person they fear the most (even moreso than her husband, who’s introduced killing a man in a knife fight). She pushes her husband beyond his already brutish methods until they seize near-tyrannical control of the area. But when a life-threatening miscarriage renders her sterile, she decides to kill her husband’s illegitimate toddler son and the boy’s mother. That decision opens up a dangerous rift in her marriage that endangers their lives and their control over the county. I’ve enjoyed very few characters more than I enjoyed Serena (which explains why I was so annoyed by her tacked-on comeuppance in the epilogue).

2. The Flashman series, by George MacDonald Fraser
My list is really short this year, mainly because I spent a good chunk of 2009 reading the 12-book Flashman series, which tells the adventures of Sir Harry Flashman, imperial war hero, ladies man, coward and all-around scoundrel. I could rank the books separately, but they all generally follow the same formula: Flashman is unwillingly pulled into the latest British imperial war, he sleeps with as many women as possible, and he shirks his duty yet somehow ends up with greater glory and acclaim each time around. (I can only remember two characters who saw him for what he truly was: his father-in-law, and Abe Lincoln.) The books are incredibly funny, and they have that real swashbuckling feel to them, but they’re also meticulously researched, and give a subtly effective history of Britain’s empire during the second half of the 19th century. Flashman has a very modern P.O.V. that I can appreciate. He clearly doesn’t believe in the British imperial mission, but he doesn’t go for any “noble savage” nonsense either. In Flashman and the Redskins (in which Flashy admits to possibly killing Custer at Little Big Horn in a friendly fire accident) Flash gives what’s probably the best summation of his attitude:

“…when selfish and frightened men–in other words, any men, red or white, civilised or savage–come face to face in the middle of a wilderness that both of ‘em want, the Lord alone knows why, then war breaks out, and the weaker goes under. Policies don’t matter a spent piss…”

Since he’s always the biggest villain on the stage, this attitude is a bit self-serving, but there is more than a bit of truth to it.

1. Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
If I were a writer, this is the kind of book I’d want to write. Adichie brings home the elation of liberation and the tragedy of defeat in a remarkably affecting way, so that I (who knew nothing about Biafra and the Nigerian Civil War) felt as elated and as mournful as the main characters while reading it. Adichie builds a deeply involving world of educated, upper-middle class intellectuals, and watching them slowly descend to the point of fighting over scraps of food in refugee camps was heartbreaking, and a needed reminder that these images of third world suffering that we see on TV don’t tell the whole story of their lives. Adiche makes that point more effectively than I ever could in this talk, “The Danger of a Single Story.” I recommend watching it, and if you enjoy it, give the book a try.

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