Tag Archives: Michiko Kakutani

Best of 2013 Dept.: New York Times’ Critics Pick Their Fave Books

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Today the New York Times‘ book critics each listed the books they most enjoyed during 2013. Below are the lists. But to read what they like about each book, head to the New York Times.

In the intro to the lists Janet Maslin writes:

“Let us be the first to tell you: These are quirky lists. They’re supposed to be. These are our favorite books of the year, so please don’t confuse them with 10 Bests, because we can’t make lists like those. For one thing, all of us — Michiko Kakutani, Dwight Garner and I — read so many books on assignment that we don’t have the leeway to be comprehensive. For another, we’ve listed books that we liked as much as we admired. That’s where the quirks come in.

“Each of us has chosen only from among the books personally reviewed during the calendar year. That alone creates big omissions. We cannot review books by reporters for, or writers associated with, The New York Times. That means that at least two widely praised works of nonfiction — Peter Baker’s “Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House” and Sheri Fink’s “Five Days at Memorial” (part of which originally appeared in The Times Magazine) — weren’t covered by us. The same goes for books by friends. And, yes, there are books we didn’t cover and regret having missed.”

Michiko Kakutani’s list

1 THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt
2 THE EXAMINED LIFE: HOW WE LOSE AND FIND OURSELVES by Stephen Grosz
3 THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE by David Finkel
4 CLAIRE OF THE SEA LIGHT by Edwidge Danticat
5 AFTER THE MUSIC STOPPED: THE FINANCIAL CRISIS, THE RESPONSE, AND THE WORK AHEAD by Alan S. Blinder
6 JOHNNY CASH: THE LIFE by Robert Hilburn
7 MY BELOVED WORLD by Sonia Sotomayor
8 BIG DATA: A REVOLUTION THAT WILL TRANSFORM HOW WE LIVE, WORK, AND THINK by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier
9 HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA by Mohsin Hamid
10 TENTH OF DECEMBER: STORIES by George Saunders

Janet Maslin’s list:

1 LAWRENCE IN ARABIA: WAR, DECEIT, IMPERIAL FOLLY AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST by Scott Anderson
2 THE UNKNOWNS by Gabriel Roth
3 SOMEONE by Alice McDermott
4 THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS by Elizabeth Gilbert
5 MANSON: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CHARLES MANSON by Jeff Guinn
6 LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson
7 EMPTY MANSIONS: THE MYSTERIOUS LIFE OF HUGUETTE CLARK AND THE SPENDING OF A GREAT AMERICAN FORTUNE by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr.
8 JOHNNY CARSON by Henry Bushkin
9 N0S4A2 by Joe Hill
10 NEVER GO BACK by Lee Child

Dwight Garner’s list

1 THE FLAMETHROWERS by Rachel Kushner
2 THE UNWINDING: AN INNER HISTORY OF THE NEW AMERICA by George Packer
3 MEN WE REAPED: A MEMOIR by Jesmyn Ward
4 CRITICAL MASS: FOUR DECADES OF ESSAYS, REVIEWS, HAND GRENADES, AND HURRAHS by James Wolcott
5 COUNTRY GIRL: A MEMOIR by Edna O’Brien
6 MY PROMISED LAND: THE TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY OF ISRAEL by Ari Shavit
7 MARGARET FULLER: A NEW AMERICAN LIFE by Megan Marshall
8 THE WET AND THE DRY: A DRINKER’S JOURNEY by Lawrence Osborne
9 THE SKIES BELONG TO US: LOVE AND TERROR IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF HIJACKING by Brendan I. Koerner
10 I WANT TO SHOW YOU MORE: STORIES by Jamie Quatro

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

Beautiful Tribute to Lou Reed In the New York Times

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Photo by Jean Baptiste Mondino.
Photo by Jean Baptiste Mondino.

In today’s New York Times, book critic Michiko Kakutani offers a beautiful tribute to Lou Reed. It is fitting that Lou Reed, the New York outsider who documented the outsiders of New York, should now be celebrated in the ultimate New York establishment media, the New York Times.

About the New York that Reed wrote and sang about in song for close to 50 years, Kakutani writes, it was “as distinctive as Chandler’s Los Angeles or Baudelaire’s Paris.”

Kakutani continues:

Mr. Reed was a pioneer on rock’s frontier with the avant-garde, translating lessons he learned at Andy Warhol’s Factory, and the disruptive innovations of the Beat writers — Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr. (“Last Exit to Brooklyn”) — to the realm of popular music. He not only embraced their adversarial stance toward society and transgressive subject matter (in songs like “Street Hassle” and “Heroin”) but also developed his own version of their raw, vernacular language, while adding a physical third dimension with guitars and drums. His early songs for the Velvet Underground — delivered in his intimate, conversational sing-speak — still sound so astonishingly inventive and new that it’s hard to remember they were written nearly half a century ago.

If Mr. Reed provided a literary bridge to the Beats (and through them, back to the Modernists, and the French “decadents” Rimbaud and Verlaine, and even Poe, the subject of his 2003 project “The Raven”), he also created a bridge forward to punk and to glam, indie, new wave and noise rock. He would become a formative influence on musicians like Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Roxy Music, R.E.M., the Sex Pistols, Sonic Youth, the Strokes, Pixies, and Antony and the Johnsons. As his friend the artist Clifford Ross observed, “Lou was the great transmitter” — of ideas, language and innovation.

Read the whole essay at the New York Times.