December is here. The final month of the year, where everyone starts publishing their "best books of the year" lists and I start to compile my reading list for 2015. More on that next month probably. This month is our last chance to meet our reading goals for 2014 (if we set any - I did, of course, and I tracked the whole thing on a spreadsheet, because that's who I am).
I had two goals for 2014.
1) Read 60 books (I usually set my goal somewhere around 50, then adjust as life happens). I'm about 50 pages from finishing my 58th book of the year right now, so things are looking good for that.
2) Read about one "big" book per month that I have wanted to read before, but never found the time. An attempt to clear away some of my backlog that really worked out well, I think. Read some really interesting books and checked off a few bucket-list books.
Here's my final list of "big" books for 2014 in general order of how much I enjoyed them (I'm going to start Midnight's Children next week and finish before the end of the month).
| Author | Title |
| Laszlo Krasznahorkai | Seiobo There Below |
| David Markson | This is Not a Novel |
| Georges Perec | Life A User's Manual |
| Roberto Bolano | The Savage Detectives |
| Bruno Schulz | The Street of Crocodiles + Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass |
| Fyodor Dostoevsky | The Idiot |
| Jorge Luis Borges | Labyrinths |
| Neal Stephenson | Cryptonomicon |
| John LeCarre | The Spy Who Came in From the Cold + The Looking Glass War |
| Italo Calvino | Invisible Cities |
| Haruki Murakami | 1Q84 |
| Kobo Abe | The Woman in the Dunes |
| Vladimir Nabokov | Pale Fire |
| Thomas Pynchon | Gravity's Rainbow |
| J.G. Ballard | Concrete Island |
So, what do you have left to read in 2014? What are you reading right now?
I don't know how you find the time. I struggle to get one book per month done, period. It's not that I'm a slow reader, I just don't seem to have the time in the evening to read very much before I conk out.
I found that early morning is my best reading time. I usually get up at 5, read for 45 minutes or so before I start with breakfast and getting ready for the day. Evenings are a lot more hit and miss for me as well.
After Philo does his pork-steamed buns post, maybe you could share your secrets for this humble pie you're serving up.
Additionally, I recommend not perusing The Nation Has An Appetite right before lunch.
thanks for that reminder link, because it meant that I got to see meat's red beans and rice recipe. I think I was out on vacation that week (and the following).
also, it is past time for another Appetite post from someone. Nothing since August? For shame.
I've got some ideas kicking around.
as motivation, I snaked three racks of baby backs on saturday.
I much prefer the flavor of spare ribs to baby backs. But, when the old man is buying....
These were ridiculous -- like half a pork chop each. I've never seen so much meat on a pork rib.
The Snake King!1100!1111one11!001
I'll take credit for your put ability from here on out, doc.
I give you all the credit, meat. Genius technique and I thank you for teaching me about it.
I have at least one in the hopper - just need to download the pictures from my phone/camera.
My goal is usually 25 a year. This year my goal was 10 non-fiction books. I think I accomplished that, or I'm on the last one. Reading Lone Survivor, and just having trouble getting into. Maybe I shouldn't have watched the movie first.
Need to start on The Death Cure in the Maze Runner series. Really liked the first two. Just haven't gotten around to it. Not into reading right now. More into watching shows and doing puzzles (and playing board games)
I think I'm going to set my reading project for 2015 as a re-read of all of Kurt Vonnegut's novels (14 in total - I've read 10 or 11 of them at least once before). I'm thinking I'll go chronologically through them.
Don't forget Venus on the Half Shell, under the Kilgore Trout pseudonym.
My time's been really limited lately, so Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is taking a lot longer than it should be.
I recall the first part being a bit slower, but the last 100 pages or so fly by, and have always led to all-nighters for me.
I forgot to mention last month that I'd read Gaiman's Stardust. It was a quick read, but I didn't mind. Gaiman is such a wonderful storyteller.
I read this month A Walk in The Woods on my various flights. It really made me want to put all my hiking and camping equipment to better use.
My goal was to read a book a month (on average) and finish Gravity's Rainbow. Part 1 I think is in the bag, but I'm really gonna miss part 2 by some margin
I read 300,000,000 by Blake Butler at the beginning of this month. After the first 50 pages or so, I posted my two-word review to Twitter.
After the next 400 pages I would say that still stands; this is Blake Butler at his best. The book is dense and visual and grotesque and sprawling and subconscious and narcotic. A possessed madman (Gretch Gravey) vows to kill everyone in America ("the thing about killing everyone in America is that you can start with anyone in America"). The book begins as the police arrest him. The detective (E.N. Flood) assigned to investigate the case discovers a notebook in Gravey's house that may detail his descent.
This is not a mystery/detective novel. The points of view mire the reader in the perspective of those that perpetrate the atrocities. It makes the reader almost complicit in the events. If we would stop reading, the reign of terror would come to end.
This style makes the story a personal one, and although Butler's prose is as dense as anything he's written, it's in service of a world that stuck with me and a strong narrative that felt satisfying at its conclusion. A book that gave me a lot to think about.
My goal is usually 25 books a year, and I'm guessing I've exceeded that. I just finished The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace about a boy who grew up in inner city Newark with a father in jail for two murders and yet he gets accepted to Yale where he thrives. It's written by his college roommate. It was like a gut punching 400 page book that was basically season four of The Wire.
I'm halfway through Barbarians at the Gate about the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco in the late 1980s. I don't understand much about business, but it's really well written and interesting and I don't know how it ends!
I also read The Class of 1846 about the West Point class with graduates most closely remembered with the Civil War. Good, but nothing special.
After a year and a half I finally finished It. I plowed through it because every single one of my family members says it's one of the best books they've ever read. Meh.
I've now started the Dragon Tattoo series as well as The Art of Fielding. I just lost my Kindle, in my house, so who knows when I'll start back up again.
Going home over thanksgiving, I read Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan, a memoir that reads like a novel. It was the perfect book for that trip. It's subtitled "a biography of place". A meditation on family and heritage and what you take from your hometown and what you leave behind. I enjoyed a couple of short stories of McClanahan's that I read ("Phone Girl" for example) and I enjoyed his writing style in this as well. Breezed through this book quickly, but still noted a lot of passages and phrases that caught my eye, lots of vignettes that come back with just a word of reminder.
Plugging through Inherent Vice, about half way through. Very enjoyable, much, much easier than all other Pynchon I've read.
Finally. Dido. (Though the only other Pynchon I've read was V, and it was very hard to read while sleeping. [Turns out it's also very hard to discuss while sleeping.])
From the list in the post, 3 shorter books that I finished (or almost finished) this month.
Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz. Both books collected into one volume. Schulz's surrealism works really well and all his stories feel interconnected so this feels like one big work instead of fragments. I loved most the stories about his father (and his ongoing battle with the cleaning lady) culminating with "Father's Last Escape" as the final story in Sanatorium. Like Kafka, but less pessimistic.
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. The amount of thought that went into all these stories and essays is readily apparent. I very much enjoy some stories that are crafted and constructed that way so this was right up my alley. Very glad I read this.
Concrete Island by JG Ballard. A man is marooned on an urban expressway after a car wreck. I've tried two Ballard novels now and neither has done much for me. I really enjoyed his short story about the drowned giant, but haven't found a similar connection with his longer work.
After Pale Fire, I dove into Pynchon's Against the Day about a hundred pages, then stalled. Since then I've read Spies of Warsaw, Spies of the Balkans, and Night Soldiers, all by Alan Furst (birthday Barnes & Nobles purchases).
Am now in the middle of non-fiction The Blue Nile by Alan Moorehead - interesting.
I get bored of reading the same stories to the kids in and out (or even worse, movie and toy tie-ins [shudder]), so I've been reading fairy tale collections to AJR. I had read parts of Lang's The Green Fairy Book to HPR, but some of those stories are really long. For AJR, I had a Reader's Digest one and... another one, and now I've got a leather-bound one of 101 Grimm Brothers stories from Costco. At first, I tried to soften things a bit, but now I just plow through them, no matter how rough and horrible the situations or archaic the language. I may have changed three words so far in 30 Grimm stories.
Skipping through collections like this leads you to reading the same stories over and over, just start at the beginning and follow to the end. I look at the number of pages in each story. "Oh, this is a one-night story" or "This is a long one, at least three nights", etc. When she's really tired, she asks what everything means. Even things she knows. Sometimes we will have a "one-night story without questions or two-night story with questions."
I have a collection of Grimm Brothers stories adapted by Philip Pullman that I pull out every so often. He has notes at the end of each story talking about variations and other interesting tidbits.
I picked up the latest two Captain Underpants books for Runner daughter for Christmas -- does that count?
I love to read, but with the "new" house projects, new child and (recently) new job, this has been one of my slowest years for reading in recent memory. Probably read less than 20 books this year.
The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry - From Berry's Port William, KY stories, it spends a day with retired farmer Jack Beechum as he reviews his life in vignettes/memories, from just after the Civil War through the early 1950's. It's a story about the choices people make, love, family & community and a person's connection to their place and acceptance of who (and what) they are. One of my favorite Berry books.
East of Eden by John Steinbeck - Somehow, I never got around to reading this one. After about 100 pages, I can already begin to see why it's considered his best.
I’d generally characterize myself as goal-oriented, but for some reason I’ve never set reading goals for myself. I guess I have enough goals in other areas of my life, so I keep reading as something purely for pleasure by allowing it to be a disorganized jumble. I will say, though, that the WGOM has definitely motivated me to read more than I might otherwise--I really appreciate having this monthly forum to talk about what we’re reading .
Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham. Memoir. I mentioned this book already—it’s funny, absorbing, and just the sort of thing I wish I’d had when I was 16. Dunham is very honest about her experiences growing up and coming of age. By sharing what are often awkward or embarrassing moments, she helps to normalize them, particularly for other girls/young women. Despite our current confessional culture, I find this sort of honesty surprisingly rare. She is sometimes so focused on her failures, though, that she misses an opportunity to share what she’s learned about being successful. But I also think it’s harder to find funny, interesting ways to talk about finding love and being successful.
Now I just need to find some time to watch some of the stuff she’s made. (I seem to have time to read, though not as much as I’d like, thanks to commuting by bus, but I rarely manage to find the right circumstances to watch movies/television.)
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. Memoir in verse. This book just won the National Book Award, though the award was nearly overshadowed by a terrible attempt at a joke by M.C. Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket). The book focuses on Woodson’s early years—from birth to age 10. It’s a beautiful portrait of her family in good times and bad, and it includes some lovely pieces about how a girl who struggled mightily to learn to read came to see herself as a writer.
Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity by Emily Matchar. Nonfiction. This book delves into what is behind some of the trends of the last decade having to do with crafting (knitting, sewing), gardening, cooking, and attachment parenting. The handmade and hand crafted has been fetishized to a certain extent, particularly in the middle class. As someone caught up in a lot of this, I was really interested in what the author had to say about it.
Here’s a particularly salient (and perhaps provocative) quote:
One of the main arguments Matchar makes is that the rise of DIY culture is connected to the fact that a lot of Americans lack confidence in our health care system, our food system, our schools, etc. However, when people opt out, they may be able to affect their own families, but they’re not putting that energy into affecting larger scale changes that could benefit large numbers of people (e.g. paid maternity leave, an area where the US is particularly lacking).
This is a book published for a general audience (rather than an academic audience), and sometimes I wished the analysis had gone even deeper, but all the same it left me with a lot of very interesting things to think about.
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Novel. What did I say last month? Oh, yeah. “Do I get points for making it to page 460 in October? It’s really well written and really intense. So much so that last week I needed a little time away from it. But I’ll for sure finish it this month.” Replace “week” with “month” in the penultimate sentence and it’s all still true. So . . . here’s hoping I finish it by the end of December!
There goes another one of my hip-hop alters-ego.
That is a provocative quote ... and pretty insightful as well. For a long time, I thought of my domestic pursuits (gardening, brewing, canning, even cooking to some extent) as nostalgic hobbies with an independent, counter-cultural bent. The past few years, I've started to think that my DIY attitudes may be a less unique to me and more of a generational thing.
Man, apparently I've been participating in all sorts of gender bending as I cook most the meals, and have quilted most the blankets in the Slaughterhouse. I'm currently working on a quilt made from all the pants I've ruined on the job. Last install saw three pairs of pants go to the quilt pile. I hardly see this as an 'indulgence in an expensive hobby', rather as a creative use of material that would otherwise be trash or rags. I know that we're fetishizing the handmade more than ever, but I just can't agree that engaging in craft and taking pleasure in doing it yourself is a reflection of personal enlightenment. Hipsters have really ruined us all.
The book itself actually talks a fair amount of men taking part in the DIY/domestic hobbies trend as well, though there's a greater focus on women. That quilt sounds great, btw. I'd love to see a photo when it's done. And if you're reusing fabric rather than buying the fancy designer stuff that's out there, of course it's significantly less expensive!
Er, 'spreadsheeting' not on the list was probably a typo. And no mention of bird calls.
don't forget Ha ha-ing your Tonka. Or hoofing your Deer.
He hasn't been here that long.
So he's got that going for him...which is nice.
says the shat man.
I just tore trough Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje. Holy cats. I realized suddenly that I've been following Mr. Ondaatje around all these years what withThe Collected Works of Billy The Kid illustrating our days in the desert, and nowBuddy Boldin's descent into madness as a portrait of our new diggs. These are two of my all time favorite books. The look into madness and the creative process is intense, terrifying, and enlightening. One of the best reads I've had all year.