Bostonist Books: The Year In Review

It's not hard to identify the biggest event in Boston (or at least Massachusetts) books this year: that'd be the departure of David Foster Wallace. The Amherst graduate and imposing literary figure took his own life in September, leaving a generation lost without its intelligent, imposing, idol. Wallace gave us many grandiose works, but the man himself will be missed for a long time to come. At the time, we fought the "self-indulgent" label often stuck on DFW, saying:

in any swing of a writer's work, chances are there will be passages that will make you leap out of your seat, makes you want to play with them, jam with them, whatever the verb is. Passages that made you want to be there, too, and you could ape their language a little bit, get at their rotating, multi-tentacled why-this-is-why-it-is a little bit, your inner wall of lightbulbs going on the fritz. That's the nugget necessaire. Wallace had--and fought for--that quality in spades.

More about the year in books in Boston and beyond after the jump.

We covered many events hosted by Harvard's Berkman Center this year (and were even written about by them), but only one focused specifically on a book. John Palfrey and Urs Gasser's Born Digital studies a generation of folks born after 1980: perhaps endeared to DFW, and definitely linked to the internet. Born Digital analyzed the implication of digital culture: of a record tracing our lives from birth to death, on Flickr and Facebook and more. We noted:

Though the internet has its drawbacks, [Palfrey] celebrates the fact that it enhances the "ability of more people to participate more actively in the making and remaking of their culture," and we think he's hit on something important there. The internet may open us up to big problems, but it also opens us up to big possibilities. We can choose to fear change and difficulty or embrace potential.

Looking back to the past instead of forward to a digital or DFW-less future, we reviewed a new edition of Thoreau's Cape Cod this year. We noticed the book's "natural coherence, describing a single walking tour up the Cape to Provincetown, in which the sea provides a continual backdrop for [Thoreau's] inner quest."

As if it weren't enough for Thoreau-calm longtime Cambridge resident Haruki Murakami to be an award-winning novelist, he's also run nearly every day for two decades. Way to make us feel inadequate, man. Regardless, this year's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running was an interesting juxtaposition of Murakami's intellectual and physical achievements. We said that the low-key book's "simplistic aphorisms bring to mind Garrison Keillor's introduction to Good Poems, in which he quotes Bukowski—"There is nothing with wrong with poetry that is entertaining and easy to understand. Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.'"

We all constantly seek the best ways to say what we want to say. Sometimes, the thesaurus helps us find the right words. But how often do we think about the invention of the thesaurus? This year, Joshua Kendall brought us The Man Who Made Lists, the story of thesaurus creator Peter Mark Roget. Kendall is soon coming out with a biography of dictionary-makin' Noah Webster.

The epilogue to The Man Who Made Lists criticizes Microsoft Word's Thesaurus feature as an incomplete thesaurus that provides an easy shortcut rather than an enlightening grouping of related concepts. The ease of finding a different word--without thinking about what that word should be or mean--may be part of what's decreasing our ability and willingness to use words thoughtfully. In contrast to the electro-thesaurus' easy outs, and other modern ways of enabling casual and thoughtless writing, Kendall feels that Roget would conceive of the thesaurus as a way "not to get out of thinking but to think harder." Here's hoping Kendall and his book(s) will make at least some of us think harder--and write better.

Eating the Sun author Oliver Morton attended Boston's conference on green energy this year. We had the chance to attend the conference and talk to Morton:

[As Morton says] the key to energy development in the 21st century is a reawakening to the nature of energy as part of a process, not something derived from a fixed source. "We have come through a century where... pretty much all the energy story can be solved with digging more black stuff out of the ground or pumping more black stuff out of the ground. We can't live like that anymore...we have to see that energy is not a matter of finding a fuel, it's a matter of tapping a flow. There are all sorts of energy flows around us, and all sorts of different ways to tap them. That's the 21st century agenda."

Outside of our own coverage, there was a lot of Boston book action going on this year. BU grad Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth received extensive acclaim, making the New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2008. Also in this top 10 were former Harvard Nieman fellow Dexter Filkins' The Forever War, an analysis of the Iraq war, as well as Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust's Death and the American Civil War, an account of how the Civil War dramatically changed Americans' conception of death. This year was certainly a strong one in books—we look forward to more good reads in '09.