52 in 07 Recap

2007 was a great year for my reading. Movies can awe you, and TV can entrance you, but books - at their best - can actually change the way you see things, restructure your personal philosphy. I was lucky enough to encounter a couple of these this year.

After some deliberation, a 1-23 ranking of the books I read this year.

1. The Stones of Summer - “Stones is like lead: it’s terribly dense and you go crazy if ingest too much.”
2. The Savage Detectives - “The fact that Bolano can invent all this bespeaks an oceanic imagination, one that’s wide and deep and glittering brilliant.”
3. The Road - “This lean prose sometimes spirals into beautifully complex sentences as the father dreams, and these moments of lyricism shine all the brighter for the dullness that surrounds them.”
4. Finn - “The prose’s form and purpose are so completely wedded it’s downright shark-like.”
5. Dominion - “And so Jane Austen has established, in forty words, that her main character leads a sweet life. Baker, in thirty, lets us know that people are eating corpses. Point: Baker.”
6. The Course of the Heart - “I worried at the end that the book would dissolve into meaninglessness, as all realistic novels must, because the real world does not recognize climax and denouement … but suddenly the normal is exalted, and all the spirits at the edge of apprehension make themselves plain.”
7. The Master and Margarita - “sometimes I don’t get these ‘cult’ things (Donnie Darko is not an enjoyable movie), but I’m fully onboard with this one.”
8. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ - “And it’s all so much richer than the official dogma.”
9. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union - “Mike Chabon is a writer with a warm eye and the deep empathy to make his characters next to real.”
10. Playing for Keeps - “Quite simply, the man was a top-flight journalist, with a keen sense of psychology, an endlessly readable style, and a finely honed ability to know what’s relevant to the story.”
11. The Collector - “Fowles got me again.”
12. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City - “‘Who doesn’t want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?’”
13. Nova Swing - “One more brilliant book by one of my favorite authors, so go read it.”
14. Light - “I think this is the ease of a master craftsman entirely comfortable with his medium.”
15. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - “…like an object rushing at you in the fog, indistinct until the last instant, the heart of the book doesn’t become clear until almost the end.”
16. The Snow Leopard - “A leaf makes you see the underlying unity in all things? Really?”
17. Harry Potter 7 - “But then again, your average woman is much more likely to be a reader than your average man (who’s much more likely to be texting his vote to see WHO’S MORE NOW)”
18. Maps for Lost Lovers - “His successes, then, when they occur, must be praised, and so too should his failures be accommodated.”
19. I Am Legend - “He’s a smart writer, who obviously did his homework, only taking narrative shortcuts rarely.”
20. The End of Mr. Y - “am I reading the Player’s Handbook for D&D? What the hell is this?”
21. On Writing - “I’d say the stuff about King’s personal life is more worthwhile than anything he has to say about writing”
22. The Testament of Gideon Mack - “I hereby move that the sentence ‘The blood in my penis beat like a drum’ be banned from the language.”
23. Red Seas Under Red Skies - “it feels a lot like watching some dudes LARP.”

The Top 5: Stones of Summer is an enormously important book to me. I picked it up sophomore year of highschool, and finished it some 3 years later. I’ve never experienced a book like that, with a huge gap in between readings. What’s interesting about it is how crucial that 3 years turned out to be: Stones is divided into three sections, the first of which follows Dawes as a youngster, maybe till he’s 10 years old. I read this at what, 15? I left off right before the second section, which picks up Dawes story when he’s a full-fledged teenager, 18 years of age - just like me when I picked it up again. I imagine a lot of the middle portion of the book would not have made sense to the 15 year old me, but it was not only intelligible, but precision aimed at me, it felt like. Mossman showed me a new way to look at things (crazy as it is), and especially a new way to write. Stones thrums along with an intensity and emotion in its imagery and every sentence that I’m still trying to harness for just short bursts.

The Savage Detectives shares Stones’ sense of unchained expression and vigor. There’s a vital insanity present in both books, and I recognize it in myself on occasion. Bolano’s labile voice astounded me, and I’m sure 52 in 08 will feature some of his other work.

The Road wasn’t at all like the first two, which were both long works that sprinted through great tracts of plot, laughing the whole way. The Road plods through comparatively few pages, and each sentence is a punch in the gut (or the kidneys, depending on how badly Cormac wants to stomp on your feelings). It’s a real masterwork, compact and potent, battered and raw, like some dug up mine that’s still live.

Finn was just a beautiful exercise in style, and had me smiling in amazement over the prose more than any book this year. Clinch lets his sentences stretch and yawn for half a page, cramming clause after clause between the periods, but always maintains complete control. It can sweep you up like the Mississippi.

Dominion was another great style. Most TV shows I really like have a language not at all like my own: The Wire and Deadwood are two good examples. There’s a real joy in unfamiliar dialects, and Dominion has a great one, mixing the propriety of the colonial days with the rawness of the backwoods. Generational stories are a hell of a thing to pull off, and Baker absolutely pulls it off.

The Rest

07 was also the year of M John Harrison. I read Viriconium in December of 06, then hit Light, Nova Swing, and The Course of the Heart in 07. I’m not sure how much of his ouevre I’ve got left to run through, but you can bet I will. With a shifting of my tastes, Harrison seems to emerge as my undisputed favorite author, while the former favorites have fallen by the wayside - he writes about things that interest me, and he does it better than anybody else. Or maybe he’s so good he makes me care about what he’s writing. Either way, the man’s great.

Red Seas Under Red Skies was easily the biggest disappointment of the year, and I think I kinda despise Scott Lynch now.

Also surprised by just how short I fell of 52 books. I felt like I did pretty well this year reading-wise, but a couple stretches of inactivity murdered my shot at hitting 52. We’ll see how 08 goes - I’ve already got a stack of Christmas books demanding my attention, and I try not to glance at them sidelong as I slog through The Master and Margarita. Why, oh why, would I pick the dense russian novel for my capstone?

Satan’s Grand Ball

By some weird coincidence, no less then 3 of the books read this year featured prominently the Great Deceiver himself: The Testament of Gideon Mack, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, and The Master and Margarita. No two depictions were the same - Saramago’s was well-meaning, Bulgakov’s might have been, but that wasn’t in his department, and Robertson’s didn’t seem to give a damn.