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Critic's NotebookMoments in Reading That Salvaged an Often Sour YearA good book can confirm your sanity. A good book can make you feel a bit less alone. In 2019, there was no escaping a sour and scalded national mood, and good books were necessary.Top 10 lists, including my own, have mercifully come and gone. What remains for this critic, after a year of purposeful reading, are remembered scenes and moments and observations. This column is about a few favorites.The poet Bob Kaufman died in 1986, but a new book of his verse, "Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman," was released this year. In one poem, he sent us a message, as if through a pneumatic tube:People who read are not happy.People who do not read are not happy.People are not very happy. The critic Clive James died in November. He wrote, as if in response: "If you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do."Politics pushed to the surface, like a fin, in this year's fiction. "How're you doing," a character asked in Ali Smith's novel "Spring," "apart from the end of liberal capitalist democracy?" In Robert Menasse's sophisticated novel "The Capital," set in Brussels, a character watched old nationalist ghosts rise in a tabloid culture, and commented: "He had been prepared for everything, but not everything in caricature."In Ocean Vuong's first novel, "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous," a young man thought: "The one good thing about national anthems is that we're already on our feet, and therefore ready to run." Plump new collections of Wendell Berry's nonfiction were issued by the Library of America. In one essay, Berry described a lesson learned in military school: "Take a simpleton and give him power and confront him with intelligence - and you have a tyrant."This year'
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