As Schiff writes, "All the issues that disrupt the dinner table, that go to our heads like snake venom, combine in her person."įourteen-hundred pages of reading may seem like a preposterous amount to recommend at the onset of a season of burping indolence, but if the writer of those pages is H.L. The story is at once utterly exotic and strangely relevant, since Cleopatra has been slandered through the centuries for exercising political power as a woman. The best new nonfiction book I read was Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra, which is both a wildly atmospheric melodrama and a revisionist history that rescues the reputation of the most maligned female archetype since Eve. His Ora is so fleshy and vital and tragically real-completely unlike Patty, the artificial marionette at the center of Jonathan Franzen's overrated Freedom. Plus, he's better than just about any male novelist I can think of at writing female protagonists. Grossman is an artist who captures the tragic complexities of Israeli liberalism in a way that no journalist or historian ever could. (To all those people who put 2666 on their lists in 2008-thanks, you were right!) Still, this year, without a doubt, the best new novel I read was David Grossman's searing To The End of the Land, which is so boundlessly compassionate it feels half-holy.
These choices are always hard for me, because most years, the best books I read came out two or 20 or 100 years earlier.
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