One common bond linking McCarthy, Jackson, and Stein — three women featured in Elaine Showalter’s history of American women writers, A Jury of Her Peers — is that their spouses allowed them the time and solitude required to imagine, write, and produce. Even if their spouses’ approaches were controlling or their motivations questionable, the writing flourished.

From ‘The woman writes as if the Devil was in her…’ by Anne K. Yoder on The Millions

And so amid all the lists (even our own), to round out the year, we offer a new installment of our annual “Year in Reading” series – an anti-list, as it were. Acknowledging that few readers, if any, read exclusively newly published books, we’ve asked our regular contributors and distinguished guests to name, from all the books they read this year, the one(s) that meant the most to them, regardless of publication date. Grouped together, these considerations, squibs, and essays will be a chronicle of reading and good books from every era. We hope you find in them seeds that will help your year in reading in 2010 be a fruitful one.

For The Millions‘ A Year in Reading 2009, the site asked the following seven authors what book(s) touched their hearts this year.

• Hari Kunzru, author of My Revolutions
• Julie Klam, author of Please Excuse My Daughter
• Phillip Lopate, author of Notes on Sontag
• Stephen Dodson, coauthor of Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit, proprietor of Languagehat.
• Mark Sarvas, author of Harry, Revised, proprietor of The Elegant Variation.
• Diane Williams, author of It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature, editor of NOON
• Jonathan Lethem, author of Chronic City

Also see: The Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far): An Introduction

What books did you read and love this year (regardless of publication date)? My vote goes to The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Latin America is extravagant and irrational, nothing can be done about it; its dictators are savages and inhumane, but we miss them as characters of a novel; and we find solace in its inhabitants’ ability to maintain their will to dream in the middle of poverty and injustice. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is very nice to be exotic, to brown under the sun and to be neighbors with criminals and torturers, to populate chaotic and bloody cities, to believe in voodoo or in the Virgin of Guadalupe, to belong to such gracious and unusual nations.

In his talk, Volpi criticizes the concept of a Latin American genre of fiction defined by a belief in or resignation to the supernatural. Volpi believes that such a thing ignores the rich literary diversity of Latin America. It’s a pernicious form of stereotyping that limits writers, readers, and regions.

This paragraph in particular caught my attention because I think it is the way most Southern nations and peoples are viewed and treated by the European-American establishment. Tan, brown and black people are almost universally deemed less modern, more regressive, and in need of either saving or punishment depending on your political leanings. This plays out in the fiction world when we expect that the work of Southern nations writers will be more tortured, more magical or just plain different somehow than that of their European or American counterparts. And if it isn’t, it is not authentic.

Perhaps this is part of a larger discussion about art, authenticity and representation. Is it ever possible for an ‘Othered’ artist to make art without being Positive and Uplifting^TM or An Authentic Representation of the Group Experience^TM?

Also see: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2009 TED talk Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story, and Binyavanga Wainaina’s 2005 Granta essay How to Write About Africa.

[Via The Millions]

* Chil’ please. Yes I know Africa is a continent of 47 countries, give or take some disputed territory and excluding islands off the coasts. But how many times have you heard the place spoken of as though it was one big ass nation full of black people somewhere over there?