Open book
I'm on Goodreads and all that (add me if you haven't!), but I mainly use it as a personal list-keeper and, via my friends' lists, reminder -- I haven't written many "reviews" on there, because that kind of thing usually goes here on LJ for movies and albums and stuff. In turn, I don't talk about books very often on LJ because it is by far the least current, least immediate of my arts-related interests.
Now that it's 2008, I thought I'd go back over what I read this year -- which was, to begin with, more than usual. This was partially attributable to taking library classes with unusually high fiction-reading components, namely Young Adult Literature in the spring and Reader's Advisory in the fall.
In fact, these classes provided an embarrassment of riches, often assigning as many as two or three books to read in a week's time (you're supposed to start sooner and get ahead of yourself, but even when I do that I inevitably fall behind when I start something boring or long). Many of the titles below were class assignments; there were more I didn't have time (or, sometimes, inclination) to finish. I'm including a handful of non-finishers below when they related to another title I did read, or when I wanted to talk about them for whatever reason.
As disappointed as I'd often be to have to cast aside a half-finished book in order to start something new for the next week's class, the classes got me back into the habit of regular, rather than erratic, reading (and, strangely, book-buying, rather than, you know, library-using). In the wake of a Christmas list packed with books, I have a ton of stuff I want to read this month before classes start up again. In the meantime, here's a bunch of what I read this year, grouped together when relevant.
Animal Crackers by Hannah Tinti
This is sort of a cheat because I bought and read this book after meeting Hannah, who is a lovely person, but I also independently enjoyed her collection of animal-themed stories, especially "Reasonable Terms," about striking giraffes at a zoo. Sometimes an ending or two would make me feel like I was missing something, but I love the menace and unrest that plays against the various animals' potential cuddliness.
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Pig Man by Paul Zindel
We read these together in YA class, and I was happy to find out that The Chocolate War has no relation to the somewhat less classic The Chocolate Touch (nor that book where the kid gets choco-pox -- is that the same book?). Chocolate War is most impressive for its unsparing darkness. I also liked Pig Man for its well-drawn characters, and both books show admirable honesty about the hard parts of growing up. Yay canon!
Rats Saw God by Rob Thomas
Slave Day by Rob Thomas
Satellite Down by Rob Thomas
Rob Thomas, as many of you know, is not the fat dude from Matchbox 20 but rather the creator of television's Veronica Mars. Rats Saw God was an early assignment for my YA class; later in the semester, an assignment asked us to read multiple titles by a YA author and analyze their appeal and all that, so I dove into some of this other titles -- not just because of the V-Mars connection but because I really enjoyed Rats Saw God. Apparently it's sort of his only big YA hit, which makes sense when you read the others. Rats Saw God isn't a big plot book (it's basically just a coming-of-age story with a lot of relationship stuff) but its characters are incredibly likable and well-drawn; you can see his facility with creating characters whose long-term company you enjoy. Slave Day is also pretty good, a multi-character day-in-the-life high school story, but some of the character voices are a bit more cartoonish. Satellite Down is entertaining enough but easily the most ridiculous of the three, with a weird far-fetched plot about a straight-laced Texas kid getting a student-newscasting job for a semester in Los Angeles. It kinda goes off the rails, though all of Thomas's work is readable and fun. Television is probably a better medium for him; his prose is quick and often very funny, but his tendencies toward smart-alecky overwriting, though often fitting for the characters, is more excusable on TV.
Blankets by Craig Thompson
This coming-of-age memoir was one of the assigned graphic novels for the YA course. It's about the author's austere, religious upbringing; his relationship with his family; and his first love. Thompson's art is lovely -- fluid and expressive, like a lucid dream or memory -- but I'm not sure what the story adds up to in the end. Maybe I'm just not the best audience for memoirs, especially written by non-famous twenty-to-thirtysomethings. Still, it's a good book and worth checking out if you're into either memoirs or graphic fiction.
Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
All of the YA I read during the first half of last year started to blend together after awhile, so it became hard to distinguish between an apparent classic of the genre (Speak) and a cute little fluff piece (Boy Meets Boy). At the risk of sounding cold, I'll say that Speak has a great central gimmick (the silent protagonist) and only occasionally slides into melodrama. Boy Meets Boy confirmed that between the two authors of Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, Levithan seems to be the weak link. His open-hearted emo-of-consciousness ramblings in Nick felt strained and cheesy, and the super-duper-gay-friendly utopian high school of Boy Meets Boy is cute but a little sugary. I like where his head's at, and there's no reason not to write an idealized, hopeful high school environment for your characters -- kind of great, actually, to read about gay characters who aren't just struggling with being gay -- I just wish I remembered more about the characters less than a year later. Oh, and it wasn't really worth writing a whole entry about, but The Earth, My Butt, and Other Round Things was pretty good, too.
Y the Last Man Vol. 9: Motherland by Brian K. Vaughan
I read the Y the Last Man comics in trade format, though I always come within just a handful of issues of being able to catch up and read them month-to-month. Usually two trades come out each year, but Amazon says no Vol. 10 until spring '08. Anyway, this is probably my favorite long-form comics storyline since Preacher, and like Preacher I feel like there have been some stumbles in the third quarter but it will be difficult to say for sure until the story is wrapped up (which I'm guessing, based on absolutely nothing but the run of Preacher, will be soon? The upcoming tenth volume is called Whys and Wherefores; maybe the long wait and the title and the nice round number indicate a finale). This volume has plenty of the usual fast-paced twists, but the story gets a little bogged down, as it probably must, from the iconic simplicity of the original premise.
No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July
Miranda July has a way of undermining my skepticism. I was skeptical of her feature film because "performance artist" to me does not sound like a good background for "writer-director," and then I actually saw Me and You and Everyone We Know and loved it and bought the DVD. Despite this love, I was a little skeptical of her short story collection because it sounded suspiciously like a successful performance artist slash filmmaker getting a shot at big-league publication because of her name and reputation. Then I (nonetheless somewhat eagerly) bought the book and loved it and I give up. She's really good. I didn't love every story here, mostly about the same kind of fumbling through intimacy and/or (more often) loneliness that you can see in her film, but there are few outright duds, and some, like "Something That Needs Nothing," are flat-out amazing. I also like that so much of her stuff really is short; it seems like the recent trend in short story collections is to have like six or seven stories that are thirty or forty pages apiece, probably because publishers only want short stories if they're convinced they're just warm-ups for the big novel. July has some long pieces here, but also several under ten pages. For this I salute her and promise to stop doubting.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
I think I already wrote about this when it came out but I'll be damned if I'm going to leave the longest book I read this year off my list! I don't have a big problem with the sappy flash-forward at the end. The middle meanders a bit. But I couldn't put it down (except when the timer went off and I had to hand it over to Marisa).
Tishomingo Blues by Elmore Leonard
Little Scarlet by Walter Mosley
For the crime/mystery/thriller week in RA, I read two authors who I've been meaning to check out for years based on my enjoyment of film versions of their work. Elmore Leonard turns out to be just as good -- crackling story, sharp dialogue, funny but believable characters -- as I'd always assumed and I'm comforted by the knowledge that if I ever need something to read on a train, there are about a thousand Leonard novels available for about seven bucks a pop. This one, Tishomingo Blues, is about an aging high-diver who gets involved with, natch, an organized crime outfit and, less natch, Civil War reenactions. Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins novel Little Scarlet, which I did not finish but mean to at some point, was a bit more of a disappointment. I love the old Los Angeles atmosphere of Mosley's books (this one is set in the early sixties, but the other Easy Rawlins novels take the character through various time twentieth-century time periods), but I was surprised by how much of the first-person Rawlins narration is a bit on-the-nose -- it sounds a little boilerplate after reading Leonard's prose, which isn't flowery but has great style nonetheless. The mystery in Little Scarlet is intriguing enough, and Easy Rawlins is obviously a rich character, but Mosley's writing didn't hook me the way I expected it to.
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
I realize I'm late to the party here, but I sort of loved this book. I remember Kasia recommending it to me when it first came out, and I wish I had picked it up then. It's really a relationship novel with a sci-fi hook in the middle, but the ins, outs, and twists of the time-traveling done by Henry, and the constant point-of-view switches between Henry and Clare, are handled with such dexterity and grace that it's never gimmicky. It occasionally goes on a bit -- this story probably didn't need to swell past 500 pages -- but I haven't been this emotionally involved in a novel in a good while. The movie version due out later this year just became my most-anticipated slash most-feared literary adaptation.
Cell by Stephen King
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
A post-apocalyptic double-feature, actually read for the "best-sellers" class in RA. I'd never read anything of King's beyond bits of his On Writing and his lame Entertainment Weekly column; still, my slight surprise that Cell was so gripping and visceral was, in hindsight, pretty dumb. Some of the dialogue and characters are cheesy in that way where you can tell that the protagonist is the author under a thin veil of cliches, but King's take on a zombie apocalypse (owing a bit to 28 Days Later) is vivid and a fun, tense, bleak read that I polished off in well under a week. I'm definitely interested in catching up with some of his better books in the future. The Road, of course, was slower-going, since McCarthy isn't out for thrills. I didn't get through it before the class deadline, and couldn't renew it because it was on hold at Donnell. What I got through was evocative but not really gripping; I was around the midpoint and not a whole lot had happened yet, though I find myself remembering images from the book now, months later. McCarthy's minimalism makes an entertaining contrast with King's on-the-nose populism, but I did find the endless fragments a bit trying (I can be picky beyond reason about stylistic tics). Both books piqued my interest in their authors, though honestly I'm more likely to pick up another King book in the near future, especially because everything I've read about No Country for Old Men makes it sound a lot like the movie, only not quite as good.
The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah
I started skimming this RA assignment for "urban and multicultural fiction" week about three-quarters of the way through, because the story of a drug dealer's daughter trying to hustle her way back to prosperity after her dad goes to jail just goes on and on and on. Souljah's decision to have Winter (yes, that is protagonist's name) not go through big, predictable epiphanies is admirable; her decision to make herself a side character in the novel, less so. In the end, Winter's stubborn clinging to her superficial and immoral lifestyle winds up reading less like realism and more like the author hammering her points home. Overall, this repetitive, preachy-yet-salacious story is pretty bad, but Winter's engaging voice makes the book more entertaining than it really should be.
Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine
I read this as three individual issues of Tomine's Optic Nerve, and then Marisa got me the hardcover "graphic novel" version (signed by Tomine, no less). Unlike some recent Daniel Clowes conversions from Eightball issues into full books, Tomine doesn't add anything, and I'm not sure if that's more of a ripoff (a big publicity build-up to wholly pre-published material) or less (since there's no reason for curious fans to re-buy the hardcover version, unlike the very slightly tinkered-with Ice Haven by Clowes). Shortcomings, about a self-loathing slash everyone-loathing Asian-American dude, is his first longer piece -- a novella rather than the short-story format his collections usually resemble -- and though the comic-book format isn't directly congruent with prose books, it still reminds me of a lot of novels by my favorite short story authors in that it's very good but not quite as perfect as his best short work. Tomine has mastered subtle, simple expression on human faces and his dialogue sounds as genuine as ever, and I don't mind his continued lack of resolution. But I think better long-form works are in his future.
Rebels on the Backlot by Sharon Waxman
Another way-later, I got this book on six-dollar clearance at Barnes & Noble and set out to read it a good two-plus years after its more-ballyhooed debut. It charts the development of new voices in American filmmaking during the second half of the nineties, beginning with Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh and continuing with Spike Jonze, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, and David O. Russell. Waxman's focus is scattered and her timeline oddly structured -- chapters try to follow the simultaneous development of several different films, but in doing so often reach far earlier or further into the future for pages on end. The book is full of minor, but still unsettling errors (like release date years), and "factual" judgments about the qualities of various movies by noted not-actual-film-critic-or-historian Waxman (her dismissal of Jackie Brown is particularly unforgivable). Yet it is a compelling read simply because it's a close behind-the-scenes look at, among others, Pulp Fiction, Boogie Nights, Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, Three Kings, and Traffic.
Away by Amy Bloom
Though I count Amy Bloom as one of my favorite short-story writers, I hadn't read anything of hers in awhile, and as a result I had almost forgotten just how amazing she is on a line-by-line basis. This novel, her second after Love Invents Us, has a more traditional big-canvas story (I don't really remember what happened in Love), which is not to say that it overstays its welcome. A woman comes to the U.S. in the early twentieth century and then sets out to find her presumed-dead young daughter; the story is somewhat episodic, but for once I'm not using the term in a pejorative sense. The truth and beauty and phrasing of Bloom's observations and descriptions all border on miraculous.
The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta
The latest suburban satire from Tom Perrotta, like Little Children before it, hits some pretty easy/obvious targets but couples its more caustic (and/or broad) moments with real humanity and sympathy for its characters. It's not as gripping, satisfying, or memorable as Little Children, but apparently even second-tier Perrotta is pretty entertaining.
Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
Any comedy nerd will want to check out Martin's account of his early life in stand-up, and this memoir marries the careful, concise, sharp prose of Martin's fiction (Shopgirl and The Pleasure of My Company, both of which I recommend) with true-life stories of his crazier days. It's entertaining and I read it in about two days. That said, it feels a little thin and underdeveloped; though I appreciate the focus on stand-up, I'm not sure Martin derives book-length material from it. I guess I would've liked, given that the book is under 300 pages (do I seem obsessed with page-count yet?), for his recollections to move beyond the very early eighties and extend further into his film career.
Books I fully intended to finish but haven't yet for various reasons: Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link (wildly uneven); Lost Girls by Alan Moore (unwieldy; impossible to bring on the subway for many reasons); Winesburg, OH (liking it but keep getting distracted by other, more fun books).
Book I am reading right now and will probably finish within a couple of days because I'm enjoying it so much and will hopefully kick off a quarterly-or-semester-ly post rather than a yearly one: I Love You, Beth Cooper.
Now that it's 2008, I thought I'd go back over what I read this year -- which was, to begin with, more than usual. This was partially attributable to taking library classes with unusually high fiction-reading components, namely Young Adult Literature in the spring and Reader's Advisory in the fall.
In fact, these classes provided an embarrassment of riches, often assigning as many as two or three books to read in a week's time (you're supposed to start sooner and get ahead of yourself, but even when I do that I inevitably fall behind when I start something boring or long). Many of the titles below were class assignments; there were more I didn't have time (or, sometimes, inclination) to finish. I'm including a handful of non-finishers below when they related to another title I did read, or when I wanted to talk about them for whatever reason.
As disappointed as I'd often be to have to cast aside a half-finished book in order to start something new for the next week's class, the classes got me back into the habit of regular, rather than erratic, reading (and, strangely, book-buying, rather than, you know, library-using). In the wake of a Christmas list packed with books, I have a ton of stuff I want to read this month before classes start up again. In the meantime, here's a bunch of what I read this year, grouped together when relevant.
Animal Crackers by Hannah Tinti
This is sort of a cheat because I bought and read this book after meeting Hannah, who is a lovely person, but I also independently enjoyed her collection of animal-themed stories, especially "Reasonable Terms," about striking giraffes at a zoo. Sometimes an ending or two would make me feel like I was missing something, but I love the menace and unrest that plays against the various animals' potential cuddliness.
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Pig Man by Paul Zindel
We read these together in YA class, and I was happy to find out that The Chocolate War has no relation to the somewhat less classic The Chocolate Touch (nor that book where the kid gets choco-pox -- is that the same book?). Chocolate War is most impressive for its unsparing darkness. I also liked Pig Man for its well-drawn characters, and both books show admirable honesty about the hard parts of growing up. Yay canon!
Rats Saw God by Rob Thomas
Slave Day by Rob Thomas
Satellite Down by Rob Thomas
Rob Thomas, as many of you know, is not the fat dude from Matchbox 20 but rather the creator of television's Veronica Mars. Rats Saw God was an early assignment for my YA class; later in the semester, an assignment asked us to read multiple titles by a YA author and analyze their appeal and all that, so I dove into some of this other titles -- not just because of the V-Mars connection but because I really enjoyed Rats Saw God. Apparently it's sort of his only big YA hit, which makes sense when you read the others. Rats Saw God isn't a big plot book (it's basically just a coming-of-age story with a lot of relationship stuff) but its characters are incredibly likable and well-drawn; you can see his facility with creating characters whose long-term company you enjoy. Slave Day is also pretty good, a multi-character day-in-the-life high school story, but some of the character voices are a bit more cartoonish. Satellite Down is entertaining enough but easily the most ridiculous of the three, with a weird far-fetched plot about a straight-laced Texas kid getting a student-newscasting job for a semester in Los Angeles. It kinda goes off the rails, though all of Thomas's work is readable and fun. Television is probably a better medium for him; his prose is quick and often very funny, but his tendencies toward smart-alecky overwriting, though often fitting for the characters, is more excusable on TV.
Blankets by Craig Thompson
This coming-of-age memoir was one of the assigned graphic novels for the YA course. It's about the author's austere, religious upbringing; his relationship with his family; and his first love. Thompson's art is lovely -- fluid and expressive, like a lucid dream or memory -- but I'm not sure what the story adds up to in the end. Maybe I'm just not the best audience for memoirs, especially written by non-famous twenty-to-thirtysomethings. Still, it's a good book and worth checking out if you're into either memoirs or graphic fiction.
Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
All of the YA I read during the first half of last year started to blend together after awhile, so it became hard to distinguish between an apparent classic of the genre (Speak) and a cute little fluff piece (Boy Meets Boy). At the risk of sounding cold, I'll say that Speak has a great central gimmick (the silent protagonist) and only occasionally slides into melodrama. Boy Meets Boy confirmed that between the two authors of Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, Levithan seems to be the weak link. His open-hearted emo-of-consciousness ramblings in Nick felt strained and cheesy, and the super-duper-gay-friendly utopian high school of Boy Meets Boy is cute but a little sugary. I like where his head's at, and there's no reason not to write an idealized, hopeful high school environment for your characters -- kind of great, actually, to read about gay characters who aren't just struggling with being gay -- I just wish I remembered more about the characters less than a year later. Oh, and it wasn't really worth writing a whole entry about, but The Earth, My Butt, and Other Round Things was pretty good, too.
Y the Last Man Vol. 9: Motherland by Brian K. Vaughan
I read the Y the Last Man comics in trade format, though I always come within just a handful of issues of being able to catch up and read them month-to-month. Usually two trades come out each year, but Amazon says no Vol. 10 until spring '08. Anyway, this is probably my favorite long-form comics storyline since Preacher, and like Preacher I feel like there have been some stumbles in the third quarter but it will be difficult to say for sure until the story is wrapped up (which I'm guessing, based on absolutely nothing but the run of Preacher, will be soon? The upcoming tenth volume is called Whys and Wherefores; maybe the long wait and the title and the nice round number indicate a finale). This volume has plenty of the usual fast-paced twists, but the story gets a little bogged down, as it probably must, from the iconic simplicity of the original premise.
No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July
Miranda July has a way of undermining my skepticism. I was skeptical of her feature film because "performance artist" to me does not sound like a good background for "writer-director," and then I actually saw Me and You and Everyone We Know and loved it and bought the DVD. Despite this love, I was a little skeptical of her short story collection because it sounded suspiciously like a successful performance artist slash filmmaker getting a shot at big-league publication because of her name and reputation. Then I (nonetheless somewhat eagerly) bought the book and loved it and I give up. She's really good. I didn't love every story here, mostly about the same kind of fumbling through intimacy and/or (more often) loneliness that you can see in her film, but there are few outright duds, and some, like "Something That Needs Nothing," are flat-out amazing. I also like that so much of her stuff really is short; it seems like the recent trend in short story collections is to have like six or seven stories that are thirty or forty pages apiece, probably because publishers only want short stories if they're convinced they're just warm-ups for the big novel. July has some long pieces here, but also several under ten pages. For this I salute her and promise to stop doubting.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
I think I already wrote about this when it came out but I'll be damned if I'm going to leave the longest book I read this year off my list! I don't have a big problem with the sappy flash-forward at the end. The middle meanders a bit. But I couldn't put it down (except when the timer went off and I had to hand it over to Marisa).
Tishomingo Blues by Elmore Leonard
Little Scarlet by Walter Mosley
For the crime/mystery/thriller week in RA, I read two authors who I've been meaning to check out for years based on my enjoyment of film versions of their work. Elmore Leonard turns out to be just as good -- crackling story, sharp dialogue, funny but believable characters -- as I'd always assumed and I'm comforted by the knowledge that if I ever need something to read on a train, there are about a thousand Leonard novels available for about seven bucks a pop. This one, Tishomingo Blues, is about an aging high-diver who gets involved with, natch, an organized crime outfit and, less natch, Civil War reenactions. Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins novel Little Scarlet, which I did not finish but mean to at some point, was a bit more of a disappointment. I love the old Los Angeles atmosphere of Mosley's books (this one is set in the early sixties, but the other Easy Rawlins novels take the character through various time twentieth-century time periods), but I was surprised by how much of the first-person Rawlins narration is a bit on-the-nose -- it sounds a little boilerplate after reading Leonard's prose, which isn't flowery but has great style nonetheless. The mystery in Little Scarlet is intriguing enough, and Easy Rawlins is obviously a rich character, but Mosley's writing didn't hook me the way I expected it to.
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
I realize I'm late to the party here, but I sort of loved this book. I remember Kasia recommending it to me when it first came out, and I wish I had picked it up then. It's really a relationship novel with a sci-fi hook in the middle, but the ins, outs, and twists of the time-traveling done by Henry, and the constant point-of-view switches between Henry and Clare, are handled with such dexterity and grace that it's never gimmicky. It occasionally goes on a bit -- this story probably didn't need to swell past 500 pages -- but I haven't been this emotionally involved in a novel in a good while. The movie version due out later this year just became my most-anticipated slash most-feared literary adaptation.
Cell by Stephen King
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
A post-apocalyptic double-feature, actually read for the "best-sellers" class in RA. I'd never read anything of King's beyond bits of his On Writing and his lame Entertainment Weekly column; still, my slight surprise that Cell was so gripping and visceral was, in hindsight, pretty dumb. Some of the dialogue and characters are cheesy in that way where you can tell that the protagonist is the author under a thin veil of cliches, but King's take on a zombie apocalypse (owing a bit to 28 Days Later) is vivid and a fun, tense, bleak read that I polished off in well under a week. I'm definitely interested in catching up with some of his better books in the future. The Road, of course, was slower-going, since McCarthy isn't out for thrills. I didn't get through it before the class deadline, and couldn't renew it because it was on hold at Donnell. What I got through was evocative but not really gripping; I was around the midpoint and not a whole lot had happened yet, though I find myself remembering images from the book now, months later. McCarthy's minimalism makes an entertaining contrast with King's on-the-nose populism, but I did find the endless fragments a bit trying (I can be picky beyond reason about stylistic tics). Both books piqued my interest in their authors, though honestly I'm more likely to pick up another King book in the near future, especially because everything I've read about No Country for Old Men makes it sound a lot like the movie, only not quite as good.
The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah
I started skimming this RA assignment for "urban and multicultural fiction" week about three-quarters of the way through, because the story of a drug dealer's daughter trying to hustle her way back to prosperity after her dad goes to jail just goes on and on and on. Souljah's decision to have Winter (yes, that is protagonist's name) not go through big, predictable epiphanies is admirable; her decision to make herself a side character in the novel, less so. In the end, Winter's stubborn clinging to her superficial and immoral lifestyle winds up reading less like realism and more like the author hammering her points home. Overall, this repetitive, preachy-yet-salacious story is pretty bad, but Winter's engaging voice makes the book more entertaining than it really should be.
Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine
I read this as three individual issues of Tomine's Optic Nerve, and then Marisa got me the hardcover "graphic novel" version (signed by Tomine, no less). Unlike some recent Daniel Clowes conversions from Eightball issues into full books, Tomine doesn't add anything, and I'm not sure if that's more of a ripoff (a big publicity build-up to wholly pre-published material) or less (since there's no reason for curious fans to re-buy the hardcover version, unlike the very slightly tinkered-with Ice Haven by Clowes). Shortcomings, about a self-loathing slash everyone-loathing Asian-American dude, is his first longer piece -- a novella rather than the short-story format his collections usually resemble -- and though the comic-book format isn't directly congruent with prose books, it still reminds me of a lot of novels by my favorite short story authors in that it's very good but not quite as perfect as his best short work. Tomine has mastered subtle, simple expression on human faces and his dialogue sounds as genuine as ever, and I don't mind his continued lack of resolution. But I think better long-form works are in his future.
Rebels on the Backlot by Sharon Waxman
Another way-later, I got this book on six-dollar clearance at Barnes & Noble and set out to read it a good two-plus years after its more-ballyhooed debut. It charts the development of new voices in American filmmaking during the second half of the nineties, beginning with Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh and continuing with Spike Jonze, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, and David O. Russell. Waxman's focus is scattered and her timeline oddly structured -- chapters try to follow the simultaneous development of several different films, but in doing so often reach far earlier or further into the future for pages on end. The book is full of minor, but still unsettling errors (like release date years), and "factual" judgments about the qualities of various movies by noted not-actual-film-critic-or-historian Waxman (her dismissal of Jackie Brown is particularly unforgivable). Yet it is a compelling read simply because it's a close behind-the-scenes look at, among others, Pulp Fiction, Boogie Nights, Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, Three Kings, and Traffic.
Away by Amy Bloom
Though I count Amy Bloom as one of my favorite short-story writers, I hadn't read anything of hers in awhile, and as a result I had almost forgotten just how amazing she is on a line-by-line basis. This novel, her second after Love Invents Us, has a more traditional big-canvas story (I don't really remember what happened in Love), which is not to say that it overstays its welcome. A woman comes to the U.S. in the early twentieth century and then sets out to find her presumed-dead young daughter; the story is somewhat episodic, but for once I'm not using the term in a pejorative sense. The truth and beauty and phrasing of Bloom's observations and descriptions all border on miraculous.
The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta
The latest suburban satire from Tom Perrotta, like Little Children before it, hits some pretty easy/obvious targets but couples its more caustic (and/or broad) moments with real humanity and sympathy for its characters. It's not as gripping, satisfying, or memorable as Little Children, but apparently even second-tier Perrotta is pretty entertaining.
Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
Any comedy nerd will want to check out Martin's account of his early life in stand-up, and this memoir marries the careful, concise, sharp prose of Martin's fiction (Shopgirl and The Pleasure of My Company, both of which I recommend) with true-life stories of his crazier days. It's entertaining and I read it in about two days. That said, it feels a little thin and underdeveloped; though I appreciate the focus on stand-up, I'm not sure Martin derives book-length material from it. I guess I would've liked, given that the book is under 300 pages (do I seem obsessed with page-count yet?), for his recollections to move beyond the very early eighties and extend further into his film career.
Books I fully intended to finish but haven't yet for various reasons: Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link (wildly uneven); Lost Girls by Alan Moore (unwieldy; impossible to bring on the subway for many reasons); Winesburg, OH (liking it but keep getting distracted by other, more fun books).
Book I am reading right now and will probably finish within a couple of days because I'm enjoying it so much and will hopefully kick off a quarterly-or-semester-ly post rather than a yearly one: I Love You, Beth Cooper.