The last book I read in 2014 was The Wanderer by Timothy J. Jarvis.
It's a horror novel (because what better time than Christmas for a little horror?) that loves what horror can be. The structure of the book is very aware of itself. A manuscript that describes something supernatural is found in the apartment of a recently disappeared author. But before you know even that, the first words of the book are an excerpt from that author's story:
"What is it?"
"An old manuscript. Much of it is hard to make out, but..."
Mr. Leatherbotham cut in.
"What? That worn-out old Gothic trope?"
He rolled his eyes.
The whole book careens along through the various stories (a demonic puppet show, a variation on Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, and an homage to Lovecraft, among others) that come from chance meetings with strangers (another self-aware nod to "weird tales" and horror stories) while updating the main plot. It only perhaps loses steam once or twice but quickly finds its footing. The Wanderer is a book where a word like ichor feels right at home. The vocabulary is extensive and the description is remarkable. The prose is described as poetic in more that one place, and it's easy to see where that comes from. The description is concerned with things often visceral, often gory, often downright repulsive. Horrible things are happening in The Wanderer. And they keep happening.
I loved it, the main plot of an immortal man fleeing an immortal pursuer while all the stories spin out around him worked really well and put this right up there among my favorite reads of the year.
I loved How I Killed Pluto and Why it Had it Coming by Mike Brown. He's the astronomer that discovered almost all of the Kuiper Belt objects that made it clear just how un-planet-like Pluto is. It tells the story of how he started searching the edges of our solar system and how he discovered all these dwarf planets and how the scientific community responded to his project and his discoveries. I loved it as a scientist, and as a new professor just kicking off a research program (one that will never get the same attention that Brown's has, but still).
Brown has a dry sense of humor that I really enjoyed as well. 11/11 on the NBB scale, highly recommended.
I first read that as "How I Killed Punto"
The best LNP-related book is obviously Nick Punto's Fury: A Restoration Guide for 1982-1989 Plymouth Mid-Size Sedans.
Nice callback!
About goddamn time this post was up. I've been waiting for three days.
Anywho....
I'm about half way through Jonathan Weiner's Pulitzer Prize winning (1995) The Beak of the Finch. It's about as exciting as a description of extensive, physically demanding, tedious field work in the Galapagos Islands can be. No, really, that's meant as praise. A really excellent, sophisticated layperson's interpretation/relaying of the massive empirical work done by Peter Grant, Rosemary Grant, and their many graduate students over a 20+ year period documenting evidence regarding Darwinian (and neo-Darwinian) evolutionary theory.
If you are into natural history, and I am, this is an excellent read, and relatively short (332 pages). Plus, Because Journalism/Pop Science writing, it has some amusing anecdotes, including one particularly, umm, touching story about a barnacle and a researcher's naughty bits.
I’m pretty sure the best thing I got for Christmas was some time to read for pleasure.
On Immunity by Eula Biss. Nonfiction. This book is amazing. Amazing. I got it from the library, but I might need to buy a copy to keep. Biss is the daughter of a poet and a doctor, and when she became a mother, she started researching vaccination. This book is the culmination of that research, and it examines both the science of vaccination and herd immunity and the metaphors at work in how we talk about these topics. Biss weaves in her personal experiences as a mother as well. She was struck by the fact that many of the mothers who choose not to vaccinate their children are mothers like her—white, educated, middle class. She looks at why this is and what the ramifications of this decision are. But she somehow does this in an empathetic and open minded way rather than a dismissive way. And as I read, I felt myself becoming more compassionate--even for those I disagree with. On a sentence level, the writing is fantastic. I so enjoyed being in the presence of Biss’s considerable intelligence that I didn’t want the book to end. I don’t think I’ve ever thought that about a work of nonfiction before. One of the big takeaways of the book is that for all of our so-called independence, we are connected to one another in important and invisible ways and that our actions can have a profound effect on the lives of others.
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay. Nonfiction. I like the title, but the book fell short of my expectations. Possibly anything would have been a disappointment after On Immunity, but I just wanted more from this. The essays in this collection felt superficial and obvious. Maybe the book would be more revelatory to a twenty-year-old just discovering feminism, but I didn’t find much new here.
Wild by Cheryl Strayed. Nonfiction/memoir. I’d come across enough mentions of the book, the author, and the movie that I decided to just read the damn book already. It’s a good story and the structure works very well—it follows Strayed on her hike on the Pacific Crest Trail and readers learn about the events that led up to the hike in flashback. One of the most impressive things about the book is how fully honest and authentic it feels. Strayed lost her mother to cancer when she was twenty-two and her path to acceptance of her mother’s death is both harrowing and beautiful. I tore through this in two days.
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Novel. TRIUMPH! The year 2014 was a success if for no other reason than the fact that I finished this by year’s end. I read the first 460 pages in October, stalled out for two and a half months, and then read the last 300 in a glorious two-day binge. I’m happy to say it was worth it. Even the time away from the book had a benefit; reading Wild deepened my understanding of Theo Decker, the main character of this book, as he loses his mother at age thirteen. Odd fact: the phrase “you can’t get blood from a turnip” appears in both this book and Wild. New Guy, if you're around and want to talk more about this book, I'd be happy to.
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. Nonfiction/how to. Yes, it’s a book about cleaning. Actually, organizing more than cleaning. And I love me some organization. While I’m far from being a neat freak, I have been amazed and horrified to see what accumulates after living in the same house for ten years. The method in this book is highly intuitive; nonintuitive people might find it unhelpful and not sufficiently specific, but I love it.
I gave my wife Not That Kind Of Girl for Christmas. She seemed excited to receive it but is hoping she finds time to read at least some of it before maternity leave ends next week.
Excellent! I hope she enjoys it.
I'll have to read Tidying. I'm on a mission to tidy and purge. My fear is that by reading a book on tidying (two things I can't get my wife to do right now: read or tidy in my way), I'll just cause more disagreement between us. How do I get her to be the one to read the book?...
The book actually addresses that a bit. Basically she thinks others in the household will be inspired by your example. I'm not sure whether this will prove to be the case in my house, but at the very least I'm getting a lot of satisfaction out of the progress I've made with my own stuff.
I hope it works for you.
For us it turns out one party (her) did not realize just how important it was for the other party (me) to have full agreement and adherence to the organizational things that the other party (me) had put in place. I think we're closer to understanding where each person stands. After a couple hard conversations. Unfortunately that doesn't mean one party (her) is interested in doing similar work putting in place the various other organizational things our household needs.
It was also hard because my wife stays home, but she does not have a knack for stepping back and improving the fundamentals on how the home functions. She works very hard to do everything that needs to be done, however. So when I stepped on her turf and began making changes, it really hit her self esteem. There certainly is a lesson in there for me on how to better propose improvements, but I don't think I've learned it yet.
the age-old Venus/Mars divide. The stereotype (men are problem-oriented, women relationship-oriented) has more than a grain of truth.
My wife and I are anal about different things around the house. From my perspective, she doesn't respect my needs in my areas of strong preference, and I'm guessing she probably has reciprocal feelings about hers.
Sorry I'm late!
Congrats on finishing Goldfinch! I'm glad to hear that you liked it. I think it was one of the most satisfying books that I've ever read. I also don't see a problem with reading it in chunks the way you did,
I'm sorry to hear that you didn't like Bad Feminist though... I've read a couple things by Roxane Gay online and she seems extremely cool. I was thinking about getting that book as a gift for New Gal, but I'm not sure if she would be into entry-level essays either (New Gal has pretty advanced feminism credentials).
Yay, you came back! More Goldfinch thoughts . . .
Further thoughts on Bad Feminist: a bunch of the essays were things Roxane Gay had previously published online. They perhaps work better in that context. (Not that you can't find in-depth analysis online, but I think I have higher expectations for books.) In thinking over what I read in 2014, the book that probably satisfied my inner feminist the most was Lena Dunham's Not that Kind of Girl.
New Gal read Not That Kind of Girl and loved it. I don't always like Lena Dunham, but I give her credit for writing a good book.
the phrase “you can’t get blood from a turnip”
Interestingly enough, I've found turnips to thrive in hemoculture.
My goal this year is to read 10 "classics". I realize that this definition is not set in stone, but basically there are many books out there that if I told you I hadn't read them, you might say, "How you can you NOT have read that... wasn't that required reading in school?" I'm thinking books that everyone's heard of and have appeared on those lists "100 books you need to read before you die." Examples include Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, etc.
I'm starting with "The Grapes of Wrath." Technically a holdover that I started last year, but dang it I'm going to count it. Not sure what I'm going to move onto next, but I'm looking forward to the challenge.
Runner daughter has made it her mission to "read" some of the classics as well, and has taken to listening to audio books on her work commute. She started with Pride and Prejudice, and then started Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
I'm in the same boat:
My last book of 2014 was "God's Middle Finger" about a British journalist's trek through the Sierra Madre in Mexico, considered one of the most lawless places on Earth. But by the end, the book was pretty boring. He only ran into trouble in the last two chapters. The book ended, essentially, with "I was so scared, I drove all the way to the border. The End." Not a real satisfying wrapup.
My 2015 goal is 3 books every two months. I have the time to read more, I just have to do it. First up is "The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America". I head an interview with the author on the CBC's "Q" (no longer with Jian Gilmeshi).
Guys, I think these book things are going to big in 2015. Even Mark Zuckerberg is giving them a whirl.
Anyone ever read any Dorothy Dunnett? She has been highly recommended to me. I'm working my way through some Sherlock Holmes first though, having never read any of them and having been gifted the complete collection for Christmas.
Never heard of Dunnett.
I did just read a kind of interesting article about Sherlock Holmes and fan-fiction and copyright and things of that nature.
Anyone here read The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet? It was quirky and interesting (it does have a precocious child narrator, which I know isn't everyone's favorite). But the author, Reif Larsen has a new book coming out. I Am Radar is excerpted here. I haven't read it yet, but after Spivet, I'm certainly going to give this a try.
Here's a bunch of other stuff I read in December.
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie.
This was my last "big book of 2014" book. I was reminded a little bit of Pale Fire in that the narrator was a little unreliable and quite a bit full of themselves. The character as allegory for a country (which is spelled out repeatedly throughout the book) isn't really a device that interests me much. So I did have several sections that were a bit of a slog to get through. The history of India is a very vibrant backdrop, but as a plotline I never got too invested. A good book, if these types of biopic/historical novels with just a touch of magic and weirdness are your thing, then this would probably be perfect for you.
The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson.
I have liked everything that I've read by Johnson (admittedly not a lot of stuff). It was an easy story to get sucked into (an ex-CIA type is trying to make his fortune in Africa by maybe selling information ... or maybe enriched uranium, he's not picky). And Johnson occasionally just puts down some really great sentences even when he's writing about international intrigue (not the most poetic of subjects).
Nothing by Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon.
It's suffocating. The wildfires in Missoula force all the self-absorbed twenty somethings in the book closer and closer together. And the characters are self-absorbed; which could be irritating, but it sets the scene of the novel really well. The story builds to something too (not always a given when the main characters are listless and self-involved) which I appreciated quite a bit.
Fra Keeler by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
I read this in one sitting (about an hour and a half or two hours) Fragmented and more than a little bit strange, the narrative here starts with the narrator declaring that they will investigate Fra Keeler's death. Of course, he does no such thing. Instead things devolve into a very internal struggle for a narrator that doesn't interact with the world in a usual way. There's a fair amount of paranoia, and through the whole tangled mess of the narration, the events become clear, and it isn't that hard to figure out what happened and why (although there are plenty of things left unresolved).
Averno by Louise Gluck
A book that I didn't want to put down. Averno is a crater in Italy that the Romans believed was the gate to the underworld. These poems dealt with the myth of Hades and Persephone and how death is something that happens to us over and over again in pieces instead of all at once. Almost every poem had lines that struck me, and I will almost assuredly be returning to this book in the future.
Hellboy in Hell: Vol. 1, The Descent by Mike Mignola
I enjoyed coming back to the Hellboy universe. I forgot how dreamlike the narrative is sometimes, so I had to adjust to that, but this was a good start to another Hellboy narrative.
Post Office by Charles Bukowski
It was OK. It has the short declarative sentences and straightforward narration that now is really prevalent in a lot of alt-lit circles. Maybe coming back to this from that direction deadened the impact, but I doubt I'll be pursuing any more Bukowski.
The Collected Works, Vol. 1 by Scott McClanahan
Short, minimal stories. I liked them, but then I like McClanahan in general. I guess he might be considered a southern writer. I would suggest picking up Crapalachia of his first, and if you like that, then try this.
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
This is a book where I could see what some people liked about it. There is a great world built in these pages. And it's a strange enough world (with strange enough characters) that it can keep you off balance, never quite sure what is real and what is possible. And it all snaps into focus occasionally before meandering back out toward dreaminess. And all of that added up to a book that I enjoyed reading. But, ugh. The ending.
Did I talk about Inherent Vice yet? I finished that in December. It was, far and away, the easiest Pynchon I've ever read. Almost too easy, actually. I love the detective genre (coughmartyrcough), and this was a crazy, trippy version of that. I expected more though. Crazier. Trippier. Funnier. More bizarre scenes. I think it'll translate well for the movie, so I'm excited to see that. But as a book, it was just sort of "meh" with a few select highlights.
My favorite line in the book:
"You are one crazy white motherf****r."
"How did you know?"
"I counted."
Yup. Mine too.
I can't decide if I should ruin the movie or the book for me.
Read the book first. Reviews suggest the movie is just so-so if you haven't read it.
According to goodreads the only book I read was AWOL on the Appalachian Trail. Which was pretty average. Also relistened to The Tipping Point on our drive. That too was still average, but a pop "science" does make the drives go faster.
derr https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/610470.AWOL_on_the_Appalachian_Trail
I'm hoping to say a few things about this when I have a chance, but the book is more for people who think backpacking would be cool if they'd get around to doing it, rather than those who spend a lot of time outside. Good book, but the "deep thoughts" felt manufactured for me.
I just finished reading By Blood by Ellen Ullman. It's about a disgraced college professor who rents a space next to a therapist's office, and thanks to the office's thin walls, is able to overhear the therapy sessions of a young lesbian searching vainly for her birth mother. He becomes obsessed with the patient and eventually finds ways to insinuate himself into her quest to discover her family history. It was a really well-written book, but I wasn't sold on all of it. It had a classic disturbed/ unreliable narrator (he's like a slightly less grotesque Humbert Humbert), but even the sympathetic characters were a little grating. It was a compelling read, though. It started fairly slow, but once it got going it was almost unstoppable.
Also enjoyed Inherent Vice last month. Lolita was decent. No god but God was not nearly as good as Zealot. American Uprising sucked.
Had a Furst-fest over the holidays. I had read Alan Furst's The Polish Officer a number of years ago and enjoyed it. So with a B&N gift card, I loaded up and read Spies of the Balkans, The World at Night, Night Soldiers, and I'm almost done with Midnight in Europe. Nice change of pace from the tomes I have been wading through.
I'll probably go back to Pynchon's Against the Day (I'm in about a hundred pages, a weird read), and I also bought v..
I read Never Let Me Go. My 14 year old also read it.
Not a lot happening but the author kept it interesting by slowly revealing more of the story.
I finished my first Sherlock Holmes story last night. It was... OK. I think as the world expands, it will get better. The first story, A Study In Scarlet was supposed to be a one-off anyway, and at the time he didn't plan on writing more Holmes mysteries. Apparently things get fleshed out more in the future. The biggest problem with this one was that there was no way for the reader to connect any dots, you were just along for the ride with Watson. I prefer a mystery where you can speculate as a reader. I hope those start to come along.
It has been a really, really long time since I read any of the original Holmes stories. But I do have some recollection of Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, later made into a very entertaining (and star-studded) film.
I read most, if not all, of the original Holmes stories while I lived in Prague, since they're public domain and available for Kindle on Project Gutenberg.* They're good entertainment, but I don't have a particular interest in re-reading them. I felt they got rather formulaic eventually.
*By far the easiest and cheapest way to get English language works in the Czech Republic. One reason I will always love my e-reader.
I actually like the way you gradually get introduced to everyone around Holmes. Seems like how you meet and are introduced to new people in real life.
But yeah, the way the mysteries are solved generally irritated me. I don't like new evidence being introduced during the expose'! That's cheating!
I have the collected stories version- I love carrying around a giant book like that for "light" reading. Might have to go find it- been at least ten years since I read it.
My brother got me the giant collection for Christmas. I agree, quite fun lugging that around.
Reading that also counts as exercise!