{"id":39,"date":"2008-12-27T14:38:52","date_gmt":"2008-12-27T21:38:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewkirby.com\/kirbside\/?p=39"},"modified":"2008-12-27T14:38:52","modified_gmt":"2008-12-27T21:38:52","slug":"favorite-books-of-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/?p=39","title":{"rendered":"Favorite Books of 2008"},"content":{"rendered":"

That is, favorite books that I read<\/em> in 2008, not books that were published in 2008.\u00a0 Sometimes I read a book the year it comes out, but not usually.\u00a0 I’m behind the curve that way, either slow to hear about the book or waiting for my public library to acquire it.\u00a0 That being said, there were a couple of titles published in ’08 that I managed to get to.\u00a0 So here, in no particular order, are the books I most enjoyed this past year.<\/p>\n

\"Watchmen\"<\/span>Watchmen<\/span><\/a>, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.<\/p>\n

As a comic book fan, I really should have read this long ago, but only got to it this year.\u00a0 I was largely spurred by the\u00a0 fact that they are making a movie adaptation<\/span><\/a>, and this was a book I wanted to read before I saw it on the big screen.\u00a0 Moore has famously said that Watchmen<\/span> is unfilmable, after all.\u00a0 The thing I like most about this book is how it questions just about every assumption we make going into a superhero story.\u00a0 We assume our heroes have no serious flaws.\u00a0 They are flawed, to be sure, but only to the degree that makes it so we can identify with them, and never to the point where we question their status as heroes.\u00a0 We assume our heroes have noble motivations and would never abuse the power we give them.\u00a0 We assume our heroes will take an interest in the world we live in, and use their power to make it a better, safer place.\u00a0 But why do we assume these things?\u00a0 Why are they a given?\u00a0 Moore treated the superhero genre with intelligence and sophistication, gathered up all these assumptions, and turned them right on their head.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe Graveyard Book<\/span><\/a>, by Neil Gaiman<\/p>\n

I love the dark humor, the magical unpredictability, and delightful storytelling in this book.\u00a0 The life of Nobody Owens, raised in a cemetery by ghosts, plays out over eight chapters that are each a short story and also part of a whole.\u00a0 The concept behind the book is one that makes other writers slap their foreheads in wonder, wishing they’d thought of it, all the while certain they would never have written it so well.\u00a0 This is a Neil Gaiman book.\u00a0 You know one when you read one.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe Yiddish Policemen’s Union<\/span><\/a><\/span>, by Michael Chabon<\/p>\n

A Yiddish noir murder mystery set in an Alaska that might have been. Throw in a powerful rabbi\/crime lord, a messianic crack addict, chess masters, and some genetically engineered cows, and you have yourself a Michael Chabon novel. As always, his facility with language renders his prose entertaining and dazzling, but not in the least transparent. I really came to like Meyer Landsman, the cop protagonist, but I actually enjoyed the peripheral characters more (like Berko Shemets, Landsman’s half-Indian, half-Jewish cousin and police partner). But one of the greatest things about the novel is the gritty realism with which Chabon builds his alternate Jewish enclave. By the end of the novel I could almost believe that way up in Alaska, a colony of Jewish refugees had turned Sitka into a Yiddish homeland.\u00a0 The news that the Coen brothers are adapting the novel for the big screen makes me very happy.
\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"TheThe Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Volume 1: The Pox Party<\/span><\/a>, by M.T. Anderson<\/p>\n

Reading this book, I felt as though I were learning about an America I never knew existed, and as a history major, I was thrilled by the discovery.\u00a0 Anderson has taken the mythology of the United States and rendered its darker twin, its underbelly.\u00a0 And the language in which he brings it to life is astounding, a distillation of 18th century prose through Anderson’s own inventive capacities.\u00a0 I received the second volume as a Christmas present this year, and can’t wait to read it.<\/p>\n

So those are my favorites from among the books I read in 2008.\u00a0 What were your favorites?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That is, favorite books that I read in 2008, not books that were published in 2008.\u00a0 Sometimes I read a book the year it comes out, but not usually.\u00a0 I’m behind the curve that way, either slow to hear about the book or waiting for my public library to acquire it.\u00a0 That being said, there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1mtjQ-D","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewjkirby.com\/kirbside\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}