Following c-dog's advice, I've been keeping track of my books this year on LibraryThing. I like seeing the covers collected together on my page. It also shatters any idea I may have had about having a highbrow reading list this year. This year I've been trying to concentrate on poker, pulp, crime, books written over 25 years ago and books I've been avoiding, which makes Lawrence Block's Lucky at Cards the near-perfect book for early 2008. ("He could handle cards like a master, but could he handle her?")
I recommend LibraryThing if you're getting to the age where maybe you can't remember the name, author or plot of a book you read two months ago but know that maybe it was good. For the second half of 2008, I'm thinking about reading some history, memoirs, and books about movies and would love to hear any suggestions.
Why Armond White is My New Favorite Movie Critic (After Filthy)
'"The Bubble,' featuring the year's best original screenplay, is one of the peaks of the gay cinema breakthroughs that critics pretended to welcome with the big-budget, name-star 'Brokeback Mountain' but then ignored as a matter of habit. Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox's symbolic situations, recognizable characters and nuanced dialog surpasses even the superb (and unfairly maligned) 'I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry' in realistic details. Fox's script isn't a satire but a political romance that dares give unprejudiced clarity to the inequities of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, global homophobia and middle-class privilege." -- Armond White [indieWIRE]
Is he brilliant or totally wack? I'm not sure, I guess I'd have to netflix ' ... Chuck and Larry' to find out, a step I can't bring myself to take; but, I like that I'm almost always surprised by his reviews.
6) The Saturdays, Elizabeth Enright - This is a reissued, nearly lost gem of a juvenile novel, first published in 1941. The four Melendy kids decide to pool their allowances so once a week one of them can have a forty cent adventure instead of each of them trying to have a ten cent adventure. As history, the book is fascinating. A six year old walking alone around New York City to get to the circus! There's something beautiful about Enright's vision of childhold here that probably makes The Saturdays more appealling to grownups than actual kids. (My seven year old read this but only once and didn't seem to like it as much as me and Mrs. BoneDaddy.) She romanticizes siblings and long afternoons with little to do, out of the way playrooms and "what I want to be" dreams. Adults probably like that stuff more than kids.
5) Gone, Baby, Gone, Dennis Lehane (1998) - I've had this book forever. Fear of spoilers surrounding the movie convinced me to finally pick it up. Lehane doesn't do anything great, but he does a lot of things well. His dialogue is good, but I didn't put this away with my Elmore Leonard or anything. The sense of place is strong, if one note - this is not a Boston novel, it's a south Boston novel. And the plot ... well, if you've seen the movie you know the plot. The resolution is sad, mostly earned and admirably unflinching. I did tear through this in a day, so it also works as a good, but not really great thriller.
4) The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta (2007) - For me it was a better year in non-fiction (with two giant exceptions coming), since I have to start talking about Perrotta's latest by saying it's not as good as either Election or Little Children. Ruth Ramsey accidentally tells the truth while teaching high school sex ed (oral sex - "some people enjoy it") and the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth begins a crusade against the school, sex ed and Ruth. They insert in the classroom a Tracy Flick-ish co-teacher, who is the only part of The Abstinence Teacher to be truly satirical. Perrotta writes with a lot of sympathy for Tim - former addict, Tabernacle member, soccer coach for Ruth's daughter and other half of the novel's focus. I suspect this novel signals Perrotta stepping away from satire towards a contemporary Updike area. He is a master of suburban unhappiness - which is rarer than it sounds - but also great at comedy. A slightly unsatisfying finish keeps this from finishing higher on my list.
3) The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead (2000) - Imagine if the elevator were more important than the car and the computer. If Otis were better known than Ford and Edison. Then imagine the power a corrupt union of elevator inspectors could have over a city, if that city existed in some kind of Brazil-ian (the movie, not the country) non-time, non-place. That's odd enough. But what if a new way of inspecting elevators split the union into the traditionalists and the intuitionists, who can feel what an elevator will do? If one side wanted to discredit the other side, they could frame Lila Mae, the first black female elevator inspector and an Intuitionist to boot, right? (Racism, by the way, is rampant. And it's a sign of the maturity of Whitehead's vision that Lila is the second black elevator inspector and the first one hates her because he feels he paid all the dues for her and she's stirring up the trouble that had settled down.) Odd, dense and certainly not for everyone, but I liked it.
2) Watership Down, Richard Adams (1972) - Now we get to the reccomendations without reservations. There's a long list of movies I won't see because I loved the book. The list of books I wouldn't read because I loved the movie too much was one book long. Watership Down, the movie, probably isn't nearly as good as I remember it. When I was nine, this movie had more of an impact on me than Star Wars, not that I'd have ever admitted it.
So I refused to read the book for a few decades. I'm funny that way. To my surprise - I have read other Richard Adams books - Watership Down is a masterpiece. The heft of the book always made me think it was crammed full of naturalistic garbage and meandering nature writing in British and/or rabbit slang, but the book is terrifically paced. Ultimately it's as much an adventure novel as an allegory with the nature writing complementing the story.
Watership Down is filled with chill scenes, and I don't think it's entirely because certain quotes ("There's a dog loose in the woods...""Can you run, rabbit?") are indelibly marked on my brain. Bigwig in the tunnel was utterly gripping and people, we're talking about rabbits here.
1)Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling (2007) - My No Duh choice. The publishing event of the year was also the book of the year. Some of the nitpickers make some good points about the book. I have complaints here and there about other Potter books, but I'm also upping the degree of difficulty here. Rowling had to finish an epic story, tie up a bunch of loose ends, give many characters their due and tell a self-containted story for children and adults, all under a spotlight brighter than has ever been put on an author and Deathly Hallows got it done.
For me, the hype built up the experience. Because I partially experienced it all through the eyes of a seven year old I was reminded that story-telling is often a social activity. Round the campfire, in front of the TV, whatever. Stories and masses aren't enemies. The articles, the book discussions and yes, even the balloons in the Stop-n-Shop added to the fun but only because the book delivered. (Also helped that I managed to finish the book without encountering spoilers - even from my own house.) Harry walking through the woods surrounded by ghosts (you know what I'm talking about if you've read the book) is the quintessential moment of the series and it happens at the end. You don't get that often. And you get a fantasy like this probably once in a generation.
My honorable mention for 2007 goes to Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954), not on the list because I'd read it before. It really holds up. I read it in preperation for the movie, then never saw the movie. Based on the reviews, I think I got a better experience. Dan Harrington's Harrington on Hold 'Embooks also almost made it onto my non-fiction list, but I figured that's kinda niche.
Why four? Because sometime soon I'll be back with my top six novels of the year and this saves me from shuffling them together into a top ten.
4) About Alice, Calvin Trillin (2006) - This expands a lengthy essay Trillin wrote for the New Yorker about his late wife Alice. He recounts a letter he received after the original essay's publication from a young woman worried that her fiance doesn't love her "the way Calvin loves Alice," which sums up the feel of the book. About Alice is an ode to love itself. A bone-deep sadness pervades this humorist's book. Although she led a long, full life, this is not a "well, at least she led a long, full life" eulogy. What happens after you lose your soulmate? About Alice will give you empathy for those old couples you see shuffling along. And it will make you, like that young letter-writer, want to eventually become one of those old couples shuffling along.
3) Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger (1990) - This book is ridiculously good. In any other year, it would top my non-fiction list. The TV show, even in its superb first season, is no substitute. And forget about the movie. Written before "A Year in the Life of X, Y or Z" books became a cliche, Friday Night Lights is more about the locale than the kids and more about the kids than about football. The chapter about the use of "nigger" in Odessa should be essential reading in American high schools. With the corrupt and arrogant boom and bust oil business of west Texas as a backdrop, Friday Night Lights also marginally qualifies as the first in my string of anti-Bush books.
2) Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, Rajiv Chandrasekaran (2007) - It's amazing this book could be so readable when it's basically the same story over and over. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld again and again picked loyalty over experience, ideology over practicallity, and P.R. over reality when it came to choosing leaders to rebuild Iraq's health-care, business, education, industry and government. And then they stumbled supporting these Bushies who were already doomed to fail. Guess what? It didn't work. Again and again. The chapter about a handful of guys trying to privatize Iraqi factories is this close to being a living Tom Tomorrow cartoon.
"Yeah, we've got this factory for you to buy and privatize. We think it makes olive oil. Hard to tell, because of the bombing. I bet it'd be real productive too, once the electricity gets turned on. Now, you can't visit it because of the security situation and there's a good chance that whatever government eventually runs this hell-hole will just nationalize it again. You also have four times the number of workers you need but if you fire anybody, they'll blow the place up, but other than that, you're good to go! Two hundred million sound about right?"
1) The Greatest Story Ever Told: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America, Frank Rich (2007) - There are a lot of anti-Bush books out there and I've read my share. If you're looking for screeds, rants, insults, etc. they're out there and many of them are certainly justified given the tragedy that is the Bush administration. Rich's book tops my list first of all because of the scope. There are good books about the military mistakes (Fiasco), the intelligence manipulation (Hubris) or the rebuilding incompetence (see above), but The Greatest Story Ever Told covers a lot of the flim and the flam behind selling the Iraq war in succinct fashion. It's also well-written. It's easy to fall into hyperbolic rants and cheap insults when discussing Bush (again, many justified). Rich lets the facts do the damning. Even if you have scandal fatigue and wish to ride out the last 385 days with low blood pressure, you should check out this book.
Dropkick Murphys - "The Meanest of Times": I can't imagine any Battle of the Bands format the Murphys wouldn't win ... and I'm not only imagining formats where the band members have to do shots of whiskey chased with Guinness between songs, where success is measured by the vivacity of the mosh pit, where the bands play in front of a soused crowd of laborers in the sweaty basement of a union hall, etc...
Tim Armstrong - "A Poet's Life" : I don't know if Armstrong is more than thirty years old but, even if not, he might want to take Mencken's quip to heart. As much as I like this album, the title makes me cringe. Once you get past his "I'm a poet and a sex-drugs-and-rock-n-rolling party man" posing, there's no denying the wickedly danceable ska-inflected groovealiciousness.
Books (Read for the First Time Regardless of Year Published)
A more macho list of manly-men movies would be hard to imagine. I'm really not trying to exclude female filmmakers (nor authors, nor musicians) ... but, wow, take the Y chromosone out and you're not left with much here. Although, I actually thought China Mieville was a woman until I saw his picture in the back of "Perdido Street Station".
Heinlein's Star Fading?
I keep rereading Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and some of the "juveniles" (Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Citizen of the Galaxy & Podkayne of Mars) every year or two and I still think he's miles better than Asimov or Clarke. Still, I haven't even thought of going back to Stranger in a Strange Land, Friday, To Sail Beyond the Sunset (any of the Lazarus Long novels, actually) and -- long separated from the wild libertarian to fascist swings of my teenage years -- I don't have much stomach for his "hairy-chested" prose, as this LA Times piece dubs it. (Nice synchronicity, btw, with Mark over at Cheek nominating R.A.H. for membership in the Manly Writers Corps.)
Also in the LA Times is a list of fave sci-fi novels of 2007 that'll make it's way to my library hold list.
Update: Heinlein's (manly) optimism in an essay on thisibelieve.org -- he's popping up everywhere these days as his Centenary year winds down.
Love them Lists More music lists ... Blender picks the top 100 indie albums of all time. I always think 100 is something of a cop out. You can probably correctly guess about 60 of them. Not that it's a horrible list, just that this has been done before and, as always, I think New Day Rising and Zen Arcade should switch places. Same with Daydream Nation and the unlisted Sister. Most egregious ommission: Psychocandy. Seems like they feared being called too old. Is Arcade Fire that good?
The A.V. Club goes a little more original with a 21 item lists of good albums that would have been great E.P.s. Right off the top of my head I'd say Dinosaur Jr's Bug. I haven't listened to the whole album in about ten years. E.P. version: Freak Scene/No Bones/They Always Come/Yeah We Know/ The Post. And you could switch pretty much any of the other noise-fest songs for "Yeah We Know" if you wanted.
Mrs. BoneDaddy had already seen these by the time I passed it along to her, but some of you might enjoy this photo collection of the World's Most Beautiful Libraries. A little too European and cathedral-ly for my tastes - I figured Yale's Beinecke was a lock - but some undeniably beautiful rooms in there.
12 Memorable newspaper comic strip deaths. They're only sort of ranked, but I would have given the top two spots to Doonesbury, one for Dick Davenport (dead of a heart attack while bird-watching) who is mentioned and for Andy (comic strip's first gay character, died from AIDS while listening to just-released Pet Sounds on CD).
I can only comment on the ones I've read, pardon the formatting:
Historian, The Kostova, Elizabeth Little, Brown 2005 [I can't believe this. I almost didn't finish this book, it was so bad. Two word review: pedestrian, bloodless.]
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Haddon, Mark Random House 2004 [Worthy.]
Da Vinci Code, The Brown, Dan Transworld 2003 [A good read, but one of the 100?]
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone Rowling, J.K. Bloomsbury 1997 [I'm OK with this.]
High Fidelity Hornby, Nick Penguin 1995 [OK]
Suitable Boy, A Seth,Vikram Orion 1994 [Yes. I wouldn't have bothered linking the list if this hadn't been on it.]
Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow Hoeg, Peter HarperCollins 1992 [Yeah, so I'm noticing that lots of the ones I read were made into movies. Great book, good movie.]
English Patient Ondaatje, Michael Macmillan 1992 [I'm thinking of Elaine at the movie theater, unable to bear the overwrought drama. I actually liked both the book and the movie, but I get the attitude.]
LA Confidential Ellroy, James Random House 1990 [Ellroy was on one of those shows on the Biography Channel, or Court TV, one of those things, talking about his mother's murder, his investigation of it, etc. It was kind of creepy how he talked about is feelings about his mother and how he's written about it. Very odd character, that one. Great novel though.]
Remains Of The Day Ishiguro, Kazuo Faber 1989 [I stand by this.]
Bonfire Of The Vanities, The Wolfe, Tom Macmillan 1987 [I wouldn't have included this one.]
Watchmen Moore, Alan Titan 1987 [Yeah.]
Perfume Suskind, Patrick Penguin 1985 [Definitely.]
Handmaid's Tale Atwood, Margaret Random House 1985 [OK]
Love In The Time Of Cholera Marquez, Gabriel Garcia Penguin 1985 [Absolutely.]
Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Kundera, Milan Faber 1984 [Yep.]
Neuromancer Gibson, William HarperCollins 1984 [Zzzzzzz. So many better sci-fi novels to choose from. I guess this is where I'll rant about how there is not a single KSR book on this list. Idiots. This over "The Years of Rice and Salt"?!?!? Over the "The Gold Coast"?! Ugh.]
Money Amis, Martin Random House 1984 [Yep.]
Name of the Rose, The Eco, Umberto Random House 1983 [Ironically, or not, I just finished Krugman's "The Great Unraveling" and was looking for a book I haven't read in a while to reread and "The Name of the Rose" wound up getting pulled off the shelf.]
I'm a little discouraged by the 19% read rate. More discouraged that the literati apparently think so little of Stan Robinson's novels. I mean, fine, if you were put off by the science and pacing of the Mars books, I don't get it, but lots of people were so, I can see how those could be overlooked. But they slogged through Gibson's overrated prose and liked that better? Better than a half-dozen or so of Stan's books that were better than at least half the 19 listed above? I just don't get it.
Best Books of 2006 My list is late, but this year all the books included were actually published in the referenced year.
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks. I've already praised this book here, but it's worth mentioning that it hasn't faded in memory the way some genre stuff does. I still vaguely wonder, during slow moments of my day, if I could put my house up on stilts. (Brooks' zombies are poor climbers.) Each of my best books has some connection to the Iraq War. World War Z's connection is slight but not insignificant. There are several references to fatigue and depletion of military supplies and men due to Iraq, stress that leaves America vulnerable to the zombie plague. But more meaningfully, Brooks plays on a post-Iraq, post-Katrina fear that the people who are supposed to protect you have no idea what they are doing. They seem surprised by religious and anti-American violence in the Middle East and couldn't get water to flood victims. Think they could stop a horde of zombies? Hey, who's that outside?
My next book, Ken Kalfus' novel A Disorder Peculiar to the Country begins on September 11th, 2001 and ends shortly after the invasion of Iraq. Those events are just backdrop to the dark, dark comedic struggles of the main characters to divorce each other. How pitch black is this book? In the first chapter, on 9/11, both characters are secretly thrilled by the morning's events because they both believe the other has died. The ending is even more audacious. Probably a dozen or so books have literally made my jaw drop as I read them and this is one. The politics of this book sneak up on the reader. I won't give away the ending, but I will say that one of the most damning things you can do to a delusional person, such as our President, is take them at their word.
And with the most obvious connection to the Iraq War, Thomas Ricks' Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. My main complaint with Fiasco is the title. One glance, and the title looks like it reflects a screed instead of a conclusion. Ricks is the military correspondent for the Washington Post and concentrates on the military in Iraq. Bush, in fact, hardly appears in the text. (When he does, he is out-of-touch and completely willing to play politics with the war.) I've followed the news from Iraq pretty closely since the start and Fiasco had enough new information and insight to encourage me to press on through the dense and dry writing.
Although Ricks reports on several of the atrocities and heavy-handed treatment that only increased the violence there, he lays most of the blame on the failed strategy of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld. There was no proper counterinsurgency strategy in place because there wasn't going to be an insurgency. Counterinsurgency, where "the people are the prize," is also counter-intuitive to the dominant hit-'em-harder, round-'em-all-up mentality. A depressing, depressing book. It's hard to read about how in the weeks after the statue came down an American could walk near the Tigris and drink coffee in a cafe without much fear and not shake your head at what's happened. Like the others, Fiasco is not really for the faint of heart.
Once I gorge myself on some fiction, I'm going in search of a Washington-based, political history of the Iraq War. I'd welcome any suggestions.
Lists, lists, lists ...Top 50 Loose Ends of Lost - I still like Lost, but dwelling on too many of these questions may change that. Premiere's 20 Most Overrated Movies of All Time list is good because it's not particularly gentle. (American Beauty and Gone With the Wind are first ballot Overrated Movie Hall of Famers to me.) There's probably a movie or two you don't think should be there. While we're acknowledging things, we should note that James Bond has been uncool often enough for a list, which thankfully features a Connery moment. Lastly, this list of Worst Band Names helpfully comes with rules, such as "no prepositions." Archers of Loaf is a truly awful band name. Vanilla Trainwreck (unlisted) is almost as bad without violating any of the rules. I kind of like Death Cab for Cutie, though.
Double Shot of Movies A free night and a lingering virus gave me the chance to catch a couple of movies recently. I probably never would have watched Below if I had been physically able to do anything else, but I was happily surprised by this video sleeper pick. An American sub in WWII plucks some survivors out of the ocean and creepy, weird things start happening. The sub, you won't be surprised to hear, may have a mysterious past, vengeful ghosts, sabatoge, or just a bad case of atmosphere poisoning. Nicely directed by David "Pitch Black" Twohy, Below gives good claustrophobia, as you'd expect from a sub movie. X-Files and Twilight Zone fans might find this refreshingly different from the recent slew of gory, dead child/ Japanese revenge remakes. There's very little gore, but a couple of good creepy scenes. There's one sequence done in front of a mirror that just about exactly matches something I've always wanted to see in a horror movie. Below doesn't really go the extra mile, either with the story or the acting, but it's certainly good enough, and that's not just the medicine talking.
The horribly-titled The Squid and the Whale has been getting enough attention so I'll just toss my two cents in. The dialogue is good - the two kids on Kafka was hysterical - and the acting is great - especially the kids - but this is a hard movie to love, mostly because every single character is kind of unlikeable and the plot is pretty small. After seeing this movie, you won't want to be divorced, married, a parent, a child, sexually active, sexually inactive, squid, whale or any kind of writer. You may want to be a philistine, as the younger kid proudly declares himself in a great scene because then you get to see movies that make you smile at the end. A cautionary tale.
While I'm in a list mood, I'll link to this - The 50 Greatest Marvel Characters. It claims to be compiled from a bunch of people, but that's clearly not the case. This list is too idiosyncratic to have emerged from the minds of 200 nerds. Admittedly, I haven't picked up a comic in almost two decades, but Galactus at #4? Why? Storm doesn't make the list but the Black Panther does? Alright, maybe something's been going on in comics - Jamie Madrox, the Multiple Man did something interesting? - but this looks like the work of one person.
In a way, that's good. The list is funnier. On the Punisher:
Frank Castle's solution to this fracas al fresco was to strike back. Not necessarily at the mobsters that killed his family, but at any mobsters he could find, and probably a few cheery pizzeria chefs, respected character actors and monkey-taunting plumbers along the way.
Still, this is one person's list. No 200 random comic readers would place Dr. Strange ahead of Daredevil, with all due respect to neilalien, from whom I've stolen this link. The funniest ranking is right at the top. The greatest Marvel creation, ahead of Spider-Man, is Dr. Doom. Look, anybody who puts clothing on over armor is not a good character. Does Darth Vader wear a fez? No. Iron Man ever wrap himself in a toga? No.
So the New York Times has collected a list of the 25 best American novels of the past 25 years and gets pretty much what you'd expect. (Nice to see Richard Ford's Independence Day, but if Sebold's The Lovely Bones or Franzen'sThe Corrections aren't better than Winter's Tale, I'll eat all three books.
Meghan O'Rourke at Slate uses the list to examine our American bias towards "big" novels. And by "Americans," I mean "those who read." I've always had a penchant for a writer's "smaller" novels, such as Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 over V, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises over For Whom the Bell Tolls, even Heinlein's Starship Troopers over just about everything he wrote afterwards.
10 Worst Blockbusters of All Time. Hard to argue when there's so much at rock bottom. I think Titanic is a decent movie and doesn't deserve to be on the list, but even deleting it doesn't make room for all the junk left out. Godzilla. Con Air. Jurassic Park II.
