Eugene Fischer

Tag: Patrick Ness

Reading 2014: Final Roundup

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My New Year’s resolution for 2014 was to read at least one book per week. I counted as a “book” any bound volume of a complete work, or digital version of the same. So books included things like novels, omnibuses of several novels, novellas published as slim volumes, graphic novels, anthologies, ebooks, or audiobooks. Things that didn’t count were single comic book issues, or individual short stories or articles. My in-progress roundups are here: 1, 2, 3, 4.

For much of the year I was on pace to double my resolved amount, but then I moved from Iowa City to Austin, and my reading rate never really recovered. Looking through my journal I see averaged over 9 books per months before my move, and only a little over 4 per month after. Moving, unpacking, buying furniture, dating, breaking up, traveling; these all replaced the predictability of my Iowa routine after I reached Texas. Here are the stats:

  • 73 total books read
  • 50 prose books
  • 22 graphic novels
  • 1 audiobook
  • 60 male authors (writers & artists)
  • 22 female authors (writers & artists)
  • Best month: March (14 books – 6 GNs, 8 prose)
  • Worst month: October (1 book – prose)

Looking back over my list, there are 12 books (not counting rereads) that stand out as my favorites. Here they are, ranked in order of how much they’ve stayed with me over the last 12 months. That isn’t quite the same thing as how much I liked them, but it’s close.

  1. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
  2. Blame by Michelle Huneven
  3. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
  4. The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis
  5. Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
  6. The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne
  7. Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke1
  8. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
  9. The Genocides by Thomas Disch
  10. Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch
  11. Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck
  12. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

Some things I notice about this is that, while my list for the year doesn’t have gender parity, my list of favorites does: five men (one twice), six women. Also notable is that the top five most-thought-about books are all works of realist fiction, almost certainly the first year of my life when that has been true. I don’t think this is indicative of a shift in my taste so much as an expansion of it. While at Iowa, reading and critiquing the work of my peers, I developed an appreciation for realism that I didn’t have before. My enjoyment of speculative fiction hasn’t lessened, but the appeal of realism is something new and exciting. I think that’s why the top five novels have been so much in my thoughts; I have thorough understanding of how SF works, but I’m still learning the nuances of mimetic realism.

For next year I hope to improve on my 2014 performance. I’d like to hit 100 books read in 2015, and to have at least 50% of them authored by women. I’d also like to read more classic or public domain fiction. At the time of this writing, I’m on my 6th book of the year, and have maintained gender parity thus far.

  1. Technically a reread, but since the first time was when I was under ten years old, I’m counting it. ↩

The Last Books of 2014

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I didn’t get a lot of reading done since my last roundup. Life has gotten in the way, I’m afraid. I have a few books in progress, but soon I’m going to be in Central America and won’t be returning until early next year, so I’m going to go ahead and call my year’s reading here. I’ll do a roundup of all my reading for 2014 later, but for now, the last thirteen capsule reviews.

  1. The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders – Political allegory and social satire, but perpetrated with far less subtlety than Saunders’ short stories. Which isn’t to say it’s bad, but it only works because Saunders’ sense of humor lands far more often than it misses. Reads like he felt he hadn’t said enough when he wrote “The Braindead Megaphone,” and so did a fictional version as well.
  2. Dataclysm by Christian Rudder – Rudder is a cofounder of OKCupid and was the author of the OKTrends blog. This book is a recapitulation and expansion of the kinds of analysis he did there. I think many of the articles are of general interest, but the OKCupid analysis in particular fascinated me as a user of the site. For example, he publishes lists of words that are most likely to be used in profiles by only a single ethnicity. Four of the ones on the list for white people are in my profile.
  3. What If? by Randall Munroe – Mostly articles from the What If? blog. My favorite part was the intermittent samples of the weirdest or most upsetting questions people had submitted. My copy, though, had typesetting issues; in several places there were empty rectangles where there should have been mathematical symbols.
  4. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer – Jeff’s Southern Reach trilogy has been much talked about this year, and well liked by many of my friends. I waited until all three books were available to start it. This book I found mildly entertaining and pleasantly paced, but little more.
  5. Authority by Jeff VanderMeer – I did not enjoy this book. I found it one-note and overlong. I will not be finishing the trilogy.
  6. Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman – Very fun. A collection of fabulations with an occasional physicsy bent.
  7. The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis – What a gorgeous jewel of a book this is. A tender account of the life of an orphan chess prodigy and addict, who grows to adulthood and must learn to navigate both her talent and her dependencies. A much more optimistic book than The Man Who Fell To Earth, which I think it matches in accomplishment.
  8. More Than This by Patrick Ness – A story of young refugees in a confusing world, an Earth that they only discover after their own deaths. Something I like about all of Ness’s fiction is that there is a palpable sense of menace. He doesn’t have a George R. R. Martin-esque bodycount, but he doesn’t need it. The threats in a Ness novel always feel real.
  9. I Die at Midnight by Kyle Baker – I’d been meaning to read this since I was a teenager. A delightful, stylish noir romp.
  10. The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino – This is Kevin Brockmeier’s favorite book by his favorite author, and Carmen Machado loves it too, so I was glad to finally read it. It’s a lovely book, clever, funny, frequently surprising. I don’t think it hit me as hard as it does Kevin and Carmen, though. While I liked it, I occasionally found it overly twee.
  11. Man v. Nature by Diane Cook –An impressive debut collection. I read it in an airport and on airplanes, and barely noticed the travel, except during the stories with explicit sexual content. Her sex writing is legitimately sexy, which made it feel weird to be reading in close contact with strangers in narrow aircraft seats.
  12. Veronica by Mary Gaitskill – I was already a fan of her short stories, and now I know she’s excellent in the long form as well. Veronica is full of tangled, tricky insight. I’ve quoted it previously on the blog, and expect I’ll be writing about it more in the future.
  13. Megalex by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fred Beltran – Not worth it. There’s nothing in here that wasn’t done first and better in the earlier Jodoverse graphic novels, and the ending is too rushed to have any power. For Jodorowsky completists only.

Twenty More Books of 2014

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My last book roundup only had three graphic novels in it. This bunch, though, more than doubles the number I’ve read all year. My rate has also slowed way, way down. (Though I can claim success for my New Year’s resolution of averaging at least a book per week in 2014. No way to miss that mark now.) For both of these, I blame my August move from Iowa to Texas, which sapped huge amounts of my time and attention.

  1. Mad As Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies by Dave Itzkoff – This was a gift from my friend Samantha Lange, in thanks for introducing her to Network, which she had never previously seen. It’s a fantastic retrospective of Paddy Chayefsky’s career leading up to the film, and a detailed look into the production itself. Easily recommended for other Network obsessives.
  2. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett – My mother had been singing Patchett’s praises to me, and so I read Run, which I liked but did not love. Friends told me, though, that I should give Bel Canto a try anyway. They were right. This is an utterly gorgeous book, in the mix for my favorite I’ve read this year. It is a deft piece of kaleidoscopic insight and tenderness, which manages to create some suspenseful, harrowing moments without ever seeming to ask for them. An incredible book.
  3. The Ghost in the Shell by Shirow Masamune – I’d bounced off this book a few times, but now have finally made it to the end. I think it was more an act of stubbornness than anything else. I’ve enjoyed many of animated projects based on Shirow Masamune’s manga, but find the book itself cold, cursory, almost flippant. He clearly puts a very great deal of thought and attention into the functioning of his imagined future, but the stories themselves seem little more than excuses to get aspects of that future on the page. All of the elements of the famous and influential movie of the same name are in here, but almost completely lacking in the liveliness they had on the screen. I own his other GitS volumes, but it will probably be a while before I get to them.
  4. Incandescence by Greg Egan – I love Greg Egan. I love his writing, yes, but I also just love that he exists. There is every other hard science fiction writer who has ever been, and then, floating above them in a diamond firmament, is Greg Egan. What he is doing in this book is so much harder than mere hard science fiction that it’s almost a new kind of literature altogether. And while I get great intellectual excitement from that, I don’t mean it completely as a compliment. This novel is, well, hard. Difficult. The idea was to come up with a scenario where a culture inventing science would come up with relativity before Newtonian mechanics. He pulls this off, but it makes for a narrative experience that is didactic and difficult to follow. Exciting if you are excited by the beauty of physical ideas, but a lot more like doing homework than most things I approach for entertainment. In some writing on his website, Egan indicates that he expects that readers will need to keep a notebook nearby to draw some diagrams if they are to get the most out of the novel. Again, I love Greg Egan. I love that someone is writing novels that ask their readers to draw free-body diagrams. But I didn’t do it; I just followed what I could and trusted that it all hung together. Perhaps that is why I enjoyed this book less than I have Egan’s others: this book insists on being appreciated on its own terms, and I didn’t want to put in the effort.
  5. So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell – This small novel seems to inspire cultish reverence around Iowa City, so I read it. I enjoyed it. But I don’t really see what all the fuss is about. My experience here may have been soured by overbuilt expectation.
  6. Birds of Prey: Of Like Minds by Gail Simone and Ed Benes
  7. Birds of Prey: Sensei & Student by Gail Simone and Ed Benes – I read these two Birds of Prey volumes sitting on the floor of Karen Meisner’s library during my last visit to Madison. I’ve long been wanting to read the BoP comics, and enjoyed these enough that I expect I will track down the rest of the trades sometime soon.
  8. House of Holes by Nicholson Baker – Verbally clever sex farce. The novelty, and thus the entertainment, wore off for me about 2/3 of the way through. (Suspect I would have loved it if it were a Ralph Bakshi-style cartoon, though.) I’ll give Baker another chance though, on the strength of his prose cleverness and his nonfiction writing about pacifism.
  9. The Hustler by Walter Tevis – I only have two more to go, but it’s starting to look like Walter Tevis never wrote anything that wasn’t good. This, his first novel, is excellent. The prose is rougher than in some of his later work, but in a way that fits the story, so for all I know it was intentional. I watched the Paul Newman movie after I finished the book, and thought it was good in the places where it recapitulated what Tevis wrote, and inexcusable in the places it didn’t. Loved the book, hated the movie.
  10. Seconds by Bryan Lee O’Malley – I’m a huge fan of his previous work, Scott Pilgrim, so I was eager to read this book, though I didn’t expect it to be more of the same. Thus, I wasn’t at all disappointed. While there are a few notes of Pilgrim-esque humor (including one direct callback), Seconds is it’s own book, and a very successful one. It’s about the spirits of places, and about fucking up your life by altering your own history. It’s great.
  11. Dragon Ball vol. 1 by Akira Toriyama
  12. Dragon Ball vol. 2 by Akira Toriyama
  13. Dragon Ball vol. 3 by Akira Toriyama
  14. Dragon Ball vol. 4 by Akira Toriyama
  15. Dragon Ball vol. 5 by Akira Toriyama
  16. Dragon Ball vol. 6 by Akira Toriyama
  17. Dragon Ball vol. 7 by Akira Toriyama – Moving from Iowa to Texas was long, involved, and unpleasant. While I was doing it, I wanted something to read that would take no effort at all, just pure, mindless entertainment. These fit the purpose nicely. I might finish the series someday. I might wait to do it until I’m similarly stressed out again.
  18. The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem – I love Lem. So when I heard that the movie The Congress was based on this Lem novel, I was very excited to watch it with my parents, also Lem fans. It was terrible, a total train wreck of a film. No one should pay to see it. Read the book instead, which is a minor one of his works, but fun and short.
  19. The Adventures of Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware – I read this many years ago, but had forgotten much of it. It’s truly excellent, though given the universal acclaim you probably already knew that. The reread was inspired by [redacted], who identified this as her favorite novel, graphic or otherwise. Also, having recently read Essex County, I was struck by the similarity between this and Lemire’s book. Since they are both collections of work originally serialized, I’d need to know more about the timelines to even begin to guess at vectors of influence.
  20. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness – I have been a fan of Ness’s writing since I read his Chaos Walking trilogy. This book, illustrated by Jim Kay and based on a concept by the late Siobhan Dowd, is gorgeous. Gorgeously written, gorgeously drawn. A heartbreaking fable of stories and loss, and clearly deserving of its multiple awards. I own a copy of Ness’s novel More Than This, and will probably read it soon.