Year End Book Wrap-Up '11

Here is last year's book wrapup. And this year we have much less to talk about, since I only read 21 books. Only six are on the Time 100 list (and three of those are parts of a 12-novel cycle), which means I still have 22 (I think, I keep mis-counting) of the Time 100 books to go. Eight of the books I read this year were by women, 13 were by men.

Obviously I read much less because I had a baby (though the early middle-of-the-night feedings were pretty good for reading on the Kindle). I feel like I'm getting back into the swing of it now, though. Anyway, here is my very abbreviated list of the best and worst books of the year.

Top three books:

1. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
I loved both this one and The Marriage Plot, but I'm going to give this one the edge for its larger scope and for the way the characters stuck in my head. I am always torn when making these lists, because I love to re-read things and I'm sure if I re-read Goon Squad and Marriage Plot, I could be far more definitive. (I never blog re-reads. It would just be endless entries all "I just finished In This House of Brede for the seven millionth time.") Maybe after I'm done with all my reading lists, I can make a re-reading list. I just got Cloud Atlas back and I'm going to re-read that one immediately. Then Brideshead Revisited again. Then Catch-22 again. Wait, what was I saying? Egan's book. Not perfect, but I liked it! And I want to re-read it, I think is where I was going.

2. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
This sticks in my mind like The Corrections does: as a meaty, intelligent, entertaining work of lit fic. A lot of the classics that I slog through aren't really what I'd call "entertaining" (my recent read of Money notwithstanding) so I appreciate that this was a page turner, that I enjoyed the characters, and that the milieu of this world was recognizable. I liked it.

3. One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde
I have to give this one the edge just because I love Fforde and he always entertains me. This was fast-paced, fun, and funny. But it could just as easily be swapped out with any of the runners up, if only because it wasn't quite as good, for me, as First Among Sequels.

Runners up: An Object of Beauty, Persepolis, The Namesake, Will Grayson, Will Grayson, The Wave, A Question of Upbringing... I didn't read much this year, but I liked almost everything I read!

The worst:

1. Herzog
AKA Herzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzog. Speaking of boring-ass classics that are torture to get through. It was so endlessly dull. I know it supposedly is saying important things about the Jewish Experience. I know people love Saul Bellow and owe him a debt or whatever. But yawn. I'm even bored of trying to write this paragraph.

And that's it! I read some disposable stuff this year, but nothing that I actively disliked, other than Herzog. And next year this will be expanded once more, as I will no doubt read more than 21 books. Man.

The Assistant (Bernard Malamud)

That's right, another book list book! Woo! Of course this is one of the shortest, and it was a really fast read, but still. Making progress.

The back cover says something about the book reading like a prose poem, and it really does. It's spare, heavily symbolic, with shifts in perspective sometimes within one paragraph. Without giving too much away, I'll say it's mostly about one character named Frank and his efforts to become a good person, under the influence of a Jewish grocer named Morris, who is both very good and very poor. There's also Morris's daughter Helen, who's a pretty great character, and who also influences Frank.

I want to talk in a slightly spoilery way about the Helen/Frank subplot, because I had some issues from a feminist point of view. I really liked the fact that this subplot evolved in a non-cliche way, that Helen had self-discipline and didn't just cave in to Frank, that she was not a virgin and didn't get punished for that in the usual "get pregnant, this ruins your life somehow" plot that has been the fate of female characters in literature forever. I also really liked that Frank didn't succeed in his plan to put her through college, that she valued education and was pursuing college of her own accord, albeit with his indirect help.

HOWEVER. It really really bothers me that this is framed as a redemption story and that the text privileges Frank's perspective at the end, after he RAPES HER IN THE PARK. We're supposed to let it go because 1) he is really really sorry, 2) he changes after that to be a genuinely good, self-sacrificing person who essentially saves the family from starving, and 3) Helen is a very strong character who rationalizes the rape to herself all, "well, I was going to sleep with him anyway" (!!!!) but still doesn't forgive him. But... dude, he's a RAPIST.

I'm interested to know what you guys think. We (the readers) are able to forgive Frank for being a thief. But I don't want to forgive him for being a rapist--perhaps because I'm uncomfortable with Malamud's choices here. At one point, Frank muses on the difficulty of being redeemed from one horrible act, but--and this is key--the rape is not presented as that one horrible act. It's presented as a little bit of backsliding on the road to redemption. When, in fact, as far as I'm concerned, it's the worst thing that Frank does. Phew! Long spoiler bar.

If the author clearly wants us to forgive a character, what happens when we have a hard time doing so? (This is all especially weird contrasted with Money, the last book I read, wherein John Self is a total antihero, way worse than Frank in many ways. He just 1) doesn't cross that line and 2) isn't portrayed quite the same way Frank is, in the end. Plus, the tone of the book is satirical, which makes a huge difference.

Anyway, I really liked reading this, and I was up for a while last night, thinking about it. If you don't mind spoilers or don't plan to ever read this, or have read it already, chime in and let me know how you felt about all of this.

"Whatever she read, he crept into her thoughts; in every book he haunted the words, a character in a plot somebody else had invented, as if all associations had only one end. He was, to begin with, everywhere. So, without speaking of it, they met again in the library. That they were meeting among books relieved her doubt, as if she believed, what possible wrong can I do among books, what possible harm can come to me here?" (p. 131)

Money (by Martin Amis)

Y'all know how I feel about the unreliable narrator, right? Can't get enough of him! This unreliable narrator, John Self, is basically drunk through the entirety of this novel, which makes the narration hilarious, but also leaves holes in the text. He objectifies women to a horrifying degree, is slightly racist, is monstrously self-centered, and yet somehow is still funny and somehow sympathetic? In a weird way?

The novel has a lot going on, with super symbolic names (like "John Self") and with the author, Martin Amis, showing up as a character in the novel and apologizing for tormenting his characters (of course, while John Self is in the middle of being tormented by various events) and then not to give too much away, but at the end, as often happens with unreliable narrators, the reader finds out what's been going on between the lines of the book all along.

This book is laugh-out-loud funny, pretty dirty, brilliantly written, with some terrific observations about our consumer culture. And I bookmarked so many quotes I don't even know where to start. If you don't mind super-penisy novels (and I think you know where you fall on the penisy novel spectrum) this one really, really works.

Now the way I figured it I had six realistic options. I could sack out right away, with some scotch and a few Serafim. I could go back to the Happy Isles and see what little Moby was up to. I could call Doris Arthur. I could catch a live sex show around the corner, in bleeding Seventh Avenue. I could go out and get drunk. I could stay in and get drunk.

In the end I stayed in and got drunk. The trouble was, I did all the other things first. Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who is doing all the moving. I'm not the station, I'm not the stop: I'm the train. I'm the train.

At Lady Molly’s: Book Four of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

I often go to check out Amazon reviews after I finish a book. There's one lone guy reviewing all of the books in this series, but I'm enjoying his thoughts on them. There's also a "popular highlights" feature for the Kindle edition, where you can see what other people highlighted on their Kindles. It's a little creepy that Amazon is tracking my highlights, but I do enjoy seeing what people decide to highlight. It's never the same stuff that I do. (Except this quote, for obvious reasons: "Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they’ll marry anybody.")

I liked At Lady Molly's quite a bit. The beginning is slow, since yet more characters are introduced, but the narrator's observations of life continue to be witty and the characters are interesting (if perhaps somewhat too numerous and slightly difficult to keep track of at times). Strangely, in this book the narrator gets engaged, but there's almost nothing in there about the woman he's engaged to, or anything about their courtship at all. It's strange because in the previous book, there's a lot of detail about his love affair with another character. But maybe we'll get to spend more time with her in the next volume.

The other quibble I have is that it's getting to be way too coincidental for the narrator to happen to show up at almost every significant event or bump into all the main characters continuously or have seemingly every character divulge deep dark secrets to him. It's really the secrets thing that's the most glaring, since in a couple of cases towards the end of this book (Jeavons and Conyers) there's really no reason for them to have these explicit conversations with Nick, of all people. But the conversations themselves are interesting, so there you go.

"Would it be too explicit, too exaggerated, to say that when I set eyes on Isobel Tolland, I knew at once that I should marry her? Something like that is the truth; certainly nearer the truth than merely to record those vague, inchoate sentiments of interest which I was so immediately conscious. It was as if I had known her for many years already; enjoyed happiness with her and suffered sadness. I was conscious of that, as of another life, nostalgically remembered."

Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust (by Nathanael West)

I just realized I never did my year-end book post! I'll have to put that up soon. (It was not a busy reading year, I'll say that much.) In the meantime, The Day of the Locust is on the Time 100 list, and it came in a volume with two short novellas, that one and Miss Lonelyhearts.

Lonelyhearts is a series of bleak vignettes about a man who answers an advice column in the paper and basically becomes a sponge for all the world's despair. It's pretty poetic. But Locust is the one I really want to talk about (especially since it's the Time 100 pick.)

Locust is about people on the fringes of the movie industry in Hollywood, set during the Great Depression. It reminded me of Breakfast at Tiffany's, only it's set in L.A. instead of New York, and the "Fred" of the story isn't a vanilla narrator who is most probably gay, but instead is a screenwriter named Tod who likes to fantasize about raping Holly Golightly. Plus, it's super satirical. So maybe not that similar at all?

Not only is it satire, it's specific-to-Los-Angeles satire. Each one of the characters is a type (including the pathetic everyman "Homer Simpson"--the name might not be a coincidence). For example, it's hard not to read the clash between a cowboy and a Mexican guy over the sexual favors of the desirable aspiring starlet Faye as anything but a metaphor for the settling of California. (Plus, Faye, who represents the specifically Californian American dream, descends into prostitution at one point. Come on, that is so totally the film industry!) West reportedly admired Hemingway--it's very The Sun Also Rises in terms of the sexual metaphor. But it ends with a full-on riot and descent into madness at, of course, a film premiere.

If you like satire, or the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles, where the line between actress and prostitute is wafer-thin and where dreams go to die--this is the novella for you!

"Throwing away his cigarette, he went through the swinging doors of the saloon. There was no back to the building and he found himself in a Paris street. He followed it to its end, coming out in a Romanesque courtyard... on a lawn of fiber, a group of men and women in riding costume were picnicking. They were eating cardboard food in front of a cellophane waterfall."

The Marriage Plot (by Jeffrey Eugenides)

Reading this book, I didn't know about all the David Foster Wallace controversy (to what extent is the character of Leonard based on him, and is it a mean-spirited portrayal, even if it is?) I also have not read Middlesex. So it is from a particularly ignorant point of view that I say I deeply enjoyed this novel.

Digging into it was like digging into Visit from the Goon Squad, just really good, really enjoyable literary fiction. I loved the characters, as annoying as each of then were at times. (Yes, Leonard felt most annoying of all.) I adored the ending. Just a great, juicy, enjoyable read. Is Middlesex this good? I'd better get to it.

(I really wanted to highlight or dog-ear a number of passages in the book, but I was borrowing a copy. I'll have to re-read it so I can pull out my favorite quotes.)

The Acceptance World: Book Three of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

For some reason, this volume didn't grab me as much as the first two, and thus it took me a while to finish it. I also saw some reviews (which I guess only show up on your Kindle, not on the Amazon site) talking about how Powell is clearly satirizing his friends like George Orwell and all these other people. Reading that I realized how much of the satire I'm probably missing in these books! But I'm enjoying them anyway. This one less so. Still overall, an interesting world is beginning to develop. Plus, the narrator is having a hot and heavy affair with a married woman who at one point answers the door naked. So how bad can it be?

"There is always a real and an imaginary person you are in love with; sometimes you love one best, sometimes the other."

I Don't Know How She Does It (by Allison Pearson)

Bought to pass the time while we waited six hours for our plane. There's nothing like chicklit when you're exhausted and on a plane!

The trailer for this movie is hideous, but everything I read about it said the book was better. I did really enjoy the book! As a new mom about to go back to work, the musings on balancing motherhood and career and having an identity all hit very close to home. There are some smart observations here!

Two disappoitments. One is that there are a couple of gratuitous fat references (the main character, Kate, meets a receptionist who is described as very fat, and Kate spends some time wondering why the receptionist is so unhappy that she has to eat so much--the character is never seen or mentioned again). The second thing is (major spoiler alert) the ending involves her giving up her job, which she talks about throughout the whole book as loving and being very good at. I felt like there should have been a compromise, and the message shouldn't have boiled down to: working moms, quit your jobs! Your babies need you! Does the movie end the same way?

Anyway: perfect fluffy reading for a plane, and definitely smarter than the average chick lit.

A Buyer's Market: Book Two of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

I'm still enjoying this series of novels, and already on to number three!

Usually I like to read through the Amazon reviews after I've finished a book, but this book doesn't even have Amazon reviews. It's like living IN THE DARK AGES.

(They do have a list of "popular highlights," of which my favorite is this one: "For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.")

In this novel, the protagonist has a job of some sort in an art book publishing house, but the novel barely touches on his job at all, more about the people who drift in and out of his life. I'm starting to get a feel for him as a slightly unreliable narrator; in the scene where he loses his virginity, he says something like "and there may have been an embrace," either downplaying the sex, or (perhaps) putting a fissure in that layer of trust between the reader and the narrator. It makes the narrative voice that much more interesting. (One of the characters also gets an illegal abortion, which is presented more clearly, and one of them makes some kinky remark about tying up "bad girls," so I don't think it's prudishness in general happening here.)

I was less interested in the characters introduced here (primarily Deacon and Gypsy Jones) than the ones introduced in the previous volume who come back in this one (Jean and Widmerpool), though Barnby has potential. I have to say I love the character names in general here: Widmerpool, Stringham, Mrs. Ardglass, Magnus Donners.

I know this writeup is pretty confused; it's late and I'm sleepy. But I did want to say something before I lose track of what happened in Book Two vs. Book Three, which I'm reading now!

"Barnby used to say that he knew a bill-broker, scarcely aware even how pictures are produced, who could at the same time enter any gallery and pick out the most expensively priced work there 'from Masaccio to Matisse', simply through the mystic power of his own respect for money."

A Question of Upbringing: Book One of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

So I was taking a look at ye olde Time 100 book list to see if I had any prayer of finishing the list before the end of the year. I only ("only") have 21 books left, but it turns out that in addition to Gravity's Rainbow, which I know is very long, and The Sot-Weed Factor, which I started but misplaced in the move (bad since it's a library book), which is also long, The Recognitions is also almost 1000 pages long. (It sounds absolutely amazing, though; apparently it was a huge influence on Catch-22.)

So I learn all of this and think, well maybe, and then I get to A Dance to the Music of Time, which it turns out is not one but twelve novels. Twelve! So, yeah. Finishing the list this year might be a challenge.

Anyway, I bought this first book on my Kindle. It was only $6, but still, buying all twelve books won't be cheap, so I'd better look into library lending for the later volumes. (If I can learn not to lose books.) It also was a quick read; 223 pages for the paperback version. I also love love loved it. It's more of a British novel of manners, not a whole lot of action, more human observation, but the writing is just fabulous, with a lot of wit, and I loved the characters and the details of this world (aristocratic England in the 1920s). I'm not sorry at all there are 12 books in the cycle, because I have a feeling I'll enjoy them. How great is this quote?:

"I thought, at first, that he worked far harder than most of the men I knew. Later I came to doubt this, finding that Quiggin's work was something to be discussed rather than tackled, and that what he really enjoyed was drinking cups of coffee at odd times of day."

Herzog (by Saul Bellow)

Another one of those books on my reading list that was a slog to get through. I'd call it a "novel of ideas," but only because it doesn't have much of a plot. (There are hundreds of pages of random stream of consciousness letters.) It deals with the idea of modernity and what it means, and in a way is a rejoinder to the idea of the modern world as a Wasteland. But I would much rather have a conversation about that or read a really good postmodern poem. This novel isn't postmodernist, although it's a 1960s novel, and this makes it feel kind of stale. Basically, it feels like the poor man's Ulysses, and I don't even love Ulysses.

"He noted with distaste his own trick of appealing for sympathy. A personality had its own ways. A mind might observe them without approval. Herzog did not care for his own personality, and at the moment there was apparently nothing he could do about its impulses." (p. 20)

Will Grayson, Will Grayson (by John Green and David Levithan)

YA on the Kindle is a bad idea; one night of breastfeeding and this book was done! I enjoy John Green, so I knew I would enjoy this, about two guys named Will Grayson. I liked the focus on gay teenage boys (only one of the Wills is gay, but there are a number of gay characters that feature heavily in the plot).

I wish the depression stuff had been handled with more depth; I think the issue is that Green's half is better written than Levithan's half, and it's Levithan's Will who is depressed. There is some discussion of how depression is a real thing and often misunderstood by teenagers, but it's underexplored, I think.

Overall, worth reading if you like YA (especially John Green's stuff).

The Imperfectionists (by Tom Rachman)

Recommended by Jenfu after I enjoyed Goon Squad and damn, books go fast on my Kindle app while I'm nursing. (I also re-read Persuasion in between Goon Squad and this). I need some recommendations for longer books, because otherwise I'm going to go broke! Or someone needs to explain how to borrow friends' books on my Kindle. That's a real thing, right?

Anyway, another novel from multiple perspectives, set at an English-language newspaper in Rome. Very similar in feel to Goon Squad, although less "literary" feeling. I really enjoyed it with one caveat, which is (spoiler) Something Bad Happens to an Animal. I can't really handle that at the best of times, not to mention when I'm hormonal. But otherwise, a really good (and sadly very fast) read!

A Visit from the Goon Squad (by Jennifer Egan)

Really engaging, with some terrific chapters and amazing characters. Loved the linkage between the stories (even if ultimately I wished the stories were a little less linked, ala David Mitchell, so I could get a Noreen chapter or a Rolph chapter instead of more Bennie and Sasha). But that's just me.

I really loved some of the chapters, like the safari chapter (which I read first in the New Yorker) and the Powerpoint chapter (which could have been gimmicky but had surprising depth). It edged towards cartoonish at moments for me (like the chapter about the General) and I would have also preferred more realism. Again, that feels like me projecting again!

So for what the book is as opposed to what I wanted it to be, it is a really great read. I actually am looking forward to re-reading it, picking up more of the links between the chapters and the characters.

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean, by Susan Casey

This one has been on my "to-read" list for a while and, again, a breezy non-fiction book seemed like a good option for reading while nursing. (Although literary fiction is turning out to be fine too; I'm almost done with A Visit from the Goon Squad.)

This book alternates between talking about big wave surfing and about the science of climate change, salvage operations in different parts of the ocean, and other ways that "rogue waves" are affecting the world. There's a lot of scary prediction about climate change causing more rogue waves, tsunamis, and earthquakes, and I didn't enjoy those parts as much because I prefer to be in denial about that stuff! (Actually, feeling there's nothing I can really do about it, and knowing that we're screwing up the planet, it's just incredibly frustrating.) But I wouldn't call it a flaw in the book, necessarily. You do get the idea after a while though.

The pacing is slightly off at points. For instance, when we're following the big wave surfers (which is totally my favorite part of the book, and takes up about half the narrative), one chapter ends with the surfers (and the author) all speeding to Mexico to catch a huge wave in, like, 2009. The next chapter begins, and suddenly we're in Alaska in the 1960s. Like, what happened to Mexico? I don't mind alternating the perspective, but there are instances where ending on a semi-cliffhanger throws off the flow of the book.

Anyway, overall, I really enjoyed it!

Forever Liesl (by Charmian Carr)

I took the advice of a friend and downloaded a Kindle app for my Smartphone to read while nursing, and I've been doing just that the past few days. (I also have an actual Kindle, but the app is handier, since I also have a stopwatch on my phone that I use to time how long the baby is nursing.) I decided to start off with something super light, hence this memoir by The Sound of Music's Liesl.

Definitely a fun read if you're into the movie, and definitely a very light read. I wanted it to be better written and denser; for instance, I really don't get a good sense of the personalities of most of the "von Trapp kids," and I get the sense there's a lot of dirt she isn't dishing. (Come on, she and Christopher Plummer were relatively close in age and super hot. Tell me more, Liesl!) I also wanted more details about the movie itself. It just felt like there could have been more there there. Still worth a read if you're a fan.

On a completely tangential note, I saw Charmian Carr when we went to the Hollywood Bowl a few years ago for Singalong Sound of Music. She is still just as beautiful as she was when she played Liesl.

The Complete Persepolis (by Marjane Satrapi)

The last book I taught in my World Literature course. Really a lot of fun to discuss; the graphic novel made a nice change of pace to round out the end of the semester, and the final papers were on the whole super smart. Again, it's been a while, so I'm trying to remember what we talked about. I know we talked about feminism in Iran; Marjane's character as a metaphor for the Iranian people; the importance of the "simple" visual style; the importance of the amount of "real estate" the graphics took up; the theme of art in general, and the subversiveness of the graphic novel form; the role of Western culture; the controversy over the book's portrayal of Islam; other interesting shit like that. An excellent teaching book.

Chocolate and Vicodin (by Jennette Fulda)

I'm just randomly guessing on the date that I finished this book. I just forgot to blog about it! I remembered to Facebook about it though, which totally counts. A book by my friend Jennette about her headache that wouldn't go away. I really liked it, as I always do Jennette's writing. There's this kind of clean, straightforward, sensible tone to it that I always enjoy. I think I like the way she organizes information in her head. Anyway, it's always hard to "review" books by friends. Especially when you've had a baby since you finished reading it, and have forgotten most of the details. All I can say is, I'm proud of Jennette, and I super-liked the book!

Waiting (by Ha Jin)

Another book for class! It was a'ight. I mean, a good book, but really suffered with comparison to Oscar Wao, which we'd just finished discussing. I liked it, I just wasn't crazy about it. And really right now, don't have anything exciting to say about it! (I really liked the ending though.)

One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (by Jasper Fforde)

The latest Jasper Fforde book! It was the first thing I bought for my new Kindle (a birthday gift from Ian). I do love the Thursday Next series, and this one is really fun, and takes place almost entirely in the BookWorld (as opposed to the RealWorld). As funny and enjoyable as ever. Plus, there's a seventh one planned! Yay, Jasper Fforde!

I still have Shades of Grey on my "to read" pile, though. Gotta get to that one of these days.

The Namesake (by Jhumpa Lahiri)

I just finished teaching this one too (now in the middle of Oscar Wao). I haven't read Interpreter of Maladies, but I absolutely loved The Namesake. Gorgeous prose, excellent story, good class discussion. Would teach again!

The Men Who Would Be King (by Nicole LaPorte)*

Here's the subtitle of this book: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies, and a Company Called DreamWorks. You can see why I kept it out of the post title.

So, this was another audiobook where the narrator drove me crazy. First of all, the book is by a woman, and she's a character in the book occasionally (as in, "when I met with so-and-so at the Ivy" or whatever). So it was irritating on general principle that the narrator was a man. ("It's a Hollywood story about dudes! We need a MAN VOICE.") But I could have gotten past that if I enjoyed his narration. I could nitpick about the words he mispronounced or the ones he pronounced annoyingly, but really the problem is that rather than speaking the words, he intoned them. Every sentence is... intoned. It's this inflated, stentorian, annoying voice that really bugged me from start to finish.

That being said, I still listened to the whole thing. It's a fun and insidery book full of Hollywood gossip. I could boil it down for you: DreamWorks was a series of dumb decisions, Spielberg is somewhat selfish, Katzenberg is a putz, Geffen is rich and pointless. There was never any unity among them. Hollywood is all about holding stupid grudges and being ridiculously greedy about money and awards. And about people with penises, who have all the power. Probably stuff we already knew, but still fun to read about, if you like that kind of thing. Just don't get the audiobook!

Red Harvest (by Dashiell Hammett)

An entry on the Time 100 booklist, probably more for what it represents (Hammett's first book featuring the unnammed "Continental Op" narrator) than for the book as itself, although I did read an interesting idea that the story of a corrupt town turning on itself can be seen as a Lord of the Flies-esque meditation on human nature.

The narrator seems to stay a few steps of the reader and withholds a lot in terms of motivation, which makes it (for me) not quite as much fun to read. (I like unreliable narrators, but not needlessly recalcitrant ones.) There's also a little bit of scaffolding showing throughout--at times, the narrator does things that would almost certainly get him killed, except that Hammett needs him to keep narrating the book.

That being said, it was a fun and quick read, a nice way to dive back into the list. I think I have 20 books left, if I'm counting correctly. Those 20 are:

The Adventures of Augie March
American Pastoral
The Assistant
At Swim-Two-Birds
Blood Meridian
Call It Sleep
The Confessions of Nat Turner
A Dance to the Music of Time
The Day of the Locust
Deliverance
Dog Soldiers
Falconer
Gravity's Rainbow
Herzog
Loving
Money
The Power and the Glory
Ragtime
The Sheltering Sky
The Sot-Weed Factor

Graceland (by Chris Abani)

I'm just finishing up teaching this novel, so I figured I should write about it! It was recommended by Aych, and worked out really well for the class, which is a World Lit class that's focusing on the issues each novel raises about the region in which it's set. This one is set in Lagos, Nigeria, and deals with issues like Western influence and postcolonialism, as well as poverty and the economy, native traditions and women's rights issues... there was a lot to talk about, and we had some good class discussions (at least the percentage of the class that did the reading).

That sounds kind of dry maybe, but the story is also pretty compelling in and of itself: it's the coming of age story of a young boy named Elvis (after Elvis Presley) who is a very likeable, if flawed, protagonist. It's set in Africa so a lot of terrible things happen, but it's nonetheless a great novel! Next up, The Namesake.

An Object of Beauty (by Steve Martin)

I do love me some Steve Martin. I was so sad that this wasn't on audiobook with Steve Martin as the narrator, since I loved listening to his two previous novellas. But then I found out there are reproductions of artworks throughout the book, and I realized I wouldn't have wanted to miss those. (I would just have read it twice, though.)

So, this is a book about the New York art scene and about art, told as the story of an anti-heroine named Lacey Yeager. I really enjoyed everything about this book--the quietness of the plot (which is I think a Steve Martin signature) and the discussions of art from various places and eras.

I honestly don't know how successful Lacey is as a character (there is some male fantasy in there about female sexuality, where I think it's pretty clear a guy wrote it) but she was convincing enough for me to really, really enjoy this book. Write another one, Steve Martin! And read it on audiobook! Pretty please?

Year-End Book Wrapup '10

The end of another year, time for another book wrapup!

I thought my tally of books would be very pitiful this year because I spent a lot of the year too nauseous to read, but I see that at 59 books, I read more than I did last year. 30 were by women, 29 were by men, a delightfully even gender split. [Edited to add: turns out I read 60 books, 31 by women, and forgot to write about one of them. Oops.]

The one sad thing is that I did not finish the Time 100 list. I read 9 books from the list, which I think means I have 24 to go. This was the reading project I really wanted to complete this year. Maybe next year! A girl can dream.

And now, the top and bottom books of the year. It's kind of fun to go through the list and see which books I've forgotten about and which have stayed with me, for better or worse. More hits than misses once again this year, I see!

Top five books of the year:

1. The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
The big caveat about this book is that it takes place near Hiroshima after World War II, but focuses almost entirely on white Europeans. If you can get past that and take the novel on its own terms, in which war and disaster is merely a backdrop, it's marvelous. The language is sumptuous, and I just adored it. I'm surprised it isn't more famous. It's just so incredibly... good.

2. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
This book alternately frustrated and fascinated me, and when I was done, I felt like I had gained some sort of greater understanding of Russian literature and history and culture and human nature. I don't know if this was the most enjoyable book of the year, which is why I almost put it lower down on the list. But I found myself relating all kinds of things in my life to War and Peace for weeks after I was done with it. And now I find myself wanting to read it again, in a different translation, just for fun. Ultimately, reading all 1300 pages was worth it, and it was definitely my must-read of the year.

3. Looking for Alaska by John Green
From a Russian masterpiece to a YA novel, why not? The thing is, this is a really, really terrific YA novel. It's got humor and honesty and heart, and the characters are compelling. I neither want to oversell it or give anything away, but if you're into YA at all, you should read this.

4. Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
Oh, I just loved this series of loosely autobiographical stories, one of which was the basis for Cabaret, about Berlin in the 1930s. It's a world that I loved immersing myself in. After I finished it, we watched Cabaret (of course), Chris and Don: A Love Story (a documentary about Isherwood and his longtime partner), and A Single Man (the acclaimed Colin Firth movie also based on Isherwood's writing). One of my favorite tangents of the year: the Isherwood tangent! Highly recommended.

5. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
After I read it I thought this book would surely be closer to number one, but then I taught it this year, along with my favorite book from last year, Never Let Me Go. While the Ishiguro really stood up to the test of the classroom (and my students loved it, across the board) the Bechdel worked less well, and I think it lessened my affection for it a little. I found that I didn't enjoy discussing it as much as I did Ishiguro. I almost kicked it off the list in favor of Joan Didion. That being said, I can't forget that it was this book I demanded everyone read this year, including my book club, and that I decided to teach it in the first place. So here it is at number five.

A few honorable mentions: Game Change (about the 2008 election), Netherland by Joseph O'Neill, The Help by Kathryn Stockett, Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, The Possessed by Elif Batuman, and the runner-up for this list, Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion.

Bottom five books of the year:

1. The Christmas Cookie Club by Ann Pearlman
Thought this would be a fun, fluffy audiobook, but it really is embarrassingly awful. My original review covers it pretty well.

2. Baby Proof by Emily Giffen
Most of the books on this list are less empirically terrible and more irritating or disappointing in some way. But in addition to being annoying, the writing itself here (very "tell, don't show") kinda sucks. On top of that, it has a promising premise and then blows it with a stupid ending. Approaching this book as a feminist just made me angry, and it's not very good anyway, hence it "wins" the dubious honor of being number two here.

3. A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
Oops, I see that I never even wrote about this book or added it to my booklist! Well, I'm sorry to say that after hearing all my friends rave about Lorrie Moore and reading this novel, I ended up violently hating it. After the first, oh, I don't know, five pages, I started keeping a list of all the utterly implausible things that characters say and do in this book. Nobody in this book behaves even remotely like a real human being. So while the writing itself is good, in terms of plausibility, it's a disaster. I wouldn't have bothered to finish it if it hadn't been our book club selection. I possibly would have run it over with my car instead. It annoyed me that much. Sorry, Lorrie Moore fans.

4. The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski
I can see the value of this book as an allegory for the horrors of war. However, it sticks in my mind as basically a book about animal (and occasional young boy) torture. Just unrelentingly awful. Like The Tin Drum, it created a world that I never want to enter into again, and thinking about it even now gives me the squicks.

5. Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins
I think the Hunger Games series is done a disservice by this book, which has a good chunk of action happen off-screen and disappointed me on many levels (which may or may not be fair, I've heard arguments on both sides). I read the entire trilogy very quickly and once Mockingjay had a chance to sink in, I guess I decided I didn't like it so much. I think there are worse books I read this year as books (although all the weird offscreen action and strange pacing is not very good) but it was a notable disappointment for me in terms of the trilogy, so it ends up here.

Honorable mentions go to One Day, which is 3/4 of a good book, and the book that made me give up on the Beekeeper's Apprentice series, A Letter of Mary. Also, my biggest disappointment was The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, by David Mitchell, which is not by any means a bad book; it's good. I just have the highest, highest standards for Mitchell, and I wanted to love and adore this book the way I love and adore everything else he's ever written, not just mildly like it.

And now, on to 2011!

The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America (by Michael Ruhlman)

I've been going Top Chef crazy this season, so I picked up this book for hopefully a good insidery look at cheffing. I was a little disappointed because the author didn't actually go through the full training at CIA; he went in as a reporter, and dipped in and out of various classes. So you do get some good day-by-day insight into some of the classes, but not all of them. There's quite a lot in there about the tension between his reporter role and his desire to be a cook, which is to me the least interesting thing about the book.

My other minor issue with the book is that he doesn't always explain terms. I had to look up the definition of, say, "confit." I did learn a lot doing that, but I would have preferred a few more quick or slightly clearer explanations along the way. I guess I'd say it was a pretty good book that didn't wow me as much as it could have. Having just done my year-end wrapup, I can guarantee I won't remember much about it this time next year!

Freedom (by Jonathan Franzen)

Ian gave me some great advice when beginning this book: don't think about all the arguments about whether Franzen is overrated or the Greatest Writer Ever, or whether the book is overpraised or underpraised or whatever. Just enjoy it as a page-turning novel. And I did: I started it yesterday and finished it yesterday, all 500+ pages, and it was a lovely way to spend the day.

(Part of the reason for my book binge is that I haven't read books in a while due to months of constant low-grade nausea making it impossible to concentrate; so now I'm making up for lost time.)

So, as a page-turner, I really enjoyed it. I don't think it's a particularly wondrous writing achievement, and here's one reason: there's a whole section that's supposed to be "written" by one of the characters, but it's the exact same writing style as the third-person narrator who narrates the rest of the novel. I mean, sorry Franzen, but David Mitchell would never! Also, I think he tries a little too hard to hammer the theme of "freedom," having multiple characters go on and on about how they're free or not free or what they think of freedom. Some thought-provoking passages, but on the whole, I think he's better when he's not trying so transparently to be profound.

I am a Corrections fan, and I'm a Franzen fan. It was a really fun read: not a masterpiece.

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and People Who Read Them (by Elif Batuman)

A book that's really hard to describe. Ian went to her book reading when she was in town and brought back signed copies for half the people he knows, so I finally decided to pick this up and read it for myself. It's less of a unified book and more of a series of disconnected stories or essays or meditations on various Russian (and Uzbek) writers and their works, as well as stories of, say, attending a conference on Tolstoy, touring the Petersburg ice palace, or spending a summer with a vaguely horrible woman in Uzbekistan.

It's incredibly erudite, well-written and not in the least overwritten, and both thought provoking and entertaining. I mean, it's really funny, and I did laugh out loud a lot while reading it. In spite of the complexity of the ideas (I found the discussion on mimetic theory super interesting) it's very readable; I tore through it in about two days. I wanted more on the novels that I have read--like War and Peace of course--and I wanted to read the novels that she talks about that I haven't gotten to yet--like Eugene Onegin.

I honestly don't know how to describe this book. If you like Russian novels, or even if you just like novels, you should give it a shot. Here's my favorite bit, about names in contemporary American writing:

The premium on conciseness and concreteness made proper names a great value – so they came flying at you as if out of a tennis-ball machine: Julia, Juliet, Viola, Violet, Rusty, Lefty, Carl, Carla, Carleton, Mamie, Sharee, Sharon, Rose of Sharon (a Native American), Hassan. Each name betrayed a secret calculation, a weighing of plausibility against precision: On the one hand, the cat called King Spanky; on the other, the cat called Cat. In either case, the result somehow seemed false, contrived – unlike Tolstoy’s double Alexeis, and unlike Chekhov’s characters, many of whom didn’t have names at all. In ‘Lady With Lapdog,’ Gurov’s wife, Anna’s husband, Gurov’s crony at the club, even the lapdog, are all nameless. No contemporary American short-story writer would have had the stamina not to name that lapdog.

Baby Proof (by Emily Giffen)*

I enjoyed Something Borrowed and Something Blue, so I thought this might be a fun chicklit read. Actually, it was kind of irritating.

First is the plot itself. The main character, Claudia, marries her perfect husband, Ben, and they both agree they don't want kids. She has perfectly valid reasons for not wanting them. Then, he suddenly decides he desperately wants a kid. Without much discussion or therapy or anything else that would be reasonable in this situation, they split up. (This happens at the beginning of the book, so it's not a huge spoiler.) I basically hated this guy. I mean, he's not the one who has to give birth to a child, and he's the one who changed his mind after they'd already agreed on no kids.

Yet all the other characters tell Claudia that basically she should change her mind and have a baby to get him back because he's just so awesome. If he was even slightly awesome, he wouldn't have been so quick to run out the door just because he had changed his mind and she didn't want to change hers. You can't "compromise" on parenthood, as it is a lifelong commitment. SO HE IS OBVIOUSLY NOT AWESOME. HE SUCKS.

And apart from that, there's the way the story is told, which is basically in a series of expositiony passeges. At first I thought "oh, she's just giving us the setup, then we'll get into the actual book." But no, it's pretty much "I was sitting at my counter remembering the conversation I had with this other character, where she told me this story about her life. Blah blah exposition." "So-and-so called me and told me what had been going on with her, which was blah blah blah." I don't know how to explain it, except my friend Katie was talking about "narrative distance" and "scene-based writing" today, and I was like YES, this book I am listening to HAS THAT EXACT PROBLEM.

Anyway. Thumbs down.

The Thief (by Megan Whelan Turner)

I forget where I heard this book talked up, but people told me it was amazing and that I should read it. Sorry, people who told me that, whoever you are, but I was completely underwhelmed.

I didn't get invested in the characters or the world. I didn't care about the political intrigues. The ending was good, but not nearly good enough. Mostly, I was just really bored. I definitely will not be reading the rest of the series. Maybe you have to be 12 to really appreciate this one?

Four Books (Cabot, Rebello, Krakauer, Griffin)

Most of the reading I've been doing lately has been in the form of audiobooks, which three out of four of these books are:

How to Be Popular, by Meg Cabot*
Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, by Stephen Rebello
Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer*
Official Book Club Selection (Abridged) by Kathy Griffin*

I drove to and from Los Angeles last week, and listened to Into Thin Air for most of that trip. Now, I've read the book probably five times, but I've never listened to the audiobook, so I'm counting it as a "new" book. Krakauer reads it himself, and does a great job. It was the perfect read for that particular trip, (which was to go to a friend's funeral) since it is always engrossing, but I could allow my mind to wander and that was okay too.

After that I started Kathy Griffin's book, which I was hesitant about because I wasn't a huge Griffin fan, but I loved it, and now I want to rent her show on DVD. She is super open about everything from the disintegration of her marriage to her probably-pedophile brother, and she tells a lot of funny and charming stories about celebrities she's dated, fought with, worked with, and whatnot. I'm sad it is abridged, which I didn't notice until after I'd downloaded it. I want more, Kathy Griffin!

And (I'm so going out of order here) I also enjoyed Meg Cabot's "How to Be Popular," which is charmingly Cabot-esque YA, read by Kate Reinders. I was like "how do I know that name?" and then looked her up and realized I saw her play Glinda in Wicked in Chicago. (The last Cabot audiobook I listened to was read by a very young Elisabeth Moss. They do a great job picking narrators.)

Finally, I was going through a box of old books from my storage unit and found the Psycho book, which I don't think I'd ever actually read all the way through before. If you're a fan of the movie, it's a really fun book. The thing that sticks in my mind is the discussion of that shot where Marion rips up her piece of paper and flushes it down the toilet before she takes her shower. Seeing a toilet flush was supposed to be disconcerting for the viewer, according to Hitchcock. And it still is!

I've also been re-reading other stuff from that box: a volume of Sherlock Holmes stories, Hail, Hail Camp Timberwood and Remember Me to Harold Square and some old Babysitters-Club books. But I never count re-reads, so I'm leaving them off the list. They are, however, among the many reasons I haven't started Freedom or The Master yet.