37 books read.
8 memoirs, of which H is for Hawk (Helen Macdonald) was the runaway winner. fine, specific details and i rather liked being inside her head. i actually now have a hawk memoir section to my library (n=2).
8 non-memoir non-collection non-fiction; it has been an illuminating year. 3 books on food/digestion/health, 2 on music, 2 on the end of the world as we know it, 1 very interesting investigative expose by Masha Gessen (Words Will Break Cement). everyone should read Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything, Martin Blaser's Missing Microbes, Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction. perhaps that should be 3 books on the end of the world.
JS Bach enthusiasts should read John Eliot Gardiner's Music in the Castle of Heaven. i used to hate music theory, but it's funny what i've come back to now that i don't HAVE to do/like/read anything. leisurely learning Bach Partitas and only Bach Partitas on the piano for the entire year? tick.
5 essay collections. Meghan Daum continues to dominate. David Sedaris' dentist essay was worth the other more average inclusions in Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls. i really enjoyed a collection on solitary cooking and/or eating, aka my present enjoyable condition (Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, ed. Jenni Ferrari-Adler). combined with my almost ecstatic solo travel experience in nyc and dc this year, with associated solo dining, i have never felt more comfortable with myself. this may just be happiness. or hermitage.
i also pondered choosing childlessness while reading Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed (ed. Meghan Daum) but would have liked to hear from non-writers.
2 kathy mallory books by Carol O'Connell. my pick would be The Chalk Girl, a return to the classic style of tightly plotted nyc cops and rich people getting away with shit. and of course kathy mallory, swoon-worthy sociopath. i can't decide who would play her in a movie. i don't think such a person exists. also i'm glad that she doesn't age as such throughout the 13-book series, because who needs that.
7 queer-related fiction books. hmm. highlights were The Price of Salt (Patricia Highsmith), which i liked for its oblique, distant yet close third-person narration. Mislaid (Nell Zink) was another with the strange sped-up/slowed-down presentation of only the important stuff, in great detail, with barbed tongues (to mix descriptors) jabbing everyone at least a little.
and my favourite book of the year, Cassandra at the Wedding (Dorothy Baker), the only one i read twice. how had i never heard of this book before? it needs to be in the mainstream or even queer canon much more than it is. dark and debilitating. deflating both neurotic narcissism and boring convention with two sides of the same reflection. making the weird headspace the norm (shoutout to the last book i read this year, Pretend I'm Dead by Jen Beagin, for also inhabiting this perspective). we are all weird and it's alright.
I read Zink's Wallcreeper this year and it was a mess with a few good moments.
ReplyDeleteGlad to have discovered Cassandra, just reading reviews on the web. And Deborah Eisenberg writing the Foreword is a good sign. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/30/lezard-cassandra-wedding-dorothy-baker-review
I liked H is for Hawk, but there's something about it that rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe the entirely left out, avoided, don't-want-to-go-there stuff about her boyfriend who broke up with her? That gets one or two lines, yet very much part of the reason why she was so devastated before going back to hawking. I suspect she thought grieving for the father more dignified, literary (who wants to be appearing to grieve over a lousy boyfriend...and taking up hawking over a boyfriend doesn't have that ring to it).
oh yes, I read The Wallcreeper last year and liked it much less. Mislaid is more conventional in plot and also very interesting/timely re: a certain former NAACP chapter president. I don't know about the whole Jonathan Franzen thing either.. I am definitely not planning on reading Purity, let me put it that way.
Deletehmm I totally bypassed/didn't pick up on the boyfriend stuff in Hawk, will have to reread. (let's be honest i care negative amounts about boyfriends.) I think I really identified with the obsessiveness/extreme introspection to the exclusion of all else.
"I care negative amount" I'm stealing that.
DeleteFurther on grief, I liked Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter last year too. Most of it, however, reads like a work of poetry just dying to be spoken in public.