crunch-porn and crash-lit

Those of us interested in the sordid world of finance and the events of recent history face a glut of books in the marketplace. Luckily, we have Satyajit Ras to save us lots of time and money. And for those of us who love a choice book review, his are always full of gems. In this recent article he reviews seven, yes seven, recent books.

Here are some of my favorite bits. On what all these books seem to have in common:

A key characteristic of the emerging tidal wave of books is the fact that almost everyone saw the writing on the wall, predicted the crisis and now moreover have solutions that can ensure that this was the crisis to end all crises.  

On future regulation:

...embrace regulation and regulators freely whilst being critical of regulators as lacking in skills and beholden to special interests. The faith in government activism is perverse. It fails to consider why a new set of rules will necessarily be more effective and existing regulators will be able to deal with complex issues well above their pay grades. This is particularly the case when the same regulators failed in the very same tasks in the lead up to this crisis. This dissonance is striking.

Most amusingly, on style:

The style of these books varies. The tone is mostly the desiccated drone (reminiscent of John Cage’s experimental work from the 1960s). Some are deliberately academic in tone to achieve the correct type of unreadability. One assumes that they are weapons deployed in the dawn duels between economic scholars.

2009 reading list

So many books, so little time. My year in reading 2009. Some pleasant surprises, some surprising disappointments. Among a number of good reads, a few that stand out after the fact: Atonement (no surprise there really), 2666 (still puzzle over this one), and Before I Die, which was really fabulous. If you're interested in perusing my pithy (usually) thoughts on individual books, you can check out goodreads. In reverse chronological order:

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
In the Woods by Tana French
Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
Man in the Dark by Paul Auster
Twilight of the Superheroes: Stories by Deborah Eisenberg
Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy
Hairstyles of the Damned by Joe Meno
How Fiction Works by James Wood
That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo
Lush Life by Richard Price
Bangkok 8 by John Burdett
The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow
The Brothers K by David James Duncan
Hunter's Moon by Randy Wayne White
Knights of the Cornerstone by James P. Blaylock
The Anatomy of Deception by Lawrence Goldstone
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
The Steel Wave by Jeff Shaara
The Turnaround by George Pelecanos
Darkness Take My Hand by Dennis Lehane
Ten Thousand Islands by Randy Wayne White
A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O'nan
The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
2666 by Roberto Bolano
Towing Jehovah by James Morrow
Code of the Street: Decency, Violence and the Moral Life of the Inner City by Elijah Anderson
Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau
Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen
Before I Die by Jenny Downham
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq
The Battle of New Orleans by Robert V. Remini
The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos
The Man Who Watched Trains Go By by Georges Simenon
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Cop in the Hood by Peter Moskos
Christine Falls by John Banville nee Benjamin Black
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
The Moon is Down by Steinbeck
The Pearl by Steinbeck
Spirit of 69: A Skinhead Bible by George Marshall
The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley
God's Pocket by Pete Dexter
Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo
A Mercy by Toni Morrison

just acting human

This interview with Marilynne Robinson is the best thing I've read in a while. Great stuff. I'd never read an interview with her before, or heard her speak, and didn't really know anything about her other than her novels.*

Plucking out some good stuff here:

on religion (and writing): "I don’t like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not. "

on the narrative of decline:

At the same time, there has always been a basic human tendency toward a dubious notion of beauty. Think about cultures that rarify themselves into courts in which people paint themselves with lead paint and get dumber by the day, or women have ribs removed to have their waists cinched tighter. There’s no question that we have our versions of that now. The most destructive thing we can do is act as though this is some sign of cultural, spiritual decay rather than humans just acting human, which is what we’re doing most of the time.

on religion as a framing mechanism:

Religion is a framing mechanism. It is a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions. It talks about the arc of life and the quality of experience in ways that I’ve found fruitful to think about. Religion has been profoundly effective in enlarging human imagination and expression. It’s only very recently that you couldn’t see how the high arts are intimately connected to religion.

There was a time when people felt as if structure in most forms were a constraint and they attacked it, which in a culture is like an autoimmune problem: the organism is not allowing itself the conditions of its own existence. We’re cultural creatures and meaning doesn’t simply generate itself out of thin air; it’s sustained by a cultural framework. It’s like deciding how much more interesting it would be if you had no skeleton: you could just slide under the door.

on fear and our humanity:

People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

on the arbitrariness of being: "No physicist can tell you why things persist as they are, why one moment follows another. The reality we inhabit and treat like an old shoe is amazingly arbitrary. "

And that's really just scratching the surface. It's well worth the read even, I think, if you aren't familiar with her work.


* (A tangent here: I did not like Home. This was especially disappointing to me as I really liked Housekeeping and loved Gilead. I thought Home was well written, and successful as far as that goes, I just did not like it. And that's ok of course. On some level it doesn't matter at all. I frequently found myself angry at the characters, incredulous at their failure to realize their own roles in their problems, and I realize that this is much like life, and perhaps says more about me than the novel. It's good that I did not live in a small town in Iowa in the middle of the twentieth century. Of course I wouldn't have been me then would I?)

2008 reading list

The reading list for the year that was.

I read more than I realized and I'm glad. A habit worth keeping. There were some disappointments: Edgar Sawtelle and Carse spring to mind, and some real pleasures: The New Measures, discovering Jon Hassler, and Don Paterson all stand out, and overall I read a bunch of good books. I see that I maintained about a 3 to 1 fiction to non-fiction ratio, and although I mean to balance that out in the future I'm not going to worry about it. I suppose it's still a reaction to years of reading mostly academic non-fiction.

* Best Thought, Worst Thought: On Work, Art, Sex and Death by Don Paterson
* The Risk Pool by Richard Russo
* Mohawk by Richard Russo
* A Green Journey by Jon Hassler
* Home by Marilynne Robinson
* The Love Hunter by Jon Hassler
* My Staggerford Journal by Jon Hassler
* The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
* Simon's Night by Jon Hassler
* Plainsong by Kent Haruf
* The Confidence Man by Melville
* Grand Opening by Jon Hassler
* Staggerford by Jon Hassler
* A Time Gone By by William Heffernan
* All or Nothing by Preston Allen
* South of the Pumphouse by Les Claypool
* The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse
* The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
* Clockers by Richard Price
* The Book Against God by James Wood

* The Gathering by Anne Enright
* The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
* Maigret in New York's Underworld by Georges Simenon
* The Dogs of Bedlam Farm by Jon Katz
* The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh
* Heart of the Old Country by Tim McLoughlin
*The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by Dave Wroblewski
*The Man Who Invented Florida by Randy Wayne White
*Captiva by Randy Wayne White
*Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen
*The Sand Cafe by Neil MacFarquhar
* Hubert's Freaks byGregory Gibson
* Times Like These by Rachel Ingalls
* Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
* Katz on Dogs by Jon Katz
* The Men Who Stare At Goats by Jon Ronson
* Dirty Work by Larry Brown
* The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood by Simon and Burns
* Heyday by Kurt Andersen
* Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
* Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'nan
* The New Measures: A Theological History of Democratic Practice by Ted A. Smith
* Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
* On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho by Basho
* The Art of War by Sun Tzu

recent reading

Some of my recent book blurbs from Goodreads:

The Book Against God by Woods
I like reading Woods the critic and I liked reading his novel, but was surprised a bit by the tone of the novel. Despite its concern with theodicy it manages to be--almost--lighthearted. It pokes fun at academic life with a lead who owes a little to Ignatius J. Reilly, albeit in a more restrained, more English fashion. Which, really, is high praise. The theodicy debate goes unresolved of course as does the ending but it hardly matters as it's a fun read. Who would've guessed?

The Religious Case Against Belief by Carse
I like Carse and his approach to things (see Finite and Infinite Games) and I had high hopes for this book. I was hoping for a little inspiration, a shot of wonder. I was left wanting. Parts of the book are interesting and he makes a few important points but you have to get through the first section of the book, which is rather dry. With some good editing this could have been one very tight, article-length essay.

South of the Pumphouse by Claypool
An odd first novel. Claypool is pretty raw as a writer but this was likable despite its flaws.

All or Nothing by Allen
This is a damn good read, the best I've sampled thus far from Akashic Books (the Brooklyn publisher). Allen is a talented writer. The first part of the book nails addiction so well that it was kind of tough to read despite the page-turning quality of the writing. The big turn the plot takes is a bit of a stretch, but not so much as to strain our suspension of disbelief, and it does lift the book beyond being simply a depressing account of a small-time addict. There's some fascinating stuff in here about the...epistemology of gambling I suppose you could say, that I might like to have seen more of as it really gets you inside the head of an addicted gambler. But this is a tight, fast novel that offers just enough introspection to give it depth, any more might have slowed the pace and made it a different sort of story. One less easily adapted to film, which I expect this will be before long. Allen is more than simply a genre writer and I look forward to his next book.

A Time Gone By by Heffernan
Reading a really good genre novel is like eating a great steak. There aren't any surprises--insofar as you know where the surprises are likely to be before you even start--and it doesn't do anything you haven't seen done before, for which you are grateful because it's just really damn satisfying as it is. So if you like a novel with a good dose of noir that's full of crooked power brokers, gangsters, Irish cops and beautiful dames with secrets, this will make you happy.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Finally finished Edgar Sawtelle and was both disappointed and irritated. It's clearly a first novel. The book labors toward profundity but never arrives. Heaping loads of suffering on your characters is not a surefire strategy to achieve the status of great literature. I had really high hopes when I bought this--high enough that I felt compelled to pay retail for it just so I could read it right away--but it wasn't long before my skepticism awoke. Let's see: a sentimentalized account of dogs, a coming of age story about an amazingly intelligent boy with a peculiar disability, some ghosts, a riff on Hamlet, yeah it's got "Book Club Reader's Guide" written all over it. I'll be curious to see if those folks are let down or manage to convince themselves that tragedy is inherently profound. But the suffering here does not redeem the easy sentimentality, it simply smothers it. The book is ambitious, I'll grant that, and a compelling read despite the ending being foretold, but it is too long and too calculating and in the end The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is most like its primary antagonist: skillfully manipulative and cold-hearted.

Benjamin on the left

This line from Walter Benjamin made me wince and chuckle at the same time:

"The intellectuals, as always, were the first to acclaim the builder of their own scaffold."

Context, if you're interested, here. It's the context that really gives the line its weight, but something Benjamin says of another writer certainly applies here as well: "This makes his work full of passages that, like double exposures, project information of immediate interest onto a background of the recent past." Recent being a relative term of course.

the secret to editing

Zadie Smith has good advice for novelists but I think it applies well to most creative endeavors:

When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second - put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year of more is ideal - but even three months will do. Step away from the vehicle. The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer. I can't tell you how many times I've sat backstage with a line of novelists at some festival, all of us with red pens in hand, frantically editing our published novels into fit form so that we might go on stage and read from them. It's an unfortunate thing, but it turns out that the perfect state of mind to edit your novel is two years after it's published, ten minutes before you go on stage at a literary festival. At that moment every redundant phrase, each show-off, pointless metaphor, all of the pieces of dead wood, stupidity, vanity, and tedium are distressingly obvious to you.

It's from this article (can't see the whole thing here) in the Believer.

the postmodern legacy

Quick and dirty here, but I know if I don't do it now I won't get around to it later...

Interesting bits from a review (it's behind a wall so no point linking to it but it's in the Chronicle of Higher Ed if you have access and are interested) of a new book about the American embrace of French critical theory:

"As Cusset recounts, another major irony of French theory's American reception is that a paradigm radically opposed to the idea of a centered and cohesive "self" became the basis for American-style identity politics." This made me chuckle. It gets right to the heart of the postmodern legacy here.

more:

French theory's "antifoundationalism" jibes surprisingly well with the precepts of American pluralism. Both traditions are deeply wary of metaphysical absolutes and high-flown theoretical speculation. Liberalism can be frustratingly nonprescriptive: It democratically allows everyone the luxury of having his or her own opinion. Deconstruction — which, under Derrida's stewardship, embraced the confusions of "undecidability" instead of taking a firm position — similarly ended up in a state of self-canceling judgmental paralysis.

He claims that it is the "sturdiness" of our liberalism that allows us to flirt with ideas and movements that call into question the very foundations of that same liberalism. The end result being that we defanged poststructuralism: "By appropriating the precepts of French theory, we Americans undermined its residual claims to theoretical and political radicalism — and thereby succeeded in domesticating it. In the end, it became grist for the mill of liberal pluralism."

I find that kind of comforting. I have no idea what kind of reception the book is getting in academic circles, and don't much care, but it seems to uh, depuff, if you will, a certain brand of self-important postmodern critical theory. Mind you, I really do mean a certain brand. I don't have much of a problem with Derrida.

Taleb's tips

Life tips from Nassim Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. He sounds like an interesting guy, I've been meaning to peruse his stuff for a while now. I especially like his opinion of economists: they're shite. I'm inclined to agree.

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

You can read the whole profile here.

shorties

The Corner: Simon is reliably enthralling and depressing.

Dirty Work: The casualties of war linger on.

the world cannot be disenchanted

It's pithy wisdom day here I guess.

In talking about The New Measures the other day I'd meant to mention a couple of Saul Bellow quotations that figure prominently in the book but I'd only written one of them down and Cambridge doesn't make their books searchable on Amazon. But both of these deserve a place of their own anyway. The first serves, along with a couple of other choice quotations, as an introduction of sorts to the book:

"There's the most extraordinary, unheard-of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it. But now this is true for the world as a whole. The agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way."

The second comes near the end of the book, and in the context of the argument the quotation is placed perfectly. It was one of those reading moments that made me want to catch my breath and bang the desk at the same time:

"The educated speak of the disenchanted (a boring) world. But it is not the world, it is my own head that is disenchanted. The world cannot be disenchanted."

There's an art to finding the right quotation, contextualizing it and timing it. The New Measures does this brilliantly. Both of those are Saul Bellow and both are from Humboldt's gift, which I've never read (but I made sure I went and mooched a copy and will get to it soon). I love those few sentences enough that Saul Bellow will forever have the benefit of my doubt.

The last bit especially moves me. Why? I've tried to write about this before and I'm not sure I can explain it any better now without either lapsing into cliches or being incoherent. I will say that I'm tempted to claim those words as marching orders for trickgnosis, whether blog or life, but I don't know that I can live, or write, up to it. "Well done is better than well said" anyway. And I'm grateful for the inspiration.

shorty book reviews

six word takes on recent reads:

Heyday

synopsis: interesting historical setting plus thrills, chases

review: great setting, clunky prose equals screenplay


The New Measures: A Theological History of Democratic Practice

synopsis: fascinating stuff happened, God in details

review: Fascinating indeed. Great read. God? Hmmm.


Guess that's actually twelve words per book, but, well, the brevity leaves too much unsaid. Both books take the middle of the 19th century (roughly) as the primary historical setting. I read The New Measures first and decided to read Heyday because it was a novel set during the same period. I heartily recommend the former but I cannot do the same for the latter.

Heyday felt like it would have been better off a screenplay for an HBO miniseries or something. It was clearly well researched but the narrative rarely goes more than a few pages without tripping over the research. Nor is the plotting strong enough to sustain the book's length. The seams show in a fashion that is often awkward.

The New Measures on the other hand manifests its construction by design. A neat hybrid, it crosses academic genres and disciplines skillfully while avoiding all the usual excesses of academic writing. It's clear and cogent, and shit, it's even a fun read and full of great stories. Can't remember the last time I could say that about an academic book. It's got a theological argument to make but it keeps the actual theologizing to a minimum, making its case humbly and gracefully.

Ben Franklin in my inbox

Ben Franklin emailed me this morning with some good advice on life and blogging:

...were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults of the first. So I might, besides correcting the faults, change some sinister accidents and events of it for others more favorable. But though this were denied, I should still accept the offer. Since such a repetition is not to be expected, the next thing most like living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing.

Indeed. Ok, he didn't really email me.

He's dead.

But I have been getting his autobiography emailed to me in daily segments. I'm trying this out via DailyLit. They send you books via email in increments you choose. Many, perhaps even most, of the titles are free. I don't know if I'll continue with it after I bid Mr. Franklin adieu, but I am enjoying it.

and then everyone called it skeleton town

I put this over on the other blog, but I like it so much I'm putting it here too. I found it in this long article, which is interesting in and of itself if you are so inclined, but the story of skeleton town stands just fine on its own.

Once there was a dragon who went poo poo on a house and the house broke
then when the house broke the people died
and when the people died their bones came out and broke and got together again and turned into a skeleton
and then the skeletons came along and scared the people out of the town
and then when all the people got scared out of the town then skeleton babies were born
and then everyone called it skeleton town
and when they called it skeleton town the people came back and then they got scared away again
and then when they all got scared away again the skeletons died
no one came to the town
so there was no people ever in that town ever again.

That's by a four year old. Consider me impressed. This one is pretty fun too, and it's by a two year old:

The Monkeys
They went up sky
They fall down
Choo choo train in the sky
The train fell down in the sky
I fell down in the sky in the water
I got on my boat and my legs hurt
Daddy fall down in the sky.

2/14/08: Valentine's assortment

Happy Valentine's day pals.

I know it's a made up holiday and a nefarious product of the consumer industrial complex. I'm generally quite the grinch about such things, but I decided to try to make this Valentines into something I could appreciate. Mind you I still resent the wave of commercialism suggesting that diamonds and such equal love, but I tried to emphasize some sentiment worth valuing apart from all the candy and flowers and bullshit.

So I did a few small, personal things that expressed some sentiments worth expressing. My sweetie appreciated it and I scored a cool hat. Later we'll have some good Thai food. That's a pretty good day.

In other news, I've been deep into a weighty academic book about...the theological underbelly of American History. Or maybe the theology lurking, tucked away, in the unfolding of the American experiment. Maybe. I'd have to think about that for a minute. It requires my using some long dormant intellectual muscles so it's a little slower going than the novels I've been reading since my own academic endeavors went to hell a while back. It's a very interesting book and I expect I'll have more to say when I'm done.

In the meantime, here's a Valentine's haiku for you. A colleague who also is fond of Japanese poetry gave me this today, printed on an envelope. It's by a poet named Issa:

What a pretty kite
the beggar's children fly high
above their hovel!

1/7/08: crows and bulldogs

I've been looking at some Hokusai lately--I really dig his paintings and prints--and was struck by some of his birds. This reminded me of Basho's haiku about the crow. It is one of my favorite poems (I've seen various translations with slight differences, I've stuck together those elements I liked best):

On the dead branch
squats a crow
nightfall in autumn

It captures a moment with such elegance and economy, in translation of course. There are lots of other Basho haiku that I love too and which I will probably share in coming days. All of nature is Basho's territory but I think he never fails to capture autumn/winter perfectly. As I did a little research on Basho and Hokusai on the interweb, I looked down at Chloe, sitting between my feet under the table as she often does, and was struck with a little inspiration. When the last word came to me, I knew I had it:

under the table
squats a bulldog.
toofers.

The Basho crow haiku inspired a poem Wallace Stevens wrote called "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". I like it. It's got 13 short haiku like parts, some of which are very good. The second:

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

and the fifth:

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

the twelfth:

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

and the last, which is the most...Bashoesque:

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

I like it! Mind you, I know nothing of poetry. I read it and just sort of wait for something to jump out at me and I don't much worry about whether I really understand it.

1/3/08: The Art of War

First book of the year is The Art of War. Lessons so far: be of sound defense, limit your mistakes and pay careful attention to your opponent while waiting for him to provide you with an opportunity. Vary your tactics and do not repeat patterns. Do the unexpected. Deception is key. Knowledge of the enemy is essential, be subtle in obtaining it.

Several passages jump out as relevant to our current quagmire. Now, granted, things have changed an awful lot where warfare is concerned, but there are a few underlying ideas that probably hold true across time, geography and culture and that anyone considering strategy would do well to heed. For instance, in chapter two, Sun Tzu says:

6. There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.

7. It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on.

And then later, in chapter twelve, he gets more philosophical, and it is here that a 21st century American can only wince:

20. Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content.

21. But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come back again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life.

22. Hence the enlightened ruler is heedful and the good general full of caution. This is the way to keep a country at peace and an army intact.

Oy.

12/31/2007: the year in books

Here's my reading list for 2007. I started keeping a yearly list a few years back and I found that it helped me remember individual books better (as well as the times and places associated with the reading of those books) so I continued the practice. There are a number of really good books on the list and only a few that were not so good--only one I did not finish. I ended the year on a light note with two books that were fun but not especially good. I also tackled a few of the "important" 20th century American writers this year: Faulkner, Roth, Delillo, Ford. Underwhelming mostly, though I did like White Noise for the most part. This was countered by the highlights: digging into McCarthy (who goes in the "important" category as well but who I really enjoy now), Russo (though my response to this book was more mixed than to any of his other novels), McEwan and the short stories as well as Chandra and my first Tyler and a few others that I enjoyed as well as a couple old friends I revisited. The best book I read in 2007 was The Road. Perhaps I will think differently when I go back to it someday but I cannot remember another book having such a visceral existential impact.

Here it is, last to first:

The Case of the Missing Books by Sansom
Eyeing the Flash: The Education of A Carnival Con Artist by Fenton
like you'd understand anyway by Shepard
All Aunt Hagar's Children by Jones
Blink by Gladwell
The Solitudes by Crowley (unfinished, threw in the towel after 150 pgs)
Bridge of Sighs by Russo
Cannery Row by Steinbeck
Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra (all 947 pgs of it)
Your Body is Changing by Jack Pendarvis
Digging to America by Anne Tyler
On Fire by Larry Brown
What is the What by Dave Eggers
NewJack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
Saturday by Ian McEwan
As I Lay Dying by Faulkner
The Dogs Who Found Me by Ken Foster
Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand
White Noise by Don Delillo
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
Later, At the Bar by Rebecca Barry
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
In the Little World by John Richardson
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Forbidden Zone by Michael Lesy
Breakfast on Pluto by Patrick McCabe
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
The Sea by John Banville
The Amalgamation Polka by Steven Wright
The Places in Between by Rory Stewart
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Charming Billy by Alice McDermott
The Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

12/12/07: short stories

Just finished Jim Shepard's like you'd understand anyway and am thinking about it. I bought it for my Ma for Christmas, as she likes short stories, and the stories that make up this book had received so much praise and a nomination for the National Book Award. I gave it a go since it was several weeks before Christmas and I had just finished another collection of stories, All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward Jones...which was quite good itself. So I decided I'd be on a short story kick, unusual given that I am not generally a reader of short stories. I have always preferred novels and each of Shepard's stories is like a novel with all the excess removed and cooked down to its essence. While the stories vary widely in their historical, geographic, and cultural locations they are all linked thematically: disasters small and private, large and historical, unfold in these stories. Things will not end well. Some of these stories are quite grim, and there was one I finally just skimmed through, but many are relieved by touches of well-placed humor, and all are carried along by the quality of the writing. The true tribute to Shepard's skill is the ease with which his stories unfold, unencumbered by the enormous amount of research that must have gone into writing them, and which his acknowledgments spell out. I imagine most writers would not have been content to invest so much work in a mere short story. A simple summary of each story illustrates the breadth of Shepard's terrain here: Chernobyl, mental illness in a suburban family, a Roman functionary on the British frontier, high school football in Texas, Nazis hunting for Yeti in the Himalayas, an Alaskan tsunami, a doomed expedition into the interior of Australia, Aeschylus at Marathon, a lovesick female cosmonaut, two weeks of summer camp misery, and the travails of an executioner during the height of the revolutionary terror in France. Some stories are better than others, this is inevitable, but none come off as gimmicky and this is even more impressive given the economy with which he works.