10 Books I Read in 2011

I lifted this entry’s title from the Home.Spice.Life blog. Her (or his) recent post about books read in 2011 was recognized in WordPress’s Freshly Pressed section, meaning it was judged to be among the best posts of the day. Congratulations! My list of books is different.

From the 95 books I read in 2011 (60 fiction and 35 nonfiction), I selected 10 good ones that I liked and can recommend to other readers. My list includes a comment with each entry in case the title is unfamiliar. I tried to split the list 50-50 between fiction and nonfiction, but I didn’t read enough quality fiction this year to be able to do that.

My opinion of what’s “good” is subjective. The criteria I use to judge a book include great writing, an interesting subject, professional editing, a compelling storyline, and, mainly for fiction, a lead character I can identify with and perhaps learn something from. Books with a local (Northwest) setting have a slight advantage.

The list:

• Dan Barry, Bottom of the 33rd (N, c. 2011) – Veteran sportswriter Dan Barry recreates the era and portrays the trials and dreams of Triple A players in a recounting of the longest professional baseball game ever played—a 33-inning 3-2 win by the hometown Pawtucket Red Sox over the Rochester Red Wings in 1981. Hall of Famers Wade Boggs and Cal Ripken Jr. played in the game.
• Philip Connors, Fire Season (N, c. 2011) – From his perch atop a fire tower in southeastern New Mexico, the author writes about firefighting, weather, nature, and how he passed the time as a fire lookout. There are no maps; he relies on words to take us there. A writer to emulate.
• Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (N, c. 2009) – A Syrian-American named Zeitoun paddles a canoe around New Orleans in the wake of Katrina helping people who stayed in the city only to be imprisoned in a system that held people without bail, charges, or a hearing.
• David Goodwillie, American Subversive (F, c. 2010) – Goodwillie’s male lead, a blogger, gets involved with modern young terrorists who want to wake up America, through bombs, to issues like Iraq, big oil, complacency, and more. Set in New York City and Vermont.
• Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken (N, c. 2010) – World War II survival story of Louie Zamperini, whose B24 crashed in the Pacific on a search mission in 1943. Conditions on the raft and in the Japanese POW camps were so horrifying I almost had to stop reading.
• Donovan Hohn, Moby-Duck (N, c. 2011) – The author gets caught up in the search for and tracking of 28,000 plastic bath toys (floatees) that spilled from a container ship in 1992 near the Aleutians. Notable: the politics of beach cleanup, physics of big waves.
• Rex Pickett, Vertical (F, c. 2011) – In a sequel to Sideways (2004), the now-famous Miles and his friend Jack take a wine-fueled road trip to deliver his crippled mother to her sister’s home in Wisconsin. The medical procedures aren’t for the squeamish.
• Keith Scribner, The Oregon Experiment (F, c. 2011) – A professor moves to Douglas, Oregon (Eugene?), to teach and research anarchy and secession. His pregnant wife has an amazing sense of smell. The characters are sharply drawn, but it’s a good story with a great setting.
• Peter Stekel, Final Flight (N, c. 2010) – The author’s investigation of the 1942 crash of an Army-Air Force training flight in Kings Canyon National Park includes his informed speculation about how the crash occurred. One frozen airman was discovered in 2005. Stekel found a second in 2007.
• Hill Williams, Made in Hanford: The Bomb that Changed the World (N, c. 2011) – Williams was in high school at the time; his father was the editor of a local newspaper that helped keep the government’s mission secret. The difficult process of enriching uranium is explained in layman’s terms.

I also read three books about the Amanda Knox case. I can’t recommend any of them, but I can say that after reading them I am convinced that she didn’t help murder her roommate in Perugia.