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Top 10 of 2011: Writing
Dec 28, 2011
Every year is a great year for books if you know where to look. Sometimes, it becomes almost impossible not to hear about a major new release like The Art of Fielding or The Marriage Plot. Being Character Approved isn't about having a high profile though, so although you'll find a few blockbusters on this list, we hope there's at least one author (or publisher) you'll be discovering for the first time. And everybody has their own idea about what makes for a great story, so use the comments section to tell us about the books you're passionate about that we haven't mentioned!
Below are our picks for the best writing of 2011:
Below are our picks for the best writing of 2011:
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- Steve Jobs: Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs was the most hotly anticipated biography of the year, even before Apple's visionary co-founder succumbed to pancreatic cancer in October. Isaacson had exclusive access to Jobs, and he used it well, but Steve Jobs is also balanced by a frank examination of its subject's turbulent management style. [Image: Simon and Schuster]
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- Maira Kalman: Maira Kalman doesn't just illustrate books--she inhabits them. This year, the acclaimed designer transformed Michael Pollan's Food Rules with her warm, welcoming visuals, and added a gentle humor to the flotsam and jetsam of a failed relationship in Daniel Handler's YA novel, Why We Broke Up. [Images: Penguin Press; Little, Brown]
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- The Night Circus: Two children are trained to become opponents in a magical competition, but confound their masters by coming together as adults in Erin Morgenstern's lyrical The Night Circus. This debut novel transports us to a fantasy world as vividly detailed as Harry Potter's, but with decidedly mature undercurrents. [Images: Helen Musselwhite/Kelly Davidson]
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- New Directions Turns 75: New Directions published its first poetry anthology in 1936, and went on to become American readers' primary source for innovative works by writers like Ezra Pound, Tennessee Williams, and Djuna Barnes. The independent publishing house recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, and its offerings are as bold as ever: Recent titles included a new edition of Patti Smith's first memoir, Woolgathering, and Lightning Rods, the long-awaited second novel by Helen DeWitt.
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- A Widow's Story: A Widow's Story is Joyce Carol Oates' unflinching account of how the death of her husband after nearly fifty years of marriage pushed her to the furthest edges of grief. Her struggle against suicidal despair doesn't bring easy victory, but she recounts it with a raw honesty that anyone who's ever dealt with the loss of a loved one will recognize. [Image: Jane Yarborough Creech]
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- Ganymede: Over the course of her last few novels, Cherie Priest has given readers a panoramic tour of the "Clockwork Century," a 19th-century steampunk America where the Civil War still rages after two decades and a zombie-like plague makes its way across the continent. Ganymede is a fast-paced action-adventure story set in New Orleans, as a band of airship pirates races to steal a shipwrecked submarine from under the noses of the Confederacy. [Image: Libby Bulloff]
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- Reamde: Neal Stephenson's technothrillers are as smart as they are exciting, and he's outdone even himself with Reamde. Once you get sucked into the story, which covers half the world and a major chunk of virtual reality just for good measure, you won't even notice that it's 1,000-plus pages until the end. [Image: Neal Stephenson]
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- Salvage the Bones: Our blog readers first learned about Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones back in September. Since then, Ward's heartwrenching story of one rural Mississippi family's troubles in the days before and after Hurricane Katrina has gone on to win this year's National Book Award for fiction. [Image: Ron Hogan]
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- Moondogs: Half of Alexander Yates' Moondogs is a painfully realistic novel about a young man who visits Manila in a failed attempt to reconnect with his estranged father. The other half is a vividly unreal story of the magical commando team assigned to track down the kidnappers responsible for the father's disappearance. Yates shifts tones smoothly, making even the weirdest elements seem natural in context. [Image: Alexander Yates]
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- Electronic Publishing: 2011 has been a fantastic year for electronic publishing. The Atavist and Byliner are two companies that are spurring a revival in longform journalism, delivering feature stories by top-notch writers across multiple platforms (even print!), frequently with multimedia add-ons. [Images: The Atavist, Byliner.com]
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