Book List 2009, The First Six Months
Now that the movie list is up, it's time for Book List! As with the movies, an asterisk is a book that I've re-read (though there aren't really any this time). This list took me a lot longer than usual, I've made my reviews a bit more thorough (or as thorough as one can be in a few sentences, anyway).
01 The Terror; Dan Simmons. Starting off the year with a huge novel about/inspired by the Franklin Expedition! It was by no means amazing, but there's sometimes something satisfying about torturing oneself with tales of hardship on the frozen wastes.
02 Material World: A Global Family Portrait; Peter Menzel et al. I found Hungry Planet much more compelling, I guess I'm more interested in what people eat than what they own. The most interesting thing came out of the fact that the book was published almost 15 years ago - one wonders how people's possessions have changed in this vastly more disposable age. I think only one family in the book had a computer, for instance, and I'm sure consumer electronics would make up a much more significant part of families' possessions, even outside of the developed world.
03 1215: The Year of Magna Carta; Danny Danzinger & John Gillingham. A fairly simple and readable social history of the British population at the time of Magna Carta. It felt a little calculated at times in terms of providing wacky anecdotes (oh, those nutty People From the Past! What will they think of next?).
04 Ant Farm: and Other Desperate Situations; Simon Rich. Rich is one of those ridiculously young and successful types whom it's so so easy to hate. He doesn't always succeed with these tiny funny-stories, but the good ones are worth the time spent.
05 Consider the Lobster: and Other Essays; David Foster Wallace. Came very close to upsetting A Supposedly Fun Thing, but not quite. "Authority and American Usage" made me so sorrowful that no one will ever be his student again.
06 Men Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film; Carol Clover. I've been waiting to read this for years, and a discussion of horror films just after new years prompted a library visit to find it. It leads me now to wonder whether academics who study anything other than what is commonly accepted as "high art" will ever escape the accusations of "slumming". Have we not reached a point when this choice of subject is no longer a surprise?
07 Abject Terrors: Surveying the Modern and Postmodern Horror Film; Tony Magistrale. This book brings us closer to the present than Clover's but after her well-presented ideas, Magistrale seems to simply distill the theoretical musings of other film critics. His interpretation of slasher films seems to begin and end with the simplistic notion of female heroines being a frightened response to feminism.
08 House of Many Ways; Diana Wynne Jones. Jones is one of my favourite YA authors, this book is a new one, occurring in the same world as both Howl's Moving Castle (maybe you've been the Miyazaki film?) and Castle in the Air. This entry in the series is not quite as strong as the first two, but the story moves along at a fine clip, plot elements slipping in sideways in typical Jones fashion.
09 Get a Life; Phillipe Dupuy & Charles Berberian. Get a Life follows Monsieur Jean through various connected-but-separate small tales. It achieves a very pleasant balance of comedy and pathos, but ultimately didn't make a huge impression on me.
10 The Savage Detectives; Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño rips the literary world apart for its ludicrous pretensions while holding a faithful candle for it in his other hand. Given the hype around this novel, I wasn't expecting it to be as hilarious as it turned out to be.
11 Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72; Hunter S Thompson. I'd been inspired by DFW's article about his time on the 2000 campaign with John McCain to revisit Thompson's version. The jittery stream-of-consciousness style and long dialogue sections can pull the reader pretty far from the root of the story (especially if you're not particularly well-informed about that election's ins and outs). I found there were some wonderful revealing moments where Thompson feels like a person rather than a frenetic character, which is something I've never some across in the other couple of his books I've read.
12 I was Told There'd Be Cake; Sloane Crosley. The slightly confessional character of the essays in this collection give it a fuchsia, chick-lit sort of tone. There are some seriously wandering essays, like a late-model Simpsons episode you often get several twists and false starts before the real topic asserts itself.
13 Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste; Carl Wilson. This little sliver is a part of the 33 1/3 series, which is mostly made up of meditations on solid gold critics' faves like Highway 61 Revisited, Doolittle or Pet Sounds. Wilson doing a Celine Dion album feels like a gimmick - the aforementioned slumming - but he pulls out a really thoughtful and exciting (to me, at least) examination of what makes "good" taste in a post-whatever world.
14 The Complete Sherlock Holmes Vol I: Arthur Conan Doyle. How have I not read any Sherlock Holmes ever before? Who knows. Reading them as an adult really makes me wish I'd discovered it as a kid! I'm waiting til the end of the summer to start Volume II, blustery London doesn't seem to make a good summer read, I don't think.
15 40 Ways to Look at Winston Churchill; Gretchen Rubin. Nonlinear biography, huh? Taking the point of view that people are complicated, and that biographies tend to ignore the parts of their subjects that don't follow the biographer's particular bias, Rubin takes a different tack with each chapter presenting conflicting views.
16 New Kings of Nonfiction; ed Ira Glass. Nonfiction you guys! I like it! If you've followed popular narraive nonfiction in the last couple of years you're not going to see anything particularly new in this book, but it's not a bad primer, and could definitely introduce you to a few new authors.
17 Infinite Jest; David Foster Wallace. I'm now regretting that I didn't wait and read IJ as part of Infinite Summer, because I think I would have benefited from some relatively informal outside contributions. I tried to keep notes of my books read this year, but this defeated me utterly, it was enough to try and keep up with it. Next time, I will do better.
18 Nearest Thing to Heaven: Empire State Building and American Dreams; Mark Kingwell. I chose this book after hearing Kingwell speak about it at UofT. I find Kingwell an interesting speaker, but the book was overly sentimental.
19 Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-War Activist; Bill Ayers. I heard Bill Ayers on Fresh Air and found him compelling enough to seek out this memoir. In the end I think his hour on NPR was a clearer elucidation of what he thought went wrong and what went right in the anti-war movement of the late 60s and the Weather Underground. Ayers lapses into some grating "experiemntal" prose occasionally, but otherwise a pleasant read.
20 The City in Mind: Notes on the urban Condition; James Kunstler. Heard about this author at the same symposium Kingwell spoke at. Kunstler is or has adopted the rhetorical style of a cranky old man, but I did leave the book with the beginnings of an understanding of the development of the eight cities he critiques here.
21 Forty Ways to Look at JFK; Gretchen Rubin. See above for the concept! Another interesting way to take on a divisive figure, but Rubin isn't a particularly great writer and the book is often trite and repetitious, this one even more so than the Churchill book.
22 The Stories of English; David Crystal. You know, I feel bad for not being as interested in the Middle Ages as I ought to be. I felt unfair wishing to get through Old and Middle English to get to the juicier modern developments. Crystal puts English dialects level with standard English throughout the book, which is a nice strike against the purists and a satisfying followup to the DFW essay on american english from earlier in the list.
23 Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingley Amis; Kingsley Amis. Did I mention cranky old men earlier? How about cranky old men writing about booze? Because this is three disparate works brought together, there's a fair amount of repetition, but you can count on some good recipes and many witty bon mots.
24 Shortcomings; Adrian Tomine. Is it possible to have a more dickish protagonist? I think not.
25 Swindled: The Dark history of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee; Bee Wilson. This book was neither as exciting nor as memorable as I would have liked. I was hoping for a more trenchant discussion of the move from additives-as-adulteration to additives-as-selling-point.
26 Bleak House; Charles Dickens. Can you believe I've never read a whole Dickens novel? I know, right? We watched the miniseries in the winter, so this one seemed like the obvious choice. The librarian asked me if I was reading it for school, which seems a little sad - does no one read Dickens for fun anymore?
27 Tamara Drewe; Posy Simmonds. After I got in my bike accident, I stayed in the house for three days feeling sorry for myself and applying cold packs to my broken face. The series of comic books beginning here is a product of those days. I'm not usually too into soap-opera comics, but Tamara Drewe has such a strong sense of place (and that place is so distant from my own life) that it overcame my doubts.
28 Best American Comics 08; ed. Lynda Barry. What can one say about anthologies? There are always some standouts, and some skippable bits. I could stare at the cover art all day though, it's by Eleanor Davis and it's gorgeous.
29 Skim; Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki. I found Skim quite lovely, if a tiny bit typical in terms of subject matter. There are always new teen girls who need to feel like someone understands their angst, though.
30 A Drifting Life; Yoshihiro Tatsumi. I feel like I might have gotten more out of Tatsumi's massive opus if I was more informed about the world of manga in the 50s and 60s, especially in terms of the changes Tatsumi and his colleagues wrought. Regardless, it's amazing to see how Tatsumi ricochets between periods of intense, driven activity and melancholy unproductivity.
31 America: God, Gold and Golems; James Sturm. One of those books that's about equal parts entertaining and harrowing, which is a combination I'm happy to indulge in.
32 Scoop; Evelyn Waugh. This is a fairly typical Waugh satire (if I knew more about the world of news in the early parts of last century it might have meant more but that's by no means necessary for enjoyment) with some occasional lyrical passages I can't get out of my head. If you please: ""He was a stranger alike to the bucolic jaunts of the hayfield and the dark and costly expeditions of his uncle Theodore. For 23 years he had remained celibate and heart-whole; landbound. Now for the first time he was far from shore, submerged among deep waters, below wind and tide, where huge trees raised their spongy flowers and monstrous things without fur or feather, wing or foot, passed silently, in submarine twilight. A lush place." Daaaaaaaaaamn.
33 Superstud: Or How I became a 24-year-old Virgin; Paul Feig. I read this in a single night, which tells you about how light and fluffy it is. Feig is one of the Freaks and Geeks creators, and if you've watched the commentaries you'll know that they took many of the embarrassing incidents on the show from the lives of the creators and actors. Does that tell you everything you need to know? I think YES.
34 Moby-Dick; Herman Melville. Another neglected (by me) classic! I'm more or less programmed to enjoy a book like this what with my five years working in maritime museums. It's certainly a strange one though, with the narrator appearing and disappearing at will. One wonders about Melville's madness almost as much as Ahab's.
35 Spectacle of the Scaffold; Michel Foucault. There's an argument to be made that this should be an asterisk book, because this is part of the Penguin Great Ideas series, and is only a chapter or so of Discipline and Punish, which I read back in university. I was interested to note this time that in France, trial were much more secret than in the British legal system, secret even from the defendants, who came to court only to be sentenced.
36 Vile Bodies; Evelyn Waugh. Read it just after watching Stephen Fry's film version, then watched the Supersizers 1920s episode last night. Britain really seems to filter its view of that decade through this book, says largely-ignorant me.
37 A Little Learning; Evelyn Waugh. Waugh's autobio! The first section notwithstanding (I found it merely skim-able) this was pretty wry and enjoyable. For some reason I can't get enough British boarding school stories (?) and of course it ends (SPOILER ALERT) with possibly the most hilariously inept suicide attempt in the history of letters.
38 The American Way of Death Revisited; Jessica Mitford. Mitford's 1963 exposé of the American funeral industry, revised in the 90s. Full of just the sort of open manipulation of the bereaved that you would (sadly) expect. One of the interesting additions concerns the use of embalming for spurious hygienic reasons in contrast with the refusal to embalm AIDS victims.
39 Asterios Polyp; David Mazzucchelli. Without a doubt, one of the best books (graphic or not) that I've read this year. Read it if you like dense and convoluted stories, with a thick side-order of greek myth and modernist architecture. Seriously amazing, with new insights on each re-reading.
A book I've read recently but shouldn't add to the list (because it's the kind of thing you don't really read cover to cover so I will clearly never) is the Oxford Companion to Food. Totally fascinating encyclopedia-style guide to all sorts of food and food-related stuff. Coming at it from North America I really notice a British bias (e.g. the entry on diners is two paragraphs long, where in an N. American context this could merit far more ink) but that's OK, I'd rather read about foods I'm not as familiar with anyway!
01 The Terror; Dan Simmons. Starting off the year with a huge novel about/inspired by the Franklin Expedition! It was by no means amazing, but there's sometimes something satisfying about torturing oneself with tales of hardship on the frozen wastes.
02 Material World: A Global Family Portrait; Peter Menzel et al. I found Hungry Planet much more compelling, I guess I'm more interested in what people eat than what they own. The most interesting thing came out of the fact that the book was published almost 15 years ago - one wonders how people's possessions have changed in this vastly more disposable age. I think only one family in the book had a computer, for instance, and I'm sure consumer electronics would make up a much more significant part of families' possessions, even outside of the developed world.
03 1215: The Year of Magna Carta; Danny Danzinger & John Gillingham. A fairly simple and readable social history of the British population at the time of Magna Carta. It felt a little calculated at times in terms of providing wacky anecdotes (oh, those nutty People From the Past! What will they think of next?).
04 Ant Farm: and Other Desperate Situations; Simon Rich. Rich is one of those ridiculously young and successful types whom it's so so easy to hate. He doesn't always succeed with these tiny funny-stories, but the good ones are worth the time spent.
05 Consider the Lobster: and Other Essays; David Foster Wallace. Came very close to upsetting A Supposedly Fun Thing, but not quite. "Authority and American Usage" made me so sorrowful that no one will ever be his student again.
06 Men Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film; Carol Clover. I've been waiting to read this for years, and a discussion of horror films just after new years prompted a library visit to find it. It leads me now to wonder whether academics who study anything other than what is commonly accepted as "high art" will ever escape the accusations of "slumming". Have we not reached a point when this choice of subject is no longer a surprise?
07 Abject Terrors: Surveying the Modern and Postmodern Horror Film; Tony Magistrale. This book brings us closer to the present than Clover's but after her well-presented ideas, Magistrale seems to simply distill the theoretical musings of other film critics. His interpretation of slasher films seems to begin and end with the simplistic notion of female heroines being a frightened response to feminism.
08 House of Many Ways; Diana Wynne Jones. Jones is one of my favourite YA authors, this book is a new one, occurring in the same world as both Howl's Moving Castle (maybe you've been the Miyazaki film?) and Castle in the Air. This entry in the series is not quite as strong as the first two, but the story moves along at a fine clip, plot elements slipping in sideways in typical Jones fashion.
09 Get a Life; Phillipe Dupuy & Charles Berberian. Get a Life follows Monsieur Jean through various connected-but-separate small tales. It achieves a very pleasant balance of comedy and pathos, but ultimately didn't make a huge impression on me.
10 The Savage Detectives; Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño rips the literary world apart for its ludicrous pretensions while holding a faithful candle for it in his other hand. Given the hype around this novel, I wasn't expecting it to be as hilarious as it turned out to be.
11 Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72; Hunter S Thompson. I'd been inspired by DFW's article about his time on the 2000 campaign with John McCain to revisit Thompson's version. The jittery stream-of-consciousness style and long dialogue sections can pull the reader pretty far from the root of the story (especially if you're not particularly well-informed about that election's ins and outs). I found there were some wonderful revealing moments where Thompson feels like a person rather than a frenetic character, which is something I've never some across in the other couple of his books I've read.
12 I was Told There'd Be Cake; Sloane Crosley. The slightly confessional character of the essays in this collection give it a fuchsia, chick-lit sort of tone. There are some seriously wandering essays, like a late-model Simpsons episode you often get several twists and false starts before the real topic asserts itself.
13 Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste; Carl Wilson. This little sliver is a part of the 33 1/3 series, which is mostly made up of meditations on solid gold critics' faves like Highway 61 Revisited, Doolittle or Pet Sounds. Wilson doing a Celine Dion album feels like a gimmick - the aforementioned slumming - but he pulls out a really thoughtful and exciting (to me, at least) examination of what makes "good" taste in a post-whatever world.
14 The Complete Sherlock Holmes Vol I: Arthur Conan Doyle. How have I not read any Sherlock Holmes ever before? Who knows. Reading them as an adult really makes me wish I'd discovered it as a kid! I'm waiting til the end of the summer to start Volume II, blustery London doesn't seem to make a good summer read, I don't think.
15 40 Ways to Look at Winston Churchill; Gretchen Rubin. Nonlinear biography, huh? Taking the point of view that people are complicated, and that biographies tend to ignore the parts of their subjects that don't follow the biographer's particular bias, Rubin takes a different tack with each chapter presenting conflicting views.
16 New Kings of Nonfiction; ed Ira Glass. Nonfiction you guys! I like it! If you've followed popular narraive nonfiction in the last couple of years you're not going to see anything particularly new in this book, but it's not a bad primer, and could definitely introduce you to a few new authors.
17 Infinite Jest; David Foster Wallace. I'm now regretting that I didn't wait and read IJ as part of Infinite Summer, because I think I would have benefited from some relatively informal outside contributions. I tried to keep notes of my books read this year, but this defeated me utterly, it was enough to try and keep up with it. Next time, I will do better.
18 Nearest Thing to Heaven: Empire State Building and American Dreams; Mark Kingwell. I chose this book after hearing Kingwell speak about it at UofT. I find Kingwell an interesting speaker, but the book was overly sentimental.
19 Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-War Activist; Bill Ayers. I heard Bill Ayers on Fresh Air and found him compelling enough to seek out this memoir. In the end I think his hour on NPR was a clearer elucidation of what he thought went wrong and what went right in the anti-war movement of the late 60s and the Weather Underground. Ayers lapses into some grating "experiemntal" prose occasionally, but otherwise a pleasant read.
20 The City in Mind: Notes on the urban Condition; James Kunstler. Heard about this author at the same symposium Kingwell spoke at. Kunstler is or has adopted the rhetorical style of a cranky old man, but I did leave the book with the beginnings of an understanding of the development of the eight cities he critiques here.
21 Forty Ways to Look at JFK; Gretchen Rubin. See above for the concept! Another interesting way to take on a divisive figure, but Rubin isn't a particularly great writer and the book is often trite and repetitious, this one even more so than the Churchill book.
22 The Stories of English; David Crystal. You know, I feel bad for not being as interested in the Middle Ages as I ought to be. I felt unfair wishing to get through Old and Middle English to get to the juicier modern developments. Crystal puts English dialects level with standard English throughout the book, which is a nice strike against the purists and a satisfying followup to the DFW essay on american english from earlier in the list.
23 Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingley Amis; Kingsley Amis. Did I mention cranky old men earlier? How about cranky old men writing about booze? Because this is three disparate works brought together, there's a fair amount of repetition, but you can count on some good recipes and many witty bon mots.
24 Shortcomings; Adrian Tomine. Is it possible to have a more dickish protagonist? I think not.
25 Swindled: The Dark history of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee; Bee Wilson. This book was neither as exciting nor as memorable as I would have liked. I was hoping for a more trenchant discussion of the move from additives-as-adulteration to additives-as-selling-point.
26 Bleak House; Charles Dickens. Can you believe I've never read a whole Dickens novel? I know, right? We watched the miniseries in the winter, so this one seemed like the obvious choice. The librarian asked me if I was reading it for school, which seems a little sad - does no one read Dickens for fun anymore?
27 Tamara Drewe; Posy Simmonds. After I got in my bike accident, I stayed in the house for three days feeling sorry for myself and applying cold packs to my broken face. The series of comic books beginning here is a product of those days. I'm not usually too into soap-opera comics, but Tamara Drewe has such a strong sense of place (and that place is so distant from my own life) that it overcame my doubts.
28 Best American Comics 08; ed. Lynda Barry. What can one say about anthologies? There are always some standouts, and some skippable bits. I could stare at the cover art all day though, it's by Eleanor Davis and it's gorgeous.
29 Skim; Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki. I found Skim quite lovely, if a tiny bit typical in terms of subject matter. There are always new teen girls who need to feel like someone understands their angst, though.
30 A Drifting Life; Yoshihiro Tatsumi. I feel like I might have gotten more out of Tatsumi's massive opus if I was more informed about the world of manga in the 50s and 60s, especially in terms of the changes Tatsumi and his colleagues wrought. Regardless, it's amazing to see how Tatsumi ricochets between periods of intense, driven activity and melancholy unproductivity.
31 America: God, Gold and Golems; James Sturm. One of those books that's about equal parts entertaining and harrowing, which is a combination I'm happy to indulge in.
32 Scoop; Evelyn Waugh. This is a fairly typical Waugh satire (if I knew more about the world of news in the early parts of last century it might have meant more but that's by no means necessary for enjoyment) with some occasional lyrical passages I can't get out of my head. If you please: ""He was a stranger alike to the bucolic jaunts of the hayfield and the dark and costly expeditions of his uncle Theodore. For 23 years he had remained celibate and heart-whole; landbound. Now for the first time he was far from shore, submerged among deep waters, below wind and tide, where huge trees raised their spongy flowers and monstrous things without fur or feather, wing or foot, passed silently, in submarine twilight. A lush place." Daaaaaaaaaamn.
33 Superstud: Or How I became a 24-year-old Virgin; Paul Feig. I read this in a single night, which tells you about how light and fluffy it is. Feig is one of the Freaks and Geeks creators, and if you've watched the commentaries you'll know that they took many of the embarrassing incidents on the show from the lives of the creators and actors. Does that tell you everything you need to know? I think YES.
34 Moby-Dick; Herman Melville. Another neglected (by me) classic! I'm more or less programmed to enjoy a book like this what with my five years working in maritime museums. It's certainly a strange one though, with the narrator appearing and disappearing at will. One wonders about Melville's madness almost as much as Ahab's.
35 Spectacle of the Scaffold; Michel Foucault. There's an argument to be made that this should be an asterisk book, because this is part of the Penguin Great Ideas series, and is only a chapter or so of Discipline and Punish, which I read back in university. I was interested to note this time that in France, trial were much more secret than in the British legal system, secret even from the defendants, who came to court only to be sentenced.
36 Vile Bodies; Evelyn Waugh. Read it just after watching Stephen Fry's film version, then watched the Supersizers 1920s episode last night. Britain really seems to filter its view of that decade through this book, says largely-ignorant me.
37 A Little Learning; Evelyn Waugh. Waugh's autobio! The first section notwithstanding (I found it merely skim-able) this was pretty wry and enjoyable. For some reason I can't get enough British boarding school stories (?) and of course it ends (SPOILER ALERT) with possibly the most hilariously inept suicide attempt in the history of letters.
38 The American Way of Death Revisited; Jessica Mitford. Mitford's 1963 exposé of the American funeral industry, revised in the 90s. Full of just the sort of open manipulation of the bereaved that you would (sadly) expect. One of the interesting additions concerns the use of embalming for spurious hygienic reasons in contrast with the refusal to embalm AIDS victims.
39 Asterios Polyp; David Mazzucchelli. Without a doubt, one of the best books (graphic or not) that I've read this year. Read it if you like dense and convoluted stories, with a thick side-order of greek myth and modernist architecture. Seriously amazing, with new insights on each re-reading.
A book I've read recently but shouldn't add to the list (because it's the kind of thing you don't really read cover to cover so I will clearly never) is the Oxford Companion to Food. Totally fascinating encyclopedia-style guide to all sorts of food and food-related stuff. Coming at it from North America I really notice a British bias (e.g. the entry on diners is two paragraphs long, where in an N. American context this could merit far more ink) but that's OK, I'd rather read about foods I'm not as familiar with anyway!