I am Kyle's self-indulgence

This was both the easiest and the hardest to compile of all my "Best of the Aughts" lists: easy because I had so few books to choose from, and hard because I quickly began to question whether I could legitimately claim that these are the best books of the decade, even in my opinion. My problem is that I just don't read very much contemporary prose literature. I read plenty of great books over the last ten years. It's just that most of them were not written this decade.

But the point of all these lists isn't necessarily to establish the greatest works of the decade, but merely the ones that had the most profound impact on me personally. So with that in mind, I present my list: the Best Prose Books of the Aughts.

Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
As a reader I really like to challenge myself to read works that tend toward the avant-garde and the difficult. It was probably inevitable, then, that I would eventually give Thomas Pynchon a crack. I started with the then-brand-new Against the Day, and blogged the whole experience. http://www.brendoman.com/kyle?s=against+the+day+pynchon&sentence=AND&submit=Search
Since I've already written so much I won't go back to revisit it, except to say that overall it was an enjoyable book, albeit a very long one. I plan to read all of Pynchon's book someday, but I have yet to read another. I'm just waiting for the right combination of ambition and free time.

Teacher Man by Frank McCourt
Frank McCourt's third and final memoir is all about his career as a teacher, from his start teaching working-class kids to his retirement and the start of his new career as a successful writer. As an English teacher myself, I found it to be fun to read because I recognize so many of the problems McCourt dealt with, and also encouraging to know that he was not a great teacher from the start, but that he learned from his mistakes. I think that was an important thing for me to see during my own first two years of teaching English to working-class kids.

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Defining economics broadly, Levitt and Dubner use scientific statistical methods to describe and explain a bizarre range of human behavior. Some of my favorite chapters are the ones that prove teachers in Chicago cheat for their students on standardized tests, outline the organizational structure of a street gang (which, interestingly, looks a lot like a fast food chain), and make the very provocative claim that decreased crime in the 1990s is mostly a result of Roe v. Wade. On the latter point, the authors stress that they are making no moral or political argument, but are merely attempting to account for the truth. This objective, scientific approach to a diverse range of unusual questions makes Freakonomics an essential read.

The Universe In A Nutshell by Stephen Hawking
Theoretical physics fascinates me, although I don't pretend to understand more than a small fraction of it. The most helpful and enjoyable book I've read on the subject is this one. The low per-page word count, concise writing, and numerous color illustrations and diagrams help me to read it at such a pace that I can mostly follow what Hawking is saying, although I still get lost when he starts mentioning Branes, and what I do understand of it blows my mind.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
I haven't read American Gods since it came out in 2001, back when my only exposure to Neil Gaiman was through his comics. I read almost the whole book in one sitting, on a 20-hour bus ride to Florida in the middle of winter, and something about watching the landscape fly past the window resonated with Shadow's mythical journey across America. This is familiar territory for those who have read Sandman: a world in which all gods and mythical figures physically exist and draw their power from the beliefs of their followers. Gaiman writes it very well, though, and has some new things to say about the waning power of these gods and what the new gods are in a modern America.

Everyday Apocalypse by David Dark
My approach to Christianity has changed considerably over the past 5-10 years, and there are certain ideas and assumptions that I take for granted now that seemed revolutionary to me just five years ago. http://www.brendoman.com/kyle/2004/06/14/everyday_apocalypse So when I think about the book Everyday Apocalypse and its proposition that spiritual Truth can be found in the best of "secular" popular culture, that in fact, any separation of religious and secular is artificial, my gut reaction is "Well, duh." It seems so obvious now. I think that's a tribute to the influence David Dark's book (and its follow-up, The Gospel According To America) has had on my worldview.

America (The Book) by Jon Stewart and The Daily Show
Next to The Onion's Our Dumb Century, America (The Book) is one of the most hilarious works of political satire I've ever read. Done in the style of a Civics textbook gives the authors room to mock American history, contemporary politics, and school textbooks themselves. I also think this was the first audiobook I ever listened to (performed by Jon Stewart and the cast of The Daily Show), which made for a very entertaining drive to Chicago. Here's one of my favorite bits:

Warren G. Harding: Our Worst President by Stephen Colbert

Historians debate feverishly over who is the best president in American history. However, there is little disagreement over who was the worst. His name was Warren G. Harding (1921-1923), and he sucked.

The reasons why he sucked are many and, to be truthful, have been widely catalogued in the annals of presidential history. So, with your indulgence, I'd like to focus instead on the intensity of his sucking.

Warren G. Harding was a worthless piece of s***. F*** him. His presidency was a taint, not just in the sense of a "stain on the office," but literally a taint--the anatomical area between the anus and the testicles. I hate Warren G. Harding.

To this day, every time I hear the name Warren G. Harding I can hear Stephen Colbert slowly slowly enunciating "I hate Warren G. Harding."

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
During my senior year in college I wrote a paper about the modern adult-oriented trend in American comics, and whenever I would talk about it with people in my writing class I would hear, "Have you read Kavalier and Clay?" I had not, and I didn't have much desire to read it: I was much more interested in good contemporary comics than a prose novel that take a nostalgic look at Golden Age of American comic books. Still, enough people brought it up that I decided I ought to give it a try.

What struck me at first was how well-researched the novel was: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is about a pair of fictional comics creators, but some very specific elements of their characters are obviously inspired by their real-life counterparts: Siegel, Shuster, Kirby, Lee, Eisner, etc. Plus, the world they work in and the course of events are very true to the history of American comics.

Chabon does great things with this set-up. He is a masterful writer who elicits powerful empathy in the reader. It's been about seven years since I read the book, and I don't recall much about Chabon's specific writing style or even all the events of the story, but I have very vivid memories of how it feels to inhabit the world of his novel: I can still see and smell the office of Amazing Midget Radio Comics and the abandoned Antarctic cabin. It's this quality of description and characterization, paired with Chabon's sincere love of comics and genre fiction, that has made him one of my favorite living writers.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
I just can't say enough good things about Gaiman's recent all-ages novel. It has a simple premise: orphan boy raised by ghosts; but it's written so well that each self-contained chapter is an absolute delight to read. This is a book that I hated to finish, not because the ending is sad (and it is), but because I, as a reader, do not want to have to leave the characters and the world they inhabit. My favorite character by far is Silas. He's the type of character, like Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, who is lovable but also very dangerous, and who you're just glad is on the right side. I think The Graveyard Book has the potential to be a new children's classic. I'm certainly looking forward to reading it with my kids.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic masterpiece is the most engaging and heart-wrenching book I have read in recent memory. The premise is that some global catastrophe has killed all plant life, and therefore all animals that survive on plants, and so on up the food chain until, when the book opens, the only living creatures left are people. In this world a man and his son struggle for survival, scavenging for what food they can find without being eaten themselves. This description really doesn't do justice, though, to the real heart of the novel: the relationship between father and son and the desperate empathy they evoke in the reader.

Once I began reading The Road I didn't want to stop even to sleep because I couldn't bear to leave the characters in such dire circumstances. It's not that there is a lot of action or new threats constantly popping up: it's that the characters are so close to starvation and so vulnerable in this lawless world that something as simple as walking down an abandoned highway and seeing another figure far off in the distance takes on a nail-biting suspense.

The hopelessness of the characters' situation is so unrelenting that, in the one moment when they have a very brief respite, when they are actually able to fill their stomachs and sleep safely for the night, I felt a great relief and and could finally put the book down and get some sleep myself.

Why read a book that is so hopelessly and utterly grim from beginning to end? In the midst of all this darkness, of a nightmare world in which it seems the only survivors are the very worst of humanity, there is a single shining spark in this father and son, determined to not just survive, but survive without resorting to murder and cannibalism. I have to admit that several times during the course of the book, I questioned why they even bother. There is no hope of rescue in this novel, no chance that the human race can recover from this. Everyone is just delaying the inevitable extinction that will come when all food is gone.

It reminds me of what Wayne Coyne said about the song "Evil Will Prevail": to recognize that evil really will win out in the end and that there is no reward for those who do good, but to choose to do good anyway is a noble and beautiful thing.