Bookeywookey's bookish plans for 2014

After the look back at the past year (here and here) it is time to look ahead at some of the reading to come in 2014 (theoretically).


Non-fiction

Nate Silver's 2012 The Signal and the Noise is a look at the application of statistics to everyday prediction making and how data is converted into knowledge.

Chrystia Freeland, a finance journalist, writes about the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. in the U.S., the consolidation of power into the hands of fewer and fewer persons across the globe, even as we continue to holler the word 'democracy' and try to sell it to the highest bidder. 

A companion piece to the above, Mark Mizruchi's book, argues that the influence of America's CEO's has changed since World War II from a consolidated force driven by civic responsibility to a fragmented group uninterested in using their power to tackle the "big issues." 

I'm really looking forward to Robert Page's synthesis of the work uncovering the genetic and physiological mechanisms which underlie bees' collective societies and how their social behavior evolved.

British social historian Theodore Zeldin wrote in 1994 about the forces that shape humanity in what is meant to be a ranging, unsentimental, and learned volume.

The thesis of Ian Buruma's latest, Year Zero, is that 1945 was the founding year of our modern era.  His narrative has a dual focus on world events and on the biography of his father, who was imprisoned by the Nazis, spending much of World War II in Berlin.




Fiction

This book was a gift from a friend and colleague in celebration of the completion of my PhD.  I love it when a friend is willing to pick a book to give as a gift instead of giving a bookstore gift card.  Described as a  seductive love story, a satirical epic about the middle class, a comedy about the interior world of a cuckold,  like Joyce, Baron Munchhausen, and the Marx Brothers, this work, published in 1968, is now considered a classic.  I can't wait!

Alberto Moravia's Contempt was the basis of a Jean-Luc Goddard film.  It is rumored to be a "caustic dispatch from one man's self-made hell." While this isn't likely to be a laugh-riot, it is meant to be psychologically astute and an unflinching look at a failing marriage.

I was introduced to the writing of James Purdy when his collected stories came out in 2013.  I haven't actually decided which of his novels to read first, but this one about the dual forces of creativity and self-destructiveness in a mother and daughter is drawing me.  His prose is astonishingly plain and clear - Jo Ann Beard and Joan Didion both came to mind as I dipped into it, which is promising.

I have really enjoyed some of Kathryn Davis's strange, other-worldly novels, so I am hopeful about Duplex which apears to be part social examination of suburbia, part time-travel.  Hmmmm.

The winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize, The Luminaries, by New Zealander Eleanor Catton may be up next.  I am chomping at the bit to start this 800-page saga - part mystery, part 19th century nautical novel, part adventure, part ghost story. 

Ah, so many books, so many plans.  I wish you all a 2014 full of curiosity and wonder, fueled by good reading.

Bookeywookey's Favorite Books of 2013

The summing up of my reading for the year 2013 moves now from hard, cold statistics to content.  Here are my best of... lists.  Rather than post separately on each genre, since I didn't read as many books as in the past several years, I am going to collect my favorites reads of 2013 in one place.

Essay/Memoir

I'll begin with the essay/memoir category.  Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of my Youth is superbly crafted.  She can write about anything, the pleasures here are in the writing itself.  As I said earlier in the year:

the book is full of one marvelous essay after another - about her poor father's drinking, about her mother and aunt fishing, about a terrible event Beard experienced while working at the University of Iowa.  Why should I care about this stranger's life, you may ask?  But her sentences lend the boredom, deep pleasures, longings, and misgivings of ordinary life true grace.  She fashions sentences so deft you want to live in them.

History/Memoir

 Timothy Garton Ash's The File straddles the memoir and history categories.  This hybrid of forms is really what makes it so effective as a story of how individuals participate in history.  Garton Ash writes about his own time in East Berlin in the 1970s and about the subsequent reading of his own secret police file when the archives were made public after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  He visits each of the people who informed on him and tries to understand what about them and the facts of history led them to do so.



Fiction

There were a number of novels this year that were solidly satisfying, each in their own way.  In no particular order they were.

Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch , many of my reading buddies were critical of Tartt's latest, particularly of its length.  I didn't have this problem with it. I found it an addictive saga, equal parts Gothic and Victorian, with more sophistication than her earlier novels, though no less entertaining. 

Days in the History of Silence - As the title suggests, this is a thoughtful, dark, interior book by Norwegian novelist Merethe Lindstrom.  A beautiful read about an elderly couple and their relationship to each other and to difficult events in their past.  

NW - I'm a big fan of Zadie Smith's multi-textured, urban, literary opus.  NW captures something essential about the social and economic zeitgeist of contemporary London.  She is an artist for our time whose work, I think, will last beyond it.

The Woman Upstairs Anger drives Claire Messud's latest book.  I love its depiction of the duality of the human psyche, and how the work of the artist and the work of being human interact. 

The trouble is that Nora needs others to tell her who she is.  She is not willing to reject their formulas, and that makes her angry as hell.  She's believed all this time that she's been mildly disappointed, but it takes meeting the Shahid family, particularly Sirena - a visual artist - someone seemingly free of these demands, to find out she's actually furious.

The Starboard Sea  - Amber Dermont's novel is the most promising debut I read this year. I found the prep school setting, the complex and sympathetic protagonist, and his search for moral compass enveloping and compelling.





Best read of 2013

Art Criticism/Fiction

Artful - If I had to choose my best book for 2013, it would not be a traditional novel, it wouldn't even be a traditional work of art criticism, but rather a wondrous piece of writing that uses the tools of fiction - character, plot, voice - as a vehicle for loving art, for translating the power of art upon an audience.

Artful is a masterpiece of integrity, and I mean that in all senses of the word.  Artful does not seem that it could be added to or subtracted from. It is consistent in its methods - its form (the subject, in fact, of its second chapter).  It is difficult while inside the whole to question these methods. Smith's narrator tells us she is mourning a lover.  Even as I am aware that Smith has created a narrative with craft and ingenuity, I believe that this must be true about Smith herself.  Finally, as Merriam Webster would have it, Artful is incorruptible. What I mean is that it brings its diverse pieces together so successfully that, well I was going to say that I am not aware of them, but that is not true. When I stop to consider the components of this book - form and content, reading and writing, painting and film, artist and art, lover and loved, mourner and mourned - my appreciation of the whole doesn't pause.  To consider the parts is to consider the whole.  

Bookeywookey's best fiction reads of 2012

And now, my favorite fiction reads of the year (excluding re-reads which are obviously already favorites).

Toby's Room by Pat Barker
The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St Aubyn
Any Human Heart by William Boyd
What is the What by Dave Eggers
The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
Be Near Me by Andrew O'Hagan
Nineteen-Seventy-Four by David Peace
The Life of an Unknown Man by Andrei Makine

I enjoyed looking over all the fiction I read this year.  The worlds I inhabited thanks to the authors were so varied, full of strong characters, sharp observations, and the narrative technique, particularly in this short list, was sure.  I'm not sure whether I am going to end up wanting to add Andrei Makine's The Life of an Unknown Man to the list of contenders (addendum: see above) , as I'm in the middle of it now, but here are the four, upon looking back, that I think the best of the best. Click the titles for links to my posts about them.

Bookeywookey's best biography and memoir reading of 2012

There is a blizzard headed our way here in the wilds of Ohio and I brought no boots.  Great!  I guess I will return to my end-of-year list-making. 

I noticed that I returned to a reading pleasure of old this year.  I used to read many more biographies and autobiographies than I have in the past few years (especially when I was acting), but in 2012 I read many more. Here were the highlights.

Catherine the Great by Robert Massie
Blue Nights by Joan Didion
A Positively Final Appearance by Alec Guinness
My Name Escapes Me by Alec Guinness
Winter Journal by Paul Auster

It is difficult to pick a 'best' from this list since the straight, long-form biography of the empress of Russia is so different from the memoir form, which is different again from Joan Didion's deep elegiac reflection on the loss of her daughter.  Good thing I don't have to choose.  These were all great, but I'll single out:

Bookeywookey's best non-fiction (non-biographical) read of 2012

Time for the annual best-of ritual.  I'm dividing my non-fiction category into life story forms (biography, memoir) and anything else.  Here were the non-biographical non-fiction highlights of my 2012 reading:


The Emperor of all Maladies by  Siddhartha Mukherjee 
Remarkable Creatures by Sean B. Carroll
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
In Europe by Geert Mak


There isn't a single title in this list that I wouldn't strongly recommend.  Since The Emperor of all Maladies and Behind the Beautiful Forevers got a lot of air time from others, I think I'll call it a tie between In Europe and Remarkable Creatures.  I found In Europe impressive for combining tremendous scope - covering all of Europe and the 20th Century - with a sense of the impact of history on individual human beings.  Remarkable Creatures makes an adventure story out of a narrative that shows how science done by individual mavericks contributes to the fund of general knowledge.

I have a little list... (Lists - The Sunday Times 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945)

This this has been going around like a bad summer cold - everyone has had it: BooksPlease, Books and Bicycles, My Porch... It’s from the Sunday Times - The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945. Since I consider myself a strong appreciator of British lit, let's see how many I have read. Red numbers indicate that I have, black that I haven't.

1. Philip Larkin - This is not starting off well. No, he is a hole in my poetry reading
2. George Orwell - Animal Farm and 1984
3. William Golding - Lord of the Flies
4. Ted Hughes - Oh yes. His translation of The Orestia is my favorite by far
5. Doris Lessing - The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, the Canopus in Argus series
6. J. R. R. Tolkien – I have not been able to get through a single book of his and I have tried
7. V. S. Naipaul - no.
8. Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
9. Kingsley Amis - not a thing
10. Angela Carter - no.
11. C. S. Lewis - the Narnia books, The Space Trilogy, Till We Have Faces
12. Iris Murdoch - Nearly everything. She is smashing
13. Salman Rushdie - He is another one I have tried and not succeeded with
14. Ian Fleming - No, but I have seen the movies
15. Jan Morris - No.
16. Roald Dahl - Yes.
17. Anthony Burgess - No.
18. Mervyn Peake - I haven't read Gormenghast, but I saw the miniseries
19. Martin Amis - I have tried and find him obnoxious.
20. Anthony Powell - I consider A Dance to the Music of Time one of those projects I have to get to
21. Alan Sillitoe - No.
22. John Le Carré - several
23. Penelope Fitzgerald - The Bookshop, The Blue Flower, The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels
24. Philippa Pearce - never heard of her
25. Barbara Pym - no
26. Beryl Bainbridge - No, but I'd like to
27. J. G. Ballard - No
28. Alan Garner - The Owl Service.
29. Alasdair Gray - No
30. John Fowles - The Magus
31. Derek Walcott - I saw his adaptation of The Odyssey on stage and have read Omeros
32.Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go, Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans
33. Anita Brookner - Yes, The Debut, A Closed Eye
34. A. S. Byatt - The Children’s Book, The Game, Posession, Babel Tower
35. Ian McEwan - Saturday, Atonement, The Child in Time, Black Dogs, Enduring Love, Amsterdam
36. Geoffrey Hill - No
37. Hanif Kureishi - The Buddha of Suburbia, Gabriel's Gift, and I have seen his films of My Beautiful Landrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
38. Iain Banks - The Business is sitting on the shelf
39. George Mackay Brown - never have
40. A. J. P. Taylor - No.
41. Isaiah Berlin - One essay, I don't remember the title
42. J. K. Rowling - Read em all
43. Philip Pullman - Excellent
44. Julian Barnes - No
45. Colin Thubron - Among The Russians
46. Bruce Chatwin - The Songlines
47. Alice Oswald - No
48. Benjamin Zephaniah - Never have, he's quite prolific, isn't he
49. Rosemary Sutcliff - No
50. Michael Moorcock - wow, what an output, but no

That's 23 out of 50. Not bad, but I clearly have some work to do. And I just wouldn't be playing the list game without bitching at the end about who I think is missing. Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, John Betejman, D.M. Thomas, Daphne DuMaurier, P.D. James, Elizabeth Bowen, Harold Pinter, Howard Barker, Olivia Manning, Hilary Mantel, Sarah Salway, Margaret Drabble, Charles Lambert, Allan Hollinghurst, Caryl Churchill, J. B. Priestley, and Zadie Smith could easily have replaced J.K. Rowling on my list, but having just 50 spaces makes the job difficult and it is evident that The Sunday Times wanted to be inclusive of a variety of writing and perspectives. How did you do?

Recent acquisitions department...

I am not following the current path of many of my colleagues in the book blogosphere, reading only books from my existing TBR pile for a designated period of time. I cannot make claims to such virtue. Au contraire. I was tempted. I indulged willingly, and oh such treasures await me:

This may not be the enticing morsel to everyone that it is to me, but this collection of chapters on congenital and developmental brain disorders covers the current knowledge of, clinical research on, diagnosis and treatment of the disorders that most commonly effect children. Pediatric Neuropsychology should be a useful addition to my professional library.

It was the New York Times Review of Books that led me to Ian Frazier's new book Travels in Siberia. Interesting how we can visit Siberia now, just as people visit the concentration camps in Poland and Germany. Interesting too to have this history of repression published now in a supposedly democratic Russia, (but really it is an oligarchy just as it has always been, whether under the Tsar, Stalin, or Medvedev). This may seem like a tangent, but stay with me: my finding this in the NYTBR reminds me of the movie that The Ragazzo and I watched last night - Sidney Pollack's 1975 thriller Three Days of the Condor with Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway. Before I describe it, let me use one sentence to say what an artist Pollack is - what effective performances he encourages from his actors, how improvisatory he makes situations feel, even with less than the most subtle actors, how accidental his settings feel with the way he directs the background. This is subtle stuff but it is is essential in helping the viewer to believe in the situations shown in a film. To return to the point, in Condor, Redford plays a CIA employee whose job it is to read everything current, no matter the genre, and feed it into a computer. The computer looks for patterns of information and changes in those patterns over time to see if what the world is writing and reading about reveals anything that the rest of "intelligence" doesn't. Aside from being a well-made thriller with a somewhat prophetic plot, I bring it up here because it speaks to a point I have always made about why I read the book reviews of any paper first (aside from the fact that I like it), because it's more news than the news. It reflects what people are thinking about, even if they don't know they're thinking about it. As for Frazier's book, it is part travel book, part history, and part portrait of some of the great Russian's involuntarily exiled to Siberia. I'm fascinated by Russian history and this bleak geographic prison with its rich history.

Journalist Alan Riding introduces us to the collection of writers, artists, and performers who remained in Paris during the Nazi occupation in And the Show Went On. Riding asks - were they "saving" French culture by working or were they simply collaborationists?

The value of Doubt is a favorite subject of mine in my self-righteously, faith-obsessed, country. Jennifer Michael Hecht's books is a history of great doubters from the Greeks and Thomas Jefferson to H. L. Mencken and Werner Heisenberg, with whom the Uncertainty Principle is associated.

Dutch novelist and cognitive psychologist Paul Verhaeghen has written what most critics agree is an ambitious and intellectual challenging book about a woman attracted to neo-Nazis in contemporary Berlin called Omega Minor which I heard about through Charles Lambert, a novelist I very much admire. Described by one critic as a mishmash of heart-rending horror and hilarious sex, of Hinduism and theoretical physics, of Greek mythology and Hebrew lore, this novel seems to have the reach of another one of my favorites Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley, so I'm going to give it a try. I have a feeling it will be awfully great or greatly awful.

I am a great admirer of the South African novelist Damon Galgut, as is evident from my thoughts on his The Imposter and The Good Doctor, so reading his latest In A Strange Room, a booker Prize finalist last year, was a no-brainer for me. I'll read anything the man cares to write.


Cynthia Ozick's other work has offered such an interesting combination of qualities: erudite, observant, hilarious, and literary. Her 1983 novel The Cannibal Galaxy is about a French Jewish immigrant to the American Midwest and his encounter with a scholarly prodigy and her mother.

Wendy Moffat's wonderful biography of E. M. Forster which I wrote about last week reminded me of a hole in my knowledge of poetry - Greek poet C. P. Cavafy. I decided to patch this hole with Daniel Mendelsohn's recent translation of his collected works, something to savor over time.

Finally, John Self spoke highly of Italian novelist Antonio Tabucchi's 1994 book Pereira Maintains. A brief work about an insular widowed journalist's political awakening.



This spate of voracious greed probably erupted because classes are beginning again on Tuesday and I forsee the end of freedom to read as I know it. A last hurrah, you know? Indulge me a little.

Best of... (My best fiction reads in 2010)

And finally... I have read 37 novels, novellas, or collections of stories written for adult readers in 2010, the bulk of my pleasure reading. The titles were:
Leeches
The Long Falling
The History of Love
Once on a Moonless Night
The Private Life of Trees
Comedy in a Minor Key
The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life
Maiden Voyage
The Giant's House
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Getting the Picture
Journey to the Center of the Earth
The Imperfectionists
Little Monsters
Any Human Face
A Week in December
The Good German
The Debut
Love and Summer
Sarah's Key
Something is Out There
Nothing is Black
The Unnamed
The White Hotel
In the Beginning
The Next Queen of Heaven
Authenticity
The Birds of the Innocent Wood

Looking over this list, I am surprised at the number of really good ones. Of these, my favorite story collection was Something is Out There by Richard Bausch, and, limiting myself to just 10, my favorite longer fiction works were: In the Beginning by Chiam Potok, The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas, The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris, Nothing is Black by Deirdre Madden, Any Human Face and Little Monsters by Charles Lambert, The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken, Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, and The Long Falling by Keith Ridgway.

That brings a stimulating and varied reading year nearly to a close. Wishing you all good reading in 2011.

Best of... (My best YA fiction reads in 2010 - The Magicians & Thursday's Child)

I hope everyone who celebrates christmas had a good one. Next year end list: books for young readers (YA fiction), a category I enjoy, but read sparingly this year. It's a bit of a quasi-category since good readers of any age can read anything that strikes their fancy (I know I did). For that matter, a number of these books make excellent reading for adults. In some ways I think that the humor of both Cosmic and The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet will be lost on kids. Sonia Harnett's novels are rich reading at any age and Lev Grossman's The Magicians is just a superb work of fantasy period, no matter what the age of the reader. Just 9 of the 52 books I read or 17% were touted as books for younger readers. They were:

The Borrowers
Cosmic
Journey to the Center of the Earth
The Card Turner
The Ropemaker
The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet
Surrender
Thursday's Child
The Magicians

My picks for my favorite reads for younger readers in 2010 were Thursday's Child and Surrender by Sonia Harnett, who creates works of art for readers she assumes are dead-smart, and The Magician's by Lev Grossman, who takes his fantasy as well as his readers seriously and is prolifically imaginative.

I'm just realizing that this is my 1,000th post - ding, ding ding (bells going off). Thank you to all of you who come by and read, whether occasionally or regularly. I set out in search of regular writing practice and a community of readers and I have been richly rewarded in both.

Best of... (My best non-fiction reads in 2010 - The Hustle, Full House, Nine Lives, Your Inner Fish)

I will begin the list madness with my non-fiction reads for 2010. I read quite a bit of non-fiction this year. I have read 51 books so far this year, which means I'll probably make it to about 53 or so. Of those 15 were non-fiction or about 35%:

Microcosm
The Hustle
Nine Lives
Full House
Epilepsy in Childhood and Adolescence
An Introduction to the History of Psychology
Your Inner Fish
How We Decide
Travels with Herodotus
Freud's Technique Papers
Freud and Psychoanalysis
Reading in the Brain
Diagnosing Learning Disorders
I of the Vortex
The Pattern in the Carpet

I have linked a few of the stronger and more memorable non-fiction reads: everything from a picture of life's mechanisms in a portrait of the E. coli bacterium, to a memoir on inequality in 1980s Seattle, to a portrait of singular Indian mystics, to a meditation on probability - a varied year. I'm going to single out three:

The Hustle a singularly observant and personal memoir of the author's participation in a racially integrated basket ball team, and the aftermath of that social experiment for each of the team's members (it's also written by my friend Doug Merlino).

Full House by the late, great paleontologist Stephen J. Gould. An absolutely remarkable book given how amusing it is to read and that it is about the author's diagnosis of a deadly illness and statistics.

William Dalrymple's portrait of Nine contemporary Indian mystics - Nine Lives - is a fascinating book mourning the price of cultural homogenization.

Ok, four, Your Inner Fish is also wonderful. A book about why collecting fossils matters.


A rich and varied year of non-fiction reading, as I review it. I will continue to post my lists and other goodies from the road, as the Ragazzo and I head to his parents' for the holidays.