Posts Tagged ‘Héctor Tobar’

Jesse Bering's Bookshelf

With more and more books published every year, it’s increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Does this increase the usefulness of all the annual “Best of” lists? Perhaps. It’s irresistible when a critic distills a year of reading into a simple hierarchy, especially if her tastes match your own. It’s just so efficient. I tend to eschew those books awarded the most (or loudest) hosannas in favor of the previously unknown novels that slipped past me at publication. (This year it’s Ben Lerner’s excellent Leaving the Atocha Station.)

Sites like Salon, The Millions, and The Guardian go straight to the authors for their recommendations. I decided to do the same, canvassing our writers and editors. With a couple caveats: First, the editors couldn’t choose their own titles; Second, one’s choices didn’t need to be published in 2011, just read in 2011. Old classics and novels from 2010 and 2009 are all welcome.

Some submitted a straightforward list, while others penned brief summaries. (The Spanish-Argentinian novelist Andrés Neuman even separated his list by language.) I hope you’ll find your next favorite book among them.

Favorite Reads from 2011: (more…)

Héctor Tobar, now a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a novelist. He is the author of Translation Nation, The Tattooed Soldier, and most recently, The Barbarian Nurseries. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.

I loved the drama, the scope and the ideas in Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, about the renaissance book-hunter whose discovery of an ancient poem helped kick off the Enlightenment. Oscar Hijuelos’s memoir, Thoughts Without Cigarettes, appealed to me for its portrait of mid-century New York—and of the private struggles and family stories that helped set off the late-century boom in Latino literature in the United States. In fiction, there was so much tenderness and wisdom in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. Also, 2011 was the year I caught up with and rediscovered a couple of gems from the recent past: W. G. Sebald’s painful, Proustian epic Austerlitz, and the canonical stories in Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions, wonderfully translated by Andrew Hurley.

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction