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 #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 #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 #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 #1: One Hundred Years of Solitude

I've certainly begun my 52 books with a bang. One Hundred Years of Solitude just might be the best novel I've ever read. It's definitely the most epic. It follows a family and a town from birth to death, through wars and colonialism and personal tragedy. The family line is so complicated, with the vast majority of names involving Jose Arcadio or Aureliano in every generation, that the publisher was kind enough to include a family tree just before the first chapter begins. At one point, one Aureliano begets seventeen more Aurelianos.

It's also very long and a rather slow read - not to say it's boring: it held my interest throughout. I should also say that listing it as the first book of the year is somewhat of a cheat because I started reading it at least a couple of weeks ago and only read the second half of it since the first of the year.

The funny thing is that most of the things I'm saying about it seem bad when I think I've found a new favorite novel. It beats any Murakami I've read hands-down. I read somewhere that Murakami lists Marquez as an influence on his own work, and I can see how: One Hundred Years of Solitude is infused with the same kind of magical realism that Murakami's is. It's like the supernatural elements - like flying carpets, benign ghosts, and an ascension into heaven - are fully integrated into reality.

I'm half tempted to gorge myself immediately on the rest of Marquez's books, but I'm not going to. I'll spread him out like I did Murakami, stretching his novels into a couple years, at least - and not ruining him for myself like I did DeLillo.

One Hundred Years of Solitude isn't my first Marquez book, though it's the first one I've finished. Years ago, I tried reading Autumn of the Patriarch, which I didn't finish because it seemed impossible to read. It's around three hundred pages, split into eight chapters, and each sentence is almost the length of the whole chapter. I read it for a challenge, and I lost. Reading this one, though, makes me want to give it another try.