The Book Lady’s Best of 2011: Best of the Rest

2011 at 5am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

Without further ado: the final installment The Book Lady’s Best of 2011: the best books I read that didn’t fit neatly into any of my other categories. I never know where to put short stories!

   Other People We Married by Emma Straub (Five Chapters Press) Whatever your experience with short fiction, you’d do yourself a favor by spending an afternoon (and really, that’s all it will take) with Other People We Married. Straub’s collection, full of the kind of quirky, flawed, believable characters that will remind you of your friends, your colleagues, and yourself, begins with “Some People Must Really Fall in Love,” in which a young writer attempts to fight her attraction to a student by dating a real Grown-Up Man (who owns a house and everything) and ends up reflecting on the strange in-between-ness of the stage of life during which one is technically an adult but doesn’t feel like it yet. Straub’s characters wrestle with identity and struggle to reconcile the reality of who they’ve become with who they imagined they would be, and she explores loss—and the things loss makes us willing to believe in—with subtlety and clever insight. Other People We Married is keenly observed, deeply felt, and an absolute delight to read.  Straub’s characters are authentic, and they live in the real world, with all its weirdness, uncertainty, and “well, this isn’t what I expected it to be”-ness.

Ladies & Gentlemen by Adam Ross (Knopf) Dark is what Ross does, and as we saw in his 2010 debut novel Mr. Peanut, he does it remarkably well. The characters who populate Ladies and Gentlemen are complex, cunning, and duplicitous; their relationships nuanced, complicated, brimming with secrets and unspoken fears. They lie to each other for sport, make fools of each other for entertainment, and make reckless decisions with little regard for consequences. Yet they are compelling—even, in some cases, charming—in all their imperfection, and Ross’s ability to explore the underside of all kinds of relationships is noteworthy. As tight and economical as Mr. Peanutwas winding and dense, this collection establishes Ross as a writer unconstrained by format, one who doesn’t need the bells and whistles, twists and turns, regardless of how skillfully he deploys them.

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