THE BEST OF '18'

10 of the many authors who captured the urgency of our times

YOU could have spent the past year reading incendiary insider accounts of the current White House, moving book to book with barely a pause for lunch or earning a living; a few — Michael Lewis’ “The Fifth Risk,” perhaps, an appreciation of civil servants who can see past their own noses — might even endure beyond the present political cycle.

Or you could have read anything by anyone about anything.

Reading while the world is burning down around you tends to give whatever’s in your hands the contours of apocalypse. My two most satisfying moments while reading this year? “The Way Home in the Night,” a children’s picture book from Japanese illustrator Akiko Miyakoshi, and “Running With the Devil,” the memoir of a former manager for Van Halen. Both were from 2017, one about the granular importance of individual lives, the other about entitled, powerful people who take offense whenever anyone tells them no.

Somehow both felt unusually meaningful in 2018.

The problem is, so many authors captured the urgency of the times you didn’t have to read old heavy metal memoirs to feel a part of the zeitgeist. On the other hand, there were not enough hours in the day to even crack this wellspring.

Say you think the following top-10 list is ridiculous and an equally valid list, in an alternative universe, must include Wesley Yang’s essay collection “The Souls of Yellow Folk,” Jill Lepore’s “These Truths: A History of the United States,” Susan Orlean’s “The Library Book,” and “The Witch Elm,” the latest masterful crime novel by Tana French. Well, you would be right. But in this universe, here’s what I especially adored this year.

Nonfiction

“Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City,

Its Chaotic Founding,

Its Apocalyptic Weather,

Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-Class Metropolis” by Sam Anderson (Crown, $27)

I don’t care much about Oklahoma City. Then again, before reading John McPhee’s “Oranges” and Ian Frazier’s “Great Plains,” citrus and the Dakotas weren’t especially front-of-mind, either. Anderson goes to Oklahoma City to write about basketball and expectations, then, pinging between centuries and subjects, electric with curiosity, comes away with a story of highways, weather forecasting, land rushes and James Harden. As Anderson insists, you really do start to believe this is the story of everything. (Bonus points for the most fitting epigraph in years: John Ashbery’s perfect reminder that “Some things are simultaneously too boring and too exciting to write about.”)

“This Land: America, Lost and Found” by Dan Barry (Black Dog & Leventhal, $30)

Story to story, this collection of reportage from Barry for The New York Times might appear to be what it is — old journalism. Yet what is actually here, a decade of stories about crumbling traditions, breaks in trust and flickers of grace, is the most comprehensive single-book portrait of the United States (circa 2007-2016) in a long time. The accumulated power of these pieces — angry, corny, inspiring, mournful and insane — takes on the shape of a salute to durable, keenly observed newspaper writing.

“Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” by David W. Blight (Simon & Schuster, $38)

Some historical figures never break from their amber jails, regardless of how vital their legends may be. Historian Blight returns the heartbeat to the story of a man too often known from plaques and speeches. With the snap of a great narrative and near-biblical grandeur, Blight recounts the myth-making that Douglass assembled for himself while shredding the easier image of high school history classes: Douglass, Blight writes, presented the 19th century with something it had not anticipated, a “frightening black man with brains, who has penetrated the racist psyches of powerful people with words and his physical presence.” The definitive biography you assumed was already written.

“Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore” by Elizabeth Rush (Milkweed, $26)

Not a data dump, policy paper, rhetorical screed or even journalistic explainer, but the book on climate change and sea levels that was missing. Rush travels from vanishing shorelines in New England to hurting fishing communities to retracting islands and, with empathy and elegance, conveys what it means to lose a world in slow motion. Picture the working-class empathy of Studs Terkel paired with the heartbreak of a poet.

“Feel Free” by Zadie Smith (Penguin, $28)

There is a wise argument out there that Smith, better known for some of the finest novels of this young century, is actually masquerading, that she’s really been one of our finest essayists the whole time. This collection of autobiography, criticism and rangy impressions already feels like a quiet classic, a phone book of thoughts on everything from joy to childhood bathrooms to Brexit to movies — her essay on “Get Out” is undoubtedly the smartest thing written about that very written-about film. Her piece on Facebook — “500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore” — is worth the price alone. But the rest is accessible without feeling tied to convention, that rarest and most necessary of works, the portrait of an artist dizzy with curiosity and insight.

Fiction “Motherhood” by Sheila Heti (Henry Holt, $27)

Heti, whose writing has the freedom and unpredictability we like to tell ourselves we possess, has delivered a novel that’s more like an essay — except when it’s a novel. The subject is the decision, or not, to have children. Heti interrogates herself with the relentless anxiety we associate with repenting criminals and, well, tortured artists. “I feel like a draft dodger from the army in which so many of my friends are serving,” she writes of being childless, “just lolling about in the country they are making.” At times lacerating and exhilarating, frustrating and funny, Heti is always,

unswervingly, honest.

“The Largesse of the Sea Maiden” by Denis Johnson (Random House, $27)

Generally, the last works of great authors don’t burn with the generosity of spirit and meaningfulness shown in Johnson’s final collection, finished just before he died in 2017. The author of “Jesus’ Son” and “Tree of Smoke” (and a bunch of others that couldn’t have been written by anyone else) takes a final headcount of every ghost he never shook, of accomplishments and misunderstandings and failures, and rather than rage against the night, he finds warmth, friends and regret. And that’s just the first story.

“X-Men: Grand Design” by Ed Piskor (Marvel, $60)

A hard sell for most of you. At best, you’re sick of superheroes. Yet Piskor’s remarkable twovolume distillation of the past 55 years of X-Men history — he boils down decades of soap opera, characters and conflict into a single, Robert Altmanesque narrative — is a study in storytelling, and how the most minor history between family can gain poignance. Piskor’s “Hip Hop Family Tree” graphic novels have been some of the smartest music-history writing in recent memory. Here, he roots his artwork in cultural precedent — Roy Lichtenstein would have swooned — and his story in a love for the silly.

“The Overstory” by Richard Powers (Norton, $28)

Now hear me out: A novel about trees, grand as its subject, told from the vantage of, among others, a man who hears nature, a war veteran, a biologist, a farmer — some characters likely, some less so. With his 12th novel, Powers goes from National Book Awardwinning cult favorite to national treasure, that rare novelist whose vision is ambitious enough to encompass more than humanity.

“Heads of the Colored People” by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (37 INK/Atria, $23)

Underrated debut of the year. With a brisk effortless glide and bit of satire, Thompson-Spires assembled a collection of stories that feels fresh and unnerving about violence done to black bodies and the problems of representation. Her characters are black cosplayers, parents of the only children of color in a school, women with disability fetishes, and a black child whose authenticity hinges on a craving for brioche. (It’s also pretty hilarious.)