i'm a very very complex person

Happy New Year, friends! I have to confess that I love this time of year on livejournal, as everyone posts their summaries and reflections, their resolutions and goals, their lists of books and movies and what have you... I've already shared my goals for the coming year, so now it's time for the annual reading list.

My reading seemed to go in phases this year: I had stretches of time where I loved every book I read, and other stretches where I spent ages slogging through two or three lackluster books in a row. In 2012, I narrowly missed my goal of reading 33 books so I set the same goal for 2013. I made it this time, but it was surprising to see that for the first half of the year I was on pace for a much higher total, and then slowed down significantly in the last three or four months. Interestingly, at the same time that my reading pace slowed, I decided I need to get a handle on my ever-growing pile of unread books and so forbade myself from checking anything out of the library. So that means I just couldn't get as excited about the books I own? Or I made the wrong choices from my shelf?

Enough talk! Here is the list (links go to the post that contains the closest thing to a review of each book that I wrote):

01. Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
02. Toby's Room by Pat Barker
03. Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
04. Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
05. The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
06. Bad Dirt by Annie Proulx
07. Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
08. Art and Fear by Ted Orland & David Bayles
09. The Last of the Handmade Dams by Bob Steuding (never posted a review--oops!)
10. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
11. The Real and the Unreal: Where on Earth by Ursula K. Le Guin
12. Tenth of December by George Saunders
13. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
14. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
15. Plainwater by Anne Carson
16. The Charioteer by Mary Renault
17. A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee
18. Inscriptions for Headstones by Matthew Vollmer
19. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
20. Historic Tales from the Adirondack Almanack by John Warren
21. Ireland by William Trevor
22. Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
23. Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser
24. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster
25. A Humument by Tom Phillips
26. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
27. The King Must Die by Mary Renault
28. We the Animals by Justin Torres
29. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
30. Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
31. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
32. Giants in the Earth by O.E. Rolvaag
33. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
34. An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler

Not a single re-read this year--how unusual! Only 12 of my 34 books were by women, which is also unusual--I usually come closer to a 50/50 split. Far more nonfiction than usual, and fewer short story collections. For my own interest, here is the list divided up a couple of different ways:

( By genre )

( By nationality of author )

My favorites this year:

Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood: Two closely linked novellas with narrators that are highly observant of others and intriguingly effaced themselves. Clever and compelling and full of beautiful prose. A pure pleasure to read!

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. A brilliant example of the novel-in-stories, this book provides a complicated portrait of two families over several generations. I loved Erdrich's variety of narrators and the way she subtly traced the long ripples of history through her characters' lives. Erdrich's use of language is so rich it feels decadent.

Tenth of December by George Saunders. Brilliant, brutal, heartbreaking, funny. This is on everybody's "Best Books of 2013" lists, and it belongs on all of them.

The Charioteer by Mary Renault. Fun, fun, fun. A soap opera, sure, but it grabbed hold of my emotions and made me feel like a teenager. It's a flawed book, but I loved it anyway.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I hated the first hundred pages, but now I'm ready to call it the best book I read all year. This book is so smart, so sharp, so gripping. It's full of fantastic characterizations and sly humor. I can't remember the last time I was so engrossed in a book.

Other titles I would recommend include Every Man Dies Alone, The Real and the Unreal, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Where Angels Fear to Tread, and Bring Up the Bodies.

The biggest disappointments were Steppenwolf and A Gesture Life, which were just plain boring, and Gone Girl which was utterly, inexcusably moronic.

Here's to great reading to 2014 for all of us!

Happy New Year, folks! As usual, I find myself with the typical backlog of New Year's posts waiting to be written: a book post, a post in which I think about goals and plans for the coming year, a post in which I tell you about the fascinating and strange museum that Ms. E and I visited on my birthday... But I'll start with the books.

This was a rather lackluster year for me in terms of reading. I'm not exactly sure why--I read plenty of books that I wanted to love, books I thought I would love, books by authors whose other works I've loved... And I admired quite a number of them, but very few ignited any sort of real passion in me. I also did not quite meet my goal for the year; I had decided that I wanted to read 33 books, and I only made it through 32 and a half. I considered putting on a push in these last few days in order to make the number, but decided against it. Trying to rush through a book under the pressure of a deadline (and a rather arbitrary one at that) rarely helps me get the most out of what I'm reading.

With no further ado, here's the list (links go to the post that contains the closest thing to a review of each book that I wrote):

1. Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer
2. The Cows by Lydia Davis
3. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
4. Life Times by Nadine Gordimer
5. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
6. Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry by Elizabeth McCracken
7. The Birthday of the World by Ursula K. Le Guin (Re-read)
8. Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson
9. Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter
10. Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame
11. Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston
12. Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel
13. The Waves by Virginia Woolf
14. Atonement by Ian McEwan
15. A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley
16. Ransom by David Malouf
17. The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
18. The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
19. The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster
20. Bluets by Maggie Nelson
21. The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
22. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin (Re-read)
23. Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard
24. The Story of the Night by Colm Tóibín
25. Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt
26. When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro
27. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
28. Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
29. The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
30. The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín
31. Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
32. Death in Venice and Other Tales by Thomas Mann (trans. Joachim Neugroschel)

It's very rare for me to read according to any sort of plan or program, so it's often a bit of a surprise to see the patterns that emerge when I put together this year-end reading list. Only two re-reads this year, for instance--I think I often have more than that. And so many short story collections! I wouldn't have said I was focusing on short stories specifically, yet they make up a large portion of the list. For my own interest, then, here is the list divided up a few different ways:

( By genre )

( By nationality of author )

My favorites this year:
Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter: With these three stories, Porter proves that the novella can be just as rich and powerful as the novel. Haunting and deeply felt explorations of memory, family history, and mortality. A wonderful book.

Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel: I know that a lot people were not in love with this book, but I was. I read it immediately after hearing Bechdel read from it and talk about it, and I'm sure that influenced my feelings about it, but the book gripped me and resonated with a lot of my own personal history. It's thorny and sort of messy and at least a little bit self-indulgent, but I loved wrestling with it.

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray: Sprawling, ambitious, and definitely flawed. The ending was disappointing and Murray allowed it to drag on for way too long, but the first two thirds of this book were as fun, inventive, and devastating.

Death in Venice and Other Tales by Thomas Mann: I liked Mann's novellas better than his short stories, but the novellas alone are good enough to earn him a spot in the favorites list. "Death in Venice" is the famous one, and it certainly is brilliant, but my sentimental favorite was "Tonio Kröger."

Other titles that I recommend include Tree of Codes, Life Times, The Birthday of the World, The Waves, Ransom, The Fixer, and The Empty Family.

By far the worst books on this list are Winter's Tale (sloppy, incoherent, way too long, utter nonsense!) and A Fan's Notes (misogynistic, manipulative, unpleasant from start to finish). Stay away from those two!

Here's to lots of great reading in 2013, both for me and for all of you!

Now that 2010 is over, it's time for my annual summary of what I've read during the past year. This was the first year in quite a while that all of these books were my own choice--I had no assigned reading in my last semester of grad school, and certainly none since!

Here's the list (links go to my reviews of the books, or whatever I posted that most closely resembled a review):

1. Run by Ann Patchett
2. The Adirondacks: A History of America's First Wilderness by Paul Schneider
3. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
4. Potiki by Patricia Grace
5. At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien
6. Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame
7. Letter to a Child Never Born by Oriana Fallaci
8. Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima
9. The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat
10. Maurice by E.M. Forster
11. Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin
12. Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
13. The All of It by Jeanette Haien
14. Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter
15. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
16. Surfacing by Margaret Atwood
17. The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott
18. The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
19. Islanders by Ammiel Alcalay
20. Fort Da: a Report by Elisabeth Sheffield
21. In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje

I'm a bit disappointed by how short the list is this year! I was reading a lot in the first half of the year, but got utterly bogged down once fall and winter arrived. Another surprise: this list is almost 100% novels! There's one non-fiction (the Paul Schneider), and that's it. No short story collections, no poetry.... I did read two novels-in-stories (Strout, Danticat), but those are close enough to novels that I don't think they add much variety.

These were my favorites:

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout: A collection of linked stories revolving around a complicated and sometimes unpleasant main character, this book is a resonant, carefully structured exploration of aging and change. Strout does an excellent job of writing from within Olive's anger and inarticulacy. Some of these stories really put me through the wringer.

Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame: This book is powerful and deeply personal, full of intense images that linger long after reading. At moments it feels almost as though Frame is allowing us to read something written in her own private language. A heartbreaking book.

Maurice by E.M Forster: Of all the books I read this year, this was the one that stole my heart. Oh, I loved this book! I can't remember the last time I was as emotionally invested in a book as I was in Maurice; I actually leapt up off the couch at a certain climactic moment!

Surfacing by Margaret Atwood: I read this book about being in an isolated cabin in the woods while I was in an isolated cabin in the woods, and I'm sure that synchronicity helped me enjoy the book, but I think it would be very good no matter where you read it. It begins as a conventional literary-thriller, but towards the end it changes into something darker, stranger, and denser. An interesting book for sure.

I found it a bit more difficult than usual to compile my year-end reading list this year. I'm usually very orderly about my reading--one book at a time, from start to finish--but that reading style isn't really compatible with having lots and lots of required reading for school. There were many books that I just skimmed or read in bits and pieces, and my careful record keeping sort of went out the window. So here, as best as I can reconstruct it, is a list of the books that I read in something close to their entirety in 2008:

( The List )

I'm disappointed in how few books I read "for pleasure" this year (some of the assigned reading was pleasurable, of course, but it's somehow not quite the same.) Only nos. 8-14 were my own choices. But it's always been very hard for me to do outside reading when I'm in school, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. I am surprised at how little fiction I read--only about one third of the titles on the list are novels, a shocking development when you consider the fact that my reading lists are usually at least 97% fiction. I did read a lot of short fiction that isn't represented here (mostly in The New Yorker, but from a few other places too), but it's still a much smaller amount of fiction than usual. I know that this is because I took two classes that required a lot of reading about pedagogy and one where the reading list was entirely autobiographies, but I'd really like to make sure I get back to reading more novels in 2009.

The lack of variety in my list makes it difficult to do my usual awards show format, with different categories and all the rest, so instead I'll just name a few of the best books of the year.

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson: This book is beautiful and quiet, perfectly suited to the dark and the cold. I suppose it's no wonder that I liked it, since it hits on a couple of my big themes: aging and memory and family history.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein: I had never read a full-length work by Gertrude Stein before this one, and I was intimidated going into it, but I ended up really liking the book. Stein creates a vivid depiction of her and Alice's life in Paris. I was surprised by how funny the book was, and also by the way it forms a sort of slyly moving portrait of their long life together.

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy: I loved McCarthy's voice in her autobiography: erudite, clever, curious, matter-of-fact, and thoughtful. This book also served as my inspiration for an essay on family history and place that I've been working on for a while now.

Cruddy by Lynda Barry: It's difficult to hold a book that I only finished two days ago up against books that have had months to settle in my mind, so perhaps I'll change my mind on this at some point, but I was really into this book. It is a glimpse into a dark, violent, sexualized childhood and its aftermath that was totally engrossing. I kept finding myself in bed at night saying "One more chapter. Okay, now just one more chapter..." I haven't written a proper post about this book, but I'm planning to do it very soon.

The two worst books of the year were The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta and The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. The Perrotta was absolutely flaccid and boring, and The Mistress of Spices was nothing but cheap exoticism and non-credible romance. To be avoided!

I'm joining the list-posting crowds and offering my fourth annual compendium of the best stuff I read during the past year. As usual, re-reads are ineligible, as are things that I failed to read in their entirety.

( First, the list )

Best short story collection: This is not a particularly strong category this year. I guess the award will go to Stillness by Courtney Brkic, which was uneven, but had a couple of real gems.

Best short story: It's always so hard to choose just one story (partially because I don't do a good job of keeping track of the short fiction I read in magazines, etc). Anyway, I won't choose one, but will give you three stories to run out and read right now: "Thailand" by Haruki Murakami, "The First Sense" by Nadine Gordimer, and "Stillness" by Courtney Brkic.

Best nonfiction: Oh man, I only read one nonfiction book this year. I read a lot of fragments of interesting nonfiction this year (most notably A.C. Haddon's Head-hunters Black, White, and Brown) but only one book in it's entirety. That's a new low, even for me! I guess that means that Will Blythe's To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever is the winner.

Best young adult novel: This is another category where I have only one entry. And it's not even a very good entry. I grudgingly give the award to the disappointing Gifts by Ursula K. LeGuin.

Best graphic novel: I read two graphic novels in a row right at the end of the year, and haven't even had a chance to properly post about them yet. Both were excellent, but Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis wins by a very narrow margin--if you want to know why, you simply must wait until my next post! Ah, the suspense!

Best novella: "Morpho Eugenia" by A.S. Byatt. Wow, really good!

Best novel: I have two nominees this year, and they couldn't be more different: The Road, and The Remains of the Day. Shall it be Cormac McCarthy's desperately grim post-apocalyptic vision that enthralled and terrified me, or the beautifully restrained novel of British repression that broke my heart? Impossible to choose. They both win. (And honourable mentions go to Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach and Sarah Waters's Fingersmith--both were just a hair away from making it a four-way tie.)

Now that the year is officially over, I offer my third annual list of the best stuff I read during the year. I don't take publication date into account; anything that I read for the first time in 2006 is eligible. Links lead back to my primary post about each book.

( First things first: the list of contenders )

Best short story collection: I only read one collection of stories this year. What's up with that? That one collection was Close Range by Annie Proulx, so that's the winner by default. It's good enough to win for real, though, so it's kind of shame that there was no competition.

Best short story: This is tough. I really liked "The Mud Below" from Close Range. I also really liked "Bohemians" by George Saunders, although I have a vague feeling that I may have read it a year or two ago... At the very least it gets an honorable mention.

Best nonfiction: I read three whole nonfiction books this year! That's a lot for me. The best one was Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett.

Best young adult novel: Without a doubt, Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie.

Best graphic novel: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. This is also the only graphic novel I've ever read. Yeah, ever. I'm not very hip. But I really liked it and I'd like to read more graphic novels, so that's a start, right? (Also, there's no link because I haven't posted about this book yet. I've got some catching up to do, and I should get to it in the next day or two.)

Best title: Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl. Not a very good book, but I really like that title.

Worst novel: At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott. God, did I hate that book. So, so boring. The runner-up for this prize is The Inner Circle by T.C. Boyle--it wasn't nearly as bad as At Weddings and Wakes, but it was a big disappointment because I know Boyle can do so much better. I really disliked The World According to Garp too, but I think that was more about me than about the book.

Best novel: Oh, this is also so hard to choose. The contenders this year are Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, and Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. How can I choose? Reading in the Dark was so powerful, and its images stayed with me for so long after I read it. And The Awakening--I identified so strongly with Edna, and loved the book so much more than I thought I would. And then there's Gilead, which comforted me at a time when I needed it most.... Forget it. I can't pick this year. It'll just have to be a three way tie.

Okay, so there actually were topics other than baseball about which I wanted to post, but they were forgotten in the excitement of seeing the White Sox make the World Series. I still can't quite wrap my mind around that, but here's what I've been reading lately:

I finished The Namesake over the weekend, and I found it rather a let-down. Lahiri's writing is just as pretty and her descriptions of food just as mouthwatering as they were in Interpreter of Maladies, but her characterization has not improved and neither has her ability to (for lack of a better phrase) "write outside the box." The plot of the book was just what one would expect from this sort of immigrant narrative, and Gogol's emotional development from spoiled, whiny teenager to slightly-less-whiny thirtysomething was disappointingly obvious. When I read Interpreter of Maladies, I felt that there were a few stories that showed Lahiri's full potential as a writer, but I decided that most of the stories didn't live up to that potential. Now that I've read The Namesake, I wonder if perhaps Lahiri is writing just at the level of her potential, and it was only in those few stories that she managed to transcend her own limitations. I'm not sure I'll read any more of her books.

After finishing The Namesake, I started Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. I've been meaning to read Greene for ages, and I'm enjoying this quite a bit so far. I want to get started on some of the reading about secrets and repression that I need to do, but not having any of those books sitting on my shelf is proving to be an obstacle. Must get to the library.

In other reading news, Time magazine recently issued a list of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923. The list is rather predictable and I'm not sure why they picked 1923--seems rather arbitrary to me--but since I love lists of all kinds I thought I'd post it.

( I've bolded the titles I've read )

I often refer to my to-read list as if it were an actual, coherent thing that exists in some form other than titles scribbled on the backs of envelopes and author's names dashed off on bookstore receipts, but doing so presents an inaccurate picture of the situation. I have a notebook where I list all the books I read, and the front of that notebook is stuffed with all the scraps of paper on which I've jotted down various book recommendations over the years. I also have a list on my office computer for book ideas that come to me at work. And a separate list in the notebook where I keep notes for my novel. My system is a little bit complicated, and isn't actually much of a system at all. So I thought I'd consolidate things here.

( My to-read list )

And now I'm off to do some writing.