I once asked a friend if she had read the new novel by some popular author whose name I can’t recall. “Why would I read that book when there’s still Joyce and Proust?” Her high-minded response irritated me at the time, but years later it sticks with me whenever I go to the bookstore.

Deciding what to read next is a serious commitment. Abandoning a book feels much worse than skipping to the next song or walking out of a movie.

I don’t read enough to offer a Best of the Year list. Having made a few missteps, I could tell you which books weren’t the best of 2008, but I doubt there’s much value in that. Throwing dates and genres to the wind, I offer the 10 most influential books I read this year.

Haruki Murakami – What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Knopf, 2008
I don’t care for Murakami’s novels. There are too many metaphors and fantastic elements; I’m never sure what the rules are in Murakami’s world. So now the animals can talk? Sure, why not. But this book about running as a parallel to the creative process is so earnest and clear-minded that it’s impossible not to start making promises to get up at dawn everyday and run four miles before sitting down to work hard. I’m even thinking about buying some sneakers…

David McCullough – 1776
Simon & Schuster, 2000
America seems like a forgone conclusion but it was a surprisingly close call. McCullough describes the rebellion’s devastating losses and unlikely victories shot by shot, breathing life into the iconic as well as the forgotten. We see Washington’s despair and costly moments of indecision, Henry Knox’s bravery as he drags hundreds of tons of cannon down from Canada to Boston for the first battle, and the utter madness of fighting the world’s best army with a handful of barefoot soldiers without gunpowder. McCullough takes us beyond the stars and spangles and shows us the heavy demands placed upon ordinary men. We peek into the journals of husbands and sons filled with resolve, frustration, and disgust. In 1776, Joseph Reed wrote:

When I look round, and see how few of the numbers who talked so largely of death and honor are around me, and that those who are here are those from whom it was least expected . . . I am in wonder and surprise. Your noisy sons of liberty are, I find, the quietist in the field. An engagement, or even the expectation of one, gives a wonderful insight into character.

New Yorkers get an added bonus, as the troops race across the island (and get crushed in Brooklyn and Kip’s Bay) and we uncover the origins of names like Fort Greene, Washington Heights, and most of the streets in Soho.

Susan Orlean – The Orchid Thief
Ballantine, 2000
The Orchid Thief is home to John Leroche, a beaten-up mess of a man with a shocking passion for flowers (and money). Before flowers it was fish and before that it was fossils. I wish I cared about something like Leroche cares about orchids – and so does Orlean, who injects herself into the book, initially as a cynic and later as an author obsessed with finishing her project. An incredible mixture of journalism, history, and storytelling, The Orchid Thief takes us deep into Florida’s swampland and uncovers real estate schemes, black markets, slander, and flower pageants that make gun & knife shows look tame. Ultimately, it’s a book about passion: passion for collecting, writing, growing, and the weird edges of the American Dream.

Hunter S. Thompson – Hell’s Angels
Random House, 1966
I ditched the dust jacket because carrying a Hunter S. Thompson book feels like carrying a five-foot bong. Unfairly or not, the man’s reputation eclipses anything he ever wrote. This is the book where he first earned that reputation at age 29, several years before he started up the Gonzo act. The writing is hard and disciplined. Although you came for salacious details about gang initiations and riots, you soon realize that you’re not reading about motorcycles at all – this is unfiltered American class warfare and Thompson spares nobody: the Angels, the Merry Pranksters, hippies, college students, local sheriffs, and the media are all complicit. Knowing that he would later disappear into the caricature of a drug-addled gun nut rather than write another book like this is nearly tragic.

Norman Mailer – Miami & The Siege of Chicago
NYRB Classics, 1968
Another polarizing author, although I’m 100% on his side after reading The Executioner’s Song. Mailer’s coverage of the 1968 Republican and Democrat conventions proved to be an indispensable sidekick to this year’s election mayhem. Presenting himself only as “the reporter”, Mailer tries to give Nixon the benefit of the doubt, anticipates Reagan’s rise twelve years later, explains why the Left will never fully connect with the American public, and pegs everything from air-conditioned conference rooms to banal campaign buttons against the American psyche. In the process, he highlights the same conflicts that confuse us today: urban vs. rural, religion vs. secular, foreign intervention vs. isolationism.

His introduction to the Democratic convention begins with this summary of America’s cities:

Chicago is the great American city. New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington wink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St. Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.

He then moves from the muck of the slaughterhouse up to the highest corrupt heights of the political machines and back down into the blood and bedlam of the riots that followed.

Jack Weatherford – Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Three Rivers Press, 2005
Did you know that Genghis Khan invented pants? Weatherford’s biography restores the Great Khan’s reputation from godless barbarian to the force behind one of history’s most progressive civilizations, sparking the European Renaissance and the Ming dynasty in China.

In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be understood if the United States, instead of being created by a group of educated merchants or wealthy planters, had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves, who, by the sheer force of personality, charisma, and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented a system of warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil, and opened roads of commerce in a free-trade zone that stretched across the continents.

Weatherford’s book reads like a Russian novel, packed with love, vengeance, intrigue, and the rise and fall of empire.

Luc Sante – Kill All Your Darlings
Yeti / Verse Chorus Press, 2007
The cleanest prose this side of Joan Didion. Sante can write about anything and he does: the gentrification of New York City, cigarettes, working in a plastics factory, the history of blues, photography, and the importance of New Jersey. “I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say” is one of the most phenomenal essays about music I’ve come across, as Sante recreates a sweaty 1902 performance in a New Orleans church and spins it across the 20th century as a heartbreaking origin story for James Brown, Funkadelic, pop music, and hip hop. And he does it in ten pages.

David Nasaw – Andrew Carnegie
Penguin, 2006
Here is the American myth writ large. Very large. At 878 pages, this thing bursts with railroads, steelworks, labor unions, skyscrapers, drawing rooms, steamships, and the smokiest backrooms of American business and government. Carnegie’s story is Horatio Alger on steroids: an uneducated immigrant boy from Scotland sweeps the floors of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s telegraph office and, after a few wise investments and handshakes with the right people, he quickly becomes the richest man in the world – and one of its greatest philanthropists. Nasaw’s book is packed with details about the social mores of the Gilded Age and its robber barons. At the center stands Carnegie (at barely five feet tall), preaching the virtue of passive income and struggling to give his money away faster than he was making it. One tip: while others invested in railroad companies, Carnegie invested in wood and iron for the track; now that Obama’s about to rebuild our highways, perhaps we should invest in yellow paint and asphalt.

Raymond Chandler – The Big Sleep / The Long Goodbye / Farewell, My Lovely
Vintage, 1939, 1953, 1940
What American man hasn’t at some point wished he was Philip Marlowe? Reading Chandler for the first time, I knew I was about to enter the heart of the “hardboiled” caricature – scotch, broads, unfiltered cigarettes, living by one’s word, and plenty of gunplay – but there’s a hell of a lot more: a collision of the modern age with nostalgia for the old codes of conduct, world-weary philosophy, great dialogue, and a chiseled narrative:

I got up and walked to the end of the office and slapped the wall with the flat of my hand, hard. The clacking typewriter on the other side stopped for a moment, and then went on. I looked down through the open window into the shaft between my building and the Mansion House Hotel. The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on. I went back to my desk, dropped the bottle of whiskey back into the drawer, shut the drawer and sat down again. I lit my pipe for the eighth or ninth time and looked carefully across the half-dusted glass to Miss Riordan’s grave and honest little face. You could get to like a face like that. Glamoured up blondes were a dime a dozen, but that was a face that would wear. I smiled at it.

Chandler’s writing defined the pulp genre, yet he belongs to literature.

Denis Johnson – Tree of Smoke
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007
Hemingway on acid.  The level of detail is eye-popping. Every mosquito in the Mekong Delta is accounted for, every ramshackle bar and whorehouse is inhabited by living and dying grunts, lieutenants, and corporals. By page 200 or so, you’re thinking in their jargon: Psy Ops and CORDS and LZ and Mobilization-Loss. As much as it’s about Vietnam, the book is ultimately about the psyche of the soldier and how it breaks: the man forced to fight soon understands no other way of life.

When Screwy Loot stood up to leave he looked over the replacements, in particular Fisher, the tall one with a front tooth chipped from playing basketball, and said, “The movie’s not over till everybody’s dead.” He walked out with an uncoordinated step. And then they sat around letting the new ones in on things little by little.

“Do we work for the CIA?”
“You’re working for Psy Ops.”
“Does Psy Ops work for the CIA?”

One of the new ones, Evans, was very plastered, saying over and over again only, “Let’s face it. Let’s face it. Let’s face it.”

“Do you understand what’s happening? The rest of the Third are getting chewed up alive. The rest of the whole Twenty-fifth Infantry.”

“In fact, when they get chewed up alive, they’re dead.”

“Shut up. But that’s right. They’re dead, like I would hate to be.”

The Purple Bar was made of bamboo poles and thatch. A layer of some kind of straw covered the floor. Underneath that, dirt. It didn’t have walls, only bead curtains painted with various tropical scenes – palm trees and mountain ranges . . . A table by the freezer served as the bar. On it were a portable record player, a stack of albums, and a bar toy called a lava lamp. The girl with red toenails controlled all the records. No requests allowed.