Best Books of 2014: Reprints!

In a trend that’s continued for three years now, I read more new books this year than in any previous year of my life, a very drastic change from the many years when I read virtually no new books at all, and a big enough change even from as recent as ten years ago, when the balance was closer to fifty-fifty. The sacred Open Letters PO box gets bombarded with deliveries every day (as my wonderful and long-suffering crew of clerks there can attest), and I like to keep my darling Open Letters Weekly hopping with new reviews, and these things have worked a sad but inevitable winnowing effect on the amount of random old stuff I tend to read. But whatever melancholy I might feel about that (and to be fair, a Boston Irish Catholic can feel melancholy about a broken toaster, so this is no great shakes) is mitigated by one of the most miraculous aspects of the publishing world: the steady appearance of intriguing reprints, which in themselves neatly combine the new-book and old-book duties of the conscientious reader. 2014 saw a very nice variety of such reprints, from which I’ve culled the best here:

10. Life in the Cold by Peter Marchand (University Press of New England) – This fourth edition of Marchand’s classic “Introduction to Cold Weather Ecology” takes on more urgency – and more poignancy – in a super-heating world that will, in the lifetime of babies being born today, actually lose the season of winter in most of the latitudes where humans live. For years, Marchand tramped through some of the most ungodly winters the 20th Century could supply, studying the ways living things adapt to brutal temperatures and scarcity of food and light. This is the prettiest and most lavish edition of this book so far, for all that it looks increasingly to be describing an alien world.

9. The Bridge by Gay Talese (Bloomsbury) – Talese’s great work of New York Times reporting from 1964 remains as sturdy and intermittently inspiring as his great subject, the Verrazano Narrows bridge linking New York City to Brooklyn and the nether region known as Staten Island,and this lovely reprint comes out to celebrate the bridge’s fiftieth anniversary. Talese is fading from the consciousness of the Republic of Letters, which is a shame – the tart eloquence and wily commentary on display here are a fine demonstration of what will be lost if this writer is forgotten.

8. Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell (Unicorn Press) – Like many of our reprints this time around (and, really, any time), there’s an anniversary-related justification here: Unicorn Press brings out this beautiful edition of Maxwell’s 1960 classic in observance of the centennial of Maxwell’s birth. This edition has lovely watercolor illustrations by Mark Adlington, although it could come in a brown paper bag and still not diminish a bit the beauty and sadness of Maxwell’s masterpiece. Still, this is the edition to have.

7. Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee (Godine) – Like Ring of Bright Water, this attractive reprint of Lee’s masterpiece has the centennary of the author’s birth as its justification, and like Life in the Cold, the book itself describes what amounts to a vanishing world. Lee’s sweet, bright, melancholy stories about an early 20th-century England of hedgerows and thatched roofs and unlocked doors was a predictably explosive bestseller when it came out in still war-weary 1959, and it reads even more wonderfully today, when the world Lee describes so lovingly is now largely a thing of fiction.

6. Ravens in Winter by Bernd Heinrich (Simon & Schuster) – This one brings us back to winter: it’s a reprint (with a new Introduction) of Heinrich’s landmark study of what ravens – intelligent, inventive, voluble – actually do during the long and forbidding winters that characterize many of their ranges. Heinrich is a fine writer and a fine observer, and the unendingly odd behaviors of ravens come alive in his account as in no other account I know. It’s always a pleasure to re-visit this book, so any new reprint is enthusiastically welcomed.

5. Some Flowers by Vita Sackville-West (The National Trust) – Sackville-West is one of those writers who virtually never wrote a dull word of nonfiction (her fiction, on the other hand …) , and this 1937 gem is certainly no exception. In it, she chooses 25 of her favorite flowers – such a simple scheme – and describes their lives and ways in prose so lovely that it easily surpassed the photographs that accompanied the text when it was first published in 1937. It still surpasses the elegant watercolors by Graham Rust that adorn this edition, but the watercolors certainly make for a very attractive package.

4. The Penguin Tale of the Heike! Translated by Royall Tyler – Penguin Classics turns out a reliably beautiful black-spined paperback of Royall Tyler’s superb translation of this rollicking 14th-century Japanese epic stuffed full of violence, raw humor, and forced moments of stolen tenderness. Tyler’s performance here as a translator is tremendous. You can read my review here

3. Matriarch by Anne Edwards (Rowman & Littlefield) – The slight danger of this welcome reprint is that the good folks at Rowman & Littlefield chose for its cover the coronation portrait of Queen Mary by Sir William Llewylln that was also the cover art for James Pope-Hennessey’s official biography of the same Queen Mary – an invitation for confusion, lessened somewhat by the fact that Pope-Hennessey’s book is currently out of print. Edwards’ was too, and it’s good to have it back, this scrappy and brightly conversational life of King George V’s fascinating queen consort.

2. Quartered Safe Out Here by George MacDonald Fraser (Skyhorse) – Bless the folks at Skyhorse for giving new life to this lancingly intelligent memoir of the Burma theater of World War II by Fraser, the author of the immortal “Flashman” novels. This is one of the best war-memoirs ever written, wry and vivid and gloriously readable, and it thoroughly deserves this new chance at a wide readership.

1. Mercy of a Rude Stream by Henry Roth (Liveright) – The most outstanding reprint of 2014 was this lovely but forbiddingly enormous one-volume edition of Roth’s fictional saga of Ira Stigman and the 20th-century Jewish-American immigration experience. Like everybody else, I loved Roth’s 1964 book Call it Sleep and despaired of the constituent volumes of this saga as they appeared, and so I dreaded the appearance of this book, even though it had the new temptation of an Introduction by Joshua Ferris. I was surprised and amazed by the experience of reading the whole of Roth’s epic – this is a work that actually demands to be read as the single, gigantic tapestry Roth clearly envisioned it to be, and it’s an absolutely stunning vindication of his writing vision. This volume deserves a place in the canon as a 20th-century masterpiece.