Besides that it’s been very light.  I went through a month of hardly any reading.  In June I think I finished 2 books.  Sometimes that happens.  These days I watch nothing and I’m back to heavy reading again.  The other day I was in the middle of only 4 books and felt like it just wasn’t enough.  Yes, I’m nuts.

My new library is wonderful.  Great selection, part of a large network.  The New Books shelf is always well-stocked.  Even better, they have something I’ve never seen before: the Speed Read shelf.  I believe you can’t reserve anything on that shelf, first-come first-serve.  But you only get the book for a week.  It’s an excellent idea and I’ve already used it to get a book I’d waited to get for weeks at my old library.

My fluff has been okay.  I read the new Scott Turow, Innocent.  I wish I could recommend it.  Especially since the last few Turow books I’ve read have really convinced me he’s better than I thought.  I have a theory about it.  The last half of the book is pretty good.  I think that was the starting point in his mind, but to get there in the first half requires extensive suspension of disbelief.  You have to believe that after the events of Presumed Innocent, the protagonist Rusty and his wife are still together years later.  Which I don’t believe at all.  And you have to believe that after being put on trial for murder, Rusty totally got elected to a fancy judge-ship.  Don’t believe that either.

The additional melodrama involved is constantly eye-roll-inducing.  And while the second half with the courtroom stuff is very interesting and much better, it suffers from jumping narrators, which hardly happened at all in the first half of the book.  It gets jittery instead of committing.  And none of the characters come through making much sense.  It’s a real shame; when it comes to legal tricks Turow is right up there with the best of them.  I’m very nitpicky about courtroom scenes in books and his are pretty first rate.  Too bad there’s all the other stuff along with it.

It took me a long time to get through Innocent, mostly because of that dull first half.  It didn’t help that when I had a free moment I would usually pick up Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino instead.  Kirino’s Out is one of my favorite crime novels and it drove me nuts that my old library didn’t have any of her other books.  She’s huge in Japan but getting her stuff translated and brought to the US is a very slow process, I guess.  Grotesque is not as good as Out, they don’t have much in common, really.  I suppose I could say that in many ways Grotesque is not as good as Innocent.  But it’s better where it matters: it’s interesting.  The narrative was nutty, there was a serious lack of subtlety, the unreliable narrator device was pushed to several extremes.  And yet… I really enjoyed reading it.  If there’s one thing I can say about Kirino, she knows how to draw you in and not let you go.  I see that kind of thing mentioned on blurbs all the time but I rarely actually experience it.  She’s really impressive.  She’s certainly not afraid to use completely unsympathetic and often unlikable characters and she pulls it off quite well.

You must have a stomach to get through Kirino, though.  Out is, well, quite graphic and Grotesque is too in many ways.  It’s dark dark dark.  Although I much prefer dark and twisted like Kirino than someone like Chelsea Cain, who is dark the way tv crime shows for old people are dark: purely for shock value.

Speaking of dark and twisted, if you’re looking for the female Chinese-American version of Chuck Palahniuk, look no further than Angela S. Choi and her novel Hello Kitty Must Die.  I don’t like making that comparison.  It isn’t that it’s not apt, it’s just a little too on-the-nose and I’m sure Choi’s had plenty of that.  Then again, she does certainly invite the comparison.  Definitely better than Palahniuk’s recent stuff, more like his old stuff.

If instead you’d like something that’s an homage in the opposite direction you have The Three Weissmans of Westport by Cathleen Schine, which is like Sense and Sensibility except that everyone’s middle-aged.  The romance is often convenient, and sometimes things feel a bit contrived, but I also have to say that in many ways Schine improves on the ending of S&S, which always felt a bit off to me.

One of my recent YA books that I really enjoyed was Incarceron by Catherine Fisher.  Very interesting, very well done, I hope there will be more books in the future.  Fantasy is often not my thing but I think that’s more because it’s usually done badly than any actual problems with the genre itself.

So let’s just get those unwritten post ideas out of the way to hit some of the highlights.  (Most of these will be covered in more depth in my Best of the Year So Far list that I’ll be making next month.)

–The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker is exactly the kind of book I would normally skip.  Plot-less, meandering, and about a poet.  Instead it was an absolute joy and I was very sad when it was over.  It was also highly quotable, I wanted to take so many of the sentences and cross-stitch them as samplers.

–I had a post in my head about how to write about big “issues” well vs. badly.  So Much for That by Lionel Shriver is the “well.”  The love-or-hate A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore is the “badly.”  (Which tells you which camp I fell into.)  There were a few times in Shriver’s big bold novel on health care that I felt a bit alienated because it was just so on-the-nose, but I think she showed exactly how real people’s lives intersect with such massive problems.  I realized I’m just naturally uncomfortable with current events and such in literature, probably since most of what I grew up reading was old.  Shriver got me over it.  Why haven’t more people been talking about this book?

–A Room with a View is perhaps one of the few film adaptations that is possibly a bit better than the novel.  No offense meant to the novel at all.  Howards End, however, is more typical, with the book being vastly superior.

–My YA reads have been scant, but good.  When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, and The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman are both Newbery-winners, so that shouldn’t surprise me.

–Zoe Heller writes terribly well about terribly unlikable people.  I’m a liberal and The Believers made me hate liberals.

–The Magicians by Lev Grossman is an unusual thing.  While reading it, I started to feel like it was mostly episodic and not creating a full world.  But when finished, and viewed in the whole, it definitely came together.  Unusual to have such a different feeling afterward, the kind of book that would be better the 2nd time.

But for this post, I’m going to mostly focus on the post I’ve been wanting to write for the past few weeks.  I couldn’t write it until now because I am crazy and have been reading only massively gigantic books.  (I’ve been in the middle of only two recently, a small number for me, and they’re both over 1,000 pages.)

I propose today what may look like a bizarre double feature of books, a one-two punch that is unlikely but quite effective if you’re looking for some big, fat, immersing and splendid stuff to read this summer.  They are Empire Falls by Richard Russo and Under the Dome by Stephen King.  (Told ya, kind of random.)

I will probably read a decent number of Russo books this year.  His long long books have usually intimidated me.  And their humdrum plots on small-town life never sounded quite up my alley.  I want to make sure I publicly apologize to Russo because, if Empire Falls is anything like his other books, I had him completely wrong.  It is long, but it is fantastically engrossing.  It is about a small town with quirky characters, but they are human and interesting.  The plot moves forward constantly, and manages to be both surprising and exactly right, an impressive feat.

As for King, he and I have reconciled recently.  I got a very late start on him, I didn’t read a single book of his until 2004 or so.  And while I found his books to be excellent diversions, they never really satisfied me.  Until Lisey’s Story a few years ago.  Since then I’ve seriously enjoyed his books.  I didn’t have high hopes for Under the Dome, I don’t know why, but it is exactly what his old books were trying to be (like, say, The Stand, which I consider pretty flawed) and never quite managed to be.  It is a bunch of corrosive and explosive material, thrown in a pot, heated to a boil.  It is conflicting personalities, power and corruption, chaos and destruction, with plenty of hope and goodness thrown in.  It may not have the ambitions of Lisey’s Story, but it fulfills its mission admirably.

I admit I spent the last half of the novel worrying.  It was good.  I couldn’t get enough.  But I was worried it would suffer from one of the problems of many a King novel: a bad ending.  Sometimes he seems to paint himself into a corner and not know how to get out.  Never fear, it didn’t happen.

These two novels do have similarities.  Both are long.  Both take place in small towns.  Both have lots of characters.  Both are set in Maine.  Both have powerful villains who are often underestimated and sympathetic, troubled heroes.

Really, though, the reason I recommend them so much as a double feature is the fact that they are both so engrossing.  They stick.  I have had Empire Falls in my head since it ended.  And I’ve been talking about Under the Dome constantly since I started reading it.  (I just finished yesterday.)  They have been such utterly enjoyable experiences that I am just a little hesitant to start something new because I wonder how it could measure up.

These books have also been helpful for me since I will be moving to the Northeast this month, somewhere I haven’t lived since a stint that ended when I was in preschool.  I got both these books on CD for my long work drives and I now actually recognize the New England accent, something I’ve never done before.  In high school when we put on Carousel, we Western kids were all stymied by the phrase “Ay-uh” which showed up constantly in the script.  I now know how to pronounce it!  And I have now heard New England accents besides the ones from Good Will Hunting!

So I suggest you try this odd couple.  It has definitely put me in the summer-reading-mood.  I like them big, zippy, snappy, smart, poignant, and just all-around good.  These certainly fit the bill, and like the best double features, they are even more fun put together.

As for me, I got a new book from the library to try, I just bought a copy of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell to re-read (only 700-ish pages!), and I am still a good 400 pages or so from finishing my big slog, The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer.  My first Mailer, I am a bit slow to conquer that group of big male writers but I’m slowly but surely getting there.  (I’ve started on Roth, Updike, and now with Mailer I wonder who’s next.  Pynchon?  Cheever?)  I am reserving judgment at this point, except to say I have no idea how I lived in Provo (where the book is largely set) for 7 years and never heard anyone mention this book.  How many books are set in Provo, particularly books by one of the most famous writers of the 20th century?  And how many books are set there during the exact time period that my parents were living there?  How have I never heard of this until a few months ago???

For example, on one I just read, Scott Turow blurbed it as the author’s “best novel yet.”  And he’s probably right.  That’s something I can deal with.  Honestly, though, I just don’t understand how most of this stuff gets published and who reads it and finds it satisfying.  I must now make a note to myself: no more David Ellis.  He is not good.  You do not like him.  I know you forgot the first book of his you read so you tried another, but now you need to stop.

I also think I need to call it off with Ruth Rendell.  She is actually quite revered in the mystery world and I’ve found her books competent but never that interesting.  Her newest, The Monster in the Box, was just not good.  Not by any standard.  I wonder if she’s just getting old and not quite up to snuff.  She is so very judgmental of her characters.  One female officer in this book is constantly touted as being extremely politically correct and a strong feminist.  We are reminded of this constantly.  And when she runs into difficulty with a Muslim family, where the women wear the hijab, the book tells us about 10 times that this causes a conflict between her feminism and her desire to be politically correct.  A better author would show us the character’s point of view, rather than telling us over and over.  It also made me feel like Rendell thinks political correctness quite silly, since she spent a lot of time making this character look foolish.  I don’t like such preaching in my mysteries.

Worse, the novel involves both past recollections and current cases, and the back and forth is painfully awkward.  (More than once we are reminded that “back then” there weren’t these modern conveniences like cell phones.  Seriously?  You mean there was such a time?  No!)  And there are regular meditations on whether we are safer now or a few decades ago.  Yawn.  There could have been many ways to successfully tell this story, but this wasn’t one of them.  And ultimately, the whole thing makes very little sense.  I haven’t once read a Rendell that I’ve liked.  I think I must call it off.

I will however stick with P.D. James.  I find her endings all terribly convenient.  But I enjoy myself enough along the way that I will give it to her.

Perhaps I should just go back to reading old Agatha Christies.

Thus far the tally looks like this:

• # of Tournament books read: 3 (In the middle of 4 more, with another 2 sitting on the shelf and waiting.)
• # of fluff books: 3.  A nice low number.  I do have another two waiting in the wings, though.
• # of books in the new-black-fiction school: 2.  Thanks, Colson Whitehead and Victor LaValle.  I don’t think of you as writing “black” fiction, I just think of you as writing good fiction.
• # of books written by women: 6.  Very respectable.  Last year I was at 38%, in 2008 I got 44%.  So far I’m at 38% again, hopefully I can push that number a little higher.
• How books rated: mostly I’d give 3 or 4 stars to my reads thus far.  No big standouts to give 5’s to, and only a couple of 2’s that didn’t deliver.
• # of graphic novels about logicians: 1.  Ha.  Actually, I’d like to add more graphic novels to my reading list.  I used to really love them.
• Half my reads were my 1st time with the author, also a good number.

I think I’d be doing better if I wasn’t reading so many fat books.  Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel is just sitting there in all its gigantic-ness, taking forever, and keeping me from other things.  Just like The Quincunx was before it.  And The Children’s Hour before that.  Perhaps my reading these days isn’t complete without a historical novel doorstop.

Because my Tournament reading list is the entire shortlist, I’ve tried to be very good about reading as many as possible.  I added several books that I didn’t initially plan on.  So far, with only 3 down, I’ve had uniformly good experiences, though I haven’t yet been knocked down and wowed.  Last year I had 3 that I really loved (The Northern Clemency, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, and A Mercy) so far I don’t have a favorite in the fight.  The ones I’m in the middle of aren’t wowing me either, though I have to say that my favorite thus far is probably That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo, which I am more than halfway through and which manages to be both delightful and depressing.  Hopefully it’ll stay that way.

In my non-Tournament reading, I was surprisingly underwhelmed with Zeitoun, which I heard great things about.  Perhaps I was expecting it to reach the heights of What is the What, which I adore fervently.  It didn’t.  And the first half of the book was significantly better than the second.  Still, I like Eggers’ new style, the blending of fiction and non-fiction.

Karin Slaughter’s new thriller was better than most of her old ones.  Louise Penny is a new rather quaint mystery writer I can keep track of.  And no more Stieg Larsson for me.  I just can’t take him anymore.  He bugs me.

I can’t tell if the short list is weighted in favor of smaller books, as it often is.  Many of them I knew hardly anything about.  I know it’s good to get the little guy in there, but if you’re going to include the big guy, too, couldn’t we have gone with Sarah Waters over Richard Russo or Barbara Kingsolver?  And isn’t it like illegal to have a big book-club-ish book on there like The Help?

Anyway.  Now I can say I have officially read 1, yes count it, 1 book on the short list.  It is Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, which was the easiest one to try first.  At the library, #1 on the reserve list, and it’s a graphic novel, which makes for a quicker read, if a different one.  I used to read a lot more graphic novels than I do now, I would like to change that and this book reminded me why.  I liked Logicomix quite a lot.  The graphic novel format worked in some ways, in others it kept the story a bit more stilted than I would have liked.  The book is about logicians, and focuses on Bertrand Russell as the narrator through early 20th century progress in math and logic.

The illustrated format allows for a lot of help in explaining some of the stranger and more complicated issues, and when you do see just how technical and crazy the symbology is, their approach makes a lot of sense.  The other thing I thought they did well was their overall arc.  They actually show the authors explaining the story to their logic/math consultant, complete with explanations and debates on their themes and issues.  It really allows you to see things in a more thorough light, and lets the authors throw critiques at themselves before you can.

My one complaint was that the connection between logic and life is one of their overall ideas but gets little actual attention.  I wanted more connections in their arguments a lot of the time.  This may be because I teach a form of logic on a regular basis but have no formal training in it.  It’s also interesting looking back at these developments–the massive shift in thinking that occurs over the course of the story puts math and logic in their current position, which I found to be fairly rational and obvious even though it was very novel.  It makes me wonder how much of the changes have infiltrated into our daily thinking and how much of it is just my particular frame of mind.

The book did give me motivation to read my nonfiction book on the Enigma machines from WWII, which apparently was one of the first big applications of logic.

I have 1 more shortlist book on the Kindle waiting to be read, 3 on hold at the library, and 1 in paperback waiting to be read.  Beyond that, who’s to say.  There are some I’d like to read but would have to buy because they’re not at the library–the major flaw in a system that promotes books from smaller publishers.  And there are plenty I’m not really interested in.  I can say I’m not as interested in this year’s tournament as last year.  McCann and Mantel (I’m only #4 on the list for Mantel!!) are the two big heavyweights and I haven’t read either book yet so I’m not sure where I’ll fall.

In other reading news, I have run out of library books.  !!!!  This is particularly shocking because I had so very many only a little while ago.  I finally got to two that had been sitting around patiently waiting for me to finish The Quincunx.  First there was Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott, a noir-ish book set in the 30’s and based loosely on a real incident.  The mystery blog I read had been singing its praises so regularly that I finally caved, even though it didn’t look like my style.  I did like it.  The plot was very old potboiler kind of stuff, a bit reminiscent of James M. Cain, but sexier and a bit looser in style.  I think I am going to try and find some of her older stuff, which seems to be in the same vein.

Then there was In the Drink by Kate Christensen.  If I were to write that book a letter, it would go something like this.

Dear In the Drink,

I do not remember where I saw Kate Christensen’s name, but I do remember that I picked you out of all her books as the one to read first.  I don’t know what I was thinking at the time because as I looked you over I realized that you contain almost every annoying book quality I hate.  You are set in New York in the 90’s, you follow a young apparently-smart-but-not-smart-enough-to-get-it-together 20-something, you involve a quirky job, you involve quirky characters, your protagonist is a drunk, the protagonist’s mother is a strict Freudian psychologist, etc.  I almost did not pick you up.  But then I ran out of books.  Lucky for you, Kate Christensen is a good writer if not my favorite in terms of plot or subject choices.  And often her wit felt like more than her narrator was capable of, but I will forgive her.  I made it through with only a few periods of annoyance, and it was actually a nice quick jaunt.  So thanks.  Though I’m not really sorry about anything I said about you.  Maybe I will read another one of her books.

Oh, and I am worried I am just not that interested in John Irving’s new book.  He is getting all literary on me in the early chapters and I am not sure I have the patience.  Also, I cannot find my copy of Zeitoun!  Tragedy!

Obviously I didn’t dislike the book.  I spent over a month reading it.  But once it’s all done it loses a bit of its charm.  It was nice not knowing what was happening for those first several hundred pages.  The denouement is never as good, is it?

For now I am reading The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson.  I don’t know that I ever said anything last year when I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  Larsson is perfectly competent, and his plots can be quite good.  His style is just so drab.  If a character stops to pick up groceries, he’ll list every single thing they get, and not in a coy, winking Salinger-type way.  He gives you so much of these details that his books are probably the most “procedural” procedurals I’ve ever read.  Still, I don’t mind it so much.  I’d rather he have those flaws than go overboard in the opposite direction like so many thriller writers do.  Their plots are flimsy and their style tries far too hard to achieve something they never do.

I also realized the other night in bed that I never had my say about the sequel to Hunger Games, Catching Fire.  I was not a big fan.  This says more about me than the book.  The book follows a natural course, I even predicted how it would end when I was 25 pages in.  The problem is that my favorite part of HG was not the buildup, but the games themselves.  And the sequel makes the games mostly an afterthought and does not devote near enough time or energy to following them for me.  What does this mean?  It means I should just go back and read Battle Royale again because that’s what I really wanted out of HG in the first place.

My first book of 2010 is kind of a cheat.  It is Rabbit, Redux which I just went and finished already because the book is overdue and I was halfway through and it seemed a shame to ditch it now.  But I only read half of it in 2010, so I feel a bit like it’s not fair.  Oh well.  I am wondering where Updike will take the series now, since Redux felt, in many ways, like it was so similarly structured to Run, just with everything turned on its head.  (Even down to the final chapter following Janice instead of Rabbit.) I don’t know when I will have another book to add to this year’s list.  I have dumped three in a row within the first 20 pages.  I will keep chugging away at Quincunx (Doesn’t it sound like something from Harry Potter?  Is it something from Harry Potter?) and I will try and find time to get started on a Christmas gift, Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, which I’m super pumped about.  Plus John Irving’s new novel just came in at the library, so if it’s not horrible that may make the list, too.  Fortunately, we’re taking a trip next week and I may get Eric to put a few books on the kindle for me.  (Otherwise I will never get to The Girl Who Played With Fire.)

I did not bother to make a best-movie list this year because we didn’t see enough to compile a proper list.  My improper list would be:

1. Inglourious Basterds
2. The Hurt Locker
3. Moon
4. Up in the Air
5. Up

Those 5 are the movies I loved.  Then there are honorable mentions for Coraline, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Duplicity, Watchmen, and Drag Me to Hell, movies I liked.  The sad thing is, that means every other movie I saw I neither loved nor liked enough to mention.   And I saw many more than that, most of this year’s viewing was not worth viewing.  Had I not been pregnant and able to find comfort only in a nice cool movie theater, I probably wouldn’t have seen what I did.  And all the good stuff came out when I was homebound with the baby.  I suppose it just means this year’s Netflix viewing will be good.  (It already is, actually.  Humpday was my first Netflix of the year, an ‘09 flick, and quite good.  Shortly followed by Paper Moon.)

Mysteries & Thrillers

The two that stick out the most were Black Water Rising by Attica Locke and Bad Things Happen by Harry Dolan.  I read them around the same time, and I don’t know that they have much in common (the second is a nice spin on noir, the first is best compared to early Grisham) but they both were some of the best I’ve read in ages.  And amazingly both are first novels.  I really look forward to seeing more.

I am not much of a series reader, but I did find a new series I loved.  Garry Disher, an Australian writer, writes some of the best straightforward procedurals I’ve ever written.  Beginning with The Dragon Man, I also read Kittyhawk Down and Chain of Evidence, the only ones my library has copies of.  You actually feel like you’re seeing real police work in these books, which is one of the reasons I love them so much.  The cops in the books are good and bad, have distinctive characteristics that continue from one book to another.  There is just something about Disher’s books that feels so different from the American police books which feel this constant need to be big and over-the-top, to be lazy with accuracy and real-life detail, instead focusing on brutality and shock-value.

My other favorites of the year were a new author and a well-established one.  Josh Bazell’s Beat the Reaper was insane, and I mean that as a compliment.  I usually avoid books with mob themes, they tend to be overly complicated and annoying.  But Bazell’s former-mobster-turned-med-student was great.  It had the most unexpected highs and lows, and for a genre that tends to just repeat the same stories over and over, that’s a great compliment.

Laura Lippman is one of the US’s best mystery writers and her new book, Life Sentences, was a little different.  I’m not even sure if it technically falls into this genre, because the real mystery here is the reconciliation of your own memories with those of others.  Lippman’s heroine wrote a book drawing on her own past and is surprised to find all those old friends see it as terribly inaccurate.  Her journey through her own past is one of the more mature things Lippman has written, relying not so much on plot twists as strong characters.

Post-Victorian Doorstops

I am particularly fond of late Victorian novels.  They seem concerned with bigger ideas than their overly melodramatic Victorian predecessors.  I’m not sure that The Forsyte Saga is technically late Victorian, I think it may have been written too late, but it shares much of the same spirit.  There’s a preoccupation with property and the deterioration of class boundaries and a confusion as to what it all means.  It may not have the style of a mid- to late-20th century novel, the style we now consider normal, but I liked the mix of old and new.

The Children’s Book is set in early 20th century Britain even though it was published this year.  A. S. Byatt may have a bit too much of the pre-Victorian novelist’s desire to ramble on about things the reader is not particularly interested in, but I’ll forgive her.  I also forgive the book’s considerable flaws because it had me more riveted for more days in a row than any book I can think of this year.

Nonfiction

I read some nonfiction this year, believe it or not.  And I must say I did very well for myself.  Nearly all of it was worthy of the end of the year list.

The first that must be mentioned is Volume 2 of Norman Sherry’s Life of Graham Greene.  I have yet to read Volume 3 (that thing is impossible to track down even though it’s the most recent), but it will be very hard to outshine the second volume and all its excitement.  Talk about a life that has everything.  In the same kitchen-sink category is the gangster tome Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough, which teaches you a lot about how federal law enforcement got started.  It also reminds you that criminals are a lot smarter these days, even if they’re not as famous as someone like Pretty Boy Floyd.

Also in the crime genre was And the Sea Will Tell by Vincent Bugliosi.  I got it on purpose because I wanted to duplicate the experience of reading Helter Skelter, also by Bugliosi, and the greatest true crime book ever.  It wasn’t as good, but Bugliosi does a lot with the story and it has its share of crazy twists and turns.  It’s interesting to see him now on the side of the defense.

I read two Sarah Vowell books this year and I feel bad for not reading them earlier.  I started the year with Assassination Vacation, but I really think I preferred The Wordy Shipmates.  Mostly, I found the latter to really give you food for thought instead of just a bunch of interesting but little-known trivia.  Our puritan background continues to shape the way we think of ourselves as a country and Vowell really opens you up to the history and the legacy.

Gothic Novels

I went on a rather length gothic kick this year, though the books were surprisingly varied in tone and style.  Two that stuck out were The Seance by John Harwood, which I thought was a good throwback, and The Observations by Jane Harris, which was narrated by a cheeky servant girl who adds some pep.

The best of the lot should be no surprise to anyone who’s keeping up with end-of-the-year lists.  I was probably too hard on The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters when I first read it.  I have read everything she’s written and The Night Watch has just secured its place as one of my favorite novels ever.  She had a lot to live up to and I had expectations.  The Little Stranger is excellent, but totally unlike anything she’s done before.  The longer I let it settle the more I realize how amazing it is and I’m looking forward to reading it again to enjoy it more fully.

Craziness

I always like a book that throws you for a loop and two of my very favorites this year did just that.  Sombrero Fallout by Richard Brautigan was absolutely nutty, reminiscent of Vonnegut mostly because there’s no one else even remotely close to compare him to.  There is something lovely about reading something so absolutely different.  I would like to read more Brautigan, and I’m honestly wondering why I’d never heard of him until now, especially with all the love for Vonnegut these days.

It is difficult to choose just one book to be a favorite, but if I had to I would probably pick The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike, which was so joyous and nasty and fun that I was always excited to start reading it again.  I think it helped that it was not at all what I expected to get from Updike, or any late 20th century famous old white guy writer, for that matter.

Life is Melodrama (Or TNC)

These next two books go strangely well together, like sweet and sour.  Both The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher and The New City by Stephen Amidon have the same abbreviation (TNC) but seemingly little else in common at first glance.  But when you look longer they actually go well together.  Both are period pieces, in fact, they’re set at about the same time, though Hensher follows his characters through later years and Amidon contains his time period.  While they’re set in different countries, they both have a similar feeling: they’re exploring a time period, they’re finding the melodrama in the everyday.  Both feel as though they’re building to something big.  Amidon sees it through to a crazy climax, Hensher’s climax never appears and is the book’s major flaw.  But both are fabulous to read, for sure.

Keep it Simple

Sometimes all you want is lovely writing about the everyday and these three books qualify.  Sag Harbor was one of the very high highlights of the year, with Colson Whitehead moving away from his high-concept novels, into the nostalgic summer-coming-of-age genre.  But he does it so smoothly and beautifully, still bringing in his characteristic themes and knack for language that I hope he does it more often.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth was the only book of stories I read this year, in large part because she wrote them.  She gives just what you’d expect if you’ve read Interpreter of Maladies.  Lovely, simple stories about family and culture.

Stewart O’Nan’s new book Songs for the Missing is one I didn’t hurry up for.  I like him as a writer but wasn’t sure I wanted the subject matter.  But he made it work.  The plot isn’t of the everyday–a family copes with the sudden disappearance of their teenage daughter–but the book itself is.  Her disappearance starts things off and then the book follows the family as it tries to figure out how to function day-to-day.  I still can’t decide if O’Nan’s hesitancy to have the family dwell on wondering what could have happened is a bad or good thing.  It could have dragged the book down, but I often found myself wondering how they weren’t playing out every horrific scenario all the time.  I think I’m content with his decision, I’m certainly happy with the book.

Classics in The West Indies

It’s probably a little shameful that it took me so long to read Wide Sargasso Sea, I’ve known of it since high school, but I think it’s good every now and then to stumble upon the kind of book that would be great classroom fodder so you can have a nice long think.  This is certainly one of them.

Set in Haiti,  I was a big fan of Graham Greene’s The Comedians, the only book of his I read this year.  Conceptually, it’s probably most similar to The Quiet American, following a Brit into a politically dangerous country where he makes a strange home and watches everything fall apart around him.  There’s a lot to chew on here, too (it would make an interesting double-feature with Junot Diaz’s Oscar Wao, with the Haitian and Dominican stories feeling oddly similar) and I think people put too much into Greene sometimes.  I don’t think a set of American characters is supposed to represent America completely, just as Pyle doesn’t in TQA.  But it certainly does give him a chance to poke a bit of fun.

The Remainder: Honorable Mentions

Transmission by Hari Kunzru.  One of the best internet-age novels yet.

The Dead Father’s Club by Matt Haig.  An interesting YA play on Hamlet.

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead.  My 2nd favorite Whitehead novel, set in a bizarre world of elevators.

The one thing I can say for certain about Glee is that it is tragically inconsistent.  The best episodes (which, in my opinion, are pretty much the first and the last) manage to be light and dark, both bluntly joyful and sharply witty.  The others (all the ones in the middle, except for maybe the one where Kurt does Beyonce) tend to be overly sappy or have terrible musical numbers or have out-of-nowhere plots or have weird humor that doesn’t seem to hit its mark.  The character development is way way spotty–what do we know about Mr. Shue except that he’s a nice guy?–and tends to change when it’s convenient–every episode, Rachel has some new trait which completely defines her.

But all of that could be saved if the music was just good.  Or if it remotely resembled anything a show choir has ever done.  I have just decided that in the universe Glee is set in, choir is not “choir,” but a series of solos with a massive group of backup singers.  The songs are overproduced–they should fire their music producer–and often they pick really really horrible songs.  (Can you be more *yawn* than having a pregnant girl sing Papa, Don’t Preach?  It doesn’t matter if it’s a stripped down acoustic version.)  If the music was interesting, if they had cool arrangements, if they did something besides their endless mashups–who thinks they’re interesting, they’re just weird–if they decided to really showcase their talent it would be better.  I would love to hear Lea Michele actually sing more often instead of hearing it sound like she’s coming through an electronic filter.  And it would be nice to mix it up a little bit with the other cast members, who can obviously hold their own.

The highlights are so easy to pick out that the problems become more obvious.  The very best song they did all season was Artie’s Dancing With Myself.  It was sweet and bouncy, totally different than the Billy Idol original, which is brash and crass.  I loved seeing a song I knew in a really new and unexpectedly perfect way.  It made me wonder why they don’t do that more often.  Or why they don’t just simplify things, like the Don’t Stop Believing number from the pilot, which heaves with energy.  Sometimes they get things half right–the choreography for Proud Mary was awesome, the song was meh; Don’t Rain on My Parade was glorious, but missed the rest of the ensemble (but I will be downloading that track, I am so looking forward to seeing with it at the top of my lungs).  (Update: maybe Glee is more nefarious than I thought.  Having downloaded only 3 of the many tracks available, the first time I played them I was in a car accident mid-song.  Perhaps I should be nicer?)

Still, despite my myriad of complaints about Glee I continue to watch and I continue to be happy it’s on.  Because television is far too unforgiving of niche-y stuff and there are so many niches out there.  It’s true that Glee appeals to the same people who have seen Wicked 8 times (I haven’t seen it once, I find the songs to be mostly mediocre and that’s a fatal flaw for a musical that no longer has Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth currently starring in it) and maybe my tastes are not the same as theirs, but I get it.  I was a choir geek, I listen to show tunes, I know what’s playing on Broadway pretty much all the time (which is why I know who Lea Michele is, I have listened to Spring Awakening probably a million times) and I would rather people watch Glee than American Idol or the insane number of dance shows whose names shall not be mentioned.

As for the state of tv these days, at least there is one absolutely snappy new show: Modern Family is perhaps the best new sitcom I’ve seen since… I don’t actually know because sitcoms are not this good.  I don’t think I’ve enjoyed one this much this consistently since Arrested Development.  Its cutesy family image totally belies its wit, which is probably smart since AD did get canceled and all.

I am sad Mad Men is over, though I found Season 3 to be spotty.  The main flaw: Betty Draper.  She is boring.  And this season was mostly about her.  (And what was up with Don’s new and pointless affair?)  There was a shameful absence of Peggy and Pete and Harry and actual advertising.  The advertising is my favorite part of the show.  There were still high points, though.  The last episode was great–yay Joan is back!  And I was a big fan of the infamous lawnmower episode.  It was nuts but it worked.  The Kennedy assassination ep, though, was perhaps their worst.  It was good in the bare bones, but it was so saturated with footage that it was distracting and annoying.  Just give me more Peggy next season, please, and Joan should be in every episode according to her contract.

Dexter has been pretty dull, hard to believe it’s the same show as the first two seasons which were just plain manic in tone and nutty with plot twists.  House is boring me, it doesn’t help that they keep killing off the characters I like.  This needs to change.  They need to start killing off the ones I dislike… which is almost everyone left.  Definitely start with Foreman and 13.  Community is funny enough, though it should be funnier.  Mostly I chuckle, I don’t laugh enough.  30Rock has just barely started back up so I cannot judge yet, but I have enjoyed it thus far.  There is something comforting about it being on and knowing it will be so smartly written.  I am oh so excited for Lost and Big Love to come back.  IMDb tells me that Damages will be back in January–AND it will now have Campbell Scott as a regular.  If I were not married and it were legal to marry a tv show, I would marry you, Damages.  I have always liked Glenn Close, but now I lurrrrv her.  And you make Rose Byrne tolerable.  And you have Tate Donovan, who is one of my favorite rumpled-getting-older hunks.  And you had that guy from Deadwood who was so criminally underused for their last couple seasons.  And you had William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden and I think Ted Danson is back this season.  Seriously, could I love you anymore, Damages?  No, I do not think I could.  You are beautiful.  You must tide me over until Breaking Bad comes back in March.

Meanwhile, I will finish Season 7 of The Shield, which I now feel really bad for not watching when it was on.  I realized the other day that there is yet another way it is superior to The Wire: it has women.  The Shield has 3 main characters who are women and has brought in others as well.  (Like the awesome Glenn Close and the latina chick from Defying Gravity, who’s been on for a few seasons now.)  They are good characters, they are interesting.  They are often more interesting than the men.  And they have episodes written by women–unlike the male-infested writers of The Wire.  They actually serve a purpose other than being eye candy or wives who never do anything but complain.  (Okay, maybe Vic’s wife did that a little the first couple seasons, but it gets better.)

I know all this makes it sound like I watch too much television, but it doesn’t really add up to much since shows have such short seasons on cable and such long breaks between seasons.  You pretty much get a slow trickle throughout the week with occasional spurts now and then.  (This depends mostly on which reality tv shows are on that I actually watch.  It is a small percentage, and most of them sucked this year.  Can we talk about how totally mean the Top Chef finale was?  Make us the meal of your life, oh except you only get to pick one of the 4 courses.  Nice.  And it was a snooze-fest on The Amazing Race this year, it’s great that a nice team won, but wow they are just the blandest bunch ever.  I guess I really do miss all the obnoxious teams they used to have on despite the fact that I complain about them constantly when they’re on.)

All this is a bit moot now, since the holidays mean a bunch of repeats.  So expect a book-heavy post to follow.

Hypothetically this would be a good strategy to apply to books.  I have a limited amount I get to read each year (though it’s still a pretty significant number).  And I’d rather read good books than bad ones.  This year in particular I’ve read several books I haven’t really liked.  Even though I will have read almost as many books as last year, my end of year list this year will be somewhat sparse, whereas last year I had to make like 4 different lists to contain all the awesomeness.

With all that said, I still have a very hard time abandoning books.  It rarely happens.  Even if it is bad.  Sometimes there is an excuse.  Like with Pat Conroy’s new book, he is an author I enjoy so I’m more likely to give him more and more chances.  (Even if he completely squanders them so that now if his next book is not good I will be out very early.)  Or if I suspect that something is going to happen at the end that will make it all make sense.  (Like that behemoth The Children’s Hospital, which should have had that kind of ending, but instead went with the deus ex machina kind of thing that I really hate.)  But more often there is no good reason to keep going, yet I do anyway.

I recently compromised.  And I think this may be my new thing, especially with thrillers.  I like thrillers and mysteries, but it’s particularly hard to put them down because the end is kind of the whole point.  I was reading Jennifer McMahon’s new book, Dismantled.  It was recommended by someone whose books I like, though I have to admit that my tastes vary widely when it comes to taste in books.  (This is the case with many authors.  Dismantled is blurbed by Stewart O’Nan, who is the last person on earth I would have suspected.  He writes lovely, spare, books about people whose lives feel real.  Why is he blurbing this really lame thriller?)

I knew I’d read McMahon’s first book and disliked it.  It was compared to The Secret History, my very favorite book.  I will read pretty much anything if it is compared to The Secret History.  Unfortunately, nothing lives up to the comparison, but I try anyway.  I had forgotten that I’d read McMahon’s second book until I saw it on my list from last year.  Then I remembered that I hadn’t liked it either.  I was about 50 pages into Dismantled and wasn’t liking it so something needed to be done.

Because it is so very hard to abandon mystery/thriller types, I took the middle ground.  I skimmed it.  I flipped pages through the rest of the book, occasionally stopping to read half a scene.  I finished it in less than half an hour, and wow, it was not good.  I was seriously annoyed at how not good it was and I was barely reading it.  (Seriously, I should know better than to read books with a slight supernatural bent.  They annoy me.  Even when done well, a la The Little Stranger, it is hard for me to set aside my rationality and just acknowledge that something may be unexplainable.  I demand explanations!  Agatha Christie at least gives them to me.)  It was a good solution.  I was able to feel justified in my choice to not really read it.  Had it gotten good, I could have slowed down and started to read for real again.  And it will not go on my book list because I didn’t really read it so I don’t have to remind myself of its badness.  Except to remind myself that I do not like Jennifer McMahon and need to stop reading her books.  Self, please remember this.

I did finish my audiobook of Brave New World and I still firmly believe that while it has some amazing ideas, in terms of working as a novel, well, it’s rather mediocre.  It’s like a movie or book where all the dialogue is clunky backstory.  Plus it does what I so dislike: it preaches at you directly.  I can happily now say that I do prefer 1984 and not just rely on my high school memory.

My new audiobook is the aforementioned Stewart O’Nan, Songs of the Missing.  And because it is Stewart O’Nan it is very likely that the missing girl will never be found and this is very likely to annoy me, even though it is the whole point.  Or at least, I assume it is.  It has yet to rise to Last Night at the Lobster, which I loved quite slavishly.  But if I don’t hold its subject matter against it, it is so nice to read O’Nan, who writes about small towns and suburbs without being condescending or quirky.  It is wonderful to read something that is not set in a big city and not populated by unbelievable characters.

I also have a small paperback of Up in the Air sitting in my purse which I will read while doing things like waiting in line.  I suspect it will be some time before I get to watch the movie and I’m pretty sure it will diverge enough that it won’t be bad that I just read it.  Plus, as a frequent–though not this frequent–traveler, it appeals to me.

I did just read Karin Fossum’s new book The Water’s Edge in one sitting.  It is not the best, but I did like it.  I am not sure which one is the best, though I was very fond of The Indian Bride.  I’d have to go back to the first one I read, Don’t Look Back to see if it’s better.  There was not much of Inspector Sejer in this book, it was very slim, but I do like the style of her mysteries far more than most other writers.  This one had a particularly neat little subplot that I found very intriguing.  For me, overall, Fossum is right up there with Kate Atkinson for writing really interesting mysteries.  No one else quite gets it the way they do.