In 2012, I got back to reading with a vengeance. My year-end count was 76, give or take a graphic novel or two. For 2013 I have a personal challenge of reading 100 books. I'm already at six, thanks to the magnitudes of free time Peace Corps allows. In no real order, the best of what I read in 2012:
Best Book Reccommended by a Friend: Beach Music by Pat Conroy (via Will)
Beach Music brings in the long standing themes of Southern literature (the burden of familial responsibility and guilt, depression, the importance of place, death and tragedy, The Awful Responsibility of Time, all those light hearted things) that I have been well-instructed in recognizing thanks to Dr. Messer, one of my favorite college professors. Conroy has a central tormented figure in Jack McCall, as all good Southern novels do, who is a Southerner in self-imposed exile living in Italy. The prose is impeccable. It was some of the most vivid literature I'd read in ages, and I was constantly amazed by the acrobatic skills Conroy has in both descriptive writing and conveying emotions. Speaking of feelings, this novel moved me to tears at least twice.
Favored Quote: No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.
Best Book from the Trans-Pacific Book Club: Feed by M.T. Anderson
Feed was the January pick of the TPBC, and I'm not saying it was downhill from there, but it was a strong, provocative, and terrifying first book of the year. The dystopian sci-fi setting delivers true speculative fiction: a world where humans are directly plugged into a constant feed of entertainment, communication, and above all, consumerism. Anderson advances 21st century fears of privacy rights, data mining, and corpocracy to a nightmare world of constant onslaught. The pace and voice of the novel directly contributes to the sensory overload of omni-present interconnecrivity, while the characters, teenagers caught on the bleeding edge of trends, wade through the messages of corporations.
Best Young Adult Fiction: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
Oh, man. Kids with cancer. Even worse, kids with terminal cancer. But this isn't some tissue clutching weepy story of soft sunlight and learning. This is a sharp, witty, and unflinching look into death's door, where teens are well-aware of the cruelty of terminal illness and the toll it takes on themselves, their families, and relationships. The romantic portion of the story is so thoughtful and mature, in that it handles all the possibilities of teenage emotions with a true hand. The dialogue is whip-smart and perfect pitched for its teen characters, and the ending is one of the most graceful and non-sappy of the kids with cancer sub-genre.
Best Essay Collection: We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons by Tim Kreider
Kreider is a Baltimorean of sorts, so I immediately took to his collection of essays and satirical cartoons. His writing is transparent and self-deprecating, and his willingness to reveal some of the less charming aspects of himself, weird neuroses and all, appealed to my year-long pursuit of unabashed genuinity in literature. He writes about his life like he's telling stories at the bar, talking about his friends with a nudge, "you know Ed, yeah? The one with the scar?" I loved the familiarity with which he discusses his friends, family, and even relationships.
Favored Quote: I sometimes like to daydream that if we were all somehow simultaneously outed as lechers and perverts and sentimental slobs, it might be, after the initial shock of disillusionment, liberating. It might be a relief to quit maintaining the rigid pose of normalcy and own up to the outlaws and monsters we are.
Best Science Journalism: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Stacks by Rebecca Skloot
Skloot shines a light on the near forgotten story of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman who died of cervical cancer in the fifties in Baltimore. Before she died however, a doctor at Johns Hopkins University collected a few of her cancerous cells for further examination--without her consent--and discovered them to be the first successfully self-reproducing human cells in record.Those cells, now known as HeLa cells, are part of the medical industry and used for experiments and testing all over the world. Skloot delivers not only the emotional and humanizing story of the Lacks family, who learned about the HeLa cells decades later, but also exposes areas of historical racism in medical practice, the evolution of consent in medical experiments, and medical industry interworkings.
Best Genre Stereotype Defying Historical Literature: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Mantel brings a certain respectability to the oft-overlooked genre of historical literature. But there are no torn bodices here. She reconstructs the reign of Henry the Eighth from the perspective of the many-talented and dangerously driven Thomas Cromwell. Extended reading on Mantel, who won the National Book Award for this work, shows that she spent copious amounts of time dedicated to nuanced research, and that every action is true to fact. The story is fascinating, and her narrative style is unique, running sometimes into stream of consciousness and other times to clipped dialogue.
Best Interconnected Group of Literary Blending: New Narrative/Experimental Lit
There isn't just one work I can mention in this heading. In the past few years, arising from the older school of literature called New Narrative, there have been a rise in experimental semi-autobiographical/fiction/memoir/feminist/literary theory hybrids that are directly confronting traditional ideals of form, topic, and even propriety. Bellamy's
the buddhist is a collection of her blog posts tracking a break up with a man who was a buddhist teacher, while Heti transcribed recorded conversations with her friends into a pseudo-novel about her life in
How Should a Person Be?. Though I haven't had the chance to read it yet, Kate Zambreno's newest work
Heroines combines her research on women in Modernist literature (especially wives such as Zelda Fitzgerald) with personal reflections on her life and relationship with her husband. Along with writers such as Emily Gould and Bhanu Kapil, there is an ongoing dialogue about emotional writing as feminine and therefore less serious, alternative forms such as blogging (also perceived as feminine and therefore less legitimate), and the male dominated canon of modern literary fiction.
Best Graphic Novel: Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Bra
This was a hard choice! I read some very excellent graphic novels and comics this past year. But Daytripper is such a treat to read, both for the art (look at that cover!) and the story itself. The ten chapter/issue collection jumps all over the timeline of the life of Bras, an obituary journalist and aspiring author. The story is meditative, introspective, and still tantalizingly lively, leading readers on a hunt to tie together the chapters and understand Bras's life as a whole.
Runner Up: Why Are You Doing This? by Jason
Note: 2011's Best Graphic Novel was Blankets by Craig Thompson, most assuredly.
Best Poetry Collection: The Love Poems of Rumi
I spent an intimate few hours with this collection, in that I retyped it from a horribly scanned PDF (alas, beggar pirates can't be choosers) into a fresh word document. I've always been a fan of Sufi mystic poetry in general and Rumi in particular. This collection is delightful, well-translated and as always, insightful beyond measure.
Favored Quote: You dance inside my chest, / Where no one sees you, / But sometimes I do, and that / Sight becomes this art.
Note: It was a re-read, but Love is a Dog From Hell by Charles Bukowski is one of the great collections, in perpetuity.
Best Poem: "An Imaginative Study in Degradation" by Olena Kalytiak Davis from And Her Soul Out of Nothing
This poem begins in this corner,
where barely awake and naked
I stand at the top of the stairs,
a bas-relief against a book-encased wall,
and watch you leave for the day.
You may ask: how does the nude
fit into the contemporary setting?
And Cézanne thought apples
were the most difficult fruit.
Remember the year I stopped eating apples?
Remember the summer I kept bringing home
abandoned chairs? A lucid Vincent wrote
to his brother: I have tried
to express the terrible passions
of humanity by means of red and green.
His self-portrait now hangs in the Fogg.
Remember the summer I had to walk
to the Lake just to feel anything at all?
When I descend late in the afternoon
there’s a blue plate of heart-
shaped cookies, there’s an orange
on the kitchen counter. I notice a crack
in the seam of the ceiling, a spider
vein on the inside of my knee.
What a still still life!
The rest of the day is a slanted floorboard.
The rest of the day is the color of absinthe.
Note the personal and detached attitude.
Note the application of arbitrary color.
The tilted perspective.
This poem is all surface.
You may stand where you choose.
This poem has no vanishing point.
Best True Crime Account: Devil's Knot: The True Story of The West Memphis Three by Mara Leveritt
True confession: I love true crime stories. I guess its the lurid voyeur in me who likes to get a case of the willies hearing about murders and cover ups and the like. Devil's Knot was especially interesting because I read it near the time that the three accused teens--now men-- were finally exonerated and released from prison. The West Memphis murders have had a lot of media attention, from documentaries to celebrity report, but Leveritt digs into the story from the ground up. This is a great true crime work, with plenty of salacious details, unfair outrages at the justice system, and a comforting knowledge that they do get out--eventually.
Best Classic "Children's" Literature that Should Not Be For Children: A Tree Grows In Brooklyn by Betty Smith
More like a tree grows in give up now you are born into poverty you will die in misery. While I was perpetually astounded that this can be found in the Children's section of the public library, this is indeed a powerful, if often depressing, work of literature. Smith is pretty flinty-faced about the prospects of early-generation European immigrants at the turn of the twentieath century, not to mention poverty, alcoholism, pregnancy and miscarriages, dashed dreams and really cruel school children. That being said, our little heroine never gives up, and Smith's wordsmithery kept me from giving up in a fit of sad tears.
Best Book I Haven't Finished: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Rolande Barthes
What is this amazing book? Part philosophy, part literary theory, part internalized musings, Barthes writes on the institution of love, what it is to love and pursue an object of love. The chapters are arranged in dictionary-style definitions, headed by a word (ex. "S'abimer/ To be engulfed") and then his meditations, drifting from philosophical to self-referntial. Its dense and complicated, and incredibly rewarding to work through. I look forward to owning a hard copy or two.
Favored Quote: "the love story, subjugated to the great narrative Other, to that general opinion which disparages any excessive force and wants the subject himself to reduce the great imaginary current, the orderless, endless stream which is passing through him, to a painful, morbid crisis of which we must be cured, which he must "get over"...the love story (the "episode," the "adventure") is the tribute the lover must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it."
If we are in contact on some varium of social platforming, you are probably well aware that I have been beset by a bevy of electronic issues, starting with the passing of my long lived iPod, and ending with the ongoing trials that is my not-yet-a-year-old laptop. LongReads Round-Ups are postponed until further notice.
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