2011: The Year in Books

I did it. I read fifty books this year. After 2010's embarrassing performance, I'm rather proud of myself, especially since that fifty includes some really long ones like Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and 1Q84 and some really hard ones like The Satanic Verses and Midnight's Children.

I enjoyed the vast majority of them, and I enjoyed the experience of spending most of the year ahead of my quota, then playing catch-up at the very end. I wasn't sure I would make it: I finished #46, Midnight's Children, only a couple of days before Christmas, leaving a week to read four novels. Luckily, I found some good short ones. I'm looking forward to some longer ones this year, but I think I'll try to stay away from the long and difficult. Rushdie does have some shorter novels.

Here's my list from 2011, formatted like my 2010 list. Bold means I really liked it, and italics means I really disliked it. If it's neither of those, it was good enough. I'll use strikethrough for the few books I tried to read and gave up on. You can check out the reviews in the 2011 archive in the right column.

• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Franny and Zooey
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
• Good Morning, Midnight
• Things Fall Apart
• Oryx and Crake
• The Satanic Verses
• The Hunger Games
• This Side of Paradise
• Popular Hits of the Showa Era
• Labyrinths
• Catching Fire
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• Disgrace
• Mockingjay
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold
• Crime and Punishment
• The Grapes of Wrath
• Herzog
• Brideshead Revisited
• The Blue Sword
• The Year of the Flood
• Americana
• The Moviegoer
• Watership Down
• The Silent Land
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
• The Short Stories of Conrad Aiken
• My Life in France
• The Savage Detectives
• Cannery Row
• A Handful of Dust
• Sweet Thursday
• O Pioneers!
• The Lake
• Lullaby
• Everything that Rises Must Converge
• Cosmopolis
• The Invention of Hugo Cabret
• The Hero and the Crown
• The Devil All the Time
• The Book of Sand
• The Castle
• The Mysterious Benedict Society
• The Night Circus
• 1Q84
• Wise Blood
• Midnight's Children
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• The Sense of an Ending
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower
• The Loved One

I haven't yet announced my favorite book of the year. Last year, it was David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, with Murakami's Dance Dance Dance as a close second. If you would have asked me then, I would have predicted that 1Q84 would top my list this year, but I didn't like it half as well as I thought I would, though that doesn't mean I didn't like it. And, if you've been following my blog recently, you might expect Midnight's Children, but no! It's a close second to...

Drumroll please...

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Yep. The best book I read this year was the very first one. I think it's My Very Favorite Book Ever. I'm not going to rehash my review here. The closest rival is, as I said, Midnight's Children, but that's because they're so similar. I hope I find a book half as good as either of those in 2012.

So, that's it. Out with the old, and in with the new, as they say. I have another fifty books ahead of me, and fifty-two weeks to read them. Wish me luck.

2011 Book #50(!): The Loved One

I arrived at The Loved One because I was looking for a very short novel (I had two days to read it!), and I read a random article about how prolific Evelyn Waugh was. I was first introduced to him earlier this year with Brideshead Revisited, which is now one of my favorite novels. Then I read A Handful of Dust and liked it, too. I’m really surprised at how much he wrote and how much I like him. When I picked up Brideshead Revisited, I expected something serious and stuffy, but it’s really funny – and fun.

The same goes for The Loved One. I went to Starbucks yesterday and read all but the first fifteen pages in one sitting. It’s a really entertaining read.

Dennis Barlow is a really bad British poet transplanted to Hollywood to write a film script about Shelley. The other expatriates are unhappy with him because they think he’s tarnishing their reputations because once the film doesn’t pan out, he gets a job at a funeral home for pets called the Happier Hunting Ground. Barlow lives with another Brit named Sir Francis Hinsley, who promptly dies. Barlow has the task of dealing with the human funeral home, Whispering Glades, which is entirely excessive on every level. While he’s there, he meets the cosmetician (Hinsley hanged himself, so he has an interesting facial expression that must be dealt with), Aimée Thanatogenos, and begins dating her, regaling her with his terrible poetry. He soon discovers that he gets better results when he uses poems by Shakespeare or Tennyson or Poe because she’s too dumb to realize where they come from. He asks her to marry him just after she’s offered a promotion so she can support him: he says it’s perfectly acceptable in England. But! He has a rival in Whispering Glades, Mr. Joyboy, who also has his eye on Aimée. Ridiculous mischief ensues.

The Loved One is a very English novel, and it reads like one of the old shows that come on LPB on Saturday nights. It especially reminded me of Are You Being Served. It’s about English snootiness and American excess, and it’s hilarious. And a very quick, light read.

Check it out at SML!

2011 Book #49: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

If I had read The Perks of Being a Wallflower when I was 15 or 16, it would have blown my mind. I really wish I had read it then: it might have made the melodrama that was my adolescence a bit more manageable. Or, at least, I might have realized that other kids had similar things going on. And while it makes me a bit nostalgic for the good (and bad) times I had in high school, it also reminds me how much easier things get when you grow up.

It’s about a somewhat damaged kid who starts high school and makes friends with a bunch of seniors who introduce him to the things kids are almost inevitably introduced to: sex, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes. The kid’s name is Charlie, and he’s very innocent at the beginning (I was beginning to wonder if he was mentally challenged). He’s a good kid and always thinks of the needs and wants of others before his own. He’s generally not a troublemaker, but he occasionally has Donnie Darko-style fits (that’s another thing I wish had been around when I was fifteen). He almost instantly falls in love with Sam, one of his best friends, and he deals with unrequited love for her throughout the book. A bunch of angsty teenager mischief ensues. There’s also a big reveal near the end that I don’t think was necessary but that might explain some things.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is poignant, but it can also be funny. Here’s one of my favorite passages, in which Charlie describes his first girlfriend. It made me chuckle.

I did go to the dance, and I did tell Mary Elizabeth how nice her outfit was. I did ask her questions, and I let her talk the whole time. I learned about “objectification,” Native Americans, and the bourgeoisie.

But most of all, I learned about Mary Elizabeth.

Mary Elizabeth wants to go to Berkeley and get two degrees. One is for political science. The other is for sociology with a minor concentration in women’s studies. Mary Elizabeth hates high school and wants to explore lesbian relationships. I asked her if she thought girls were pretty, and she looked at me like I was stupid and said, “That’s not the point.”

Mary Elizabeth’s favorite movie is Reds. Her favorite book is an autobiography of a woman who was a character in Reds. I can’t remember her name. Mary Elizabeth’s favorite color is green. Her favorite season is spring. Her favorite ice cream flavor (she said she refuses to eat low-fat frozen yogurt on principle alone) is Cherry Garcia. Her favorite food is pizza (half mushrooms, half green peppers). Mary Elizabeth is a vegetarian, and she hates her parents. She is also fluent in Spanish.

I think I like Mary Elizabeth so much because that’s who I thought I was in high school. I wasn’t, of course.

My plan for this blog post was to explain why I’m too old fully to enjoy this novel, but I think I’m changing my mind. Sure, it’s in the YA section of the library, as I guess it should be. In fact, here’s a review on the Teen Scene blog by one of my coworkers (It makes me feel ooooooold and highlights the difference in perspective seven or eight years can make).

I’m not sure if I’d want my kid reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I say I’ll leave my bookshelves open and encourage reading of any sort, but I don’t think I’d want my twelve- or thirteen-year-old knowing about all of that stuff just yet. Fifteen, sixteen, sure. Hopefully my kid will have a much easier time in high school than Charlie did.

Bonus: The author, Stephen Chbosky, isn’t primarily a novelist. He wrote the screenplay for Rent and the short-lived CBS series, Jericho.

2011 Book #48: The Sense of an Ending

The Christmas Crunch continues, in which I readandreadandread to reach my fifty-book goal before the year is out. Which means I'm limited to short novels for the moment. At a lean 163 pages, The Sense of an Ending definitely qualifies. It's actually been on my to-read pile since it came out earlier this year. I ended up with a copy because it was on the library's newly catalogued list, and I clicked the hold link before anyone else.

It's about Tony, a sixtyish-year-old man looking back over his life, especially focusing on the relationship he had with his friends in his school days and early adulthood. He starts when they were in high school, discussing philosophy and literature. A kid their age named Robson gets his girlfriend pregnant and then kills himself, and the topic of his suicide floats throughout the novel. The friends finish school and slowly go their separate ways. A couple years later, Tony is in the US when his parents call him back home to England because his friend Adrian committed suicide. He and Adrian hadn't seen each other for quite a while after Adrian dated Veronica shortly after she broke up with Tony. Forty years later, Veronica's mother dies and, in her will, leaves Adrian's diary to Tony, but Veronica has it and doesn't want to give it up. Then things get complicated, etc, etc.

I'm kind of ambivalent about this one. I generally liked it, and I think it's very well-written, but it's also sappy and preachy like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I really didn't like. That said, I definitely think it's worth a read. Just be patient toward the middle as it gets a bit boring and repetitive. Later, though, it gets good again. The Sense of an Ending isn't exactly a relaxing read for a lazy Sunday morning, so read it (preferably in one sitting) when you have some time to decompress afterward.

2011 Book #47: Slaughterhouse-Five

I first read Slaughterhouse-Five many years ago. So long ago, in fact, that I have no idea when it was. I might have been in high school, or I might have been in college. I only remembered a vague outline involving Dresden and time travel - and that I really didn't like it. Not one bit. The funny thing is that I'm a huge fan of Vonnegut. I've read most of his novels, and this is the only one I didn't like. Something must be wrong.

So, several years later, I decided to give it a second chance. That chance happened a couple of days ago because it's almost the end of the year, and I'd only read 46 books. This is the Christmas Crunch, and I need short books. Slaughterhouse-Five definitely fits into that category.

It's about a young (then old, then young again, etc, etc) man who has just joined the army and ends up a POW in Dresden just before the fire bombing decimates the city. Except (the first words of the novel-within-the-novel) "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." He travels back and forth to different points in his life - and death. Including an alien abduction that makes him understand life, death, and time differently.

I liked it better this time, though I'm still a bit ambivalent. It's okay. It's certainly not my favorite Vonnegut novel. I think I've fallen into a long novel morass, coming off of Midnight's Children, 1Q84, and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Long novels give authors opportunities to fill in gaps left in stories. Vonnegut wasn't one to write a long novel, of course, and he wasn't one to write particularly intense ones, either. My favorites are The Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle, both of which are pretty funny. Slaughterhouse-Five is funny in its own way, too, and poignant. I guess I just didn't spend enough time reading it to internalize it. Maybe that's what happened when I read it before.

So it goes.

2011 Book #46: Midnight's Children

I'm not quite sure what to say about Midnight's Children except that it's fantastic. Really. If you haven't read it, head over to your local library and pick it up right now. Disregard your Christmas planning, ignore the hurt faces of your family, and hole yourself up for a week, book in one hand, cup of coffee in the other. You won't regret it. Children are resilient: a few years of therapy, and they'll learn that some things are more important than having parents at Christmas.

I'm kidding, of course. Kind of.

At this point, I'm trying to figure out why I haven't read this before. I've ranted several times about colleges not assigning long books anymore, so I won't rehash that here. But everyone should read this novel. It's about everything: history, family, love, good, evil, etc, etc. Just like One Hundred Years of Solitude, which, I'm sure, is why I liked it so very, very much.

That's not to say it's easy reading: Rushdie isn't easy. I had a helluva time with Satanic Verses, but that one was worth it, too. Midnight's Children, though, is my favorite of Rushdie's so far. I picked up a couple of his other novels when I was in Houston, and I'll read them soon. After the Christmas Crunch is over. But I'll talk about that later.

Midnight's Children is about the children born at midnight on India's first day of independence from the British and how they, specifically Saleem Sinai, fit into and affect that history. It's an autobiography from Saleem's point of view, beginning before he was born with an account of his grandfather's life, and then his parents', and then his own.

I had a hard time reading it at the beginning: as I've said, Rushdie isn't easy, and his syntax takes a bit of getting used to. But you read and you read, and then you can't stop reading. A year or two ago, a friend of mine was reading it, and he excitedly told me that it's a challenge until you hit a certain page (which I will not divulge as he refused to remind me), and then BAM. You're in it for the ride, and you can't give up on it because you know it'll be worth it in the end.

The closest analog that I've read is One Hundred Years of Solitude, which gives you a sense of a sweeping history, like all things are encapsulated somewhere in the novel. There's also the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Haruki Murakami. Rushdie creates a whole world around you, and you can't help but be a part of it, swept up in the chaos of Indian independence and what follows. And the end! The end! But I won't go there.

Seriously. If you've never tried Rushdie and you hadn't planned to because of what you'd heard about his books (So many rumors! He's not at all what I expected!) or the man himself. I remember hearing about what happened after he published The Satanic Verses when I was too little to understand what was going on, and now I can see how both of these novels are incredibly controversial - but that's all the more reason to read them. He knew there'd be a scandal (seems like a petty word to use in that case), and he did it anyway. The result is incredibly moving - and, quite often, funny. I had no idea until I puffed up my chest and said, "Hey. Today, I'm gonna tackle Rushdie." I haven't looked back.

2011 Book #45: Wise Blood

I have almost nothing to say about Wise Blood, though I enjoyed it immensely. Fresh off 1Q84, I wanted something a bit shorter and not on the Kindle. I was limited to my own library since it was Black Friday, and I wasn't in the mood to change out of my pajamas. After reading Everything that Rises Must Converge and finally deciding that I love Flannery O'Connor, I picked up Wise Blood at the Centenary book sale, and it sat on my shelf for a few months.

Then, on Black Friday, I sat down and read the whole thing.

Which is very rare for me. I'm pretty sure that the only time I've read a whole novel in one sitting was Cormac McCarthy's Child of God, one afternoon at Barnes and Noble. Though I really enjoyed it, that novel is a blur since I didn't take time to digest it in part.

Same goes for Wise Blood, sadly. Once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down. Luckily, Palmer and I were both off of work that day, and we weren't going anywhere until late afternoon. He caught up on TV shows while I holed myself up in the library for Serious Reading Time. Palmer even came in for a while and napped with the kitties. It was a good day.

Except, of course, that I remember almost nothing about this novel. O'Connor likes to explore religion, and that's a big part of what Wise Blood is about. It felt like an extended short story. It's also O'Connor's first novel (of which I think there are only two), and it whet my appetite to read the rest of her work. I'll have to reread this one in the near future, in bits and pieces, so maybe I can talk about the plot a little.

2011 Book #44: 1Q84

1Q84 finally made it into English. I'd been waiting to read this novel since the Japanese version was announced a couple of years ago. I even pre-ordered it on my Kindle (who wants to lug around a thousand-page hardback?) and got it at midnight on October 25th, the very second it was released. And I dove right in.

1Q84 is being called Murakami's magnum opus, but it's pretty run-of-the-mill for him. It's just really long. In typical Murakami style, the point of view snaps back and forth between two people, Aomame and Tengo, both of whom are around 30 and live in Tokyo. The novel begins with Aomame riding in a cab, in a hurry to make an appointment. There's a huge traffic jam, though, and she gets out of the cab in the middle of the expressway and exits down a hidden flight of stairs used for earthquakes and the like. Then things get weird. Tengo, meanwhile, gets drafted to rewrite a seventeen-year-old's novella called Air Chrysalis, the release of which angers a religious movement and some only partially explained magical beings called the Little People.

The name, of course, is a reference to 1984, and that's the year in which the novel is set. Once Aomame discovers she's in some sort of alternate reality, she names it 1Q84, where the Q stands for Question since she doesn't yet know what's going on.

This novel is really complicated, as I guess any thousand-page novel should be. It took me almost exactly a month to read, which, considering how busy I've been lately, isn't too shabby. In fact, if you count Lord of the Rings as three books (which I don't), I'm pretty sure it's the longest novel I've ever read. And I didn't get bored: something interesting is always happening. As with most other Murakami novels (I've read all of them), I wish some of the supernatural elements came with more thorough explanations. The translation is good - both of the usual translators, Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, worked on this one, so I didn't have a problem with the style. I don't think it needed to be quite as long as it is, though I really enjoyed every minute of reading it.

As I was reading 1Q84, I was sure it would become my favorite Murakami novel yet, but, a few days out, I'm not sure that's the case: I think The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore might still be at the top of my list.

2011 Book # 43: The Mysterious Benedict Society

I generally like kids' novels - Harry Potter, for instance, or The Hunger Games, or The Golden Compass, or The Blue Sword, etc, etc, etc. I think it's because I can usually identify with the characters, and an adult having written them probably helps. That said, The Mysterious Benedict Society didn't work for me. It might be aimed at a younger crowd than I'm used to, though these kids are 11 and 12, and Harry Potter started out at that age. I was also somewhere around 18 at that point - certainly nowhere near 30.

The Mysterious Benedict Society is about four kids, all of them basically orphans, who see an add in the newspaper offering adventures to kids who can pass a test. They're the only for who pass, and they're taken to a large house and, eventually, told what's going on: There's a Bad Guy who is sending out subliminal messages saying that he is awesome and that they should do whatever he says. He runs a school on an island just out of town, and they're supposed to infiltrate it and discover his secrets. Well, they do both, then, in a heroic move, they decide to stay and try to destroy him. Things continue to happen. The end.

Again, I'm not a fan. It almost seems like Trenton Lee Stewart started writing a novel for a slightly older age group, then, mid-novel, decided he should aim a bit younger. I liked the beginning well enough. Stewart's style is okay, though the characters are a bit flat, and there aren't any particularly slow points. I found myself thinking too many times through the novel that the kids were being dumb and taking risks that even kids wouldn't take. They seemed to be acting even younger than they were, which really irritated me. And then there are some stupid twists that made me roll my eyes. For instance (spoiler!): one of the kids is really short and pouty, though she turns out necessary. She's probably as smart of the rest of them, but she has a really bad attitude. We find out why at the end of the novel: she's a precocious two-year-old. Urrrrgh. Then, there are the life issues brought up in the beginning and then tied up way too simply at the end. Like (another spoiler!) one of the kids has a ridiculous photographic memory, and his parents take advantage of him, signing him up for game shows and amassing piles of money. He runs away, and his parents get tons of donations to help find him, which they spend on themselves. The kid seems a bit bitter, as he should be. At the end of the novel, though, when all the kids are being adopted (meh), his parents show up all apologetic, and all, saying they decided they missed him and went into debt looking for him. Instead of being angry like any normal kid would do, this particularly smart kid is perfectly happy to be reunited with his parents, and things go on as if nothing had ever happened. Yeah, right. I was annoyed.

So I guess I've just found a novel aimed at too young an audience with which I can identify, though the top of the book's cover claims that it was at the top of the New York Times' bestseller list, and I don't know how it could do that without a bunch of adult readers. It's also a series: the Mysterious Benedict Society has quite a few adventures on the bookshelves. I won't be checking those out anytime soon.

2011 Book #42: The Castle

I had forgotten that Kafka died before finishing The Castle , or I probably wouldn't have picked it up. Few things annoy me more than not knowing how a novel is supposed to end, though, I guess, good ol' Wikipedia gives us a clue, but that's only a bit of a consolation because, of course, it is Wikipedia. The Castle has been on my reading list for a few years. I started reading it a long time ago, but I didn't get very far. I don't remember why. I think it might have put me to sleep. This time, though, it held my attention throughout, and I really enjoyed it - until it cut off at the end with absolutely no resolution.

Here's the general plot: A man named K. wanders into a village governed by officials in a castle not far away. He checks into an inn, goes to sleep, and is awakened by the innkeeper and one of those officials, who says he doesn't have permission to stay in the village and that he must leave immediately. K. claims to be a land-surveyor summoned by the castle (we never really learn whether he is or not, but I assume he's lying), and after some phone calls, he is allowed to stay. So he sleeps. The next morning, he tries to contact various officials, but he finds it impossible. He thinks he has a chance at talking to an official who knows an official, etc, etc, etc, but, of course, he doesn't. It's the same general idea as The Trial , though they're certainly two different novels. And then it breaks off. The end.

It doesn't sound like it, but I really do like Kafka. I read The Metamorphosis when I was in high school, and I really enjoyed it. I read The Trial when I was in college and, for a while, thought it was the best novel I'd ever read. The Castle was okay. Next time, I'll read one Kafka finished writing.

2011 Book #41: The Book of Sand

Several years ago, I dated a guy whose mother so often said that Kevin Costner was originally cast in Patrick Swayze's role in Ghost, that her sons came up with a gesture to express it more succinctly: they would simply touch their index fingers to their foreheads. I need to come up with similar gesture for my usual excuse of waiting too long after I've read a book to write about it. Or I could just abide by my general rule of posting about the book I've just read before I begin the next, though that idea doesn't seem to be working for me too well. So maybe I'll raise my hands above my head and cough.

Anyway. About a week ago, I finished The Book of Sand, my second Borges collection. This time it was all fiction, which was a plus, though, in general, I enjoyed Labyrinths much more. I felt challenged and entranced throughout the short stories in Labyrinths, but I found myself a bit bored with The Book of Sand.

The only story I really like in this collection is "The Book of Sand," which is about an infinite book. A bible salesman appears at the protagonist's door, offering to sell him a book with no beginning or end. As you turn to the back of the book, more and more pages appear, and the same thing happens when you try to find the front. Pages also continually change in the middle.  The protagonist (who calls himself Jorge Luis Borges) buys the book, becomes obsessed with it, and realizes that it's a curse, so he does his best to get rid of it.

There are a couple more good stories, like "The Mirror and the Mask" and "The Disk," but I didn't see any comparable to one like "The Library of Babel" in Labyrinths, which just might be one of my favorite stories ever.

I still love Borges, of course, but I hope that most of his work (that I haven't read) is more like Labyrinths than The Book of Sand, though I guess they're both the same type of thing. One of the blurbs on the back of the book compared it to Labyrinths, but it's certainly not as good.

2011 Book #40: The Devil All the Time

I really need to be better about posting quickly after I finish a novel. Unless it falls into the Best Novel Ever category, I forget what I wanted to say before I write anything down. Once I hit this year's quota, I might take a break from the writing part. Or not. We'll see.

I decided to read The Devil All the Time because it sounded similar to stories and novels by Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy, at least in substance. I'm generally pretty bad at reading pop fiction, a category into which this novel definitely fits, though I didn't have a hard time getting through this one. I think it's a story that could easily have come from either O'Connor or McCarthy - and it's certainly as gruesome.

The Devil All the Time is about various damaged people in terrible situations trying to survive. One is a young boy whose mother is dying of cancer. His father wants his mother to live so badly that he builds an alter in the woods behind his house and sacrifices animals (and one person), hanging them onto homemade crosses. Then there's the couple who drives across the country picking up young male hitchhikers, raping and killing them. The storylines eventually converge.

I enjoyed this novel more than I thought I would. It's better-written than I'd expect it to be, though I'd never heard of Donald Ray Pollock before, so I guess I didn't know what to expect. The plot is well thought-out, and the style is good. Pollock wrote another novel that, I think, is somehow related to this one, called Knockemstiff (the name of a town that reminds me of a certain author who wrote a series of novels set in another town with a stupid name, though Knockemstiff really exists), and I think I might be interested enough to read it. We shall see.

2011 Book #39: The Hero and the Crown

The Hero and the Crown is Palmer's favorite kid-book, which is why I read it. I read The Blue Sword first because there was some confusion which of the two is actually his favorite. Here's why: both were written by Robin McKinley, whowrote The Blue Sword first, but The Hero and the Crown is its prequel. I'm glad, though, that I (kind of) read them in the wrong order because The Hero and the Crown is so much better. I really, really enjoyed it.

This one's about Aerin, daughter of the king of Damar. She's a bit of an outsider because her mother was a commoner from the (evilish) North, and lots of the citizens consider her mother, now dead, a "witchwoman," and think some sort of evil rubbed off on Aerin. Tor, a cousin, is slated to become king, and he is in love with Aerin, who keeps getting into trouble. She befriends and rehabilitates her father's lame warhorse and investigates an ancient ointment that protects the wearer from fire, then runs off to fight dragons (which are about the size of dogs but much more dangerous). Her father is having problems with the Northerners, and while he goes off to battle, she kills the last of the giant dragons, Maur, and is seriously injured. As she lays in bed dying, she dreams about a silver lake and a blond-haired man who says he can help her. She musters her strength and makes it to the lake, where she meets Luthe, who saves her but also makes her "not quite mortal," and once she is well, she travels to fight her uncle in a tall black tower. Then more stuff happens.

It appears that McKinley has taken care of some of her style issues that made The Blue Sword seem sooooo long. The Hero and the Crown flew by, and I found myself wishing there was more. There's a scene about three-quarters through the book in which Aerin is climbing up an amazingly long flight of stairs, but we only find out later that it's taken her thousands of years. McKinley made it seem like a couple hours. But there was less awkward language, and it was an easier, more pleasant read. I wish she'd write more in this series.

2011 Book #38: The Invention of Hugo Cabret

I'm not sure I should count this one. The size of The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a bit daunting until you look inside. It's 533 thick (as in good-quality) pages. I was expecting it to take a while. But no. Near the end of the book, the author, Brian Selznik, mentions that it's only around 26,000 words, which is roughly half the length of The Great Gatsby, which is about the shortest a novel can be and still be called a novel. Below 50k, it's a novella. So The Invention of Hugo Cabret is, word-wise, a short novella.

But the words are only part of it. It's filled with beautiful pencil drawings - and even some photographs. It's a beautiful mix of the traditional and graphic novel, and I loved every minute of it, though I wish it was a lot longer.



The Invention of Hugo Cabret is about a young boy, Hugo, who lives in a train station in Paris. His father died, so he moved there with his uncle, but his uncle disappeared. Hugo is left all alone to perform his uncle's job of keeping all the clocks in the station wound and running correctly. Before his father, who was also a clock-maker, died, he had been working to repair an automaton he'd found, the origin of which no one seemed to know.



Hugo is determined to fix the automaton because he thinks it has a message for him: it's sitting at a desk, pen in hand, ready to start writing. He gets the parts for it by stealing from the toymaker in a stall nearby. Eventually, he gets caught, and things get interesting.

I really enjoyed this book. It's different. Martin Scorsese is directing a movie based on the novel, which I'd imagine would work out very well.

2011 Book #37: Cosmopolis

I don't even wanna talk about this one.

I hadn't read a DeLillo novel in quite a while - we're faaaar away from the glory days of the DeLillo Binge. While I was working on the Thesis Monster (which I still have to finish), I read most of his novels and realized that he's just writing the same novel over and over with different characters and settings. Once I saw that, I lost all interest in DeLillo and all interest in the Thesis Monster. Which is why I haven't worked on it in a while.

Here's the plot of every DeLillo novel I've read (except, maybe, of Underworld, which I didn't finish): A guy (always a guy: DeLillo writes Man Novels) experiences some sort of postmodern angst related in some way to the media. He runs away from his life or otherwise destroys it. Sometimes he attempts to return and is unsuccessful in reintegrating himself.

There. I've just told you the plot of Cosmopolis. And Americana, Great Jones Street, Mao II (the three novels included in the Thesis Monster), Libra, White Noise, Point Omega, Falling Man, and all the others I've read. That's right: all of them.

Really, Don DeLillo? I thought you were better than that. Or at least a bit more creative.

I still say I'll finish the Thesis Monster, and now I have a wee bit of incentive. Next August, I want to start Librarian School, which means another master's. Which also means I need to finish the one I'm "currently" working on. I only need thirty more pages, and I have until early April to do it. I need to get my shizz together.

2011 Book #36: Everything that Rises Must Converge

It took me a long time to read Everything that Rises Must Converge, but that's not because I didn't like it. Now that I have a job, I've been reading a lot less. I get up, go to work, come home, and watch bad TV. I've only been reading during my (very short) break at work and just before I go to bed. I'm glad I've gotten ahead in my quota. Also, it's too damn hot around here to read. The high today was 109. I know I said last winter that I'd rather it be 100 degrees outside than fifty, but 109 is just ridiculous. I'm working with window units here.

Anyway. The only Flannery O'Connor I remember reading before this was ye olde high school and college favorite, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," which, I guess, I liked well enough. I've never been one for southern lit in general, though I've always loved A Confederacy of Dunces, and I've grown to like Faulkner a lot. I enjoyed Tom Sawyer, though I don't have any interest in other Twain.

But O'Connor! She's fantastic! I have a new favorite short story writer. I'm not sure which of these short stories I like best: they're all really, really good, and they deserve a second (and third!) reading. I'm sitting here staring at the list of stories, trying to single one out, but I really can't, so I won't.

Everything that Rises Must Converge is O'Connor's last collection. She was still working on it when she died. She only published one other collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, so I might pick that up at the liberry. Where I work.

Speaking of the liberry, I've been thinking about writing a series of book reviews for their blog. This post would not be a good example of a review, though I've been considering looking into gearing my entries more toward the formal. We'll see if I can doff my laziness for a bit.

2011 Book #35: Lullaby

Lullaby is the second Chuck Palahniuk novel I've attempted and the first I've finished. I picked up Haunted a couple of years ago, and, though I remember liking it well enough, I didn't finish it. It either freaked me out or bored me. I'm not sure which. I read Lullaby because Jacob told me about it, and I thought it sounded interesting. It's about a feature writer investigating cases of random baby deaths who figures out that lots of the parents had copies of a book called 27 Poems and Rhymes from Around the World. There's a poem in it, which he calls a culling song, that kills people. And he kills some people, then begins a quest to destroy every copy of the book. He meets a real estate agent who has problems with amusingly haunted houses, who also knows the culling song, and they band together with a young couple in search of the rest of the books. Then Things Happen. (Just wait for the scene involving a cryogenically frozen dead baby. That one's a kicker.)

I enjoyed most of Lullaby, but at the end it gets a bit preachy. Palahniuk yells at the world, "THIS BOOK IS ABOUT POWER! YOU HAVE NO FREE WILL BECAUSE YOU'RE BEING CONTROLLED BY OTHERS! LIKE THE GOVERNMENT! AND THE MEDIA!" It was a bit much for me. Toward the end of the novel, he can't stop talking about it. He even throws a "you" in there:

Oyster occupies Helen, the way an army occupies a city. The way Helen occupied Sarge. The way the past, the media, the world, occupy you.

Meh. I made it clear when I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being that I hate being preached at. It's like the second half in Sartre's Nausea when he's preaching Existentialism. I get it. Enough already.

A year or two ago, some well-known publication (I don't, of course, remember which) had a website that said it could tell you to what author's style your writing is closest. I don't write much anymore (besides on this blog, of course), so I plugged in a chapter of the novel I'll never finish. It said my style is similar to Palahniuk's, and I can see that. And I like his style, so it's certainly not an insult.

So, in sum, I enjoyed Lullaby except for its preachiness, and I'm open to giving Haunted another try. Palahniuk also wrote Fight Club, and I hear the novel is better than the movie, though that's usually the case. I'm not even sure I've seen the whole movie. I just hope that he doesn't pound his message into the readers head with his other books. It was almost violent.

2011 Book #34: The Lake

I'm generally a fan of contemporary Japanese fiction. I've read and liked a few of Ryu Murakami's novels, and Haruki Murakami is one of my very favorite authors. A few years ago, I read Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, and I generally liked that one, too. That said, Yoshimoto's The Lake is a total waste of time. The only novels I've read this year and actively disliked are Things Fall Apart and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The Lake is fluff fiction with some of the latter novel's annoying-as-hell preachiness. Generally, my rule is that if, 50 pages in, nothing interesting is going on, I can scrap it. This one was so short that I didn't. I figured something interesting was bound to happen. I was totally wrong.

The Lake is about a girl whose mother has recently died. She lives alone in a big city in Japan, and she's lonely. She meets the guy whose window faces her from across the street, and they begin dating. He moves in. She's not sure what it is, but there's something wrong with him. He's damaged in some way. He asks her to go with him to see two of his old friends who live near a lake, and she agrees to go. They arrive at a little cabin occupied by one nice guy and his bedridden sister. The friend puts his hand on his sister's head, and she speaks through him. Fine. So the couple goes back to the city. Long story short, it turns out that (spoiler!) the boyfriend had been kidnapped and brainwashed by a cult when he was a kid, and he has problems forming relationships. The End.

This book was a total waste of time. I read it quickly simply because I wanted it to be over. The translation is terrible, too. Here's an actual sentence:

Stacks of incomprehensible books about biochemistry and genetic engineering and so on would be stacked up next to him, their pages marked with Post-its.

Really? Mr. Translator, couldn't you have tried just a little harder?

I'm glad I didn't waste too much time on this one. I'll move on to something more interesting, though I'm not sure what that is, yet. Shouldn't be hard to find: I do work in a library, after all.

2011 Book #33: O Pioneers!

I don't really have much to say about O Pioneers! I generally enjoyed it, but it's entirely forgettable. When I was in college, I reluctantly read My Antonia, also by Willa Cather, and thoroughly enjoyed it though I expected to hate it. O Pioneers! is the same type of novel - you know, pioneers and things, and I thought I'd like it more than I did.

I only finished reading it yesterday, and I've forgotten most of it. It's about a family of (what?) pioneers, the Bergsons, in the Great Plains, trying to survive and add land to their farm. The father dies and leaves his land to his two sons and one daughter, and they quibble about what happens to it. Then, there's a Steinbeck-type tragedy (a la Of Mice and Men or The Grapes of Wrath), and, as in another Steinbeck trend, Life Goes On. That's about it. It's short.

Again, I liked it well enough, but I think O Pioneers! might go into the Wait.-I-Read-That? pile with Franny and Zooey and other novels I've totally forgotten I've read. If you're trying to choose between this one and My Antonia, go with the latter. I need to read that one again.

In Cather's defense, there are lots of DeLillo-ish quotes that make me want to work on the DeLillo Project again and expand it.

The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.

A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.

We've liked the same things and we've liked them together, without anybody else knowing.

It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security.

This kind of language is what I like best about O Pioneers!

 

2011 Book #32: Sweet Thursday

I've done it again! I waited too long to write this blog post, and I've forgotten what I want to talk about. I used to have a rule that after I finished a book, I had to write the blog post before I started a new one, but, at some point, that rule went out the window. Now, I'm two books behind. But I've been busy!

My laziness aside, I really loved Sweet Thursday, even more than Cannery Row. In fact, I'm close to knocking Haruki Murakami down a rung and declaring Steinbeck my Favorite Novelist. His language is soooo beautiful, and lots of his stories, especially in these two novels, are lovely in a sentimental sort of way.

For what can a man accomplish that has not been done a million times before? What can he say that he will not find in Lao-Tse or the Bhagavad-gita or the Prophet Isaiah?

Sweet Thursday is a sequel to Cannery Row. This one begins after World War II, and Steinbeck spends a good deal of time talking what happened to the characters in Cannery Row - those who went to war and those who didn't. Most of the first novel's characters reappear here, and the focus is similar. You can read about Cannery Row in my earlier post.

In Sweet Thursday, the central plot line is similar to that of its prequel: Mack and the boys are trying to cheer up Doc. This time, instead of throwing parties that inevitably destroy Doc's lab, they want to find him a wife. All of Cannery Row's residents are involved, even the new ones. And, as in the earlier novel, Mischief Ensues.

Sweet Thursday is one of the best novels I've read in a really long time. Steinbeck captures the setting and time period amazingly well, and all of the characters are well-rounded. The only other Steinbeck novels I've read are Travels with Charley, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath, which was my favorite before Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. I'll read East of Eden soon.

2011 Book #31: A Handful of Dust

A Handful of Dust is a strange novel. It's also really good, though not nearly as good as Waugh's earlier novel, Brideshead Revisited. It's strange because of the ending. The penultimate chapter of the novel was originally a short story called "The Man Who Liked Dickens," which had been published in a magazine. Another American magazine wanted to serialize the whole novel sans that short story, so Waugh wrote an alternative ending, which is wildly different. The short story part isn't anything like the rest of the novel.

A Handful of Dust is a satire about English society. Brenda Last, Tony Last's wife, has an affair with Mr. Beaver, a young London man who is basically a player and who has no money. Brenda falls in love with him and convinces her husband to rent a flat in London because she is supposedly studying economics at the university and can't be bothered to go back to their family home in the country even though she has a son who is constantly asking about her. The kid is my favorite character in this novel and (whoa, spoiler!) Waugh kills him off before the halfway point. Brenda doesn't really care and uses her son's death as an excuse to divorce Tony. Then the story splits: Brenda continues her life in London, and Beaver eventually breaks up with her after the party season is over, and Tony goes to Brazil. Here's where the endings split. In the actual novel, Tony goes with an anthropologist-of-sorts looking for a certain tribe around Brazil, ends up with a fever and hallucinates, and he and the anthropologist get lost. The anthropologist goes down a river in a canoe and gets killed in a waterfall. Tony, hallucinating, starts walking until he comes upon another tribe that's run by an insane Englishman who keeps him captive and makes him read Dickens aloud every day. The End. Then there's the alternate ending, in which Tony just went on a tour around the Americas, and when he returns to England, Brenda is there, and they (sort of) reconcile, except when Brenda asks Tony to get rid of the flat in London, he secretly keeps it for himself. The End.

The more I think about A Handful of Dust, the more I like it. It's a good summerish sort of read, and it's really interesting. The alternate ending situation is cool if for no other reason than its novelty. Waugh says it's "included as a curiosity." If I were one to sit on a beach and read, this would be the novel to take with me. It's really light reading, but Waugh does a lot of interesting things that veer away from what you might expect of an English novel from the 1930s.

2011 Book #30: Cannery Row

I waited too long to write this one, so I don't have much to say. Cannery Row is a very short novel about, well, Cannery Row in California around the Great Depression. It starts off with a description of the town's grocery store owner and how he influences the community, then moves on to other characters, like a series of vignettes. Eventually, though, Steinbeck settles on some guys who rent from the grocery store owner and do occasional work for a doctor (they call him doc) who supplies medical parts, mostly in jars. The men want to throw him a party, and they accidentally cause lots of damage in his lab. They try again, and Doc finds out about it first, so he makes preparations, but windows get knocked out and the like, too. There are some fun fights and dealings with the local brothel madam. And that's about it. It's short.

I love Steinbeck. He's one of my very favorite authors. Many years ago, I read Travels with Charley and Of Mice and Men, and, more recently, I read The Grapes of Wrath. I enjoyed all of them immensely, just as I did Cannery Row. My favorite was The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden is on my to-read list. Next up, though, is Sweet Thursday, which is a sort of sequel to Cannery Row, and the liberry happened to have it. I have a few of his other novels in one of my bookcases, and I think I'll be moving through them pretty quickly.

2011 Book #29: The Savage Detectives

The Savage Detectives is kind of a hard read. It's also really, really long. It's also worth getting through. I'm not sure how I came across it, though Roberto Bolaño's 2666 has been on my radar for quite some time. I haven't tackled it yet because it's even longer than this one. Until recently, I've never been a fan of long books, probably because I was conditioned in college to read short ones quickly. Longer books, though, like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, are steadily growing on me.

The Savage Detectives is split into three parts. The first is somewhere under two hundred pages, and it's a nice, easy read. It's generally about this early college-age kid, Juan Garcia Madero, who fancies himself a poet and joins a sort-of movement in Mexico called the visceral realists. He meets other people, some of whom are poets and others who pretend to be poets, and Things Happen. The most important of these other characters, we figure out later, are Ulises Lima and Arturo Bolano. They end up running off withe Garcia Madero and a prostitute named Lupe. Then we get to the second part, the bulk of the book, told by lots of narrators. All of the stories at least mention Ulises and Arturo, but some only tangentially. Wikipedia (I know) has a good list of the various characters telling the stories. Ulises and Arturo went to Europe for a few years, then back to Mexico, and got into mischief. They kind of turned people off. They didn't seem to write much poetry. Finally, we reach the third part, which is a continuation of the first. After leaving town (they were all trying to hide Lupe from her pimp), they drive to the Sonora Desert to search for the founder of visceral realism, Cesárea Tinajero, and Things Happen.

I really loved this novel, though it took me forever to read. It seems like the kind that you need to reread and study: it's really complex, and working on wrapping your head around all of it would probably be rewarding. That said, I'm not going to reread it - at least not in the near future.

For a novel about poets, there's very, very little poetry in it, and we only get to see one official visceral realist poem by Cesárea Tinajero, which is basically a series of drawings. It's interesting that we don't hear anything from Ulises Lima or Arturo Bolano themselves, that it's all stories surrounding them. Even Garcia Madero, to my knowledge, only appears in the first and last parts.

A funny bit: At some point while I was reading, I tweeted that Bolaño shares Don DeLillo's love of lists, even that he puts DeLillo's lists to shame. Then, toward the end (page 574), Bolaño talks briefly about DeLillo, calling him a "phenomenon." That gave me a chuckle.

It would actually be pretty interesting to compare Bolaño to DeLillo. The Savage Detectives fits pretty squarely under the Postmodernism bracket (vague as it is), and there are lots of Deserts and unhappiness and motels. Bolaño almost makes DeLillo interesting again.

2011 Book #28: My Life in France

My original plan for this blog was 50 novels in a year, but a friend recommended and loaned me Julia Child's My Life in France. It sounded interesting enough, and though I'm usually not one for nonfiction, I figured I'd give it a try. My Life in France is an "autobiography" about Julia Child's years in France when she decided she loved cooking and went to the Cordon Bleu, etc, etc. I put "autobiography" in quotes because her nephew, Alex Prud'homme, actually wrote the book. From the forward, written by Prud'homme:

For a few days every month, I'd sit in her living room asking questions, reading from family letters, and listening to her stories. At first I taped our conversations, but when she began to poke my take recorder with her long fingers, I realized it was distracting her, and took notes instead. (x)

Yeah, that's not autobiography, and after I read the forward, I almost decided not to read the book at all. But, even though it's written by someone else, I really enjoyed it much more than I imagined I would. There's something exciting about it, and after seeing Julie and Julia, which I also liked immensely, I wanted to hear the real story. It seems that lots of the bad stuff was glossed over, like tension between Julia and Louisette when the latter wasn't really helping with the cookbook, and Julia had her name removed as an author. That said, My Life in France is an inspiring look into Julia Child's life that made me want to drink more wine, at the very least - and keep a diary (at which I'm generally terrible) because it'd be nice to look back after many years and remember little things, like fantastic meals, that I enjoyed.

2011 Book #27: The Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

I read The Short Stories of Conrad Aiken by accident, though I've been meaning to read it for years. I'd just finished Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and was waiting for UPS to deliver The Savage Detectives, and I figured I'd read a couple of the stories. This collection includes my very favorite short story ever, "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," so I thought I'd enjoy the rest of them. Once I started reading, I found myself enjoying the stories differently than I'd expected to. I thought they'd all be like "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," but they're not.

"Silent Snow, Secret Snow" is about a boy, who, one morning in his bedroom, imagines that snow is falling. He hears the postman coming down the street as he always does, but his footsteps from the farthest house are muffled due to the snow. The boy gets up, looks out the window, and sees that there is, in fact, no snow at all. He becomes obsessed with the snow, hearing it in the mornings and imagining it all day, and he loses interest in real life. His parents and teacher are concerned, as his condition progresses very quickly. Every morning, he imagines the snow getting deeper and deeper, and he can only hear the postman when he gets closer and closer. Eventually, the boy recedes completely into his world of snow, oblivious to his parents and the real world around him.

I've always liked that story. I think I read it for the first time when I was in high school. I don't remember whether it was assigned or not or how I found out about it. I still have a copy of it from a library book. The funny thing is that I own the library book, now, and that's what I read. I don't remember how I got that, either. It's from the main branch of the Jefferson Parish Library, and I assume I got it from a book sale. It's been sitting on my bookshelf for years, waiting to be read.

And I like it most of the stories. I only really like two of them, though: "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" and "Mr. Arcularis," which is about a man taking a boat to Europe after surgery in the US. He meets a woman, and things turn out interestingly. Lots of stories in this collection are about failed love, and some, like "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," are about crazy people.

I did a bit of reading about Conrad Aiken, and it appears that love and insanity were some of his major concerns. Evidently, when he was a kid, his father went crazy and killed his mother. He was always afraid he would go crazy himself. And he was married three times. In an interview with The Paris Review, he said he was primarily a poet, but he started writing short stories for the money and decided he liked them. I don't think I've ever read one of his poems, and I'm not to interested in doing so. He was a friend of T.S. Eliot's and surprisingly influential in the literary world in the 1920s and 1930s.

I don't see myself revisiting Aiken, though I enjoyed the stories. I'll probably stumble across "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" or "Mr. Arcularis" again, but his other work doesn't interest me.

2011 Book #26: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

I'd wanted to read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell since I first saw it on bookshelves a few years ago. I didn't really know much about it except that it involved magicians but isn't really fantasy. Which meant to me that it might not suck. I had a feeling that I'd really like it, but I didn't even try reading it because it's so long. Like 900 pages long. In fact, if you count Lord of the Rings as three books, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is the longest book I've ever read. But, you say, I have an English degree! Colleges don't assign long books anymore, so I wasn't in the habit. Even Lord of the Rings took me several months to read, and I was quite impressed with myself after finishing it.

Here's the most basic of summaries, as the plot is quite complex: In early ninetenth-century England, there is a society of magicians. They don't actually practice magic - they just study it. Someone gets to wondering why no one in England practices magic anymore, and a couple members if the society find the one magician who actually practices magic: Mr. Norrell. Mr. Norrell wants to get involved in the government, to help England in its war against France, but no one in politics seems to respect magic. He has a cousin in Parliament, Sir Walter Pole, who refuses to help him. Sir Walter's wife dies, though, and Mr. Norrell says he can bring her back to life, which he does, except he doesn't exactly know what he's doing. He asks a fairy, known as the gentleman with the thistle-down hair, to help him. The fairy makes a deal, saying he'll revive her as long as he gets half her life. Mr. Norrell thinks the fairy means that Lady Pole will only live for half her normal lifespan, but the actual deal is that Lady Pole will be spirited off to Faerie every night to dance in a ball, a captive of the fairy. So, since Mr. Norrell "helped" Lady Pole, he gets his foot in the door at Parliament and becomes involved in the war, using magic to defend England. Meanwhile, a younger man named Jonathan Strange stumbles into magic because nothing else interests him, and he eventually becomes Mr. Norrell's student. He learns quickly and then goes off to Belgium to fight in the war. At some point, the fairy decides he wants Strange's wife, Arabella, for his collection, so he charms a swamp log to look like her and then kidnaps her. The charm wears off after a few days, and it looks like Arabella is dead, though she is stuck in Faerie with Lady Pole. Then there are a few hundred pages of war and the like, and, somehow, it doesn't get boring. Eventually, Strange and Norrell separate, and since Norrell has hoarded all the magic books in England, Strange runs out of material to study. Not knowing what Norrell did with the fairy, he decides to summon his own fairy. The problem is that it's the gentleman with the thistle-down hair. The fairy refuses to help him, so Strange casts a spell and makes it to the fairy's mansion, and he sees his wife at the ball. The fairy curses him and sends him home, and he obsesses over getting his wife back, deliberately making himself crazy in the process. Eventually, he convinces Norrell to help him, and they team up again, fading off into magicland together.

And that's only the most skeletal of summaries.

I absolutely loved every minute of this novel. I was totally intimidated by its length, but it was so worth it. I was sad when it ended because Susanna Clarke had drawn me into a world I didn't want to leave. The funny thing is that Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was her first novel. I can't wait to read the rest of them, though I have a feeling that after this one, I'll find myself disappointed.

2011 Book #25: The Silent Land

I usually don't read books like The Silent Land, which fits squarely into the pop-fiction category. I found it through a Facebook ad that claimed it's like a Murakami novel. I was, of course, skeptical, but I downloaded it to my (new!) Kindle and gave it a try. It's was really short: I read it in four or five hours, and I read pretty slowly. It's about a couple skiing in Spain when they get caught by an avalanche. The husband digs out the wife, and they get down the mountain, but no one is there. The whole town is empty. At first, they think that the resort has been evacuated for fear of another avalanche, so they try to get out of town, but no matter what road they take, the always end up back there. The reader wonders if they're dead, which seems kind of obvious if you've ever seen Beetlejuice, or if something else is going on. The power starts going out, and time gets confused. In the end, it turns out that only one of them is dead, which is a bit of a twist, I guess.

Though The Silent Land is a predictable pop-fiction thriller, I really liked it. Graham Joyce's imagery is really good: it was one of those novels in which I found myself totally absorbed. I was even creeped out at times. I wanted to find out what was going on as much as the characters did, so I found myself reading through it really quickly just to find out what would happen next. It's totally worth a read.

2011 Book #24: Watership Down

I tried reading Watership Down several years ago and failed. I remembered what happened more than halfway through the novel, so I'm surprised I didn't just finish it. It is long, though. And it's totally worth a read. I really enjoyed it, though reading from a rabbit's point of view took a bit of getting used to. The novel is about rabbits starting their own warren and the Things that Happen. It's amazingly violent - much more than I thought it would be. I haven't seen the movie (or if I have, it's been a really long time), but I bet it sticks pretty close to the novel's plot. And Adams is great at imagery. I felt like I was in the warren with the rabbits.

The first time I tried to read Watership Down, I lived in Mid City, New Orleans. It was probably a year or two before the hurricane. My condo wasn't in the best neighborhood, but it wasn't terrible, either. Except a girl named Ashley lived next to me, and she sold prescription drugs, so ne'er-do-wells were often about, yelling up to her window. "AshLEY!" Urgh. Anyway, I was sitting in a recliner next to a window that looked out to my small patio. It had a privacy fence a good bit taller than me. I heard a noise, and a dude I assumed to be one of AshLEY's "friends" jumped over my fence, grabbed my bicycle, shoved it over the fence, and jumped back over. Goodbye to my bike. Not that I really rode it or anything. I didn't know what to do, so I just sat really still and watched him. I figured it'd be a bad idea to try and confront him since the only thing between us was a thin pane of glass.

I don't really have a lot to say about this novel. I really liked it. There's also a Tales from Watership Down that I'll probably look into at some point. A novel about rabbits was certainly a change from what I've been reading lately.

2011 Book #23: The Moviegoer

I read The Moviegoer when I was in high school, and I hated it, though I knew I should have liked it. For years, I've claimed not to be a fan of Southern lit in general - with exceptions like A Confederacy of Dunces and, more recently, Faulkner. I'm not sure why I don't like it. Maybe it's because I hear the words in my head with a heavy southern drawl.

Anyway, months ago, I decided to give The Moviegoer a second try, and I finally got around to it. I remembered almost nothing about it, but I had a feeling I'd like it more now. The protagonist is exactly my age, 29 and about to turn 30, and he has a lot of the general life issues that I have, so I can totally empathize with him. Here's an example:

Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies - my only talent - smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall - on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.

The problem with The Moviegoer is that it bored me. I wasn't bored to put it down, but I wasn't excited to read it, either. Maybe it's the drawl drifting through my head - I don't know - but I just couldn't get into it. Walker Percy just isn't my kind of writer.

On a more interesting note, I've now read as many books this year as I did in all of 2010. I was on quite a bender, but then I started messing with the Thesis Monster again, and Palmer got me hooked on Warcraft, which is much more fun than you might think it would be. I'll still hit the big 5-0, just you wait. I'm glad I got ahead in January and February.

2011 Book #22: Americana

This is the third time I've read Americana. I really need to work on the Thesis Monster, and it had been a year since I'd read the book, so I figured rereading it would be a good start. I loved it the first two times: it was probably my favorite DeLillo book (hovering there with White Noise). This time, though, I was bored out of my mind. Michael Douglas narrated it in my head (a la Wonder Boys), and he just droned on and on.

I've come to the conclusion that my love affair with Don DeLillo is permanently over. The turning point is when I was researching the Thesis Monster and realized that he just writes the same book over and over: some dude with postmodern angst is running away from identity-creating media to find his own identity. Okay, that's not exactly the case with all of DeLillo's novels, but they're all basically about the same thing.

So much for the DeLillo Binge.

As much as I didn't enjoy Americana this time around, there are things about DeLillo that I still do love. His language is beautiful. If I could make myself sit down and write a novel, I'd want it to sound like his.

Literature is what we passed and left behind, that more than men and cactus. For years I had been held fast by the great unwinding mystery of this deep sink of land, the thick paragraphs and imposing photos, the galop of panting adjectives, prairie truth and the clean kills of eagles, the desert shawled in Navaho paints, images of surreal cinema, of ventricles tied to pumps. Chaco masonry and the slung guitar, of church organ lungs and the slate of empires, of coral in this strange place, suggesting a reliquary sea, and of the blessed semblance of God on the faces of superstitious mountains. Whether the novels and songs usurped the land, or took something true from it, is not so much the issue as this: that what I was engaged in was merely a literary venture, an attempt to find pattern and motive, to make of something wild a squeamish thesis on the essence of the nation's soul. To formulate. To seek links. But the wind burned across the creekbeds, barely moving the soil, and there was nothing to announce to myself in the way of historic revelation.

DeLillo's style is beautiful. It's just that I've become as jaded as the characters in his novels. David Bell would have no interest in reading Americana.
So. On to the Thesis Monster. Now, as reconnected with the novel as I can be, I have no excuse not to write. My outline is done: all I have to do is fill in the blanks between quotes. Because that's what the Thesis Monster is: a series of quotes. The postmodern problem.
I've made a schedule of sorts. On weekday mornings, I work on the Thesis Monster, and that's that. I've never been good for much after lunch, so the afternoon is mine. If I can be productive in the mornings, it'll be done soon, and I'll never have to look at it again. I'll also be done with academia, which is another - much scarier - issue. But I have some time left.

This afternoon, I'll ride my bike up to Palmer's, water some plants, and try to tackle The Moviegoer. I hated it when I read it at least ten years ago, but I change my opinions of books pretty frequently. The weather is nice, and I'm looking forward to propping my feet up and giving Walker Percy a second chance.

In other news, the Shreveport Library Book Sale was last Saturday. I usually don't buy much of anything since everything is so disorganized and it's so crowded. Here's what I got this time:



I discovered once I got home that I already had The Poisonwood Bible, so I donated my copy to Charlotte. I haven't read any of them.

2011 Book #21: The Year of the Flood

The Year of the Flood isn't really a sequel to Oryx and Crake like I expected it to be. The two novels' events happen at the same time: the plots and characters are interwoven. The Year of the Flood is narrated by two of these characters, Toby and Ren. They're both part of an environmentalist group called God's Gardeners. The novel jumps around in time between Year One, when the God's Gardeners first organize, and Year Twenty-Five, when the Waterless Flood knocks out most humans. The Waterless Flood is the virus Crake intentionally spreads in the first novel. Then Things Happen, as they did in Oryx and Crake. We hear a bit more about what happens at the end of the first novel, though not much. Many of the characters in The Year of the Flood are minor characters in Oryx and Crake, and vice-versa, which makes it interesting.

I think I liked The Year of the Flood more than Oryx and Crake, though that one was good, too. I gave this one four stars on Goodreads because, unlike Oryx, it's really preachy. Explicitly so, even. The way Atwood does it, though, isn't annoying, at least for the most part. Adam One, founder of the God's Gardeners, gives sermons of sorts, followed by poems Atwood says were inspired by William Blake's poetry. You can listen to some of them here. They're super-corny.

I explained my past with Margaret Atwood in my Oryx and Crake post, so I won't talk about it again. These books, though, have reminded me of how much I enjoy her stories and her writing style, so I'll revisit her novels soon, though only after some DeLillo because I've given myself a stern talking-to about the Thesis Monster situation, and I have to get to work.

2011 Book #20: The Blue Sword

The Blue Sword seems much longer than it is. It's a kids' book that doesn't read like a kids' book. In fact, I'm kind of confused about why it's even in the juvenile section of the library rather than, at least, the young adult section. Maybe it was the style that made me read it so slowly. Surprising longness aside, I really liked it. Robin McKinley is good at creating a whole world in a relatively short space.

The novel is about a girl from a normal-ish world who is thrust into a magical one in which she must learn to function and thrive. Corlath, king of the Hillfolk and guided by some kind of hereditary magic, kidnaps the girl, Harry, and takes her into the hills, which are threatened by the Northerners, who aren't quite human. Turns out Harry is good at riding horses and fighting, and she has some of the magic, too. They eventually fight the Northerners. Things are more complicated than that, of course.

I read The Blue Sword because it's one of Palmer's favorite kid-books, and, though he doesn't seem to be too fond of them anymore (Harry Potter is a kids' novel!), I see how he liked this one. It's really engrossing. It's one of those I'll confuse with a movie. There was some confusion as to which Robin McKinley novel was actually his favorite. There's a prequel to this one called The Hero and the Crown, but it was written after this one. It was supposedly going to be a whole series, but I guess that didn't pan out. She talks a bit about it on her webpage:

The bottom line is, it isn't my choice. You don't write stories like you might build a bookcase. You don't get up in the morning, decide that you're going to put seven chapters together to make a novel, whip out your tape measure and decide how many words, order the paper by the square foot from the office supply shop, sit down and start stamping the pages with black ink in a quantifiable pattern, and polish off the rough edges with a sander at the end. It's not up to you. You write what you are given to write, and you just go on hoping you will go on receiving those gifts. Damar hasn't seen fit to oblige me to write about it lately.

All of this, of course, seems like corny crap to me. It's funny how a photo of an author will immediately bias me for or against him or her. Robin McKinley reminds me of one of my high school teachers. It's actually kind of creepy. She also loooooves horses. The author blurb on the back flap of the first edition of The Blue Sword says that "Robin McKinley lives at present on a horse farm in eastern Massachusetts where she divides her time between the fascinating occupants of the barn in the mornings and the tyranny of her typewriter in the afternoons." She totally wrote that herself. What matters, though, is that I enjoyed her novel, and I'll be reading the next one in the near future. I like to put a couple unrelated books between ones in a series.