Best Books of 2021

Again, we must clarify that these are the most appreciated books mentioned in this blog during the Year of Delta-Omicron (i.e., 2021.)  The books themselves weren’t published during these variants, because then they would be expensive and not available on Thriftbooks.  As you can see below, The Iluminado did not read many books this year.  (Booo!!!) On the plus side however, most of what we read was solid.  The Booby Prize this year goes to Kadare’s The Ghost Rider, which failed to create a spooky Transylvania-esque atmosphere or any characters of interest.

Drum roll.  The accountants from Arthur Andersen have handed over the envelopes, and this year’s winners are:

Gold: Killers of the Flower Moon.  Super surprised to have a work of non-fiction take the cake, but that this book was not a work of fiction was that jarring.  The social media cesspools can numb you to identity group grievances.  They are often used by activists with bad intent to help political extortionists, so one can tend to dismiss all grievances as largely fake and scroll by while the very loud band plays on.  In the case of Native Americans, every October there are lunatics center stage trying to ensconce a narrative that Christopher Columbus was a genocidal madman bent on destroying the no-questions-asked noble civilization he encountered in the New World.  That’s a point of view, not a fact for a serious history book.  I digress, but you can see how in this media hoax-a-day world, one can become a skeptic.  After reading the Killers of the Flower Moon you have to say…dang, some of those Oklahoma pale faces really were SOBs.  The book offers no eye-popping language or quotes, just a telling of ugly scenes of wolves among sheep.

Silver: Shadow of the Wind.  This one earns a silver for the group’s universal enthusiasm for the characters and its recreation of Barcelona in print.  Not to plot bust but working an angle other than incest to doom the lovers would have been more tasteful and appreciated, but few books have produced so many mid-read text messages into our group chat extolling a book’s engagement.  Carlos Zafon tells a heck of a story.

Bronze: The Thing About December.  Speaking of text messages, Donal Ryan is a remarkable writer.  Here’s a quick blurb “wasn’t it an awful dangerous thing, a text message, because once you pressed that little send button, that was it. Like pulling a trigger” I think one of the attorneys in our little group summed a reader’s reaction to this book best in that he wanted to break into this book and give Johnsey a shake, a hug and legal advice.  By shake, he doesn’t mean a massage parlor Happy Ending and I assume he meant this would all be pro bono.  This is an unforgettable book about the loneliest chap you’ll ever meet.  

We’d call it a slow, but good reading year.  Only the one clunker mentioned above.  As always, Happy Festivus and if you want to read slightly more detailed reviews on any of books we’ve read through the years, scroll down.

Blood Meridian

No, we didn’t read it this year.  I’m sure everyone would re-read it in a heartbeat, but I was just looking at the blog for books that were read (not by you Nick) but have no commentary here.  We missed a few, but Blood Meridian was a momentous omission.  I won’t rehash the discussion of the book because it was my inaugural book as an Iluminado, and hence the omission by this humble scribe, plus it was years ago.  I remember it well…I had been tricked into reading the book as the cost of admission into an exclusive beer swap.  When I arrived, there was good beer and Tostitos to dip in Beluga caviar in honor of those who had been scalped, but then a thoughtful discussion of the book broke out.  It was impossible to grab all of the beer and run, so I sat and listened.  Our host was Jay, a spry 184-year old and had ridden with the Glanton Gang because jazzercise hadn’t been invented yet, but bailed before their disastrous foray into the ferry business.

There is a hundred things to discuss about Blood Meridian, a masterpiece, and they all were that night, but thinking back it’s all a whirl.  All you need to know is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etOkZ6YBAZY Now read the book.

So Long. See You Tomorrow

There is a limit, surely, as to what one can demand of one’s adolescent self.  This sentiment is the driver of William Maxwell’s 1980 novel So Long. See You Tomorrow.  The narrator, now an old man, ruminates about the time he failed a teenage friend in a time of need.  He also imagines the unknown details of the dissolution of his friend’s family.

While playing after hours on a construction site, the narrator, a friendless nerd in a central Illinois small town, meets a local farm boy named Cletus Smith.  They hit it off famously.  One day its suppertime and the boys part saying “So long” and “See you tomorrow.”  However, by the next morning Cletus’s father has shot a neighboring farmer, who had been having an affair with his wife.  Clarence Smith’s wife was divorcing him, and her attorney had negotiated crushing terms where he lost his farm and was faced with a humiliating future.  Add to this that fact that the philandering neighbor he shot had been his best friend.  There wasn’t much to live for, so avenged, Clarence shoots himself.  With a scandal of this magnitude, Cletus’s mother can no longer continue in that small town.  She flees with Cletus and the boys don’t see each other again.

Years later the narrator is enrolled in a high school in Chicago.  As he hurries to a class on the opposite end of this gargantuan school with over 3,000-students, he passes Cletus Smith.  Going in opposite directions, neither says a word to the other.  He never sees Cletus at that school again.  (Evidently, Mrs. Smith isn’t taking any chances.)  Its his failure to reach out to Cletus that day that pains the narrator in his later years.

This is a short, well written book with several powerful passages that make it a must read.  No excuses…read it.

The Mark and the Void

The Mark and the Void is Paul Murray’s satirical look at the banking scandals of the not too distant past.  Set in the Dublin office of the Bank of Torabundo (BoT), a bank incorporated somewhere in the South Pacific on an island with an extinct volcano and an extremely benevolent tax climate, it has many industry details that parallel the idiocy of actual banks going bust.  However, thanks to its conservative CEO, BoT has survived the subprime mortgage meltdown, while its larger neighbors in the Dublin’s International Financial Services Centre have become zombie banks, i.e., banks that exist only because the government will or may prop them up with taxpayer funded loans.  Rather than reward their CEO, the bank Directors replace him with a new lead banker who has just led an enormous bank into insolvency.  The reason for the change…no one is crazy enough to do risky financing now, so BoT will make a fortune!  The new CEO establishes BoT’s new motto as Think Counterintuitive! and proceeds to overleverage the bank.

The story’s protagonist is a highly respected analyst named Claude.  While a good banker, Claude’s level-headedness takes a vacation when he hires an obvious conman to be his biographer/life coach.  Of course, hijinks ensue.  While Claude and his office mates make financial decisions that can ruin companies, industries, countries, even their own finances, the biggest decisions of the day are always where to go for lunch or for a few beers after work.  That part of the book reads like nonfiction.

In the end, you will enjoy the cynical look at banking and the characters that work at the bank, but there are many other things going on in the book, and had it been half as long, it would have been twice as clever.  Neither a BUY or a SELL, this one is a HOLD.

Ghost Story

For Halloween the Iluminado read a book that Stephen King rated as one of the scariest ever, Peter Straub’s 1979 trailblazer Ghost Story.  It was a surprising read in that no one found it particularly scary, but everyone thought this author from a strange genre could really write.

First off, as a non-horror reader why is it so difficult to find a ghost story?  There is always something wacky going on like interdimensional stuff or mental illness, but rarely a straight-up ghost.  Not to tip anything, but the book was confusing and there was nothing resembling Casper involved here.  What was interesting was “The Chowder Society.”  A group of old fellows getting together in each other’s homes on a periodic basis to have a boy’s night out.  More power to that idea.  The idea of reading Ghost Story?  Not a good idea.

The Ghost Rider

This is Ismail Kadare’s take on an Albanian legend where a mystery rider returns a lonesome daughter to her mother.  The rider appears to be one of the girl’s brothers.  This brother, Kostandin, promised his mother that if she is ever lonely in the family home, he would fetch his sister, who married a dignitary from far away Bohemia.  The problem is there was a war in the intervening time since the daughter’s marriage and all of her brothers have been dead for years.

I can’t say my old Albanian grannie with 1-tooth ever told me the original version of this story, or why this story is even interesting, e.g., what a nice boy that Kostandin is, he keeps his promises (or besa, which means oath.)  This version concentrates on the local police chief’s investigation, which runs parallel with the potentially cuckolded husband’s investigation and the Church’s investigation.  After all, you can’t have just anyone come back from the dead.  As the story progresses there’s the hint of incest, an all too convenient patsy and a rousing speech from the chief in the final pages. 

This book was published in 1980, and who of us knows what was going on in Albania then…Communism losing its grip seems likely.  Kadare seems to have a message for Albanians that the time to either stand for truth, or some easier mealy-mouthed untruth is coming.  He has hope his countrymen will stand for the truth when Albania rejoins the community of nations, and that their institutions like the besa is part of his evidence that their salutation will be “we are Albania, this is who we are” and not “we are Albania, who would you like us to be so we fit in.”  Someone more versed in Albanian politics will have to let us know what happened.

Let the Great World Spin

I missed the meeting for this one.  Also didn’t finish the book, which I was enjoying.  Very odd.

How Not to Diet

Yup. Our health nut Brother strikes again! I only read about 100-pages into this tome, and also had to leave the meeting very early in to pick-up kids from their practices.  With this book, Michael Greger, who was Carl Sagan’s roommate at Cornell, has created an encyclopedia of how to eat.  He mentions that he employs a staff to constantly screen research papers and update his offerings on healthy eating.  Clearly, a book based on ever evolving research would be out-of-date right after its printed, so Greger maintains a site called https://nutritionfacts.org to remain current and accessible.  We read another book by a Cornell man, T. Colin Campbell, that aligns with Greger’s thinking that there’s no money in people eating healthy, so there are few cheerleaders for healthy eating, except scammers, and many outlets pimping unhealthy food choices and drugs. 
 
Having missed the meeting, and read ~15% of the book, I later asked those who plowed through it “So what do we/I do?” and the answer wasn’t on the tip of their tongue.  There was a lot of info in this book, but I’m not sure there was a implementable plan.  I traded the book for a six pack of beer, so the plan would have been wasted on me anyway. If you have health issues, you really should pick up a copy or check out Greger’s website. Good luck.

The Shadow of the Wind

This and the next few entries are for books we read earlier this year, so the descriptions will as short as this scribe’s memory.  Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s bestseller, Shadow of the Wind, was a masterful yarn.  Within a few days of this book’s selection my phone was lighting up with texts saying, “loving this” and “H8 2 put it down but G2G so CU L8R CTPI” from fellow Illuminado.  Zafon created a unique and spellbinding atmosphere in his semi-fictional Barcelona.  This was originally written in Spanish, so the translator deserves credit here as well.

It’s been a while since we read this novel, so all we will (can) say is if you are looking for a page turner with heroes, villains, great names (e.g., Julian Carax), a mystery, a setting in post-civil war Barcelona, plot twists, and puppy love getting punched in the teeth – this book is for you.  It won’t change your philosophy or provide a glimpse of the meaning of life (beyond envy/pity for young people in love), but it will make you want to visit Barcelona, or uncover a forgotten great book.  Both fine things, so give it a read.

L.A. Confidential

We decided to read the basis for the 1997 hit film of the same name, James Ellroy’s 1980 novel L.A. Confidential.  Speaking for myself, I was concerned that since all of us had seen the film, the discussion would principally be a compare and contrast session.  The Illuminado who suggested the book, a legal brief-filing crime fighter by day, assured the group that the takeaway would be Ellroy’s character development.  So game on.

It turned out there were several takeaways.  The character development was admirable, but there really were too many of them.  Some characters seemed important early on where dead ended, and others that seemed to be filler, played an important role in the finale.  Another was aside from characters modeled on real people like Walt Disney and Jack Webb, Ellroy sprinkles real people into the novel e.g., Chief Parker, Micky Cohen, Johnny Stompanato and real events like Bloody Christmas.  We found the old fashion police work to be pretty impressive.  Pulling files, knocking on doors, beating information out of someone who may have it.  Today’s detectives likely just look at your cellphone and that’s all that is needed.  Also of note was Ellory’s use of newspaper articles and LAPD work fitness reports, which was an effective tool for moving the story along.  We have to say, the ending was rushed.  There was a sprawling investigation conducted by the three protagonists, that gets wrapped up at soap opera speed.  It was as if the next page would bring “And then Bud woke up.  It had all been a dream.”

Finally, it’s impossible not to bring the movie into the discussion.  Good book.  Good movie (Ellroy hated it.)  Quite different.