Book roundup 2011
Three quick reviews - all of them of YA books, all of them redefining 'short' - of books I managed to sneak in just before the year finished, bringing my grand total to 94. Happy 2012, everyone! I spent my NYE getting ridiculously tipsy on cheap white wine with a friend I've known since I was seventeen. I think that's a win on the previous year. \o/
This Can't Be Happening at Macdonald Hall!, by Gordon Korman.
♥THIS BOOK♥
(I... hear that these books are available online. Help please?)
Radio Fifth Grade, by Gordon Korman.
All right, but not brilliant. Positively underwhelming, actually, compared to This Can't Be Happening.
Bad, Badder, Baddest, by Cynthia Voigt.
Pretty good - I really like the way Cynthia Voigt writes friendships - and really amusing, actually, Voigt has a skill with caricature I hadn't really noticed before? but none of the poignancy I associate with her novels, and I think that's okay, this novel was fine without it.
Also the book meme we've all been waiting for.
How many books read in 2011?
Ninety-four! I was hoping for one hundred, but this is still respectable. I'm counting on my bookcount getting a lot higher once I graduate from university, mostly because I think about making this The Year for a hundred and getting inevitably cynical because I'll be starting my final year in October. /o\
Fiction/Non-Fiction ratio?
If we accept the tenuous fiction (a ha) that poetry counts as fiction, 74:20. I've read more non-fiction than I thought I would. Some of it was all right (Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point), some of it was effervescent (♥KENNETH PAUL TAN♥) and some of it was downright terrible (Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy). Also worth a mention are the social justice books I read, which took up a pretty huge chunk of my non-fiction list.
Male/Female authors?
38:56
(I feel there should be a POC/queer equivalent of this question, but I'm too lazy to start counting!)
Favourite books read?
Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives - in general, this year is notable for my discovery of his body of work. The Kenneth Paul Tan-edited Renaissance Singapore. Katharine Quarmby's Scapegoat. Eleanor Wong's drama tripartite Invitation to Treat. Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle. Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish & other poems. And of course, Cynthia Voigt's Tillerman cycle. Dave Chua's Gone Case, and some of Alfian Sa'at's drama.
Honourable mention: Oreo, by Fran Ross. What a strange little novel! When I first read it I thought: "Well, all things considered I really enjoy earnest mixed-race bildungsromans" - Danzy Senna's Caucasia also a big favourite, I can't believe I left that out - "to parodic send-ups of the same," and then I went to class and the professor said some things about language and Wittgenstein and Oreo, and things fell into place and I was like, "Oh my GOD I love this book."
Least favourite?
Oh, a bunch. Verena Tay's In the Company of Women and Cyril Wong's Oneiros were big disappointments. Joyce Carol Oates' Rape: A Love Story left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City and Frances Mayes' Bella Tuscany made me lose all hope of ever reading good non-fiction about privileged white women that wasn't obnoxious in that privilege.
Oldest book?
If we don't count translation as a new iteration, Mary Barnard's Sappho. Otherwise, Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens. (These books are great too btw - but I thought my list of favourites was getting a bit long!)
Newest book?
Probably You Cannot Count Smoke by Cyril Wong or Scapegoat, by Katharine Quarmby.
Longest book title?
Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern
Shortest?
Just Kids
Most books read by one author this year?
Francesca Lia Block - 7
Cynthia Voigt - 6
Roberto Bolano - 3
Any in translation?
To Live, by Yu Hua, the Sappho, and Roberto Bolano!
How many were borrowed from the library this year?
Most of them.
Book that most changed my perspective:
♥THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES♥
On a "how I think about issues" level, I probably risked falling into the fallacy of confirmation bias a lot.
Favourite character:
Mina Smiths, from Come A Stranger. No contest even.
Favourite scene:
Probably the bit from Nazi Literature in the Americas, right at the very end where Roberto Bolano leaves off from biographing fictitious writers and has one of them break the fourth wall, look him in the eye, and say, take care of yourself, Bolano, and go.
ART AND REAL LIFE AND COMMUNITY AND POLITICS AND COMPLICITY ;_____________;
Favourite quote:
From Cynthia Voigt's Come A Stranger:
Miz Hunter drank and swallowed. "Nobody needs to see that place, Missy. I had a clean room waiting. I had a friend waiting in New Orleans who would prepare me a fine dinner. I had a job to keep me, a good, secure job. Even so, looking at that place made me want to give up and die." Her eyes looked out across some distance. Her words came slow. "The water was still, dead still, and green slime all along the top. Those cypress trees - between the dead stumps coming up black out of the water and the live trees tangled up overhead with vines to keep the sun out and keep the wind out and keep anything clean out... I almost couldn't make myself walk into it. He'd have had nothing with him, nothing but the clothes he wore and his bare hands and his bare courage. You could hear the trees creaking, sometimes. And bugs - and - it was the kind of place snakes love; it felt like the kind of place anything bad would be at home in. There were little hummocks of land, sometimes, and the water looking like pea soup gone bad on the stove. I was on a pathway, no more than half a mile from a town road, and I felt it reaching out for my soul. No, he died in there. As soon as I saw it I knew that. What made me wonder was what a man's life could be like to make him go in there in the first place. Any man walking into that swamp was walking into death - so whatever lay behind him must have been worse than death."
Mina felt cold. She could see it, almost, and she thought that he would have looked like Mr Shipp. It could have been Mr Shipp born in slavery, sold into slavery. The boards of the porch floor felt thin, flimsy; when they gave out there was a swamp waiting underneath.
"That's terrible," she said.
"What's most terrible," Miz Hunter answered her, although her thin old voice didn't sound like it was so terrible, "was that if he'd just waited a few years, he'd have been freed. It wasn't ten years later that the war was finished. He couldn't know, probably didn't even know war was coming. The ignorance of slaves - nobody told them anything, nobody taught them - But if he'd only waited, he'd have had his freedom and his life."
"Oh no," Mina said.
"You have to look with a long eye, Missy. Some people never learn that, and I'd guess that my great-grandfather was that kind. We live in a blink of time, but God looks with a long eye."
"That wasn't much over a hundred years ago," Mina said.
"And it's been quite a road since then," Miz Hunter told her. "If you look down that road with a long eye - as your poppa does - it's almost a miracle how much territory has been covered."
But Mina's imagination was stuck there in the green swamp, with a man who looked like Mr Shipp, half in and half out of the water, alone, and his skin crawling over with bugs and covered with slime, the black skin that covered his strong muscles. She'd never understood before. Because that kind of man wouldn't be quiet under any master.
She put her glass down, even though her mouth was dry. She couldn't have swallowed anything. She couldn't have gotten anything down past the anger and misery, the pity and the bitterness all mixed up in her throat. She was looking with a long eye, and that man lay too close to be forgotten about.
I can still taste those tears, oh boy.
The Runner, by Cynthia Voigt | Sons From Afar, by Cynthia Voigt | A Solitary Blue, by Cynthia Voigt | The Callendar Papers, by Cynthia Voigt | Anne of Avonlea, by L.M. Montgomery | Come A Stranger, by Cynthia Voigt | Just Kids, by Patti Smith | You Cannot Count Smoke, by Cyril Wong | Pomes All Sizes, by Jack Kerouac | In the Company of Women, by Verena Tay | Oneiros, by Cyril Wong | The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga | How to Be A Woman, by Caitlin Moran | American Pastoral, by Phillip Roth | Amulet, by Roberto Bolano | Who Runs This Place?: The Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century, by Anthony Sampson | The Lives of the Muses, by Francine Prose | I Left My Grandfather's House, by Denton Welch | Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens | Kaddish & other poems, by Allen Ginsberg | Sappho: A New Translation, by Mary Barnard | The Lives of Animals, by J.M. Coetzee | Women & Violence, by Barrie Levy | Half + Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial + Bicultural, edited by Claudine Chiawei O'Hearn | Nazi Literature in the Americas, by Roberto Bolano | Corridor, by Alfian Sa'at | Collected Plays One, by Alfian Sa'at | Trilogy, by Haresh Sharma | Weetzie Bat, Witch Baby, Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys, Missing Angel Juan, & Baby Be-Bop, by Francesca Lia Block | Bloomability, by Sharon Creech | Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs Fall In Love, by Maryrose Wood | High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby | Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, by Leslie T. Chang | The Boy Next Door, by Irene Sabatini | Singapore Shifting Boundaries: Social Change in the 21st Century, edited by William S.W. Lim, Sharon Siddique, & Tan Dan Feng | The Frenzy, by Francesca Lia Block | Goodnight Mister Tom, by Michelle Magorian | The Spirit Catches You And Then You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman | Saraswati Park, by Anjali Joseph | Eston, by Stella Kon | Rape: A Love Story, by Joyce Carol Oates | Rice Bowl, by Suchen Christine Lim | The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell | Renaissance Singapore? Economy, Culture, and Politics, edited by Kenneth Paul Tan | Miss Seetoh in the World, by Catherine Lim | Free Food for Millionaires, by Min Jin Lee | Jointly & Severably, by Eleanor Wong | Wills & Secession, by Eleanor Wong | Mergers & Accusations, by Eleanor Wong | GASPP: A Gay Anthology of Singaporean Poetry & Prose, edited by Ng Yi-Sheng | Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier | Gone Case, by Dave Chua | Sex and the City, by Candace Bushnell | The Waters & the Wild, by Francesca Lia Block | Growing Up: Getting Along in the Sixties, by Tisa Ng | Oreo, by Fran Ross | Caucasia, by Danzy Senna | Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, by Owen Jones | Racism: A Very Short Introduction | Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, by Rana Mitter | Feminism: A Very Short Introduction, by Margaret Waters | A Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin | Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean | Sons of the Yellow Emperor, by Lynn Pan | Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People, by Katharine Quarmby | Tipping The Velvet, by Sarah Waters | Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro | The Lantern Bearers, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Silver Branch, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli | Brick Lane, by Monica Ali | The Savage Detectives, by Robert Bolano | Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell | Cat On A Hot-Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams | Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz | Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson | The Moon By Night, by Madeleine L'Engle | To Live, by Yu Hua | Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer | The Next Competitor, by K.P. Kincaid | Raffles Place Ragtime, by Phillip Jeyaretnam | Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy, by Frances Mayes | Mao's Last Dancer, by Li Cunxin | Marie, Dancing, by Carolyn Meyer | Man Walks Into A Room, by Nicole Krauss | How To Be Good, by Nick Hornby
This entry was originally posted at http://extemporally.dreamwidth.org/183237.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
This Can't Be Happening at Macdonald Hall!, by Gordon Korman.
♥THIS BOOK♥
(I... hear that these books are available online. Help please?)
Radio Fifth Grade, by Gordon Korman.
All right, but not brilliant. Positively underwhelming, actually, compared to This Can't Be Happening.
Bad, Badder, Baddest, by Cynthia Voigt.
Pretty good - I really like the way Cynthia Voigt writes friendships - and really amusing, actually, Voigt has a skill with caricature I hadn't really noticed before? but none of the poignancy I associate with her novels, and I think that's okay, this novel was fine without it.
Also the book meme we've all been waiting for.
How many books read in 2011?
Ninety-four! I was hoping for one hundred, but this is still respectable. I'm counting on my bookcount getting a lot higher once I graduate from university, mostly because I think about making this The Year for a hundred and getting inevitably cynical because I'll be starting my final year in October. /o\
Fiction/Non-Fiction ratio?
If we accept the tenuous fiction (a ha) that poetry counts as fiction, 74:20. I've read more non-fiction than I thought I would. Some of it was all right (Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point), some of it was effervescent (♥KENNETH PAUL TAN♥) and some of it was downright terrible (Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy). Also worth a mention are the social justice books I read, which took up a pretty huge chunk of my non-fiction list.
Male/Female authors?
38:56
(I feel there should be a POC/queer equivalent of this question, but I'm too lazy to start counting!)
Favourite books read?
Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives - in general, this year is notable for my discovery of his body of work. The Kenneth Paul Tan-edited Renaissance Singapore. Katharine Quarmby's Scapegoat. Eleanor Wong's drama tripartite Invitation to Treat. Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle. Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish & other poems. And of course, Cynthia Voigt's Tillerman cycle. Dave Chua's Gone Case, and some of Alfian Sa'at's drama.
Honourable mention: Oreo, by Fran Ross. What a strange little novel! When I first read it I thought: "Well, all things considered I really enjoy earnest mixed-race bildungsromans" - Danzy Senna's Caucasia also a big favourite, I can't believe I left that out - "to parodic send-ups of the same," and then I went to class and the professor said some things about language and Wittgenstein and Oreo, and things fell into place and I was like, "Oh my GOD I love this book."
Least favourite?
Oh, a bunch. Verena Tay's In the Company of Women and Cyril Wong's Oneiros were big disappointments. Joyce Carol Oates' Rape: A Love Story left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City and Frances Mayes' Bella Tuscany made me lose all hope of ever reading good non-fiction about privileged white women that wasn't obnoxious in that privilege.
Oldest book?
If we don't count translation as a new iteration, Mary Barnard's Sappho. Otherwise, Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens. (These books are great too btw - but I thought my list of favourites was getting a bit long!)
Newest book?
Probably You Cannot Count Smoke by Cyril Wong or Scapegoat, by Katharine Quarmby.
Longest book title?
Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern
Shortest?
Just Kids
Most books read by one author this year?
Francesca Lia Block - 7
Cynthia Voigt - 6
Roberto Bolano - 3
Any in translation?
To Live, by Yu Hua, the Sappho, and Roberto Bolano!
How many were borrowed from the library this year?
Most of them.
Book that most changed my perspective:
♥THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES♥
On a "how I think about issues" level, I probably risked falling into the fallacy of confirmation bias a lot.
Favourite character:
Mina Smiths, from Come A Stranger. No contest even.
Favourite scene:
Probably the bit from Nazi Literature in the Americas, right at the very end where Roberto Bolano leaves off from biographing fictitious writers and has one of them break the fourth wall, look him in the eye, and say, take care of yourself, Bolano, and go.
ART AND REAL LIFE AND COMMUNITY AND POLITICS AND COMPLICITY ;_____________;
Favourite quote:
From Cynthia Voigt's Come A Stranger:
Miz Hunter drank and swallowed. "Nobody needs to see that place, Missy. I had a clean room waiting. I had a friend waiting in New Orleans who would prepare me a fine dinner. I had a job to keep me, a good, secure job. Even so, looking at that place made me want to give up and die." Her eyes looked out across some distance. Her words came slow. "The water was still, dead still, and green slime all along the top. Those cypress trees - between the dead stumps coming up black out of the water and the live trees tangled up overhead with vines to keep the sun out and keep the wind out and keep anything clean out... I almost couldn't make myself walk into it. He'd have had nothing with him, nothing but the clothes he wore and his bare hands and his bare courage. You could hear the trees creaking, sometimes. And bugs - and - it was the kind of place snakes love; it felt like the kind of place anything bad would be at home in. There were little hummocks of land, sometimes, and the water looking like pea soup gone bad on the stove. I was on a pathway, no more than half a mile from a town road, and I felt it reaching out for my soul. No, he died in there. As soon as I saw it I knew that. What made me wonder was what a man's life could be like to make him go in there in the first place. Any man walking into that swamp was walking into death - so whatever lay behind him must have been worse than death."
Mina felt cold. She could see it, almost, and she thought that he would have looked like Mr Shipp. It could have been Mr Shipp born in slavery, sold into slavery. The boards of the porch floor felt thin, flimsy; when they gave out there was a swamp waiting underneath.
"That's terrible," she said.
"What's most terrible," Miz Hunter answered her, although her thin old voice didn't sound like it was so terrible, "was that if he'd just waited a few years, he'd have been freed. It wasn't ten years later that the war was finished. He couldn't know, probably didn't even know war was coming. The ignorance of slaves - nobody told them anything, nobody taught them - But if he'd only waited, he'd have had his freedom and his life."
"Oh no," Mina said.
"You have to look with a long eye, Missy. Some people never learn that, and I'd guess that my great-grandfather was that kind. We live in a blink of time, but God looks with a long eye."
"That wasn't much over a hundred years ago," Mina said.
"And it's been quite a road since then," Miz Hunter told her. "If you look down that road with a long eye - as your poppa does - it's almost a miracle how much territory has been covered."
But Mina's imagination was stuck there in the green swamp, with a man who looked like Mr Shipp, half in and half out of the water, alone, and his skin crawling over with bugs and covered with slime, the black skin that covered his strong muscles. She'd never understood before. Because that kind of man wouldn't be quiet under any master.
She put her glass down, even though her mouth was dry. She couldn't have swallowed anything. She couldn't have gotten anything down past the anger and misery, the pity and the bitterness all mixed up in her throat. She was looking with a long eye, and that man lay too close to be forgotten about.
I can still taste those tears, oh boy.
The Runner, by Cynthia Voigt | Sons From Afar, by Cynthia Voigt | A Solitary Blue, by Cynthia Voigt | The Callendar Papers, by Cynthia Voigt | Anne of Avonlea, by L.M. Montgomery | Come A Stranger, by Cynthia Voigt | Just Kids, by Patti Smith | You Cannot Count Smoke, by Cyril Wong | Pomes All Sizes, by Jack Kerouac | In the Company of Women, by Verena Tay | Oneiros, by Cyril Wong | The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga | How to Be A Woman, by Caitlin Moran | American Pastoral, by Phillip Roth | Amulet, by Roberto Bolano | Who Runs This Place?: The Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century, by Anthony Sampson | The Lives of the Muses, by Francine Prose | I Left My Grandfather's House, by Denton Welch | Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens | Kaddish & other poems, by Allen Ginsberg | Sappho: A New Translation, by Mary Barnard | The Lives of Animals, by J.M. Coetzee | Women & Violence, by Barrie Levy | Half + Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial + Bicultural, edited by Claudine Chiawei O'Hearn | Nazi Literature in the Americas, by Roberto Bolano | Corridor, by Alfian Sa'at | Collected Plays One, by Alfian Sa'at | Trilogy, by Haresh Sharma | Weetzie Bat, Witch Baby, Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys, Missing Angel Juan, & Baby Be-Bop, by Francesca Lia Block | Bloomability, by Sharon Creech | Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs Fall In Love, by Maryrose Wood | High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby | Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, by Leslie T. Chang | The Boy Next Door, by Irene Sabatini | Singapore Shifting Boundaries: Social Change in the 21st Century, edited by William S.W. Lim, Sharon Siddique, & Tan Dan Feng | The Frenzy, by Francesca Lia Block | Goodnight Mister Tom, by Michelle Magorian | The Spirit Catches You And Then You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman | Saraswati Park, by Anjali Joseph | Eston, by Stella Kon | Rape: A Love Story, by Joyce Carol Oates | Rice Bowl, by Suchen Christine Lim | The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell | Renaissance Singapore? Economy, Culture, and Politics, edited by Kenneth Paul Tan | Miss Seetoh in the World, by Catherine Lim | Free Food for Millionaires, by Min Jin Lee | Jointly & Severably, by Eleanor Wong | Wills & Secession, by Eleanor Wong | Mergers & Accusations, by Eleanor Wong | GASPP: A Gay Anthology of Singaporean Poetry & Prose, edited by Ng Yi-Sheng | Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier | Gone Case, by Dave Chua | Sex and the City, by Candace Bushnell | The Waters & the Wild, by Francesca Lia Block | Growing Up: Getting Along in the Sixties, by Tisa Ng | Oreo, by Fran Ross | Caucasia, by Danzy Senna | Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, by Owen Jones | Racism: A Very Short Introduction | Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, by Rana Mitter | Feminism: A Very Short Introduction, by Margaret Waters | A Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin | Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean | Sons of the Yellow Emperor, by Lynn Pan | Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People, by Katharine Quarmby | Tipping The Velvet, by Sarah Waters | Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro | The Lantern Bearers, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Silver Branch, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli | Brick Lane, by Monica Ali | The Savage Detectives, by Robert Bolano | Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell | Cat On A Hot-Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams | Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz | Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson | The Moon By Night, by Madeleine L'Engle | To Live, by Yu Hua | Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer | The Next Competitor, by K.P. Kincaid | Raffles Place Ragtime, by Phillip Jeyaretnam | Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy, by Frances Mayes | Mao's Last Dancer, by Li Cunxin | Marie, Dancing, by Carolyn Meyer | Man Walks Into A Room, by Nicole Krauss | How To Be Good, by Nick Hornby
This entry was originally posted at http://extemporally.dreamwidth.org/183237.html. Please comment there using OpenID.