This week I am going to tell you about a handful of my favorite books that I read this past year, starting with The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (Riverhead, 2023). It’s no surprise that awards and recognition are pouring in for the latest novel by James McBride. McBride’s deep and abiding appreciation for Americans of many flavors and varieties – especially but not limited to Blacks, Jews, and racist Whites – along with his uncanny ability to tune into the frequencies of relationships between the various figures as well as their hopes and fears, make this a startling tour-de-force, all in the form of an immensely readable and entertaining mystery. McBride’s sensitivity seemingly knows no bounds, as well as his profound insights into how subcultures work on their own and in relation to one another. This is a Great American Novel.
The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk (Riverhead, 2021)
At the relatively young age of 56, Polish author Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature. While The Books of Jacob had yet to be published in English translation in 2018, Tocarczuk won the award in large part due to this book, a nearly 1,000-page work of historical fiction closely tied to the story of the semi-obscure, real-life, 18th-century false messiah of the book’s title named Jacob Frank. Tokarczuk pulls off the impossible task of writing a page-turner wherein very little actually happens; dozens of characters act as direct or indirect narrators; and the tale relies upon esoteric political and religious history and philosophy that somehow turns into an investigation of religious fanaticism and political corruption that leaps off the page from its 18th-century origins to this morning’s headlines.
The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach (One World, 2023)
Adam Mansbach brings together a motley crew of New York City-based characters, including a public-school art teacher, a bodega clerk, and an ex-Hasid, around the somewhat accidental reanimation of the Golem – a humanoid being created out of mud or clay, usually by a rabbi, for the sole purpose of defending the Jewish people against the immediate threat of violence. This Golem is schooled in the English language and American culture by watching endless reruns of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and like that TV show, Mansbach’s novel is a series of absurd, hysterical encounters between the core characters and a world that has no idea what to make of this latter-day Frankenstein monster. And did I say this was one of the funniest books I read this year – or any year?
Baumgartner by Paul Auster (Grove Atlantic, 2023)
Paul Auster has long been one of my favorite authors, and his latest novel reminds me why. This concise, 208-page novel is a finely wrought character study of a man on the precipice of old age, unknowingly allowing the illusions of youth interfere with the realities of the time he has left. And Auster’s prose is as glistening as ever.
To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse by Howard Fishman (Dutton, 2023)
Perhaps best known until now as a rootsy, versatile singer-songwriter, Howard Fishman proves himself not only to be an expert biographer but a major thinker about American culture in this 576-page work about the singer-songwriter Connie Converse. If you have never heard of Converse, then you are exactly the target audience for Fishman’s nonfiction opus, which at times reads like a mystery, a work of musical criticism, and a critique of postwar American culture. Converse was a folk singer-songwriter in the 1950s, before the very concept of a folksinger writing her own songs had yet to be recognized and accepted. Despite a devoted following among family, friends, and a small coterie of fans in Greenwich Village, recognition eluded Converse. Then, one day in 1974, she simply vanished off the face of the earth. In Fishman’s hands, the life, music, and mystery of Connie Converse reads like a novel – and a quintessentially American story.
Happy reading.
Seth Rogovoy is editor of the Rogovoy Report, available at rogovoyreport.substack.com.
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