Maybe it's just a dispassion toward the medium of film or music or television as of late. Maybe it's the desire to take on a form I've yet to truly get entrenched in. I don't mean to say I've tackled all I'd like to in film or music. I am saying that the novel is the least familiar to me. Libraries have been a constant in my life and continue to be. Fiction, on the other hand, is something I haven't even scratched the surface of. Out of the forms mentioned, it has the most history.
Reading a book that's 200 to 300 pages takes dedication. It's not a passive activity where you press play. It requires you to set aside a chunk of time each day. Because of this, I am very picky about what I decide to read. Our lives are finite so spending time sparring with the masters is time considerably better spent than picking up the book of the week from the New York Times. I love Anthony Fantano's Needle Drop channel but I can't imagine being a reviewer who has to catch up on all the latest music that comes out. The same goes for books.
A UNESCO study revealed that 750 million people still cannot read and write and 250 million children are failing to acquire basic literacy skills. A Human Development Report showed that in the the United States alone, 32 million (roughly 20%) cannot read or write. This is more than 1 in 10 people. I consider myself incredibly fortunate and grateful.
You can see my reading drop off toward November and December. Playing catch up on the films and television I missed this year made me realize just how easy it is to get sucked into binge watching movies or television. Film was my first love. Then music. The 'torrid affair' I've had with reading has not just usurped those two art forms but made me question what I want to do with my life.
The year of reading was quite a journey.
I started off at the bottom of a mountain and made sure to bring enough supplies to last me the trip up and enough for the climb down. The fiction ranged from 1894 up until the present year 2018 and came from not just the States but Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, Norway, Belarus, and Japan. The final book from one of my heroes Denis Johnson was published. The first book from a promising author Tommy Orange was published. Literary legend Philip Roth passed away. Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk was adapted by Barry Jenkins, the director of one of my favorite films in Moonlight. Jeff Van Der Meer's weird fiction was introduced to a whole new audience through the film adaptation of Annihilation. I met Otessa Moshfegh, Jac Jemc and Lawrence Wright. Saw Joyce Carol Oates talk craft with a bottomless depth of knowledge. Continued the multi year journey with Karl Ove Knasusgaard and his My Struggle opus. Was introduced to Cesar Aira, William Faulkner, Harry Crews, Samuel Beckett, Dennis Lehane, and Rodrigo Fresan. Dug further into a hero with David Lynch's autobiography and made a new hero through Anthony Bourdain's autobiography.
I have grown and am a better person because of these books. Below is a list of 20 of my favorite books and 10 of my favorite non fiction books I read this year. If you're looking for something worthwhile to read, start with these:
TOP 20 BOOKS
20. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson (2018)
19. Things We Lost In the Fire by Mariana Enriquez (2017)
18. The Elementals by Michael McDowell (1981)
17. The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector (1977)
16. An Episode In the Life of A Landscape Painter by Cesar Aira (2000)
15. Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (2017)
14. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (1979)
13. Mystic River by Dennis Lehane (2001)
12. Books of Blood Vol. 1-3 by Clive Barker (1984)
11. If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin (1974)
10. Teattro Grotesco by Thomas Ligotti (2006)
9. The Trial by Franz Kafka (1914)
8. The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresan (2017)
7. Pet Semetary by Stephen King (1983)
6. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)
5. The Book of Monelle by Marcel Schwob (1894)
4. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano (1998)
3. Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo (1955)
2. Light In August by William Faulkner (1932)
1. The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares (1940)
10. The Road to Jonestown by Jeff Guinn (2017)
9. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures In the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain (2000)
8. House of Psychotic Women by Kier-la Janisse (2012)
7. The Looming Tower: The Road to al-Qaeda and 9/11 by Lawrence Wright (2006)
6. Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich (1997)
5. A Childhood: The Biography of A Place by Harry Crews (1978)
4. My Struggle Book Three: Boyhood Island by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2009)
3. Homicide: A Year On the Killing Streets by David Simon (1992)
2. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1965)
1. Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz (1991)
THE COMPLETE LIST
JANUARY
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (1996) (NF- Adventure/Memoir)
Probably the most interesting anecdote in this book is how people who venture to brave Everest- or any major mountain summit- must possess an uncanny drive toward their goals. While at the same time, they must also be aware of the limitations of their drive. This is why, as Krakauer explains, there are so many corpses littering the mountain. Whether it be hubris or a set of critical miscalculations, Into Thin Air revealed Everest to be a mountain filled with ghosts. Where the mistakes made from that tragic 1996 expedition were heedlessly discarded by so many future climbers of that famous mountain in Nepal.
Salem's Lot by Stephen King (1975)
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo (1955)
This 120 page novel packs just as much punch as a lengthy tome. Susan Sontag writes in the introduction that the book feels akin to a fairytale. A story told before. It's Mexican Gothic Literature that paved the road for Marquez (who loved Pedro Paramo so much that he memorized it all!), Cortazar, and so many other writers of the 20th century. It's a transformative song about the search for heritage that brings our narrator at a crossroads between past and present. No climax. No hooks. No character arcs. No prologue or epilogue. It's elusiveness as potent as the ghosts the haunt the town of Comala, telling stories of the man known as Pedro Paramo.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1965) (NF- True Crime)
In the morning hours of November 15, 1959, the Clutter family, residents to Holcomb, Kansas, were murdered. The motive? Simple robbery. When asked how much the murderers procured, one of them answered "between $40 and $50".
Between that day and the hanging of Richard Eugene "Dick" Hicock and Perry EdwardSmith, Harper Lee, Capote's friend and one of whom this book is dedicated to, published her first (and up until 2015, her only) book. It would be met with acclaim and turned into a movie two years later. Much in the same way In Cold Blood was met with immediate acclaim and Hollywood-ized in 1967.
Up until that point, fiction and non fiction had their places in a library. By synthesizing novelistic elements into his journalism, Capote proved that non fiction can be as a compelling narrative as a fiction one. The empathy and detail he imbues in each person- from Hickock and Smith themselves to the people that resided in the cells next to them on death row to a dying father and his boy out to collect Coca-Cola bottles- is astonishing. Capote spent 5 years of his life researching his subjects for what would be his last book. It is, by any definition, a masterpiece at that.
A Simple Plan by Scott Smith (1993)
John Lennon once said "Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans." If he had lived to read A Simple Plan, he would have scrapped the word "Life" for "Blackmail, betrayal, and murder."
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson (2018)
"Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson,
and I am almost ready to
confess it is not some awful
misunderstanding that has carried
me here, my arms full of the ghosts
of flowers, to kneel at your feet..."
-from the poem Now from The Incognito Lounge
The final word in a life full of all the right ones. Denis Johnson always knew how to whittle down a sentence to a fine point so it could pierce the soul. Sentences that will pivot from laughter to sorrow with effortless grace. These five stories are vibrant examples of him at his best. I still have hook holes in my heart from Johnson pulling me close (so close I could "see the veins in his teeth") to Cass in Starlight In Idaho. The hospitals and jails where crimson demons and angels share a laugh- laughs I heard before from Jesus' Son and welcome them- be it in a new light- with a warm embrace. His characters are dealing with reckoning. And the light they seek from the darkness is the kind only Johnson could supply.
FEBRUARY
Light In August by William Faulkner (1932)
This was my first Faulkner. It won't be my last.
It took some time to really get into his style. It all clicked on Chapter 6, where he opens with the beautiful quote "Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders." The background of Joe Christmas is some of the finest drawn character sketches I've read. Anything that deals with generational conflict or traits being passed down from father to son is my kind of bag. What Faulkner does here is take that and add a whole new level of complexity. Adoption, mixed race and religious stoicism. It creates this blanket of tragedy that a lesser author would not have expounded on. So what does Faulkner do next? He goes even further by showing us events from multiple perspectives. I haven't even gotten into how great a character Rev. Hightower is or Byron Bunch. And that ending. That ending gutted me.
The best part of this reading experience was knowing I have so much more Faulkner left to read. 1 down 18 to go.
If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin (1974)
The Road to Jonestown by Jeff Guinn (2017) (NF- True Crime)
Religion is something that has always fascinated me and, for a large part of my life, something I was involved in. I have since left the faith. What I find so interesting about cults is how the members keep themselves imprisoned. Why don't they leave? How did they get sucked into it?
Jeff Guinn's book answers those questions about Peoples Temple in the same way Lawrence Wright gave me answers about Scientology with Going Clear. There have been many books about Jonestown in the wake of the tragedy. Raven, by journalist Tim Reiterman- who was there on the tarmac when Congressman Leo Ryan was murdered- being the most popular and acclaimed. While that book certainly benefits from the telling from a man who was there, this book benefits from the passage of time. More importantly, while survivors have written memoirs and books themselves, Guinn presents Jim Jones and People Temple in an objective light as possible. The passage of time allows for a clarity of the history of what went wrong on the fateful day on November 18, 1978.
In the aftermath of Jonestown, the media swarmed in on the members of People Temple, trying to get as much dirt on the leader through salacious scandal. Guinn wisely plays a fair hand to what was going on. These were people who genuinely believed they were doing good. And, for a good portion of the time, they were. If Jim Jones were strictly diabolical in the way Manson was or Scientology's Hubbard was, this story wouldn't be nearly as fascinating. If anything, Jones was a majorly disappointing figure. Someone who genuinely hated inequality, fought against it by desegregating restaurants and whose congregation was predominantly black. Yet there was another component missing as he took Peoples Temple on his journey to the Promised Land. (The insight into Jones' past gives ample evidence as to how he was the way he was.) In its place, Jones created fear as a motivational tool. This only became inflamed and grew to the point of inevitable catastrophe.
The Shining by Stephen King (1977)
MARCH
The Gospel Singer by Harry Crews (1968)
| It's Enigma, Georgia. The first stop in Crews Country. A place where people are so desperate to believe in miracles that they infuse all their hopes into The Gospel Singer. This book had an unforgettable ending that I was not expecting. |
| A Childhood covers six years of novelist Harry Crews' life. The physical intensities within stirred my soul and chilled my bones. His description of a time and place where "survival is triumph enough" and "when something was necessary, it was done. To a mule or a child, it didn't matter." Crews transported me to the dirt roads of Bacon County, Georgia. It wasn't a pretty picture. But I'm grateful for having gone on the journey with him. Would I read it again? Damn right I would. | |
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)
In an interview, Martin Scorsese called The Age of Innocence his most violent film. Yet there is no bloodshed. No guns. No mob hits. What there is plenty of is "brutality in the manners." Scorsese continues "People hide what they mean under the surface of language. In the subculture I was around when I grew up in Little Italy, when somebody was killed, there was a finality to it. It was usually done by the hands of a friend. And in a funny way, it was almost like ritualistic slaughter, a sacrifice. But New York society in the 1870s didn't have that. It was so cold-blooded. I don't know which is preferable."
Edith Wharton captures this cold bloodedness, of restrictive social mores, and of people who "dread scandal more than disease" perfectly. Though it doesn't end there. Her descriptions of the prized possessions of New York very much imbue it with a critique on nostalgia.
"He was not sure that he wanted to see the Countess Olenska again; but ever since he had looked at her from the path above the bay he had wanted, irrationally and indescribably, to see the place she was living in, and to follow the movements of her imagined figure as he had watched the real one in the summer house. The longing was with him day and night, an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food or drink once tasted and long since forgotten.He could not see beyond the craving, or picture what it might lead to, for he was not conscious of any wish to speak to Madame Olenska or to hear her voice. He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty."
This quoted text is the nucleus of the novel. In a world of social tradition that is constrained by boundaries, the character of Newland Archer represents that longing for something more.
That something being Countess Olenska. To Olenska, Newland represents someone who upholds society and honors family values. To Newland, Olenska is a break from the bourgeois conventions of New York. Each covets something the other has. May Welland, Archer's wife, very embodies the conservative New York society.
Wharton gave me a peek inside this "heiroglyphic world" and the beating heart of the the triangle of Newland Archer, Countess Olenska and May Welland. I now long to someday return to it.
I feel like this book is the big sister to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, published five years later.
Homicide: A Year On the Killing Streets by David Simon (1992) (NF- True Crime)
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace to the Sea by Yukio Mishima (1963)
APRIL
Things We Lost In the Fire by Mariana Enriquez (2017)
The Temptation to Exist by E.M. Cioran (1968) (NF- Philosophy)
Nadja by Andre Breton (1928)
"Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all."
The ideas that Breton plays with have a poetic side to them. And he is not afraid to reference his influences in the book- Baudelaire, Rimabaud. Nadja is less a character and more a feeling. The surrealist idea. It maps out pre WWII Paris in a bizarre fashion that only a person like Breton could convey. It's disorienting and doesn't work all the time, but it's an interesting experiment nonetheless.
King Me by Roger Reeves (2013) (Poetry)
Provinces of Night by William Gay (2000)
A book that begins with a jar of tiny human bones and sets off from there. In the tradition of McCarthy and especially Faulkner, Gay wrestles with grand themes revolving around family. The whole cast of characters is memorable. Even Albright, whose name starkly contrasts with his actions throughout the novel. Stories and subplots weave in and out and flow into each other like veins on a leaf. It is Fleming Bloodworth, however, who I took liking to the most. His relationship with Raven Lee Halfacre, the prettiest girl in a 3 county area, is perfectly realized.
The Insufferable Gaucho by Roberto Bolano (2003)
From Here to Eternity by Caitlyn Doughty (2017) (NF- Death and Dying)
Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag by Sigrid Nunez (2011) (NF- Biography/Memoir)
Mrs. Dalloway by Virgina Woolf (1923)
Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler (1940)
MAY
Eileen by Ottessa Mosfegh (2015)
The Lonely City: Adventures In the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing (2017) (NF- Memoir/Essay)
Olivia Laing has strung together a memoir, an autobiography and a handful of essays on artists whose art affected her and in turn affect the reader. It's a rabbit hole book. The kind where after you are done or even as you are reading, you want to look up Warhol's pieces or see if a physical copy of Henry Darger's In the Realms of the Unreal just to awe at the sheer size of the thing. Or hunt down David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives or watch the Josh Harris documentary We Live In Public. A lesser author would have just written a memoir about loneliness in the city of Manhattan. What Laing has done here is mushroom outward the experiences of these artists and synthesized them into saying something far greater about the need for connection in the lonely city.
Murphy by Samuel Beckett (1938)
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano (1998)
"For a while Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irredemiably into the Great Vastness. And one day, the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man's memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy."
In The Savage Detectives, a character makes a point that the human orgasm lasts up to 6 minutes. Not true. It took me a lot longer to read this book.
Why this book works so well is its structure and the bottomless characterization within. For the first part we follow a limited set of characters as they read, eat and fuck: the essentials, really. We learn about the Visceral Realist movement, the minds that spawned it, and the excitement surrounding it.
Then it shifts. It turns into could almost be considered a documentary on paper. We get first person interviews with the lives that weave in and out of Arturo Belano and Ulisses Lima: the loves, the friends, and enemies they brushed up against. Octavio Paz even makes a brief, but memorable, appearance.
When reading it, I got several bursts of inspiration and a strange sense of melancholy.
All the Pieces Matter: The Definitive Oral History of The Wire by Jonathan Abrams (2018) (NF- TV)
I'll Be Gone In the Dark by Michelle McNamara (2018) (NF- True Crume)
JUNE
Rough Animals by Rae DelBianco (2018)
My Struggle Book Three: Boyhood Island by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2009) (NF)
I'm listening to Roxy Music's More Than This as I type out this review. Having just finished the 3rd book of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series. A volume of books that has managed to cull memories from my own life as I read about the memories from a man whom I have never met and takes place in a land I never set foot. This symbiosis is something that makes the reading experience transcend the average book. You are living out life with him.
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (1979)
The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares (1940)
Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz (1991) (NF)
The Trial by Franz Kafka (1914)
Springfield Confidential: A Lifetime of Writing for The Simpsons by Mike Reiss (2018) (NF)
JULY
Mystic River by Dennis Lehane (2001)
Room to Dream by David Lynch (2018) (NF)
The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera Garza (2017)
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh (2018)
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures In the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain (2000) (NF)
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse (1951)
The Coast of Chicago: Stories by Stuary Dybek (1990)
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder (2017) (NF)
AUGUST
Robin by Dave Itzkoff (2018) (NF)
Outline by Rachel Cusk (2014)
The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal (1948)
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (2017)
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (1972)
SEPTEMBER
The Book of Monelle by Marcel Schwob (1894)
The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresan (2017)
The Looming Tower: The Road to al-Qaeda and 9/11 by Lawrence Wright (2006) (NF)
Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio De Maria (1977)
Miss Lonelyhearts/Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1933/39)
Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich (1997) (NF)
The Changeling by Joy Williams (1978)
Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudaleire (1857) (Poetry)
OCTOBER
The Open Curtain by Brian Evenson (2006)
Comemadre by Roque Larraquy (2010)
Teattro Grotesco by Thomas Ligotti (2006)
House of Psychotic Women by Kier-la Janisse (2012) (NF)
Pet Semetary by Stephen King (1983)
The Cipher by Kathe Koja (1991)
The October Country by Ray Bradbury (1955)
NOVEMBER
The Elementals by Michael McDowell (1981)
McDowell is the screenwriter for Beetlejuice and Nightmare Before Christmas. If that isn't enough to make you want to pick up his books then this should do it: imagine if a southern gothic writer wrote horror stories with family dynamics so strong you'd expect to find them in a Steinbeck or Faulkner novel.
Paperbacks From Hell by Grady Hendrix (2018) (NF)
A book worth purchasing for the vintage 70's and 80's horror covers alone. Luckily, it's backed up with a load of insight and a wit to match. Grady divives the book into subgenres:Hail, Satan, Creepy Kids, When Animals Attack, Real Estate Nightmares, Weird Science, Gothic and Romantic, Inhumanoids, Splatterpunks Serial Killers and Super Creeps. Just be prepared for a laundry list of titles you'll want to read once you finish the book.
Books of Blood Vol. 1-3 by Clive Barker (1984)
DECEMBER
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector (1977)
***IN PROGRESS***
The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Conner
2666 by Roberto Bolano
