Jan

27

Opinions and a Letter

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I have not yet mentioned the 2010 Tournament of Books because I had to wait until I wasn’t totally and completely humiliated.  When the short list came out a little while ago, I was sure I’d do well.  I felt like I’d had a good reading year, especially as far as 2009 published books went.  With The Children’s Book, Sag Harbor, The Little Stranger, and others, surely I would be in the clear.  But no.  Not one of them–some of the best books I read last year–made the short list.  All of them would have made excellent contenders, so I admit to being annoyed.

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!

Jan

20

Journey Ended

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Whenever I expect to get a lot of reading done, I inevitably get virtually no reading done.  Thus, my little trip with a few hours on planes and no baby led to very little reading progress.  Upon my return, however, I did finally finish The Quincunx.  I feel like I should put it in all caps because it is that much of an accomplishment.  Seven-hundred and eighty-one pages!  Not only is it a massive tome, it also requires a great deal of patience.  You don’t even find out what a “quincunx” is until like page 450.  The whole plot, which is far too twisty to be called just plain twisty, basically involves the same thing over and over again.  Young hero, having been betrayed, must fend for himself again, finds new friend, gets betrayed, repeat.  These cycles can last anywhere from 15 to 150 pages, but that’s pretty much it.  The number of characters involved is Tolstoy-esque and Palliser could give Dickens a serious run for his money had he been around back in the day of the serial.  I am still not exactly sure I understand everything that happened, but neither do I feel a serious need to sort it out.  The journey has ended.  Phew.

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.

Jan

6

Slow Start to the Year

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That last book post took a few weeks to write, and sadly, I added very little new stuff to it during that time.  I expected a big jump in December, but instead hit a slump.  Probably because I started yet another doorstop, The Quincunx, by Charles Palliser, which clocks in at just shy of 800 pages.  One of my holiday reads came just shy of making the list: In the Heart of the Canyon by Elisabeth Hyde was a contender for the Keep it Simple category, but I felt that the big climax just didn’t quite deliver.  We also listened to Cell in the car on our drive and found it way better than expected.  Normally I wouldn’t have given it much thought, but I am willing to listen to almost anything narrated by Campbell Scott.  I was thinking maybe I’d give another new-but-lesser King novel a shot, and have reserved the audiobook of Under the Dome at the library, and am now super excited since it’s read by Raul Esparza, who is very close to Campbell Scott in the men-I-love category.  (He gets bonus points because he sings.)

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.)

Jan

5

Best Books of 2009

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I have decided to organize my list a little differently this year.  Usually I separate by publication date or genre with rankings, but this year I’m just going to have a loose list with different books grouped together for one reason or another.

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.