Tag: Walter Tevis

June 1, 2015

Reading 2015: May

I got in a bicycle accident early in May and broke my wrist, so was unable to type for about a week and a half. This took a bite out of my work schedule, which I filled with, yes, more TV, but also more reading.

I Kill Giants by Joe Kelly and JM Ken Niimura – An enjoyable graphic novel that was similar in many ways to Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls. A creature out of myth intercedes in the life of a child who is trying and failing to deal with the serious illness of her mother. In this case the monster is a titan rather than the Green Man, and the relationship is for the most part adversarial rather than didactic, but thematically the two books have a great deal of overlap. I’m glad I read A Monster Calls first, as it’s the more emotionally complex work, doing deep explorations of things about survivor guilt that I Kill Giants only superficially touches. But it’s possible that whichever of these two one reads second will suffer due to familiarity with the shared narrative beats.
Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel – This graphic novel, meanwhile, isn’t superficial about anything. In many ways a sequel to Fun Home, this purports to be about Alison Bechdel’s relationship with her mother, but more about using the concept of maternal relationships as a lens to look at memoir and neurosis. It struck me as a less focused book than Fun Home, but a trip through Bechdel’s expansive, unflinching intellect is so inherently interesting that the experience doesn’t much suffer for being less structured. It did make me want to go back and read Fun Home again, though.
The Color of Money by Walter Tevis – This was the last Tevis novel I’d not yet read. (There should be a word for the bittersweet feeling of finishing the last unread book by a favorite, deceased author.) It’s a decades-later sequel to his first novel, The Hustler, and while it’s not my favorite of his novels, I found Tevis’s writing as gripping as ever. My main complaint about this book is that too much of it seemed to recapitulate emotional gestures from The Hustler and plot gestures from The Queens Gambit, both of which I’d judge to be superior works. But there was a moment I found really touching, one that only this book could do. There’s an important scene early in The Hustler where Fast Eddie’s opponent, Minnesota Fats, disappears into a bathroom and then emerges, composed, having washed his hands and face. Though Tevis never points at the callback, there’s a moment near the end of The Color of Money where Fast Eddie does this same thing, and for readers who’ve read both books the parallelism is profound.
Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill – Gaitskill has sort of snuck up on me, slowly and quietly becoming one of my favorite authors. She’s one of the least sentimental writers I’ve encountered, but she creates emotional landscapes that are as solid as her physical settings. I first came to her work years ago after seeing the movie “Secretary,” and wanting to read it’s presumably pro-BDSM source material. What I found was much darker, more complicated, and personal than the movie had led me to expect. In Gaitskill’s writing I run into aching blends of disappointment and desire that are deeply recognizable, supported by sentences I never would have written. Her work captures facets of my lived emotional experience using a technology of images I don’t yet understand. This book, though it didn’t grab me as much as her second novel Veronica, wasn’t an exception. It’s about two women, Dorothy Never and Justine Shade, of different age, class, body shape, and worldview, but similarly traumatized by early life experience. They meet when Justine interviews Dorothy about her involvement with a thinly veiled Ayn Rand and Objectivist movement. It’s got some structural formality as well, with Dorothy’s sections in first person and Justine’s in third. This formality was a little bit of a stumbling block for me initially, for no reason than it made the book easier to put down at chapter transitions. But by the end the POVs are switching so fast and with such narrative momentum that I was hooked, and consumed the third section of the book in a compulsive gulp.
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks – I’ve read nearly all of Banks’s science fiction, but this was my first of his realist novels. (I’m sticking with the “Iain M. Banks” tag since it’s the same person, even though he left off the middle initial for these books.) Calling it “realist” seems only barely appropriate. Though nothing in this novel is impossible, it’s improbable as all hell. The viewpoint character is a sociopathic young man, a former murderer and practitioner of sympathetic magic, in what turns out to be a whole family of mentally damaged individuals. In some ways it struck me, especially in the beginning, as a sort of adolescent version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The POV is interesting enough and the macabre violence colorful enough that I was pulled enjoyably through the book, but–and here’s where the SPOILERS start–the final twist seemed like something of a pointless gotcha. The openly misogynist main character who believes himself to have lost his genitalia in a childhood accident turns out to actually be a biological female whose father has been secretly dosing with testosterone since childhood. This is revealed only a few pages from the end, and never narratively problematized. It’s a fireworks show of imaginative voice and depravity, but didn’t in the end seem to mean very much.
The Angel of Losses by Stephanie Feldman – I met Stephanie at ICFA this year, where she was awarded the Crawford award for this novel. Now that I’ve read it, I think the win well deserved. It’s an intrusive urban fantasy story grounded in Jewish mysticism and structured like a mystery novel. Marjorie, who at the start of the book isn’t even aware of her Jewish heritage, discovers after her grandfather dies that all the fairy tales he told her as a child were true. She has to find lost documents and rediscover ancient knowledge to try to save her sister’s newborn son, sometimes opposed by her ultra-orthodox brother-in-law. My favorite parts of the book though are the four long, beautiful passages written with cadence of folklore. Also, as I have a somewhat uneasy relationship with my own Judaism, this narrative was embedded in a point of view that I found, tonally, very recognizable.
Collected Fiction by Hannu Rajaniemi – I loved his debut novel The Quantum Thief so much that, barring a major disappointment, I’ll give anything he publishes a read. This is a somewhat disjoint short story collection, mixing near future SF, posthuman SF, ghost stories, folkloric fantasy, and some stranger things. My favorite pieces were “The Jugaad Cathedral,” the SF piece in this book that most successfully combined his typical technological fireworks with human interest, “Fisher of Men,” a fun outsmart-the-mythical-creature fantasy story, and “Skywalker of Earth,” which is a string theory pulp pastiche that is tonally unlike anything else I’ve read. The closest is probably some parts of Alan Moore’s Tom Strong, but that lacks the hard science space operatics. Great fun. (Also, it seems that Rajaniemi’s third novel, The Causal Angel, came out while my life was topsy-turvy last year and I managed to miss it. Need to pick that up.)

January 16, 2015

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.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Blame by Michelle Huneven
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke¹
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
The Genocides by Thomas Disch
Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch
Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck
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.

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

December 23, 2014

The Last Books of 2014

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
Authority by Jeff VanderMeer – I did not enjoy this book. I found it one-note and overlong. I will not be finishing the trilogy.
Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman – Very fun. A collection of fabulations with an occasional physicsy bent.
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.
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.
I Die at Midnight by Kyle Baker – I’d been meaning to read this since I was a teenager. A delightful, stylish noir romp.
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.
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.
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.
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.

September 12, 2014

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Birds of Prey: Of Like Minds by Gail Simone and Ed Benes
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dragon Ball vol. 1 by Akira Toriyama
Dragon Ball vol. 2 by Akira Toriyama
Dragon Ball vol. 3 by Akira Toriyama
Dragon Ball vol. 4 by Akira Toriyama
Dragon Ball vol. 5 by Akira Toriyama
Dragon Ball vol. 6 by Akira Toriyama
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.
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.
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.
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.

March 14, 2014

The First Twenty Books of 2014

First20Books2014
As previously mentioned, graduate school was hell on my reading. To get back in the groove I resolved that this year I would read at least one book a week. Twelve weeks in, I’m ahead of schedule. Here are the first twenty books I’ve read this year. (Collage above made with this online tool.)

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. This one failed to impress me, and I doubt I will read any other books in the series.
Solaris: The Definitive Edition by Stanislaw Lem (audiobook). This is the new translation direct from Polish released in 2008. I’d tried to read the previous translation once, which was actually a retranslation from French, and found it unimpressive. I loved the direct translation, though, and can see why it’s held in such esteem among Lem’s works.
Tuf Voyaging by George R. R. Martin. This is a reread, inspired by the book’s presence on Kevin Brockmeier’s list of his 50 favorite SFF books. I thought it delightful fun the first time, and I still feel that way about it. It’s a collection of linked short stories, but both times I’ve read it in a single sitting.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. This is really a gorgeous, ambitious book. Carmen Machado loves it, and had been recommending it for a few years. The novel’s formal conceit is that it is narrated by Death, and while this is achieved with great sensitivity and beautiful language, my own lack of affection for Cartesian dualism means I found it less affecting than I otherwise might. I suspect that’s why I merely really liked it rather than loving it.
Superman/Shazam: First Thunder by Judd Winick and Joshua Middleton. I was inspired to read this by Justin Pierce, who posted to Facebook a page from it in which Superman is furious when he learns that Captain Marvel is a transformed child. That scene was probably the best thing in the book, but it was fun.
The Genocides by Thomas Disch. This is another one from Kevin’s list. It’s one of the bleakest books I’ve ever fully enjoyed. Humanity is uncomplicatedly eliminated as unseen aliens turn the planet into a monoculture for a genetically engineered crop. As unremitting an apocalypse as I’ve ever read.
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. This, as is obvious if you’ve clicked the very first link in the first paragraph, is a reread. I bought a bunch of copies of the play and threw a table reading party. We all drank mulled wine and hammed it up.
Options by Robert Sheckley. After Van Choojitarom challenged people to come up with a novel odder than Voyage to Arcturus (which I still need to read), I offered this as a possibility. When I was 16 it seemed to me merely a memorably enthusiastic work of metafiction. Reading it now, though, it strikes me as an absurdist take on the difficulties of the creative process. Reading it makes me feel like I do when I’m struggling at the keyboard, and yet it’s entertaining. It’s also short enough that despite the overt metafictional elements, it doesn’t wear out its welcome. Might be my favorite Sheckley now. (Note if you’re planning to give it a shot, I’m pretty sure the opening few chapters intentionally read as terribly-written. Which is to say, I think they are well written, but in intentionally bad prose.)
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. Yet another from Kevin’s list. I read it as a kid and didn’t find it terribly impressive then, by Kevin’ and Jo Walton’s appreciation for the book convinced me to give it another chance. They were right. It’s really an excellent book, for all the reasons Jo outlines. Also, I realize I must have been under ten years old the last time I read it, because I remember thinking that if the events in the book were to happen, I would have been among the posthuman cohort.
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm. I’d never read one of her novels, and this one won the Hugo award in 1977, so seemed a good place to start. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to. I liked the opening section well enough, and the writing is good throughout, but I found culture of the clone generations unconvincing.
Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler. I love everything by Fowler I’ve ever read, which is several short stories and now three novels. This one is now my second favorite, behind We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, my favorite novel I read last year. Sarah Canary is lyrical and brilliant. Also, this is yet another one from Kevin’s list, which has yet to lead me astray.
The Steps of the Sun by Walter Tevis. This is the last of Tevis’s science fiction novels that I hadn’t read, after reading The Man Who Fell to Earth and Mockingbird last year. I have yet to read anything by Tevis I don’t find engrossing, but this is a weird one. The opening I loved so much it seemed on pace to become a favorite, but toward the end the book takes a turn that I’m still trying to figure out my feelings toward. I still liked it, but I think less than the previous two.
Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill. I’d read a few of these stories before, such as “Secretary” (the basis for the movie) and “A Romantic Weekend”(a favorite of mine), but never the whole collection. It’s good. Completely unsentimental psychological realism, full of obsessions and kinks. I’ve got another Gaitskill collection on deck for later.
The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang. This was a reread that I assigned my science fiction writing class, in advance of Ted doing a Skype visit. I think this book is perfect.
Hawkeye vol. 1 by Matt Fraction and David Aja. This was a gift from Matt when I visited Portland. It’s great fun, deserving of all the superlatives on the cover. Each issue is a tiny, clever action movie, the cleverest one from the point of view of a dog.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 2009 by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. After Portland I find myself on a bit of a comics kick. This is the third of the Century volumes, and I didn’t enjoy it that much. Harry Potter as the antichrist was fun enough, but at this point LoEG seems more about enacting its conceit than about telling a story. Still, there were some nice tender scenes between Orlando and Mina.
Weapons of the Metabarons by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Travis Charest, and Zoran Janjetov. A fairly forgettable addendum to an unforgettable series. I bought an omnibus collection of the original Metabarons series in Portland and will probably reread it soon.
The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. Kevin’s writing is beautiful. This book is about a city populated by everyone who is dead but still remembered by someone alive, and what happens to that city when everyone on Earth starts to die.
Fourth Mansions by R. A. Lafferty. I bought this book on the strength of its chapter titles, which are things like “Now I will dismember the world with my hands” and “But I eat them up, Frederico, I eat them up.” This book was…strange. Not bad, but not good either. I’m not convinced that it is about anything except itself. It’s an internally consistent system of symbolism that doesn’t necessarily have any relevance to the real world. The language was very entertaining, but it’s verbal fireworks bursting above an insubstantial landscape.
Nemo: Heart of Ice by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. I liked this more than Century: 2009, because it’s more strongly narrative and because I enjoyed the H. P. Lovecraft and John Campbell references. Still a minor work, though.

December 14, 2013

My Favorite Books of 2013

It’s astonishing how few books I read as a graduate student. I did a tremendous amount of reading, but it was mostly unpublished fiction by classmates, students, and applicants to the MFA program. I’ve read about 30 books this year, 2/3 of them since I graduated in May. While not that many for me historically, that’s a three year high. Here are my favorites.

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. Every once in a long while you read a book that immediately becomes a part of your personal canon, something you know from the first encounter that you’ll be returning to and finding new depths in for the rest of your life. Borges was like that for me, and Catch-22, Octavia Butler, Kelly Link, Ted Chiang, and now Arcadia. I was already a fan of Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which I read in high school. I’d been meaning to read Arcadia for years. I even bought a copy once, but it disappeared. (I think an ex stole it.) Over and over it was recommended by people as something I would like, and I finally got around this year to buying a new copy.

It’s incredible. It has all of my favorite things: clever formalism; patterns that repeat across different scales; nonlinear narrative; fractal mathematics; intellectual humor; and critique of gender roles in social, scientific, and literary regimes. It’s funny, suspenseful, heartbreaking. The best play I’ve ever read. The very first time I have an opportunity to see it produced, I will. In the meantime, the day I read it I got online and bought enough copies to throw an Arcadia reading party. I can’t give a higher recommendation than that.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. I was already a fan of Karen Joy Fowler’s work, from her short stories and her novel The Jane Austen Book Club. But her latest novel is in a different league. It’s utterly gorgeous, full of brilliant sentences that add up to an equally brilliant whole. While reading it I was frequently moved to read passages aloud to myself, just to feel the music in the prose. I’ve sold several people the book just by reciting the preface and letting the beauty of the language win them over. It’s convenient that that works, because there’s not really any way to talk about the plot without spoilers that will dramatically change the reading experience. But if that isn’t a concern to you, then you could check out this glowing review by Barbara Kingsolver in the New York Times. For my part, I’ll just say that this year I read Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel prize winners, bestsellers, and cult classics, but this was my favorite novel that I read in 2013.

Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine. The previous was my favorite novel of the year, but this was my favorite work of nonfiction. (So it was a good year for books with bright yellow covers.) If this were just a thorough takedown of biological essentialism, whether historical or modern, it would probably be enough to earn a place on this list. But Cordelia Fine has done more than that. She’s not just taken on the heroic task of going through all the recent books claiming inherent neurological differences between men and women, and tracked down all of the references to assess their legitimacy, but she’s done it with humor. The book is written in delightfully dry tones of academic snark. So, for example, while critiquing the way that Barbara and Allan Pease use scientific studies in their execrably-titled book Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps, she observes that of the studies referenced in the Pease’s claim that their “emotion maps” are based on fMRI research, only one of them was a brain study conducted after the academic use of fMRI. And of that she writes, “It might also be worth mentioning that it was a postmortem study. Possibly Sandra Witelson really did present her samples of dead brain tissue with emotionally charged images–but if she did, it’s not mentioned in the published report.” As they say in the ivory tower, oh SNAP!

NausicaaDeluxEdition

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki (deluxe edition box set). This was a graduation gift to myself, something I’d been meaning to read for years. I’m a great fan of Miyazaki’s movies, of which the film adaptation of this manga was the first for which he served as both writer and director. The movie version is glorious, and you should watch it if you haven’t, but the manga is a much larger and more intricate story. This is partly because he had only written/drawn the first two years of the manga when he made the movie, and wouldn’t finish it for another decade. The politics, world building, and characterizations are rich, and the artwork predictably incredible. (This oversized edition is worth it for the greater detail in the artwork alone.) The story does at times have a bit of a formless, sprawling feel to it. That could be because it was Miyazaki’s first (and last) long form manga work. But that hardly matters, as the expansiveness of the world is one of the distinct pleasures on offer here.

The Man Who Fell To Earth by Walter Tevis. (My copy had a different cover that I can’t find good image of. This seems to be the edition in print right now.) For a while this year I was running a science fiction movie club, and picking movies for it was an excellent excuse to watch some classic films that I’d never managed to get around to. One of those was Nick Roeg’s adaptation of The Man Who Fell To Earth starring David Bowie as an alien, which I’d been putting off until after I read the novel. Now that I’ve read/seen both, it’s the book I think I might be going back to. That’s not a knock against the movie, but Tevis’s novel was a startling work of bleak loveliness. If there is such a thing as a page turner consisting entirely of chilly, elegiac portraits of loneliness, this is it. (If you’ve seen the movie but not read the book, which seems likely to be the case for many, know that the book has a lot more tipsy rumination on the impossibility of ever really connecting with other people, and a lot less of David Bowie’s penis.)

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein. (This one isn’t the cover that my copy had either, but I wish it was, because this cover is way better. Mine was a couple of bicycles leaning up against a stone wall.) This is a novel that had been recommended by many people, and the recommendations were often things like, “This book is amazing but also it made me break down crying in public.” So, naturally, I waited until it was dark and cold and miserable outside to read it. The book is made up of a pair of linked epistolary narratives, with an unreliability-powered plot that’s so ostentatiously clever that, in my edition, the cover text touts its cleverness. That alone would make it worth reading. But this book is also that rare creature: a rollicking wartime adventure that is centered on a friendship between two women. It’s set primarily in Nazi-occupied France, full of espionage, aeronautics, and harrowing scenes of painful bravery. Even prepared as I was for an emotionally wrenching experience, the climax was shocking and the denouement deeply affecting. Read it, but not at a time when you’re feeling fragile.