The New York Times has published its list of Ten Best Books of 2006, but inexplicably listed only books Two through Eleven. The Times skipped the best book of the year. I’m starting to wonder about that paper.
The Times also published its list of 100 Notable Books of the Year, and three books reviewed here at JCI made the list: Daniel Mendelsohn’s “The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million,” Philip Roth’s “Everyman,” and David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster and Other Essays.”
But Dorothy Gallagher’s excellent “Strangers in the House” did not make the list. Her book should have made it for the haunting final paragraph alone — the conclusion of an essay entitled “Dumb Luck” in a book of essays about her difficult life: fragile friendships, fickle lovers, chronic illnesses and marital crises. The essay recounts her visit to
At last I’ve reached
Moscow. Here is my cousin Liya opening the door to the apartment. I see a small, thin woman with a mass of long, curling gray hair. She is smiling; four missing front teeth don’t stop her from smiling. She is talking, she cannot stop talking. In her excitement and happiness, she cannot keep still. She sits, she stands, she wants to know everything. She pulls me to the kitchen to make tea. The apartment is as I knew it would be, bare, dusty, a broken bed propped against a bedroom wall, the crack in the kitchen wall, and there they still are, the scuttling cockroaches. We talk. We go to a nearby café; she hungrily eats a plate of fatty pork that I cannot bear to touch, and we wrap up my portion to take home for her dinner, We pass an old beggar woman, and Liya gives her a coin. Back in the apartment, we drink more tea. She opens a bureau drawer and takes out heaps of yellowing photographs, brittle papers, books. She piles them in my lap. I look at the books. I am astonished. My books. I look at the photographs: My life: a baby in my mother’s arms, a little girl holding my father’s hand, an adolescent with my cousins, my darling aunts and uncles, my clean, comfortable house, my sweet mother, my wedding day, my full life. What did Liya think as year after year her cousin’s life was placed before her? Did she see what I see now? Did she see my great, good, pure dumb luck? Did she see that my road had always been clear and open before me? Why didn’t I know that?
Maybe the Times will get better next year.