Far From Brooklyn

Reading Banana Yoshimoto, Gregoire Bouilliere, Ismail Kadare and many others.

I was fairly disciplined about writing up the books I read in 2009.  I did fall behind a bit in the fall of ‘09, but by New Year’s Eve I had logged every last one of them.  

Not so in 2010, alas.

Early in the year the blog kept up with my reading,  but by spring I was slacking off and by summer I simply had stopped.   I was still reading, but I couldn’t seem to find time to write.

So now, with the year winding down, I want to note all the books I read in 2010, including the few I managed to write about individually back in January and February.  

Or, at least, I am listing those that I can remember…

As usual, I was a highly impatient reader, leaving many more volumes unfinished than finished.

I’ve listed them Mikey style: “He likes it!” vs. “He hates everything!”

He Likes It!

NP by Banana Yoshimoto – This is a surprisingly abstract work for such a popular writer. I tired of the literary games that underpinned the plot, but I enjoyed the portrait of Tokyo life and Yoshimoto’s kind, energetic voice.

Bad Traffic by Simon Lewis –  Although written by a Welshman, this novel is a persuasive, believable portrait of illegal Chinese immigrants in England.  Structured as a suspense novel, the plot has a couple annoying cracks, but they are easily overlooked thanks to the fine writing and excellent portraiture.

Doghead, by Morten Ramsland – A marvelous family saga that remains grounded in emotional realism even as some of its characters and plotting spin into the fantastic. 

Chronicle in Stone by Ismail Kadare – Set in Albania in World War II amidst a succession of foreign occupations, some hardly lasting a day, this novel portrays an ancient, superstitious society facing the harsh (even gruesome) realities of the modern world.  A beautiful book.

The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier – This novella manages to be both playful  and Bernhard-ian (i.e., similar to the work of Thomas Bernhard) at the same time.  Given that Bernhard’s opus is unrelentingly bleak, that is quite a strange combination. Like Bernhard, it features a narrator obsessively reliving a single moment in time, looking unsparingly at himself and those around him.  And yet somehow the book is generous and even uplifting, so unlike the Bernhard novels it resembles.

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart – Wow. A hilarious but moving love story set in a dystopian near future where we are never untethered from our mobile devices, and where our privacy settings have been permanently set at “off.” Some of the best bits are the diary entries and emails of Eunice Park, a recent college graduate whose voice is a hilarious gumbo of gangsta rap, Hello Kitty, and like-like-like adolescent inarticulation.

The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag – See my comments here.  An unexpected pleasure.

The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh – See my comments here. 

Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fisher – A remarkable history book that traces four distinct early American cultures to their roots in England. 

The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Other Plays by Martin McDonagh – See my brief comment here.  Not as powerfully complete as “The Pillowman” but powerful and unnerving for sure.

As Husbands Go by Susan Isaacs – Never let it be said that I am not honest in this blog!  I guiltily admit that I enjoy Susan Isaacs’ novels quite a bit.  Guess I’m not a manly man.

Seven Plays by Sam Shepard – Somehow I lived through the ’80s without ever seeing or reading a Shepard play.  I held off reading them because I figured they were better experienced in the theater, and yet I never got to them in the theater so they went unexperienced all these years.  It was interesting, reading these in 2010, to see how time mellows once-radical works of art.  These felt very mainstream to me.

Citrus County by John Brandon – I’m not sure I can say I truly liked this book, but it intrigued me.  It’s a troubling portrait of a kid who inexplicably does something very, very bad.  The book stalls out very early, though, leaving the reader to wonder what will happen but without really proceeding. The flatness ultimately takes over everything.

Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulluch – This is a big doorstop history that I enjoyed but ultimately bogged down in. The subtitle is “The First Three Thousand Years” which is a bit puckish, and in fact the “first” thousand years of this history (which are not about Christianity per se but the Judaism and Greek thought that led to it) are fascinating.  The development of various Christian dogmas, which in fact I had looked forward to reading, was heavy going, and I failed out somewhere in the first Millennia A.D., or CE as we say now.

Pearl Buck in China by Hilary Spurling – Interesting portrait of an unlikely literary star.  

New York Burning by Jill Lepore – A portrait of the racial tensions in pre-revolutionary Manhattan.  Her earlier book, “The Name of War,” overturned my conceptions of early American history.  This one didn’t, and so I couldn’t help but feel a teensy bit disappointed by it, which isn’t fair.  In any case, it’s another scrupulously researched, clear-eyed history, but one that nevertheless has a strong point of view.

Shanghai Nights by Juan Marse – Two stories in one – the story of a boy in post-Civil War Barcelona and an adventure story set in China, the latter a fantasy.  It’s an awkward mix but the Barcelona sections are strong.

Nox by Anne Carson – A poem, a translation, an art object, and a remembrance of the poet’s troubled brother.  It’s a beautiful, if slight, work.  I am somewhat uncomfortable commenting on it as it feels like a personal memento – a demon she had to work out on paper for herself.  And for that reason there is a part of me that feels she shouldn’t have published it at all, but rendered it for herself.  (How old fashioned of me.)

Away by Amy Bloom – I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy this novel.  It’s a page-turner for sure.  But it’s also slight, and skates along on cliche and simplification.  An interesting side note – this is a novel about the commonplaces of men abusing women.  Men as procurers, pimps, keepers of women, even jailers.  And in virtually every case Bloom portrays them forgivingly.  I wonder if a male writer could have gotten away with that – I sincerely doubt it.

The Woman Lit by Fireflies by Jim Harrison – I really enjoyed the first of the three novellas – it’s a hairy-knuckled first person tale in the vein of McGuane.  Apparently it’s more representative of Harrison’s work than the other stories in this collection, so I may look out for more of him.  The second and third novellas were dogmatic and dull.

Occupied City by David Peace – OK, so David Peace is the very, very rare exception to to “literary thriller” rule.  He’s a really, really powerful writer.  His first Tokyo novel, “Tokyo Year Zero,” was just amazingly good.  This new one is not quite of the same caliber, but damn close.   Like all his work, this is based on an actual (mass) murder, and the particulars in this case were profoundly unpleasant – to the point that reading the book was not a pleasant experience.   I admire the craftsmanship, though, and Peace’s toughness.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower – I knocked this book for being a McGuane (and even more so a Hannah) wannabe, but you know what? It was entertaining.  

Unaccustomed Earth by Jumpa Lahiri – This one might win the award for the book I disliked most and yet still liked.  My comments here.

Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger – I reread these after Salinger’s death.  Glorious.  My appreciation of Salinger.

He Hates Everything!

Total Chaos by Jean Claude Izzo – Wrote about it here.  Bleah.

The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa –  I picked this up after Vargas Llosa won the Nobel.  I had only read “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” a charming tale that I knew was not representative of most of his work.  This is a big, fat, ambitious, bulging novel that never really engaged me.

Underworld by Don DeLillo – I undertook this book (again) after writing a longish essay about our greatest living authors.  I managed to slog through maybe 250 pages before chucking it.  I then began an essay describing how deeply I hated this novel, tentatively titling my piece “Why Do Novels Suck So Much?” I didn’t complete it then but perhaps before the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve, I’ll manage to post it…

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann –  This was one of the few big literary hits of the last few years.  I absolutely loathed it.  It too was to be a cornerstone of the “Why Do Novels Suck So Much?” essay, still unfinished.

Nowhere Man by Alexander Hemon – A weak sophomore effort.  My comments here.

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon – One should always know better than to read a book described as a literary thriller.  I forget that simple rule all the time.

The Bridge of Sighs by Olen Steinhauer – Another self-consciously literary thriller, this one in the vein of Alan Furst, but set further east.  The setting (a fictional Eastern European city in the wake of WWII) is not bad, but the plotting is wooden and not believable.

One Day by David Nicholls – Feckless rich kid woos schoolmarmish middle class girl. Piece of crap.  I’m a sucker for romantic comedies so I was quick to pick this up this summer.  What a disappointment.

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons –  Humor tends not to age very well.  This is a good example of why.

Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey – Wooden.  It’s strange that a novel with such a poetic, evocative title could be so stiff and unpoetic.  

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson – If you want to read someone channeling Saul Bellow, this is your book.   But there’s perfectly good Bellow to read or re-read.  And there’s some pretty bad Bellow to dig into when you’re done with the good stuff.  So why read imitation pretty-bad Bellow at all?

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore – I’m not sure I’ve ever read a realistic novel that felt quite so untethered from reality.  Nothing seemed to ring true.

Metzger’s Dog by Thomas Perry – I generally don’t bother listing books that I’ve already read, but in this case I’ll make an exception.  I loved “Metzger’s Dog” when I first read it, I guess back in the ’80s.  I wasn’t alone – Carl Hiassen contributed a forward to this new edition that I picked up.  But I found myself oddly bored when reading it anew this year.  The characters, who once seemed wonderfully whimsical, struck me as thin and almost indistinguishable this time around, and “Chinese” Gordon was frankly insufferable.  Always sad to dislike a book that once pleased.

Up in Honey’s Room by Elmore Leonard – A mystery/suspense book that goes unfinished is pretty much by definition a bad book.  I didn’t finish this one.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows – I’m not sure I’ve ever finished an epistolary novel, and this was no exception.  What a crashing bore.

The Same River Twice by Ted Mooney – A literary thriller.  I typo’d this title as “The Same Ricer Twice,” which strikes me as inherently more interesting – some kind of culinary mystery.

The Dawn Patrol by Don Winslow – This novel tries to mix Hiassen-style jokiness with a plot involving child abuse.  These ingredients should never be mixed.

The Bedwetter by Sarah Silverman – File under the category “I read it because it was there.” The most interesting thing about this book was how mean Silverman comes off, without intending to.

Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving – I’m willing to entertain the possibility that John Irving is actually our great American novelist, as previously covered here. With Irving, I generally either hate or love the work.  In this case, I neither hated nor loved.  The first section was overlong and only intermittently entertaining, and I set it down after a couple hundred pages (specifically 213, according to the deepest dogear) and never picked it up again.

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray – Quite a number of reviewers and bloggers recommended this but it struck me as pretty bland stuff.  I enjoyed it moderately for a while, then put it down and didn’t pick it up again.

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte – Some enjoyable cleverness but there wasn’t really much there.  I wrote about it here (very briefly).

Charming Billy by Alice McDermott – Meh.  My comments here.