An intriguing collection of unlike things ends up on the New York Times list of 100 notable books each year. A recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review about the blurring of fiction and nonfiction claims that nonfiction is losing its “frisson.” I hardly agree—see my essay in Talking Story—but if you need further convincing, go no further than the NYT’s top 100.

Here is the Connie Cull:

I draw much inspiration from reading about the lives of writers and artists, and this year offers a good crop of such biographies, including Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, by Carol Sklenicka; Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, by Linda Gordon; and Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch. (“Witty, obsessed and almost inhumanly brave,” wrote Joy Williams in her review of this short story writer. “O’Connor was peculiar, her work even more so.”)

Some question whether memoir counts as journalism—or narrative journalism. I tend to include it in the broader category of nonfiction, and scrutinize the credibility of the authors. These two pass muster: City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s, by Edmund White, and Closing Time: A Memoir, by Joe Queenan.

Then there’s the world of ideas, some of the hardest books to write for a lay audience. Robert Wright succeeded in The Evolution of God, as did the every-interesting Rebecca Solnit in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.

For sheer drama—reported tales that read like a novel but tell us something important about our world—my picks are Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers (a pal from the early days of Wired and his then-magazine, Might), The Lost City Of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, by David Grann (my newest favorite writer for his mastery of character and suspense), and The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel. (I’m cheating on that last one: it’s not on the Times Top 100, but I think it should be.)

And then there’s Columbine, by Dave Cullen, which does make the list. Cullen is a Denver journalist with whom I’ve stayed in touch since we both attended a Niemen Foundation seminar. Reviewer Jennifer Senior commends him for resisting narrative cliché (i.e., starting his tale 48 hours before the notorious killing spree of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, stopping the frame just before they fired their guns, and then spooling back to the very beginning, with the promise of trying to explain how the two boys got to this twisted pass). In my book this is reason enough for nomination. But narrative skill takes more than just resisting cliché. About the central surprise of the book Senior writes, “I expected a story about misfits exacting vengeance, because that was my memory of the media consensus — Columbine, right, wasn’t there something going on there between goths and jocks? In fact, Harris and Klebold were killing completely at random that day. Their victims weren’t the intended targets at all; the entire school was. Columbine, it turns out, was a failed attempt at domestic terrorism.”

How’s that for frisson?

Related posts:

1. Is True Fiction Just True Fraud?
2. Critiquing Ken Burns