Eugene Fischer

Tag: Naomi Jackson

Reading 2015: Final Roundup

MyRealChildren_Jo-WaltonI never did a Reading2015 post for December, but I only read one book during the month, My Real Children by Jo Walton, which I consumed on Christmas day. I adored it. It’s the story of a woman who, in her old age, can remember living two distinctly different lives, stemming from a single choice in her youth. It’s an alternate history of alternate histories, with chapters alternating between two very different life courses that, in the end, ask you to make an impossible ethical and aesthetic judgement, what Ursula Le Guin on the back cover calls “a sort of super Sophie’s Choice.” I’m always a sucker for branching narrative, the way the space between the threads opens room for new resonances and emotions, just as a paper towel doubled over can absorb more than the same sheet applied flat. This book might just be my new go-to example of the form.

So here’s where that leaves my stats for 2015:

  • 67 total books
  • 35 prose books
  • 32 graphic novels
  • 26 women authors (writer or artist)
  • 44 books authored or co-authored by women
  • 33 male authors (writer or artist)
  • 28 books authored or co-authored by men.
  • Best month: September (12 books – all GNs)
  • Worst month: December (1 book – prose)

As with last year, here the the books (not counting re-reads) that stand out in most my memory (which isn’t exactly the same thing exactly as how much I liked them):

  1. The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine
  2. My Real Children by Jo Walton
  3. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
  4. On Wings of Song by Thomas Disch
  5. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
  6. The Sculptor by Scott McCloud
  7. Tenth of December by George Saunders
  8. Get In Trouble by Kelly Link
  9. Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill
  10. Angel of Losses by Stephanie Feldman
  11. Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson
  12. The Wilds by Julia Elliott
  13. Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce

Some interesting things include the presence of only one graphic novel, despite the form making up nearly half of my reading. That’s largely due to my having re-read all of Dykes to Watch Out For, all of which were ineligible for this list.  Another is which Mary Gaitskill book made the list. I think that in many ways the collection Because They Wanted To is the stronger of the two Gaitskill volumes I read this past year, but it’s her first novel my mind alights on more easily. And I can’t do anything about the wiring of memory, and what it may have to do with two books I read in just the last two month making my top 5.

It was my resolution for 2015 to read 100 books, and I fell short not just of that mark, but of my 2014 mark of 73 books read. I attribute this primarily to having started doing some work for television, which prompted me to massively increase my television watching. I would say the TV I’ve consumed, added to the hundreds of hours of Fallout 4 I played in November, is easily equal to 33 books. But since I don’t have any better ideas, I’m going to go ahead an roll over my 2015 resolution to 2016, and aim for 100 books read in the year to come.

Reading 2015: July

JulyReading2015

Hard month. Here’s what I read.

  1. Pluto vol. 1 by Naoki Urasawa
  2. Pluto vol. 2 by Naoki Urasawa – These two were lent my by Janalyn Guo. It’s a science fiction manga, a murder mystery set in a future populated by both humans and robots, some of which have human-level AI. It’s also a reimagining of an Astro Boy story by Osamu Tezuka. I’ve never read any Tezuka; he’s an author I’ve long intended to binge on, but just never gotten around to. So reading these was enjoyable, but I was constantly feeling they were relying on allusive plot points and images which were lost on me. For example, the ending notes of both volumes are introductions of new characters whose design and name are clearly intended to thunder with recognition of their famous antecedents. As I’m not familiar with the source material, the effect didn’t land. But I’m still finding the story interesting, and will likely read more.
  3. The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson – Naomi was a classmate at Iowa, and having read many pieces of her short fiction I was excited for her debut novel. It’s a story of four women–two sisters from Brooklyn, their grandmother, and their mother–over a summer in Barbados when the relationships between all four oscillate, solidify, shatter. The book is written in a fluid POV that illustrates each facet of the characters’ shared emotional experience so that the reader has access to the whole, just as perpendicular shadows, though flat, can reveal a three-dimensional shape. It’s a very effective technique, pulled off with a sure and sympathetic hand. Naomi’s writing is evocative throughout, and frequently piercing, as in this passage that I particularly loved.
  4. Vox by Nicholson Baker – I get why people like this book. It’s a novel all in dialogue between two strangers on a sex chat line; a structurally interesting exercise in playfully obsessive eroticism. I understand why sexy fiction pursued with a joyous, intellectual abandon is attractive to people. But as with House of Holes, I had to struggle to finish this. It’s one-note, and once I’d grasped the algorithm of its experimentation, I just got bored. While it’s laudably enthusiastic and uninhibited, I found the book neither arousing nor surprising, and so had little to keep me invested. Baker’s fiction may just not be for me.
Hyacinth looked at this child, at her flinty eyes, and saw how much she believed that she was not only right, but also justified. And she knew that this was the thing that would harm Dionne in the end, not her foolishness but the foolhardy way in which she clung to her own terrible ideas. She knew that this was Avril's undoing, not that she'd made the wrong choices, but that she'd been so unwilling to let anyone in to see the lie of her marriage; this masking was worse than the original mistake. Sixty-three years on this earth had taught Hyacinth that it wasn't so much the mistakes that people made but how flexible they were in their aftermath that made all the difference in how their lives turned out. It was the women who held too tightly to the dream of their husband's fidelity who unraveled, the parents who clasped their children too close who lost them, the men who grieved too deeply the lives they'd wanted and would never have who saw their sadness consume them. Hyacinth worried about Dionne because of her hard way of being in the world, the way she could only see the world through the lens of her own flawed feelings. –from The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson