Far From Brooklyn

A Year of Reading

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 14:02:54 -0800

In 2012, I resolved for some reason to limit my reading solely to books published during the year.

I also resolved to be a vegetarian.

As it happens, aside from a preposterously expensive meal in London in September, I pretty much stuck with the vegetarian resolution. As for the books, well, I pretty much stuck with that too.

I read all or part of 67 books this year. (But who’s counting? It’s not like it’s a competition, right?)

Virtually everything I read during the year was either published in 2012 or was relevant in some way to a book published in 2012 that I read. (For instance, earlier books by the same author, or topically related.)

Back in January, I was rather hopeful that at the end of the year, when the various newspapers and journals posted their “best of” lists, I would have the satisfaction of nodding sagely to myself and saying, “Yep, read it, yep, read it, yep read it, yep, read it…”

It didn’t turn out that way, though. It turned out that a lot of the recommended books were ones that I had bypassed purposely, for instance:

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon. While I am a huge fan of his sentences, I’ve never thought he had much in the way of narrative chops. I haven’t finished any of his novels, with the possible exception of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. I love his short stories but I just don’t have the patience for his longer works. So I gave it a miss.

NW by Zadie Smith: I had read “White Teeth.” That felt like more than enough Zadie Smith for a lifetime.

Building Stories by Chris Ware: I was put off by the price tag and the idea that there was no real narrative there — just a kind of graphic labyrinth to explore. I’d like to take a look but I’d appreciate a $10 taste test.

Every Story Is a Ghost Story: I’m not much of a biography reader in the first place, and DFW’s sad, shortened life didn’t seem like it offered enough to fill 368 pages, however much I liked some of his writing.

Also, I didn’t read Robert Caro’s 10 bazillionth words about Lyndon Johnson, or ”Gone Girl,” just because I didn’t feel like it, or ”Wild,” mainly because of the author’s incredibly annoying pen-name, “Cheryl Strayed.” I mean, really.

The one book I felt I should have read, and yet never got to, was Katharine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers.” I resisted for some reason. I suppose it seemed so grim, a doorstop volume about the resilient residents of a garbage dump. Besides, I had read “Maximum City” just the year before. Anyway, no Boo for me this year.

So those are some highlights of books I didn’t read during the year. Below are the ones I actually did read, or at least read a part of, ordered from favorite to i-hate-you-i-hate-you-i-hate-you. The list omits books written by friends. The top ten get hot links for easy Amazon purchasing.

As usual, I am struck by how hard it is to find a good book to read, especially novels, which is mainly what I read when my time is my own. As in previous years, I disliked lots more than I liked.

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson¹
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Thompson
Alien vs. Predator by Michael Robbins
The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg²
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick³
Arcadia by Lauren Groff
How Should a Person Be by Sheila Heti
One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper⁴
Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce
The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison⁵
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green⁶
The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach⁷
Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner⁸
Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn⁹
China in Ten Words by Yu Hua
The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq
The Thief by Fuminori Nakamora
Bad News by Edward St. Aubyn⁹
Bonsai by Alehandro Zambra
Flatscreen by Adam Wilson
American Dervish, by Ayad Akhtar
The Fun Stuff by James Woods
Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd
Tasteful Nudes by Dave Hill
Don’t Ever Get Old by Daniel Friedman
The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks
Empire State by Jason Shiga
Traveler of the Century by Andres Neuman
You & Me by Padgett Powell
Varamo by Cesar Aira
Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
Delicacy by David Foenkinos
Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander
The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers
Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil
Seven Years by Peter Stamm
Better Off Without ‘Em by Chuck Thompson¹⁰
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel¹¹
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell¹²
Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru¹²
A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers¹³
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
In One Person by John Irving
The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus
Abbott Awaits by Chris Bachelder
Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden¹⁴
Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
A Free Man by Aman Sethi
Some Hope by Edward St. Aubyn
Mother’s Milk by Edward St. Aubyn
Savage Continent by Keith Lowe
Satantango by Laszlo Khrasznahorkai
Evolving in Monkey Town by Rachel Heid Evans
Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon
Every Day by David Levithan
Hot Pink by Adam Levin
To Live by Yu Hua
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Thompson
Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff
Inside by Alex Ohlin
Wolf Story by William Mcleery
Life Among Giants by Bill Roorbach
All About Lulu by Michael Robbins
The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper
The Angry Buddhist by Seth Greenland
May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes¹⁵

^{1. This was the best book I read this year, by a country mile. Not only that, this is the first book in a long, long time that I felt I could recommend to anyone. So often the books I like best are just not that interesting to other people (what’s wrong with them???) But Johnson’s book is just a rip-roaring tale of adventure, suffering, and revenge, set in an imagined North Korea that seems both horrifyingly accurate and preposterously made up, all at once. So anytime anyone asked for a recommendation this year, I said, “Read this.” Full disclosure: To my knowledge, not one of them ever got back to me and said, “Wow, that was wonderful! Thank you so much for your wonderful recommendation!”}

^{2. Wonderful book. It would have finished even higher if the author had not seemed to go a bit soft on her characters in the concluding sections of the book. No spoilers here but I found the last third to be soft-hearted – disappointing considering the cold, tough observation of the first chapters.}

^{3. Not published in 2012. I read this wonderful portrait of everyday live in North Korea after finishing “The Orphan Master’s Son.”}

^{4. I’m not sure what the equivalent of “chick lit” is for middle aged men. Bro-Novels? Whatever the term is, I read a handful this year. This was the best of them. As a general rule, a “Bro-Novel” features a divorced father as the narrator, generally someone Apatovianly stuck in an adolescent career (in this case, rock music), and at least one clear-thinking young(er) woman who, oddly enough, finds him attractive despite his lovingly described fallen arches, poochy gut, slackening muscles, etc. Like chick lit specials, death or the threat of it tends to be the deus ex machina of the Bro-Novel. In this case, the narrator has a heart condition.}

^{5. Bro-novel.}

^{6. A novel for young adults, or whatever they’re called these days. Pretty sensitive handling of a love story involving a cancer-ridden teenager. Sounds awful, I know.}

^{7. Published in 2011. This was the first book I read in 2012.}

^{8. This one should probably be higher on the list, just for the gumption of the narrative: A stoned, neurotic American poet in Barcelona wanders the city, smoking pot and not writing poems. If that sounds boring, it is. But also oddly mesmerizing. Unlike the author of “The Middlesteins,” the author of this book, Ben Lerner, has the guts to draw an unsympathetic portrait and stick with it – no going soft and sentimental as the pages go by. It must be said that this was published in 2011. I read a review of it somewhere, wanted to read it, and pretended it was a 2012 title.}

^{9. Not published in 2012. I read this in anticipation of reading the final Patrick Melrose novel later in the year. In fact, I read the first four of the series (if that’s what this should be called, which it isn’t) and at that point felt well done with the books. But the first two volumes were powerful and fascinating.}

^{10. Pretty obnoxious book but a lovely conceit: Wouldn’t we be better off, the author wonders, if we just told the southern states to go ahead and secede? It’s a viewpoint that resonates for me – I’m kind of sick of the red state thing. Hopefully none of my southern friends (most of them arch-conservatives of the sort that the author hates) will never read this footnote. We’ll see. [Update: At least one did!]}

^{11. As with the St. Aubyn, I read “Wolf Hall” on the assumption that I would then read “Bring Up the Bodies” – a 2012 title. However, I never finished the first volume so there wasn’t much point in trying to plow through the second. The appeal of these books mystifies me.}

^{12. When Hari Kunzru’s “Gods Without Men” appeared in 2012, its layered narrative structure was compared with “Cloud Atlas.” So after reading “Gods Without Men,” I re-opened “Cloud Atlas,” which I had opened and then set aside a few years back. I didn’t like either book. But the Kunzru novel did have an incredibly engaging introductory section – a pastiche of native American mythology and meth cooking. I won’t say that section was worth the price of the book but it was close. Nothing in “Cloud Atlas” came close in terms of creative chutzpah.}

^{13. Why in the world was this considered one of the best books of the year?}

^{14. A non-fiction account of a rare escapee from a hellish North Korean prison camp.}

^{15. I hated this book.}

books read on an iPad in 2011

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:40:04 -0800

The Sly Company of People Who Care
True Grit
Fun Home
Open City
The Ice Trilogy
Hard Rain Falling
The Tragedy of Arthur
The Underground Man
The Last Resort by Douglas Rogers
A Taste for Death by P.D. James

Books I Read in Print in 2011

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:39:55 -0800

The Anthologist
She’s Come Undone (rereading this one)
White Noise
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Lord of Misrule
The Expeditions
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Flipping Out by Marshall Karp (dumb mystery)
Scorecasting
Fifth Business
The Manticore
World of Wonders

Books I Read on a Kindle in 2011

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:39:45 -0800

Andes by Michael Jacobs
The Beast God Forgot to Invent by Jim Harrison
Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
A Buyer’s Market (Book Two of A Dance to the Music of Time) by Anthony Powell
Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
A Cold Day in Paradise by Steve Hamilton
The Crimean War by Orlando Figes
Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola by Kinky Friedman
Funeral for a Dog by Thomas Pletzinger
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Instant Enemy by Ross Macdonald
Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea
The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly
The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton
The Magnetic North by Sara Wheeler
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (rereading this)
The New Confessions by Williama Boyd
Norwood by Charles Portis (rereading this)
The Old, Weird America by Greil Marcus
Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan
A Question of Upbringing (Book Two of A Dance to the Music of Time) by Anthony Powell
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
Third Class Superhero by Charles Yu
Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier
The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes by Marcus Sakey
Zone One by Colson Whitehead

A Reading Plan for 2012

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:36:28 -0800

I often begin years or seasons with plans for reading. In 2010, I recall, I thought I would backfill my somewhat spotty knowledge of modern American and English playwrights — and in the end I did read a handful of titles but the reading was not programmatic and within a month or two I was back to my helter-skelter habits of old, picking up books as I came across them.

This year, then, my plan (unlikely to be followed, of course) is as follows: I will read (and write about) only new books — that is, books published only in 2012.

Every year I read at least a handful of new books, mainly fiction but non too. In 2011 I read the following books published in or nearly in 2011 (or at least, those that when I listed them I thought were published in the preceding, say, 18 months. The actual publish dates are listed in parentheses, inserted after making the list:

A Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (October 2011)
The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje (October 2011)
The Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (November, 2010)
The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker (September 2009)
Scorecasting by Tobias Moscowitz and Jon Wertheim (Janunary 2011)
The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Battacharya (April 2011)
Open City by Teju Cole (February 2011)
The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips (April 2011)
Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson (June 2011)
The Crimean War by Orlando Figes (April 2011)
The Magnetic North by Sara Wheeler (February 2011)
Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan (October 2011)
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray (August 2011)
Zone One by Colson Whitehead (October 2011)
Funeral for a Dog by Thomas Pletzinger (March 2011)

It turns out the only one I really misjudged as far as “newness” goes was the Baker. Coincidentally or not, that was also my favorite book of the year — by far.

That said, though, clearly I can find a lot of new to read if I try, and it might be interesting to register these things as they hit the public consciousness. So, on my list for 2012:

American Dervish by Ayad Akhtar
The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq
Hope, a Tragedy by Shalom Auslander
The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn
Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander
Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru
Billy Lynn’s Long Half Time Walk by Ben Fountain
The Lower River by Paul Theroux
In One Person by John Irving
How Should a Person Be, by Sheila Heti
The Devil in Silver by Victor Lavalle
Varamo by Cesar Ara

These are all drawn from “The Millions” list so it’s perhaps self-selected the wrong way — I’ll have to look around for some other annotated guides to the books coming down the pike, and particularly more non-fiction books, but the above is a pretty good list as a starter.

So in theory this year I will read those books plus a bunch of related titles (earlier books by those authors, for instance) and see if I can write about them with some of the same energy and thoughtfulness I gave to the task in 2009 and early 2010. Doubtful!!!

Just last night I began “The Art of Fielding,” which may be newish enough to qualify as a 2012 book for the purposes this plan… Or the Akhtar and Houellebecq titles are now available, I think…

"LIfe has got a habit of not standing hitched. You gotta ride it like you find it."

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:50:02 -0800

“LIfe has got a habit of not standing hitched. You gotta ride it like you find it.”

- Woody Guthrie

Not Gray in the Least

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:28:34 -0800

Some days the New York Times is simply extraordinary. Today was one of those days. I went from page to page (metaphorically speaking, as I only read it in digital format) in state of wonder.

On the front page was a profile Mohamed Abdulahi Mohamed, a Somali expatriate working as a contract analyst for the DOT in Buffalo, NY, who became, for 10 months, the president of Somalia. It was like a Graham Greene novel come to life — charming but not candy coated.

Also on the front page was an analysis of Angela Merkel’s strategy for managing the Euro crisis. It not only deepened my understanding of the crisis, but also showed, without being shrill, how desperately dangerous the situation in Europe is — and the piece was nicely flavored with tidbits of biographical information.

The editorial page — marking the anniversary of the attach on Pearl Harbor — featured a thoughtful consideration of Isoroku Yamamoto, the reluctant architect of the attack. And in the same section was a beautiful piece (by the daughter of Al Gore, oddly) highlighting the WPA project to audio record, in the 1930’s, recollections of former slaves.

The NYT can be a true marvel.

So smart of LinkedIn to send these notes to early adopters. I...

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 11:23:00 -0700

So smart of LinkedIn to send these notes to early adopters. I was No. 88,568. I wish I had been smart enough to understand the implication of social platforms like this… but I was just messing around.

A Year in Books, Unblogged

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 16:00:00 -0800

I was fairly disciplined about writing up the books I read in 2009. I did fall behind a bit in the fall of ‘09, but by New Year’s Eve I had logged every last one of them.

Not so in 2010, alas.

Early in the year the blog kept up with my reading, but by spring I was slacking off and by summer I simply had stopped. I was still reading, but I couldn’t seem to find time to write.

So now, with the year winding down, I want to note all the books I read in 2010, including the few I managed to write about individually back in January and February.

Or, at least, I am listing those that I can remember…

As usual, I was a highly impatient reader, leaving many more volumes unfinished than finished.

I’ve listed them Mikey style: “He likes it!” vs. “He hates everything!”

He Likes It!

NP by Banana Yoshimoto - This is a surprisingly abstract work for such a popular writer. I tired of the literary games that underpinned the plot, but I enjoyed the portrait of Tokyo life and Yoshimoto’s kind, energetic voice.

Bad Traffic by Simon Lewis - Although written by a Welshman, this novel is a persuasive, believable portrait of illegal Chinese immigrants in England. Structured as a suspense novel, the plot has a couple annoying cracks, but they are easily overlooked thanks to the fine writing and excellent portraiture.

Doghead, by Morten Ramsland - A marvelous family saga that remains grounded in emotional realism even as some of its characters and plotting spin into the fantastic.

Chronicle in Stone by Ismail Kadare - Set in Albania in World War II amidst a succession of foreign occupations, some hardly lasting a day, this novel portrays an ancient, superstitious society facing the harsh (even gruesome) realities of the modern world. A beautiful book.

The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier - This novella manages to be both playful and Bernhard-ian (i.e., similar to the work of Thomas Bernhard) at the same time. Given that Bernhard’s opus is unrelentingly bleak, that is quite a strange combination. Like Bernhard, it features a narrator obsessively reliving a single moment in time, looking unsparingly at himself and those around him. And yet somehow the book is generous and even uplifting, so unlike the Bernhard novels it resembles.

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart - Wow. A hilarious but moving love story set in a dystopian near future where we are never untethered from our mobile devices, and where our privacy settings have been permanently set at “off.” Some of the best bits are the diary entries and emails of Eunice Park, a recent college graduate whose voice is a hilarious gumbo of gangsta rap, Hello Kitty, and like-like-like adolescent inarticulation.

The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag - See my comments here. An unexpected pleasure.

The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh - See my comments here.

Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fisher - A remarkable history book that traces four distinct early American cultures to their roots in England.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Other Plays by Martin McDonagh - See my brief comment here. Not as powerfully complete as “The Pillowman” but powerful and unnerving for sure.

As Husbands Go by Susan Isaacs - Never let it be said that I am not honest in this blog! I guiltily admit that I enjoy Susan Isaacs’ novels quite a bit. Guess I’m not a manly man.

Seven Plays by Sam Shepard - Somehow I lived through the ’80s without ever seeing or reading a Shepard play. I held off reading them because I figured they were better experienced in the theater, and yet I never got to them in the theater so they went unexperienced all these years. It was interesting, reading these in 2010, to see how time mellows once-radical works of art. These felt very mainstream to me.

Citrus County by John Brandon - I’m not sure I can say I truly liked this book, but it intrigued me. It’s a troubling portrait of a kid who inexplicably does something very, very bad. The book stalls out very early, though, leaving the reader to wonder what will happen but without really proceeding. The flatness ultimately takes over everything.

Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulluch - This is a big doorstop history that I enjoyed but ultimately bogged down in. The subtitle is “The First Three Thousand Years” which is a bit puckish, and in fact the “first” thousand years of this history (which are not about Christianity per se but the Judaism and Greek thought that led to it) are fascinating. The development of various Christian dogmas, which in fact I had looked forward to reading, was heavy going, and I failed out somewhere in the first Millennia A.D., or CE as we say now.

Pearl Buck in China by Hilary Spurling - Interesting portrait of an unlikely literary star.

New York Burning by Jill Lepore - A portrait of the racial tensions in pre-revolutionary Manhattan. Her earlier book, “The Name of War,” overturned my conceptions of early American history. This one didn’t, and so I couldn’t help but feel a teensy bit disappointed by it, which isn’t fair. In any case, it’s another scrupulously researched, clear-eyed history, but one that nevertheless has a strong point of view.

Shanghai Nights by Juan Marse - Two stories in one — the story of a boy in post-Civil War Barcelona and an adventure story set in China, the latter a fantasy. It’s an awkward mix but the Barcelona sections are strong.

Nox by Anne Carson - A poem, a translation, an art object, and a remembrance of the poet’s troubled brother. It’s a beautiful, if slight, work. I am somewhat uncomfortable commenting on it as it feels like a personal memento — a demon she had to work out on paper for herself. And for that reason there is a part of me that feels she shouldn’t have published it at all, but rendered it for herself. (How old fashioned of me.)

Away by Amy Bloom - I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy this novel. It’s a page-turner for sure. But it’s also slight, and skates along on cliche and simplification. An interesting side note — this is a novel about the commonplaces of men abusing women. Men as procurers, pimps, keepers of women, even jailers. And in virtually every case Bloom portrays them forgivingly. I wonder if a male writer could have gotten away with that — I sincerely doubt it.

The Woman Lit by Fireflies by Jim Harrison - I really enjoyed the first of the three novellas — it’s a hairy-knuckled first person tale in the vein of McGuane. Apparently it’s more representative of Harrison’s work than the other stories in this collection, so I may look out for more of him. The second and third novellas were dogmatic and dull.

Occupied City by David Peace - OK, so David Peace is the very, very rare exception to to “literary thriller” rule. He’s a really, really powerful writer. His first Tokyo novel, “Tokyo Year Zero,” was just amazingly good. This new one is not quite of the same caliber, but damn close. Like all his work, this is based on an actual (mass) murder, and the particulars in this case were profoundly unpleasant — to the point that reading the book was not a pleasant experience. I admire the craftsmanship, though, and Peace’s toughness.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower - I knocked this book for being a McGuane (and even more so a Hannah) wannabe, but you know what? It was entertaining.

Unaccustomed Earth by Jumpa Lahiri - This one might win the award for the book I disliked most and yet still liked. My comments here.

Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger - I reread these after Salinger’s death. Glorious. My appreciation of Salinger.

He Hates Everything!

Total Chaos by Jean Claude Izzo - Wrote about it here. Bleah.

The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa - I picked this up after Vargas Llosa won the Nobel. I had only read “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” a charming tale that I knew was not representative of most of his work. This is a big, fat, ambitious, bulging novel that never really engaged me.

Underworld by Don DeLillo - I undertook this book (again) after writing a longish essay about our greatest living authors. I managed to slog through maybe 250 pages before chucking it. I then began an essay describing how deeply I hated this novel, tentatively titling my piece “Why Do Novels Suck So Much?” I didn’t complete it then but perhaps before the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve, I’ll manage to post it…

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann - This was one of the few big literary hits of the last few years. I absolutely loathed it. It too was to be a cornerstone of the “Why Do Novels Suck So Much?” essay, still unfinished.

Nowhere Man by Alexander Hemon - A weak sophomore effort. My comments here.

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon - One should always know better than to read a book described as a literary thriller. I forget that simple rule all the time.

The Bridge of Sighs by Olen Steinhauer - Another self-consciously literary thriller, this one in the vein of Alan Furst, but set further east. The setting (a fictional Eastern European city in the wake of WWII) is not bad, but the plotting is wooden and not believable.

One Day by David Nicholls - Feckless rich kid woos schoolmarmish middle class girl. Piece of crap. I’m a sucker for romantic comedies so I was quick to pick this up this summer. What a disappointment.

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons - Humor tends not to age very well. This is a good example of why.

Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey - Wooden. It’s strange that a novel with such a poetic, evocative title could be so stiff and unpoetic.

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson - If you want to read someone channeling Saul Bellow, this is your book. But there’s perfectly good Bellow to read or re-read. And there’s some pretty bad Bellow to dig into when you’re done with the good stuff. So why read imitation pretty-bad Bellow at all?

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore - I’m not sure I’ve ever read a realistic novel that felt quite so untethered from reality. Nothing seemed to ring true.

Metzger’s Dog by Thomas Perry - I generally don’t bother listing books that I’ve already read, but in this case I’ll make an exception. I loved “Metzger’s Dog” when I first read it, I guess back in the ’80s. I wasn’t alone — Carl Hiassen contributed a forward to this new edition that I picked up. But I found myself oddly bored when reading it anew this year. The characters, who once seemed wonderfully whimsical, struck me as thin and almost indistinguishable this time around, and “Chinese” Gordon was frankly insufferable. Always sad to dislike a book that once pleased.

Up in Honey’s Room by Elmore Leonard - A mystery/suspense book that goes unfinished is pretty much by definition a bad book. I didn’t finish this one.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows - I’m not sure I’ve ever finished an epistolary novel, and this was no exception. What a crashing bore.

The Same River Twice by Ted Mooney - A literary thriller. I typo’d this title as “The Same Ricer Twice,” which strikes me as inherently more interesting — some kind of culinary mystery.

The Dawn Patrol by Don Winslow - This novel tries to mix Hiassen-style jokiness with a plot involving child abuse. These ingredients should never be mixed.

The Bedwetter by Sarah Silverman - File under the category “I read it because it was there.” The most interesting thing about this book was how mean Silverman comes off, without intending to.

Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving - I’m willing to entertain the possibility that John Irving is actually our great American novelist, as previously covered here. With Irving, I generally either hate or love the work. In this case, I neither hated nor loved. The first section was overlong and only intermittently entertaining, and I set it down after a couple hundred pages (specifically 213, according to the deepest dogear) and never picked it up again.

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray - Quite a number of reviewers and bloggers recommended this but it struck me as pretty bland stuff. I enjoyed it moderately for a while, then put it down and didn’t pick it up again.

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte - Some enjoyable cleverness but there wasn’t really much there. I wrote about it here (very briefly).

Charming Billy by Alice McDermott - Meh. My comments here.

Ah, France!

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:02:03 -0700

Total Chaos, by Jean Claude Izzo

A mystery set amidst the decay of immigrant-weary Marseilles, Total Chaos features a cop who is the very salt of the earth — so much so that he is most comfortable communing with humble fishing folk who live along the rugged calanques of southern France.

This noble (working class) cop also is blessed with an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz, world literature, and cuisine. He is by his own account irresistible to women, whether prostitutes of indeterminate age or college co-eds.

In other words, this is a total piece of crap.

Birthday Card for Jane!

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:41:24 -0700

Gee, I Guess Everything Is OK, Then

Wed, 26 May 2010 10:27:39 -0700

“Quality newspapers still are doing O.K., quality magazines are doing O.K., quality television is doing O.K. There is something to the content that we’ve forgotten about, and we’ve gotten so carried away with the technology.”

— Michael Bloomberg, quoted here

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 22:12:31 -0700

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower

The first page of this collection made me laugh out loud (“… and there was serious pain in his underpants”) so I shouldn’t be too critical.

But what the hell.

This is a perfectly respectable group of stories. Tower knows how to turn a phrase and he’s not afraid to reach for a good sentence.

Problem is that I’ve been there, done that, read this. Tower is the progeny of Barry Hannah and Tom McGuane, at least when he’s writing about men behaving badly. I got some chuckles and I admired the verbal acrobatics but I couldn’t help thinking, “Really? You think I don’t know where you got that? Really?”

Talented kid, though, and willing to take chances. Got to admire that.

The Ask

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte

A dark comedy set in a second-rate college in New York (the narrator calls it “Mediocre College in New York”, nice). The writing is tough and sharp and funny, ultimately it’s not fully readable (finishable) because the plotting is artificial and rickety. And because we don’t care about any of the characters, the thinness of the plot feels ever more apparent.

Lipsyte is a mean-spirited observer and he’s not afraid to create unsympathetic characters — traits I admire — but ultimately the cartoonishness of the plot (and characters) feels, false. Satire only works if the exaggeration somehow results in a sense of heightened reality, rather than altered or falsified reality.

Lipsyte also has some very nice turns of phrase. He has a trick where the narrator steps back and reveals his own tendency to exaggerate: “We often called it ‘The Mediocre University at New York,’… By we I mean Horace and I. By often I mean once.”

That is very nice indeed!

Still, the unreality, and the mean-spiritedness, drove me away long before the end of the novel.

Nowhere Man

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Nowhere Man, by Aleksandr Hemon

The Lazarus Project was one of my favorite novels last year, and The Question of Bruno was intriguing, so I opened Nowhere Man with high hopes.

Nowhere Man shares a lot of the strengths of Lazarus and Bruno, but it’s hard to read yet another consideration of the difficulties of being an unwilling Bosnian immigrant in America. The sheer sameness of the focus of these books begins to pall on Volume 3.

I’m worried that Hemon can’t escape his demons (memories) sufficiently to write anything other than the same book over and over. He’s talented beyond belief but if his mind always comes back to the circumstances of his forced repatriation… I’m pretty sure I will not pick up another volume by him if I have the sense he’s retreading.

King of the Cats

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Is it possible that John Irving is America’s greatest living writer of fiction?

Obviously, no. Philip Roth is the greatest living American writer.

(Slightly less obviously: No, Toni Morrison is the greatest living American writer.)

The thing is, Philip Roth has written precisely one great book in the last 30 years, and most people (myself excepted) actually found it pretty repugnant — “Sabbath’s Theater.”

The other thing is (and I know I’m an outlier here), Toni Morrison has written only one really great book: ”Song of Solomon.” I know, I know, “Beloved” is the greatest book of the last blah blah years. I pledge to go back and read it again sometime soon. But when I first dug into Morrison, “Solomon” was the keeper, the really shining, giant book. And then it seemed like there was a lot of dreck. Well written dreck, but still dreck. Isn’t it possible “Beloved” is just a wee bit drecky too?

As for Roth, well, he’s gone stale. (I think I may be an outlier here, too. His recent books keep winning awards, which baffles me.) His springy sentences have stiffened up like a 55-year-old knee. His howls of outrage have been replaced by lawyerly arguments. Worse, his books have become high concept — you can imagine them germinating in a pitch session at a movie studio: “Uh, OK, what if it turns out that the narrator is black!… What about this? Let’s say the daughter was a terrorist in the ’60s!… In a world where Charles Lindbergh is president…”

There was no studio pitch for “Portnoy’s Complaint,” that’s for sure: “Um, it’s about this guy who masturbates a lot as a kid — well, no, it’s not really…” Same goes for his two other greatest novels, “The Professor of Desire” and “The Ghost Writer.”

So, given that Roth and Morrison seem vulnerable, can anyone topple them from the perch?

Let’s start with a consideration of the ones that preceded them, the dominant forces of postwar American writers lit, the Big Names, AKA “the once thought to be among the greatest living American authors, but unfortunately they are dead”: John Updike; Saul Bellow; I.B. Singer

While we’re at it, let’s consider another group, one I’ll call “writers who were more beloved than those once thought to be among the greatest living American authors, and yet somehow not considered quite worthy of that group, and also unfortunately dead”: J.D. Salinger; Joseph Heller; Kurt Vonnegut

The there are “the dead ones that just kind of fell out of the running for one reason or another”: Ralph Ellison; Vladimir Nabokov; Norman Mailer

For good measure: “the young dead ones”: David Foster Wallace

OK, then, who among the living can be considered a credible challenger to King Phil and Queen Toni?

“The once greatly admired, now… not so much”: Thomas Pynchon; John Barth; Don Delillo; Paul Auster

“The heirs to Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver”: Richard Ford, Ann Beattie

“The ones who are too popular and/or approachable to be considered viable candidates for ‘best living author’ awards”: Ann Tyler; Richard Russo; John Irving; E.L. Doctorow

“The great/near great writers who must not be included once we recall that they are actually Canadian”: Alice Munro; Margaret Atwood; Michael Ondaatje

“The genre artists”: Steven King, Elmore Leonard

“The great avant-garde writers”: American avant-garde writers?

“The tough guys, AKA ‘writers whose names appear to be spelled wrong’”: Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson

“Not prolific enough to make the cut”: Norman Rush; Marilyn Robinson

“Too prolific”: Joyce Carol Oates

“The younger ones (most in their 30s and 40s I guess, and mainly writers whose oeuvre is just too thin at this point to judge, even though I’m largely willing to do so)”: Jeffrey Eugenides; Dave Eggers; Aleksandr Hemon; Jonathan Franzen; Michael Chabon; Jonathan Lethem; Nicholson Baker; Gary Shteyngart; Jonathan Safran Foer

“The ones I mention just to cover my bases”: Louise Erdrich, Richard Powers

So the question is, who among those many names could realistically be called the most significant/best/greatest/etc. American novelist? Who could go one to one with Phil or Toni?

Surely no one would nominate any of the writers in the Pynchon group, including Delillo, whose enthusiastic readers now seem somewhat mystified as to what it was that they ever really liked about him — sort of the same thing you see amongst former listeners of King Crimson. And Pynchon himself seems ever less relevant (and ever more annoying).

Cormac McCarthy could be a contender, I’ll admit. ”Blood Meridian” came in third place in a New York Times survey of “greatest novels of the past 25 years” that was published back in 2006. (Admittedly Delillo’s “Underworld” came in second — to winner “Beloved” — but I will take the position that that’s just nostalgia.) Anyway, McCarthy has written two truly great books — “Blood Meridian” and “All the Pretty Horses” — which would put him one ahead of Toni Morrison (by my admitted outlier view) but one behind Roth. The thing is, though, how many people have read those books more than once? I was blown away by “All the Pretty Horses” when I first read it (I learned the word “guttering” from it) but whenever I pick it up again in the hopes of re-enjoying it, I grow restless almost immediately. And “Blood Meridian” has parallels to “Absalom Absalom” — a self-evidently great book of an almost impossibly high order, and yet one that is equally almost impossible to finish.

Of the others, I’d argue that only John Irving could possibly stand alongside P and T without being dwarfed. ”Garp” and “Widow” are not only outlandishly wonderful books but, like all the greatest books, they are written in a recognizable voice that is the author’s alone. And, again like all the greatest books, their greatness is not so much reduced by their flaws but patina’d by them. Yes that is not a word.

Like Morrison (less so like Roth at this point), Irving has inspired hosts of imitators (overuse of the italics is a giveaway), and like Roth (less so like Morrison), he has continued to publish novels that are widely read and commented on.

More than anyone on this list (the living ones, at least), Irving could be described as beloved. There’s a generation of readers (and writers) who probably would never think to put Irving at the top of this kind of list, and yet would admit to loving his greatest books with adolescent ardor. Reading his best books can feel like falling in love… the way you felt reading “Catcher in the Rye,” or “Stoptime,” or “Portnoy,” or “Slaughterhouse 5,” or any of the books that blew your heart and mind to pieces when you were a teenager thinking that all you wanted to do in life was to create one thing that was one-tenth as wonderful as that. (By ‘you,’ of course, I mean ‘me.’)

So I don’t know. I’m not really suggesting John Irving is our greatest living novelist. I just wouldn’t dismiss the idea out of hand.

***Incidentally, I think Anne Carson is the greatest living author, but she’s not really a novelist and she’s not American born. So she gets a pass here.***

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:45:41 -0800

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

I don’t want to be a book-reviewing bore. The point of writing about books — at least for me — is not to recommend them or inveigh against them. I’m more interested in the way that books weave themselves into your (my) life than in persuading you, my imaginary reader, to read them yourself.

(After all, if I had my druthers I’d come to every book as an utter mystery, with no idea about the subject matter, format, style, or author — the better to experience the work truly fresh.)

But more to the point, there’s not a lot of value in reviews of books that were published years or even decades ago. Only occasionally do I crack open a new or newish book. I’m more likely to be at least a few seasons behind the times, and more than likely the book has been reviewed dozens of times or more. What can I add to that, and why would I want to?

So it’s hard to say what there is to say about “Unaccustomed Earth.” It got wonderful reviews that to some extent were valid. Lahiri writes believably about Bengali Americans and the complications of first and second generation immigrants. She’s an earnest, careful writer whose sentences just kind of lie on the page. I mean, get a load of this one:

Guests were gathered under a beautiful tree where a bar had been set up, offering cocktails before the ceremony.

Really? A “beautiful” tree? Not an elm that had somehow survived the blight? Not a sugar maple? Was it a hickory tree? Or possibly it was not deciduous. And how illuminating to learn that the bar was offering cocktails. And it’s helpful to hear that this is happening before the ceremony, which the reader knows hasn’t happened yet but a little redundant info never hurt anyone, right?

This kind of lumpy, sloppy writing crops up fairly frequently in Lahiri’s writing, and I think the reason must be this: Because very little happens in her stories, she must fill the space left by plot with something. This is not a short collection — 333 pages in the paperback edition I read — and most of the stories run very long, 40, 50, even 60 pages. The first story, the title story, is a full 57 pages, the plot of which (no kidding) is this: A widowed father comes to visit grown daughter and her young son. He wonders how to tell her he has a sort of girlfriend. He stays for a bit. Then he flies home. The end.

Now, that snotty summary of the story purposely ignores the psychological shadings of the story, and some interior twists. But in her apparent desire to remain “real,” Lahiri seems to resist even dramatic psychological shifts as plot devices (or reading aids!). There are no piercing epiphanies in these stories. After all, life is not really full of epiphanies, is it?

The best of these stories is the comparatively short, and awfully titled, “Hell Heaven,” and the longer, more complex “Nobody’s Business,” both of them about thwarted or failed love affairs, and inherently more dramatic than the others.

The second half of the book is a series of interrelated short stories that is fairly cleverly structured (clever but irritating until you understand the narrative device, which really doesn’t become clear until fairly well into the second of the three stories.) It ends on a really tawdry, icky note that I won’t go into, and it features a man whose profession, it turns out, is a globe-trotting war/disaster photographer (novelists can’t seem to resist war photographers as protagonists, and with no disrespect to photographers and photography, let me simply say that I have known more than a few of the very few that there are at any given time in the world and believe me when I say they aren’t that interesting).

So all of this is an odd preamble for saying, in fact… that I liked this book. It was well done. It gave me some insight into the lives of Bengalis in America and despite the limited stories and the sometimes insipid writing, I did want to know what (if anything) would happen. The affectless prose, the sympathy of the writer for her characters, and the repeated figures from story to story brought to mind Anne Tyler, a writer whose appeal mystifies me, and yet as I have said I do love much of her work. Likewise I can imagine looking back 15 years from now and thinking, “Huh, I’ve actually read nine Jhumpa Lahiri books.” She’s good, I’ll read more, but I’ll also hope for more — more drama, more muscular writing, more chances.

Franny and Zooey

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger

Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger

I was unexpectedly moved by J.D. Salinger’s death last month. I was not one of those readers who still wondered if or when a new Salinger work might become available. I never dug up “Hapworth 16” from the archives of the New Yorker, nor had I chased down and read the uncollected stories that he published in the 1940s.

So I’m not a completist by any means.

What I am is an unadulterated fan. I don’t look down my nose at “Catcher.” I consider it a work of art in full. I have long considered “Franny and Zooey” one of the signature volumes of Post-War American fiction, and “Nine Stories” contains several pieces that are damn near perfect.

In fact, “perfect” is a word that seems oddly applicable to Salinger’s output as a whole. What novel could be closer to perfect than “Catcher”? What novella is so nearly without fault as “Franny”? And a many of the pieces in “Nine Stories” — I’m particularly thinking of “For Esme,” “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” and “The Laughing Man” — are likewise impeccable.

As much as a fan as I am and have been for 30+ years, I hadn’t read any Salinger in at least five years and probably more like 10. So, when I learned of his death, I dug up a copy of F&Z and NS and gave them a read — trying, if I could, to see them with new eyes.

And in many ways I could in fact read them fresh. Of course there are sentences that had stuck with me, and that I looked forward to reading again, and those sentences did not disappoint. Like this one from the beginning of “Franny”:

The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries.

Those baroque creations were Salinger’s specialty, of course, but he could also write with beautiful economy. The final sentences of “The Laughing Man” are simple, direct, heart-breaking.

It was rather amazing to re-read these flawless gems of fiction in the wake of his death. The obituaries and even the considerations of his work were more about his life — his reclusiveness, his unsavory relationship with the young Joyce Maynard, the hoarding of his writing — than his writing and the effect it has had on several generations of readers. The headline of the New York Times obituary put it this way: “J.D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91.”

It’s extraordinary to think that, in the 1950s, serious literary writers were hard-pressed to find a way to write their way out from under his shadow. His work was so powerfully influential, so widely read and admired, that John Updike said it sometimes felt as if it would be impossible to set an original sentence on paper — that is how powerful and original Salinger’s voice was in the 1950s.

The problem is that we loved Salinger so, and he refused to grant us what we wanted, which was simple: more. No writer so beloved (not that there are many) was so stinting with his work. And that fed the love and raised Salinger up ever higher — if only he had published more, he surely would have failed us, and we would have taken him down from the pedestal, and we could consider him more generously. But he didn’t write, or at least he didn’t publish, and so we were all forced to read our favorite books over and over, and we associated them with our teenage selves and our teenage viewpoints, and after a while we came to think of the works themselves as teenage artifacts — rather than adult art.

Supposedly “Catcher” and Salinger’s other works are losing some of their appeal — many teenage and college-age readers prefer a plucky hero (Harry Potter) to the self-conscious, sarcastic, and generally powerless Holden Caulfield. And it was striking to me how many of Salinger’s characters are similarly helpless, however wealthy and privileged their families and upbringing.

And something else: Reading these stories in 2010, I was struck by the nearness of World War II. The war cast a huge shadow over these characters. These are not heroic warriors. At best they are survivors, like the narrator in “For Esme,” and at worst they are failures, like Franklin in “Just Before the War With the Eskimos.” Mostly they were observers, and self-conscious ones at that. They did not look at the war and think that they would have been heroes. Quite the opposite. Salinger captured the sense of what is like to be “untriumphant” in a triumphal world.

I suppose that was Salinger’s great sin — to focus on the small, and to be willing to be small himself — small in output, small in life, occupying a small corner of a small state, rather than taking a place at the head of the literary table in New York as others would have done. But choices like that do not preclude greatness in art, and without question his output stands alongside the great works of 20th Century literature.

The headline should have read: “J.D. Salinger, Giant of 20th Century Fiction, Dies at 91.”

The Beauty Queen of Leenane

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Other Plays, by Martin McDonagh

Whoosh. This is a set of dark-ass plays. Unlike “The Pillowman,” I didn’t have the sense that I might titter nervously during a performance of this work (which doesn’t mean, in fact, that I wouldn’t titter, or that there aren’t threads of humor worked into the plays, just that the complexity of tone is just slightly less than the later play — McDonagh is still working out the kinks in these earlier works.) The titular play was the best of the bunch, with several reveals that, like Pillowman, left me gasping.

The Pillowman

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The Pillowman, by Martin McDonagh

The best book I read last year was actually a sprawling set of five loosely linked novellas, “2666,” about which here and here. It cast a long shadow over everything else I read that year, and one segment of the novel so frightened me that I had trouble sleeping and ultimately had to set the book aside for several months before resuming (without reading the troubling segment to the end).

The second best book I read last year was a collection of spiky modern folk tales, “There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby.”

This play is sort of a strange combination of those two volumes — violent, gross, disturbing, occasionally (uncomfortably) funny, original, powerful. I certainly wouldn’t want to see the play on the stage — too violent, too horrible.

But on the page, an incredible work of art.

Because it was so short (it’s a play, after all) I didn’t inhabit it for long, and so at the moment I haven’t much to say about it, except that I found it profoundly moving, even if grossly violent.

The craft of this play is really amazing. McDonagh pulls off several reveals that chilled me — literally, my flesh crawled with fear and amazement.