Highlights (Booking Through Thursday)

From Booking Through Thursday:

It’s an old question, but a good one . . . What were your favorite books this year?

List as many as you like … fiction, non-fiction, mystery, romance, science-fiction, business, travel, cookbooks … whatever the category. But, really, we’re all dying to know. What books were the highlight of your reading year in 2007?

It was a good year, reading-wise. Here are my highlights, with links to my reviews.

The Ghost Writer by John Harwood

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson by Judy Oppenheimer

The Cross (Kristin Lavransdatter 3) by Sigrid Undset

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Twisted by Laurie Halse Anderson

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Joel Carmichael)

Judgment in Stone by Ruth Rendell

And a few series:

Dave Duncan’s A Man of His Word and A Handful of Men

Megan Lindholm’s Ki and Vandien Quartet

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Synopsis:
The epic tale of Adam Trask, cuckolded husband to a whore and father of twin boys, one dark, one light.

Review:
I’m rather embarrassed to confess East of Eden is the first Steinbeck I have ever read. Big deal, you say–except I majored in American Studies in college with a focus on how literature and popular culture reveal sociological truths about the American people. I was obsessed with writers like Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser. I was enamored of post-Industrial Revolution American life. It makes no sense at all–none, I tell you!–that I never once considered reading a book by John Steinbeck. I probably would’ve lost my mind with delirious delight. I bet I would’ve gone to grad school for American Studies instead of Cinema Studies. Steinbeck totally could’ve wooed me away from Hitchcock. Lewis and Dreiser just weren’t potent enough.

I am a born ‘n’ bred East Coast girl. I’ve been to LA a few times, but in my mind California has always been someplace you go to, not someplace you come from. The idea that California has people and history and a story has never quite seemed real to me. Of course, I have lots of friends who moved to New York from California (and one or two who boomeranged back). And I find it amazing that their roots are so far West, that they feel the heimlisch tug of tradition to a place that makes me think only of reinvention, and starting over.

East of Eden is steeped in California, the California I suspect my friends know a little something about. I lost myself in Steinbeck’s descriptions of a rough-hewn land rising into respectability, and in specificities of the characters he created. These people aren’t Chicago charlatans or Midwestern Boosters. They’re California people telling a California story–which, incidentally, is the only way to tell the American story, don’t you think?

Notice I haven’t attempted an actual review. Just doesn’t seem appropriate, somehow, to try to distill an epic work into a set of glib observations or, even worse, facile judgment. That’s not why reading the classics is important to me as an adult (who will never go back to school). Whenever I finish a book like this I feel a sense of relief, as if to say, “Finally, now I have this book and I can read about it at last.” The door has been opened. Steinbeck is less of a mystery. How lucky am I!