Smugglivus 2011 Guest Author: Ben Winters

Welcome to Smugglivus 2011! Throughout this month, we will have daily guests – authors and bloggers alike – looking back at their favorite reads of 2011, and looking forward to events and upcoming books in 2012.

Who: Ben Winters is best known as the Quirk-y (ok, that was a lame pun), tongue-in-cheek author of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Android Karenina. He is also the prolific author of a number of guides, articles, Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbooks, and middle grade novels The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman and The Mystery of the Missing Everything (amongst many other works). The guy’s ubiquitous.

Recent Work: Ben’s big 2011 release was Bedbugs: a deliciously creepy-crawly psychological horror novel (and Thea loved reading it for Halloween Week).

Heya, Book Smugglers. Here are some things I read this year and loved.

Alone Together, by Sherry Turkle. Like Jason Lanier in his mind-blowing book You Are Not a Gadget, Turkle writes smartly on the ways we are letting technology run away with a chunk of our souls. This book made me reevaluate my relationship with the internet, and to fervently pray that when my kids are in high school, dealing with the roiling emotions of that period, Facebook and Twitter will be out of service — like, for repair or something.

Speaking of my kids, I read Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, a funny and inspiring book for any parent or would-be parent, by a George Mason University economist named Bryan Caplan. He suggests that the labor-and-resource cost of childrearing is lower than people assume, and the potential reward much higher. It’s quite a charming argument, and I hope he’s right, since my wife and I just welcomed our third.

When I’m starting out a new book, I read a lot of books for inspiration. (Is this the best part of my job? Yes, it is.) When I wrote Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters I read Jules Verne; when I write Android Karenina I immersed myself in Isaac Asimov’s robot books. In 2010, when I was writing Bedbugs, a thriller about demon animals, I read Stephen King’s Cujo and watched Hitchcock’s The Birds; and, because I wanted it to be a psychological thriller, I read Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper.

Anyway, this year I’ve been working on a new book, a kind of science-fiction/detective story, which has sent me down a whole different rabbit hole: I read Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, the first two books of Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series (with which I was obsessed when I was in high school, twenty years ago), a bunch of Philip K. Dick (always a treat) and Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. I also read a ton of Agatha Christie, including Murder on the Orient Express. I read PD James, who I’m always reading anyway; I read Richard Price, who I am also always reading.

Oh, and I re-read Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, which kills me. That tough-guy swaggering prose is so often imitated and attempted and parodied that you forget how great the real thing is.

But by far the best book I read in 2011 was one I read for no practical purpose or career-advancing goal, but just because I’ve always vaguely wanted to read it, and because my wife kept raving about it. That book is Middlemarch, by George Eliot. For a lot of years now I’ve counted Dickens as my all-time favorite author, and now here I am like a starry-eyed kid, falling in love all over again: Oh, George Eliot, where have you been all my life? Anyway. I’m listening to Middlemarch on audiobook, and it’s twenty-one hours long, and I never want it to end.

Thanks, Ben!