52 in 08 Recap

1. Tree of Smoke – “All those books are, for me, definitive books on their respective wars. Tree of Smoke joins these ranks immediately and belongs there by all rights.”
2. Gravity’s Rainbow – “That humanity is missing from Gravity’s Rainbow, and makes it just superb instead of an all-time favorite.”
3. Revolutionary Road – “I find suburban banality just as insufferable as the next guy – I lived it for all these years, didn’t I? But Yates works magic with his material, and this is a full-blooded masterwork, a flat out book, top to bottom.”
4. Catch-22 – “Tenderhearted gravity combines with plenty of great jokes to make Catch-22 astounding. It’s some book.”
5. Out Stealing Horses – “Out Stealing Horses stands up as a great book. It’s moving and emotional, but also understated, with a typically Scandinavian reserve.”
6. Jesus’ Son – ” Credit Johnson for writing a readable, profound, and fast-paced book of short stories… It’s too good to pace yourself.”
7. The Crying of Lot 49 – “Thomas Pynchon writes just like Vonnegut might’ve, had he a thing for trannies.”
8. Drown – “Drown is a brief, achingly personal set of stories about the immigrant life, and not just after borders have been crossed… This is also a scalding portrayal of some damaged people in a foreign land, just looking to get by.”
9. The Bone People – “The Bone People still effortlessly grips its readers, enthralling with its weird poetry and stark depictions of domestic violence and things far stranger still.”
10. Survival In Auschwitz – “Survival In Auschwitz is a book that’s desperately alive, immutably vital, and it proves that there’s life even in the death camps.”
11. Slaughterhouse Five – “How can one get a handle on something this huge? How do you even put it into perspective? I’d say reading Slaughterhouse-Five is a good start.”
12. The Awakening – “it’s readable and engaging, and a credibly bold vanguard for the modernist writers to follow.”
13. White Noise – “smart, well-executed books without empathetic characters are doomed to linger in that second tier.”
14. House of Mirth – “Wharton improves upon Austen’s formula… Higher risk, and higher reward”
15. Diary of a Bad Year – “a subtle and potent book with a catholic set of interests, intriguing structure, and a fearless eye.”
16. The Grapes of Wrath – “[it] missteps occasionally, losing assurance and spiralling into bombast, but you have to respect the reasons for it – this is a passionate book directly responding to the real world.”
17. Old Filth – “…a well-crafted meditation on the pains of dotage, the power of desire, and the importance of memory.”
18. Breaks of the Game – “The book’s real subject and interest is the whole of the NBA as it stood at the brink of the 1980s… It’s a comprehensive story, and an example of what a great journalist can do with total access.”
19. The Echo Maker - “Powers lulls you into this fever dream of the flatlands of Nebraska and a self strange to itself, and when you wake up from it, things are changed.”
20. The Stone Raft – “This fable might lack the impact of his later Blindness or the strong characters of The Gospel, but still bears his trademark narration and wry good-humor.”
21. FreeDarko Presents… – “for FD devotees, these essays are fairly rote…I think it’s a great start to the FD book catalogue, but there’s a ton more to be done with it.”
22. Then We Came to The End – “…threatens to be a weaker version of the third season of The Office (which wasn’t even a good season to begin with).”
23. The 42nd Parallel – “Dos Passos writes great sentences that are short on punctuation and leave you breathless and impressed.”
24. The Odyssey – “For all that, there’s still something essential about this plot… Unfortunately all that good stuff is all too rare in a bloated narrative. Decent at best.”
25. The Marrow of Tradition – “instructive and readable.”
26. McTeague – “It’s a refreshing book because it spits in the face of stuffy Victorian mores, but its crude writing and meanness of spirit hamstring it.”
27. The Bostonians – “I’m not going to pretend that this is a book that spoke to me personally or really fired me up. But as a piece of writing craft, it’s tidy, and executed about as well as its conceived.”
28. Pudd’nhead Wilson – “Not a bad book to read for class, but not one to be sought out for pleasure reading.”
29. Of One Blood – “Mediocre in the context of the class, which means I wouldn’t recommend it.”
30. The Country of the Pointed Firs – “It’s just a lump of text on a page about some trees in Maine.”
31. The Good Fairies of New York – “Every single scene feels like he’s glossing over it.”

The Top 5

Ordering the top three this year was tricky, as I read three masterpieces in Gravity’s Rainbow, Tree of Smoke, and Revolutionary Road. I disqualified Road from contention for the top spot, as when it comes to an expertly crafted novel versus an insane sprawling epic, I give the nod to the insane sprawling epic. But which one? Gravity’s Rainbow and Tree of Smoke could both be used as blunt instruments, and both feature prose that threatens to ignite on the page. Gravity’s Rainbow has the advantage of acknowledged greatness and a mass of critics hailing it – Tree of Smoke is newer and from a lesser light in American letters. But when it comes down to it, you always have to give it to the book with more heart, and Tree of Smoke has it. The book has access to a deep well of empathy that you look for in a great writer, and while Pynchon can tap into this for stretches, his book is not nourished by it. Rather, Gravity’s Rainbow is built on a great sea of technical manuals, cogs, and flywheels, all over a solid bedrock of obsessiveness.

Since this list is 100% subjective, I don’t really have to justify anything, but I do want to explain Catch 22’s placement. Out of the 31 books I read this year, it’s by most metrics the best. But, I’ve read it before, so it took a hit in the standings. Slaughterhouse Five received similar treatment.

Out Stealing Horses rounds out the top five by being uniquely suited to my own interests. Half my family tree is Scandinavians, and I recognized Petterson’s keen and exhausted prose as the kind of stuff I’m attempting every day.

The Weak Second Half

Aside from Gravity’s Rainbow, I read the top ten in the first half of the year. Once we passed the summer solstice, I read a lot of books that landed  on the middle of the list or below. This can be explained by my English syllabus which, with the exceptions of The Awakening and House of Mirth, filled out the year’s cellar. Ignoring the putrid Good Faeries of New York, EN-357 accounted for the bottom six spots.

But everything’s relative, and considering last year’s list, 08 occupied a much narrower (and higher) band on the quality spectrum. So even Of One Blood kicks the hell out of books like The Testament of Gideon Mack or Red Seas Under Red Skies.

A Strong Nazi Presence

7 out of 31 dealt with Nazis. Beyond the obvious WW2 texts, there’s also the Crying of Lot 49, Out Stealing Horses, and White Noise, which has the leading voice in the field of Hitler Studies for a protagonist. Again, an English syllabus explains this. I had a WW2 lit class in the spring, and the reading list proved the opposite of EN-357 – these all landed near the top.

Movers and Shakers

I place books on the list as I finish them, slotting them in between a book they’re better than and a book they’re worse than. But I revised this list with the benefit of hindsight, and discovered that I enjoyed Drown and Old Filth much more than I thought at first. Drown’s heart and energy bumped it up, and the same for Old Filth’s precision and restraint.

The Bone People is a flawed book, but it’s relatively unknown and that made it something of a discovery. We’re always jealous and protective of these discoveries – an example from last year would be the top book, Stones of Summer. Probably a lesser book than some of the others in the top five, you’d have a hard time convincing me of that. But I can be a little more objective about The Bone People, so it dropped a couple spots.

The Surprises (Good and Bad)

Survival in Auschwitz turned out to be a favorite. Since it’s about the death camps, I expected a tremendous downer (Elie Wiesel’s Night, which I read in 7th grade for class, resides in my mind as more of a scar than a memory). Instead I found an essential kind of book.

Then We Came to the End was burdened by expectation from the start. I’d heard good things from people whose taste I trust, and it had plenty of buzz from all the right litblogs. But, as I mention in the review, it sets a bar it can’t clear in the very first page by alluding to Catch-22, which is an unwise decision. The first person plural voice was effective in spots, gimmicky in others. And the broad range of tones wasn’t brought together in a cohesive way (unlike, say, Catch-22, which does it well).

Breaks of the Game was also a let-down. I dug his book about Jordan, but Halberstam’s magnum opus can be a tedious affair, one that’s laced with lazy writing. Still a great look at the NBA, but not the kind of world-changer I was hoping for.

Best Moment

There were plenty of contenders. For the sake of spoilers, I won’t name the title of this book, but at one part a main character dies. The other characters bury him, but the dead man’s faithful dog won’t leave. It begins digging at the grave, trying to reach its master. One of those “Boy It’s Dusty In Here” moments.

Out Stealing Horses ends beautifully, but I can’t even try to describe it without spoilers. Still, its last line has stuck with me for the last sixth months.

On my second read of Catch-22, a lot of new scenes stuck out. Foremost among these is Yossarian’s proposal to Luciana, the Italian woman with the mysterious scar. It’s the most poignant instance of the dreaded Catch in the book, and this line: “The minute she was gone, Yossarian tore the lsip of paper up and walked away in the other direction, feeling very much like a big shot because a beautiful young girl like Luciana had slept with him and did not ask for money,”  is a sucker punch.

But even that falls short of the interlude with Lieutenant Cadawaller featured in Tree of Smoke. The best 20 consecutive pages I read all year, Cadawaller is Denis Johnson’s take on Lieutenant Dan from Forrest Gump: the bitter amputee. Since it’s Denis Johnson, he takes it to the next level, and this scene right in the middle of the book begins to feel like its center.

52 in 09

I’m already halfway through The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, one of a half dozen books I got for Christmas. While I did eight better in 08 compared to 07, I’m hoping to break forty if not fifty this year. Gravity’s Rainbow killed my pace – it took me something like 4 months to finish. But it was extremely rewarding, so I don’t anticipate shying away from Tomes in 09 either, especially since I want to read Infinite Jest, and I have Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song sitting (hulking?) on my desk.

Aside from the challenge of Gravity’s Rainbow, I simply didn’t work hard enough to find time for reading during first semester. We’ll see if I can’t do better.