The Best Books of a Bunch of Years

The nice thing about n + 1's "2010 in Books" roundup is that the editors don't even try to stick with books that were written in 2010. Instead of crudely assuming that the best books of the year are those notable books which happened, by some accident or other, to be published that year, each of the contributors writes a short blurb about a book or books that were relevant to them this year. Thus, Frank O'Hara is mentioned, but Franzen is not (phew!). From Ian Epstein:

Frank O’Hara has said, “I am mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it.” This aesthetic of solipsism turns out surprisingly to produce a serio-comic fragmentary memoir that we nonetheless come to feel as our own. O’Hara’s poems put down on paper the movements of a flâneur/poet who masquerades as a MoMA employee, a promiscuous homosexual, and an art critic in the postwar industrial bustle of the ’50s into the ’60s. He documents the familiar moments in this city—which is often as ugly as an oyster—where something breaks through (like a vision of the moon, as in ‘Avenue A’) into the strange permanence of a poem, “revealing itself like a pearl.”

We too like to tabulate the "best" books "published" in a year. But it's nice to be reminded that such an exercise, which everyone knows doesn't matter, truly doesn't matter. The books that stick with us are untimely.