2023 in reading and film

i have little preamble except that my yearly roundup is a touch late. my reading took a little dip and perhaps i found it difficult to find anything really amazing on all the axes of plot, character, writing, and relevance. perhaps my expectations have been too high? or have i been reading for pleasure on purpose and therefore avoiding the harder work of a deeper more involved work with a greater payoff. can i blame social media with its near-instant gratification like everyone else?

some book words:

i finished reading 61 books, of which i highly recommend the following:

- i keep my exoskeletons to myself (marisa crane): excellence in character, exploration of the human condition, humour, via a guise of a sci-fi contrivance which nevertheless is very successful. one of my favourite books of the last few years.

- big swiss (jen beagin): some books set themselves up to problem-solve their way out of a manufactured extreme combination of circumstances. this one was compelling reading.

- the bigness of the world (lori ostlund): great situational writing, comedy. i will be revisiting.

- biography of X, and pew (catherine lacy): audacious!! fiction in the guise of creative non-fiction in the first instance, and, a fine exploration of categorisation vs humanisation of a person within society. i look forward to the next books from this author.

- yours for the taking (gabrielle korn): many topics of relevance brought together in a pretty seamless way, via sci-fi hand-wavy mechanism that is really quite believable. differentiation of complex characters was done rather strikingly yet efficiently.

some film discourse:

courtesy of a very successful sydney film festival on my part (my part involved choosing films by their titles and from debut filmmakers) i enjoyed many films this year! highlights included:

- tar: there was unhappy internet discourse from several fronts (lesbians, classical music, classical music lesbians) but i thought (as a classical music semi-nerd) that it was fucking hilarious. the cellist doesn't know the relationship between daniel barenboim and jacqueline du pre?? a very serious half-hour buildup to the final shot?? excellent stuff. my sister and i laughed for 10 minutes straight as we left the cinema.

- aftersun

- women talking

- blue jean

- snow and the bear

- nothing compares: several moments of silence for sinéad o'connor, who was incomparable.

2022 in reading and films

hello!! i have done zero substantial typing on the computer for exactly 8 weeks and it has been glorious. the best thing i did this year was to wing it and take more time off to enjoy decompressing along the way. (of course this was within reason and with thorough establishment of expectations and there were no unexpected implosions or consequences). i took several small trips and read a lot! 

- 75(!!) books read. none of them by straight white men. only one by a male author at all, i think (The Three Body Problem, where i was not inspired to read the sequels.) 

my favourites, in order of being read:

- Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead: a solo character epic. engaging and extreme and probably too neat in the end but i didn't care.

- Flung Out of Space, Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer: ahh patricia highsmith is fascinating in horribly distasteful ways. i loved the art (also highly recommend Cosmoknights) and the pacing. one to re-read at different speeds.

- Companion Piece, Ali Smith: classic Ali Smith - lyrical, very current yet also timeless because it is about people, who are endlessly interesting.

- On a Sunbeam, Tillie Walden: excellent webcomic of graphic novel proportions! boarding school sci-fi and beautiful art.

- Vera Kelly Lost and Found, Rosalie Knecht: love this mystery series (written in classic style and form and very engaging plot-wise) and wonder if there will be more?

- Skinship, Yoon Choi: long-ish short stories based in the Korean-American experience. so many facets and aspects of the immigrant and inter-generational experience. sometimes quite funny, in a sparse, indirect way.

- Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield: ooo this one is very memorable. seamless melding of different writing styles in an honestly weird gothic body horror sci-fi-ish romantic story. i don't think adding any more description will help. it was perfect.

- Ornament and Silence, Kennedy Fraser: New Yorker essays in the art/fashion world, reminiscent of Janet Malcolm. excellent. one of the only real hard-cover books i read this year because i could only find it at the university library.

- Raised by Wolves, Jess Ho: incisively written, a fascinating look into the world of the Melbourne hospitality industry, and millennial Cantonese-diaspora life. 

- Leech, Hiron Ennes: sci-fi gothic period body horror, in a completely different way from Our Wives Under the Sea. a very very interesting premise that dissolves and then reforms the lines between individuality and a hive mind, but without you knowing. 

- How Far the Light Reaches, Sabrina Imbler: marine biology/queer memoir in essays. somehow it works, astonishingly well in fact. 

laid out in this fashion, this list is hugely varied! it's as if i chose 11 niche genres and picked one book to represent each. 

highly commended: The Priory of the Orange Tree, The Liar's Dictionary, Portrait of a Thief, Salt Slow, Cleopatra and Frankenstein. 

quote of the year, from a book i have not yet finished: "Her voice is like three sick pigeons trapped in a grocery bag." (Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel). wow.

the reinstatement of in-person film festivals also meant that i saw quite a lot of films. i overestimated my capacity and was very tired at the end of MIFF. in any case, i saw 28 films throughout the year and my favourites were, again in viewing order:

- The Power of the Dog

- Turning Red

- Petite Maman

- Never Rarely Sometimes Always

- The Matrix Resurrections

- Nelly and Nadine

i attended a range of concerts and opera! highlights included Ensemble Gombert, Victorian Opera's Elektra, Jonas Kaufman as Lohengrin, Melbourne Opera's Lucrezia Borgia, Australian Ballet's Kunstkamer, and the most technically mind-boggling show of the year, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a truly astounding one-person show. 

'til next time! may we appreciate art in all the ways it deserves.

2021: what is time

hello! this annual round-up is later than usual because i was in a different location and could not access my very analogue records of books read and movies seen.

numbers because i am otherwise benumbed and have no energy for societal/political commentary, plus notables:

41 books read, amazingly 

40 by non-cis male authors (!!)

the biggest swerve in my reading style in many years happened in the last 6 weeks of the year - i started reading escapist (sci-fi/speculative/fantasy) fiction, well, those featuring queernormative societies and strong female protagonists. very enjoyable!!! highlights - Gideon the Ninth/Harrow the Ninth for sheer bravura, A Memory called Empire for centering language in an otherwise very plot-driven genre, and especially This Is How You Lose the Time War for its very abstract lyricism. this appears to be a hugely growing area of LGBTQ+ literature and i love it.

others i loved: Crying in H Mart (michelle zauner), Yolk (mary h.k. choi), Everyone (Else) is Perfect (gabrielle korn), The Magical Language of Others (e.j. koh), The Secret to Superhuman Strength (alison bechdel), Piranesi (susanna clarke). hmm perhaps surprisingly all except 2 of these are memoir-ish, but they were all excellent "exceptions" to the usual memoir style.

25 films watched, almost unbelievably

i continued my way through chantal akerman's oeuvre (Je Tu Il Elle, No Home Movie, News From Home - especially liked the last), and also rated Kajillionare, Beanpole, Chess of the Wind, Passing, Titane highly. Memoria was a little off for me, though i had high expectations. 

after many years i was finally able to track down Secondo Me, a doco following the lives of opera cloakroom attendants. it was everything i hoped for!

dud of the year - The Dead Don't Die - what the actual fuck, jim jarmusch? as my now-retired professor would say, that was a total waste of time.

4 operas/concerts attended, very believably.

my first Das Rheingold, good for drifting off in and waking up still on the same chord, essentially

schubert and beethoven's c major string quintets by the ACO! otherworldly. maybe partly because that's how it felt being at a concert again after 16 months.

and then another 7 month break until i saw handel's messiah and teared up when the choir got going, god! funny thing is i had been listening to a choir rehearsing for the month prior, in the building below my apartment. did not connect the dots to the fact that there would then be a concert.. but realised in time to attend like a proud parent! 

who knows what 2022 will bring! stay tuned! you are very patient!

2020: a single yike

can we write about books like it was a normal year instead of an accordion? i spent so/too much time alone and survived. for a solid 2 months between late october and late december i could not bring myself to read any books (though i did read quite a lot of high-quality literary fanfic regarding which i feel no shame). let's jump in! 

39 books, including 2 rereads (the sun also rises - hemingway; how to be both - ali smith), 32 non-cis male authors.

i want to discuss what has become in my mind the clear delineation of a new genre of novels published in recent years, the characteristics of which are possibly intrinsic to their having been written by non-cis male authors, or, relative and/or multiple minorities. unfortunately, i have dubbed this genre the unlikeability genre. sometimes when bad things keep happening without relief to a character who is essentially a multiple minority, is the author is trying to represent the reality of how life might turn out for that character, or, are they are emphasising and making a point of exactly how much the "system" is stacked against them? it is good and thought-provoking when characters are complex and unlikeable, but surely they should have some likeable and relatable aspects as well, which are largely missing from the books i have in mind. it becomes a frustrating drudgery and rather miserable to read! i see myself in some of these minority characters, so it is disheartening when things almost universally turn out badly or end shortly after they hit rock bottom. "write what you know" has never been more demoralising. neither are these books particularly scintillating in terms of plot, or (this is my personal taste) writing style and technique.

anyway! reading 6 of these unlikeable books this year was probably too much! several of them have received rave reviews! but i will continue to support the kinds of authors who have written them, so i hope they can move on from centering their trauma to the exclusion of all else. of course the caveat here is that this is my interpretation and my state of mind may lack equilibrium. the second caveat is that i am not going to lay out the list of these books here because i don't want to pre-emptively ruin them for anyone else, and as mentioned, some people loved them! but, if you're interested, i will tell you privately.

the highlights:

Wake, Siren - Nina MacLaughlin. the metamorphoses, from the point of view of the subjugated women, yes thank you finally

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers - Jen Shapland. how do we give ourselves a history that existed but was erased or hidden or not documented in ways we can detect? as both memoir and biography, it was seamless.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. goodbye modern microdetailed autofiction etc etc in the form of a brick, hello mastery.

Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng. this was a very pleasant and engaging exception to the unlikeability genre though it may seem similar on the surface.

Goodbye, Vitamin - Rachel Khong. sweet everyday life through the lens of childhood, and conversely, Alzheimers', the kind of observer writing i love.

Rough Magic: Riding the World's Loneliest Horse Race - Lara Prior-Palmer. the reading surprise of my year! a lyrical memoir/account of a scatterbrained but animal-attuned young woman who won the Mongol Derby against many odds?? fascinating and engrossing.

Fair Play - Tove Jansson. sweet and longstanding relationship realities in a concise fable or short story form.

honorarable mentions: How Much of These Hills are Gold - C Pam Zhang; Vera Kelly is Not a Mystery - Rosalie Knecht

the snark:

Fleishman Is in Trouble. nononono this is basically exactly the kind of book i hate. who you are can fuck you up, wowww how groundbreaking. there is a marriage novel narrator reveal conceit. maybe i just hate "marriage novels", do not need to read any more of them for the foreseeable future.

Girl, Woman, Other. this lacked full stops/periods for.. some reason. i don't have much more to add (which is an indictment). dare i say, a typical Booker winner.

Eat a Peach. ok david chang, i like you, but you really have to start sharing your spotlight with more women, and making appropriate apologies rather than just letting your openness about your past mistakes and self-improvement be sufficient.

film highlights!

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. nooooo yesssss so good. this is the kind of meticulous detail that works, that has meaning eventually. the potato peeling, egad!

Nomadland. i had read the book several years ago but the film really transcended it, softened the popular tropes of relationship and friendship drama (from memory) into something much more poignant and complex.

Women Make Film. 15 hours of clips from female filmmakers covering (in a relatively superficial fashion) 40 areas of film-making. i saw parts of a lot of international/older films that i wouldn't have seen otherwise! perhaps it would work best as a dvd set to dip into rather than the time pressure i was under to watch it within the 2 weeks of an online film festival.

Booksmart. i enjoyed this! a Superbad for the contemporary young woman.

Dick Johnson is Dead. very sweet and wry.

'til next year!

2019: not everything is fleeting. some feelings are deep.

this is an end of year and not an end of decade culture round-up because i don't have the adequate notes nor the research energy to do it justice. my political thoughts for the year 2019 are that it is difficult to balance wanting to be a responsible engaged citizen and yet operate and live in a system that does not work and that one might like to see brought down, ideologically, theoretically. how can an alternate imaginary (as a sociological term) be posited? can a person or a society work towards a goal if it can't be imagined? if we've been progressing (and retreating, in waves) via trial and error all this time, why do we think the challenge of climate change will be addressed in any other way? culture and art, then, can be both the beacon, and the daily salve, and therefore the only antidote during this period heavy in errors and retreating. i have endless admiration for those with the optimism to manifest the world they want to live in, and a resolution to keep trying to do the same.


books

i read a truly unprecedented 73 books this year, and don't know how i did it, except that i tried not to look at my phone while commuting. (i looked at it a lot at other times, still, sadly.) rather proud to go through my statistics and find that 60 of these books were written by women! 16 written by asian diaspora or asian writers.

i still love janet malcolm (Forty-one False Starts; Nobody's Looking at You) and will read any essay or profile she wants to write. the same goes for zadie smith (Feel Free) and, thus far, jia tolentino (Trick Mirror). generations of female essayists, when put like that.

fiction notes:
a. weike wang's Chemistry was my first experience of feeling truly represented in fiction. i'll come back to this point later, but in this case, millennial asian diaspora academics and culture, i have not seen it before.

b. i was not aware that william faulkner is lumped in (by some people who have not read him, people being some friends who i very unscientifically polled) with the standard white american male canon that we kinda know as needing to be interpreted in light of the context of the time, unacknowledged privileges, masculinity, etc. to me, faulkner is not known enough (at least in australia where one must search for his books) for exposing and exploring the unfairness in society, from the point of view of those who are not in the majority, much more so than the other male authors he is often grouped with. Sanctuary wins my prize this year for outrageously gobsmacking whiplash description. some choice cuts:

• "he had that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin"
• "His nose was faintly aquiline, and he had no chin at all. His face just went away, like the face of a wax doll set too near a fire and forgotten." - as a person who has studied skeletal jaw relationships this is just !!!
• "Snopes lit a cigar, his face coming out of the match like a pie set on edge."
• "In the pavilion a band in the horizon blue of the army played Massenet and Scriabine, and Berlioz like a thin coating of Tchaikovsky on a slice of stale bread." - again, just exclamation marks. that deliberate oxford comma singling out berlioz for special treatment. i am dead.

also, i read As I Lay Dying, which is a veritable hilarious comedy just as much as it is a modernist masterpiece or whatever everyone repeats about its key themes and stylistic innovations, which are fascinating to be sure.

my book of the year, based on an overall extremely subjective sentiment of how i remember feeling while reading it, the quality of writing, the deep historical context not usually provided in more recent or other travel writing that i have read, the prickly personal relationship with an androgynous recovering drug addict friend (annemarie schwarzenbach) that was interwoven: ella maillart's The Cruel Way: Switzerland to Afganistan in a Ford, 1939.


classical

i went to a lot of concerts this year, with highlights involving organ-related epiphanies. of course it makes sense that bruckner was an organist, and that messiaen's symphonic pieces are also reminiscent of the organ. simone young will be the sydney symphony's chief conductor from 2022!! it has been excellent to see her bring some different repertoire and energy to the SSO. would love to see her do some concert opera.

opera australia put on some new stuff this year. salome! werther! any departure from or addition to the standard romantic italian repertoire is always welcome. pinchgut leaned into their countertenor tendencies.


film

i definitely have not seen everything that has been critically acclaimed this year but here are some of my highlights: The Farewell, Walden (and slow tv in general and the meditative quality of watching things in real time), Monos, High Life (extra shoutout to whoever did robert pattinson's hair and whoever decided it wouldn't be anachronistic for him to always have a perfect fade while everything and everyone else disintegrated, while on a space station), Deerskin, Parasite.

however there was one film that blew my mind and that i would quite unreservedly say is my film of the decade: Portrait of a Lady on Fire, by céline sciamma.
coming back to the idea of representation in art, it's one thing to feel like your story is being told, that someone who looks like you or has a similar family or culture is worthy of having their story told and understood by other different people out in the world. it's another level entirely to be given a history that you never knew that you might have had, that hasn't been shown before, ever, in a film that espouses the same principles that you live by and seek out. i guess this is how many people who are part of majorities feel like most of the time! for me, it was un nouveau sentiment. i have raved about this film to anyone and everyone for the last 6 months. the way that it presents what appears to be a period love story by quietly but completely upending cinematic standards, throwing traditional character expectations and tropes out the window, yet allowing the context of the time period to stand, and weaving in meditations on desire, memory, equality, collaboration in art, music, is frankly audacious. céline sciamma is creating that imaginary, giving women a history that they haven't seen on screen before, that is barely acknowledged in the way history has been recorded, and showing it to everyone. the film is a complete work. every detail has a purpose, no references are left hanging, it is staggeringly, ravishingly beautiful and should be seen in a cinema. the pace is european, one could say, but there are no wasted moments. it is also very extremely meta. is it ahead of its time? perhaps only in the sense that it may not receive the industry awards and immediate popular adulation that it deserves, although film critics have tried their best. there is no way this film will not be analysed and appreciated for years to come. maybe this has all seemed very waffly but basically i would do almost anything to go back in time and see this film for the first time, again.

2018: there's no political context because this is a respite from all that. a year in extra-curricular consumption

it's that time of year! reading roundup, film feelings, operatunities, cultural conclusions, judgy judgements, the usual unsubstantiated personal opinion!


books first. this year i did pretty well on reading more (43 in total), but quality was few and far between. there has to be a better way to decide when to give up on reading something that doesn't catch my attention or interest. only hindsight is useful.. which is useless.

8 memoirish - i can't seem to stop seeing this genre as easy reading, with mixed results. half of them were pretty damn good, particularly Notes on a Foreign Country (Suzy Hansen), When in French (Lauren Collins) and in my prize for most unexpectedly nuanced, Jill Soloway's She Wants It. The Lonely City (Olivia Laing) was a very interesting beast, musings on psychology, lived experience intercut with art history and biography.

15 non-fiction focused on special areas of interest. most alarming - Why We Sleep. largest and most edifying yet depressing, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. most inspiring - The Evolution of Beauty and The Wonder of Birds. in another life i might become an ornithologist. i fulfilled my goal from a year ago of starting to learn and understand chinese history. i particularly liked Mary Gaitskill's collected review/criticism (Somebody with a Little Hammer), i'll read anything that she writes.

12 traditional fiction - my harshest judgement is reserved for this category, where i increasingly can't stand navel-gazing contemporary literature about the minutiae of the titular life (The Idiot, Elif Batuman [who wrote a fascinating longform article on the japanese rent-a-relative industry]), this whole genre of autofiction. i write my own in my journal every night and it's more entertaining! nor do I enjoy historical fiction (Pachinko, Min Jin Lee) anymore, sorry not sorry, everyone raved about that one. everything is always telegraphed in advance, character stereotypes abound, i find myself skim-reading just to confirm my plot predictions. this is not to say that a traditional love story (Normal People, Sally Rooney) or myth transposition (Everything Under, Daisy Johnson) can't be written well in new lyrical ways, but sometimes it's more fun to blow shit up and blur the boundaries between waking and sleeping as in My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Otessa Moshfegh), which was particularly disorienting to read in bed while falling asleep. i was disappointed by Philip Pullman's plotless canoe adventure La Belle Sauvage and also, typically for the booker prize, the first graphic novel included on the shortlist (Sabrina, Nick Drnaso), where just because something is a commentary on its time and media (social and populist) doesn't mean it's interesting or make up for the fact that the characters are barely distinguishable and everything looks like it happens inside a cardboard box. "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all" - clearly i don't hew to this view, on the mostly anonymous internet, but i don't like to only write positive things because that just contributes to publication bias. scientific method and all that.

conclusions: i'll take provocative writing with brilliant turns of phrase for now, thanks. i'm looking forward to the next books by Otessa Moshfegh, Nell Zink, when oh when is Alison Bechdel going to release hers?


films: 

my worst movie experience of the year - i love a good documentary and also i love public libraries. Ex Libris: the New York Public Library went for over 3 hours (we walked out at the 2:45 mark) and lacked any sort of narrative structure or aesthetic interest, with way too many administrative meetings and american self-congratulations. i liked where they showed the automated processing of returned items, and that was about it.
i saw a lot of blockbusters this year and they were pretty much mostly forgettable. Isle of Dogs was good, i do like wes anderson. rewatching the royal tenenbaums though - it was not as good as i recalled from 14 or so years ago.
Phantom Thread was pretty great, all interiors and crunching and eating and jockeying.
hands down the best film i saw was also the most recent, The Favourite. it was in the smallest theatre in the most multiplexy of black concrete-walled lightning bolt-carpeted cinemas, and it was great. i haven't seen something where what felt like a small like-minded community of audience members laughed so much at genuinely wicked/funny/black dramedy without ruining it. throw in deadpan barbed verbal jousting, excellent shooting outfits, hefty emotional undercurrents and associated nuanced acting, unpinnable/flexible sexualities, baroque organ/harpsichord soundtrack, i haven't even gotten to the strong female characters yet. absurdist period drama, i'm here for it.
(shoutout to the moment in its sibling film The Lobster and the pony with the beautiful hair. i'm still laughing about it.)


i watched the most TV this year that i have ever, i think. Westworld was cerebrally entertaining, at least it kept us discussing and conjecturing and wending a way through all the plot convolutions. Killing Eve and Maniac are probably my picks of the year. i also watched a lot of Parts Unknown and other food-related tv, RIP anthony bourdain and jonathan gold, sigh.


the classics:

why is lucia di lammermoor, a tragic opera, in mostly major keys? is this a bel canto thing? i tried to expand my horizons and felt like laughing the entire time. Jessica Pratt was great, though, a rare treat in sydney. i would love to see this opera with a black comedy production.

ho ho ho this year i went to glyndebourne, on a trouser role pilgrimage (frankly, i wouldn't do it for anything less). it is definitely the fanciest pants thing i have ever done, trying to not stand out too much among the black tie garden picnic crowd who thought that a bling mcmansion fluoro set for Der Rosenkavalier was just not traditional enough. i think i finally understand what it means to see operas when you already know and love them, to hope they will surpass your experiences and expectations. who will be the next mezzo Giulio Cesare after Sarah Connolly hangs up her golden chestplate? that opera is just hit after hit after hit. to see Kate Lindsey in her first outing as Octavian in those sublime stretched Strauss moments was very special, i hope she has several more to come.

a final highlight, also in london, was seeing John Eliot Gardiner with the english baroque soloists and monteverdi choir do several Bach cantatas, ewig in dulci jubilo indeed.


till next year! let us put our phones down and appreciate everything else.

art and context, aka 2017: a year in reading and other things

much as the catholic archbishop of sydney mourned 2017 as an annus horribilis, trite as it may seem, so has my year in reading been. for different reasons, yet not unrelated. notwithstanding but acknowledging the underlying backdrop of a hairsprayed orange wreaking global havoc, we can both (and i would not put myself in the same sentence as the catholic archbishop of sydney otherwise) point to the socio-geopolitical climate: as a local example, 'progress', though not without unnecessary trauma and damage (the same sex marriage debate here in australia) can be lamented on both our parts, for myself the way in which it occurred of course. ugh!! means, ends, all that? smug gloating by 'leaders' afterwards. horrible. streams of obscenities issuing internally and in the presence of friends. furthermore, ignorance truly is bliss. a full 30% of the eligible voting population chose to actively deny equality to others on a symbolic point! (by which i mean alternative lifestyles are happening no matter what, this was just legality catching up to real life.) the flip is that 50% chose to actively support equality. which of those figures is less depressing? some things are just better left unknown, but that requires leadership and empathy for the least defended, both of which have been lacking in australian politics for a while.

i have always been slightly morose in my optimism, but new depths of cynicism have been reached - it's not just that it's a shitshow, but that it has always been thus; we are all muddling along in barely overlapping venn diagrams thinking that the system is one way or another and if only we got our act together etc etc... yeah, right. like in mean girls, *light-bulb* the system does not exist! western democracy is oligarchy, institutions/constitutions hold no power, meritocracy has been co-opted by 'communists' and communism is a dirty word. the press needs a hippocratic oath. who is the press?

ahem, sorry not sorry about that political rant. but as a person interested in how the world works, it can't be ignored if i only blog once a year. all that to say that reading fiction has felt trite and superficial to me for most of the year, until i realised again that appreciating the art of fiction writing is a rewarding and balancing balm and should be applied liberally to:

a. offset the detrimental effects of current geopolitics and reading about it and history, sometimes in the form of books but mostly longform things on a phone :/

b. avoid the trap of reading nonfiction of unmemorable quality, which i did rather too much of this year.

with books, as always, let us begin with the middling to bad.

i did not learn my lesson from last year, and read too many (10) memoirs (see b. above). i learned about people butttt maybe no one that interesting. Ariel Levy's The Rules Do Not Apply did not wow me like i expected, having read its central and most moving chapter previously published online. i liked Bill Hayes' Insomniac City but definitely prefer Oliver Sacks in his professional writing rather than in memoir form. i did enjoy Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker, or rather the deep dive into an area of expertise. in that vein then, my favourite of the year is David Sedaris' Theft By Finding, if i can count slightly tidied and published diaries as memoir, because yes, he's a funny guy, has had a varied and interesting life, but really it demonstrated the honing of his craft. very close second is Myriam Gurba's Mean, as an example of the heights of such craft.

the other non-fiction i read this year fell only into two other categories: russia (2) and psychoanalysis (3). i have and will continue to read most things that Masha Gessen writes, and my dad has piqued my interest in pre-20th century chinese history. Damion Searl's The Inkblots was a fascinating look at hermann rorschach the person and psychoanalyst, the art and sensitivity/specificity of the actual rorschach test, its latter-day bastardisation and usage in popular culture, quite far from the original. the other highlight, which i need to revisit, was Janet Malcolm's Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (pub. 1981). the performance of which in real life is also very inaccessible to the average person. we need to invest in mental health, well, treatment for more than just the most severe at a start, then for everyone who needs it, then prevention and health maintenance for all. see "muddling along" above.. i have only endless ellipses. not quite yet resignation.

in an effort to place more emphasis on fiction, here are most of the 11 that i read this year, somewhat in order of reading, with snarknotes as per usual:

I Love Dick, Chris Kraus - yeahhh as the first of its kind to say, women can write like this and be seen as serious writers, sure. otherwise, no. (and yet, gasp on that last page, ugh!) vacillation/would not read again

What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell; A Greater Music, Bae Suah (trans. Deborah Smith) - i read these at opposite ends of the year, but found similarities in the internal voice of a quiet person, the role of memory in that voice and the remove of living in a different country as an adult perhaps forcing that quietness. classical music throughout the latter book, which i like to think i understood as part of an internal monologue. what do people who don't know that world think of this book? '...our hands trembled and our ears seemed to pick up the sound of our hearts breaking, not as a clean crack but as a wrenching of fibers...'

Purity, Jonathan Franzen - i liked him more before the internet, there i said it. does he have a neurosis about the internet? being known for not liking it, yet having it play such large obvious roles in his recent books, j franz do you have an inferiority complex about the internet? other than that, money, too much of a complicated yet tidy plot, typical franzen female and male characters, i don't really care for it.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Madeleine Thien - fictionalised 20th century china, a page-turner with a family book myth as the hook. dragged in the end. see above, pre-20th century chinese history.

Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney - i liked this in some ways, it reminded me of emily gould's friendship, but also some parts i just didn't care about. at all. as a portrait of a contemporaneous young female person, valid, but also eye-rolling slash wish it wasn't like this.

Swing Time, Zadie Smith - this one grounded me back to the search for quality in fiction at the end of the year. pondering what it means to live and to be better in relation to oneself or others, demonstrated via a complicated yet tidy plot, not completely spelled out, modern with the impact of omnipresent screens in our lives. j franz you wish you could be zadie smith. 'She kissed her teeth.' call me inordinately biased but zadie smith has always gotten teeth right.

Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders - mmm i wanted to like this and i did, though not intensely, but felt somewhat muppet's christmas carol about it all. concept, execution, man booker prize: fine, typical. personally i prefer fewer and deeper characters. 'Two puffs of smoke became mutually fond.' !!!

Autumn, Ali Smith - i love the way ali smith plays with words and speech patterns, swirling between internal monologue and in this book, dream sequences, which sounds faffy and vague, but no, great. How To Be Both is in my opinion the best example of her work thus far in the culmination of style, flow, concept and intensity of meaning. i can't believe i haven't mentioned it previously on these end of year lists, but apparently i missed summarising the year i read it (2014).

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Carson McCullers - oh man! one of the best of those southern gothic tales, where months pass in sentences, everyone slightly repulsive, devastating nonetheless. i am a sucker for an unusual woman.

all in all, not quite so terrible a year, given the circumstances, but i aim in future not to have to read so frantically in december in order to have anything at all to write about.


documentaries i watched of note and interest:
the 13th - ava duvernay, so good
the putin interviews - not objective. enlightening nonetheless
icarus - started as an attempt to see the effect of doping on one person's cycling performance, and devolved into an exposé of systematic doping in sport. the system does not exist.
the vietnam war by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick - i have been glued to the tv for 2 hours every weekend. rigorously objective and global context provided. hugely educational.


notable concerts of the year:

finally, some Monteverdi in and around the place! i loved hearing the 1610 Vespers in st mary's cathedral, by the Song Company and choirs. can't say the same for the madrigals done by Les Arts Florissants, which suffered irrevocably from intonation issues after the first 15 minutes. madrigals ARE intonation; i wanted to clutch my ears and applauded only at the end out of courtesy, that's how bad it was. a significant dearth of press reviews followed, considering the high international profile of the group. publication bias, i know you, i see you.

my first Poppea, thanks to Pinchgut Opera. do i love a countertenor eminem-alike Nerone? no, give me sarah connolly any day. but the production was fine, and i get it, finally, having considered L'Orfeo more accessible previously; sometimes only listening to records doesn't make sense.

SSO concert stagings of Pelleas et Melisande, and Bluebeard's Castle, courtesy of opera theatre renovations. resulted in similar sinus clearings of my understanding and man, that high C climax of bluebeard with a full symphony orchestra, extra brass on the landings and the opera house organ, was just about transcendental, as intended.


and with that, happy new year folks! may we appreciate what we have and think of others. and keep appreciating and critiquing art. in the words of cameron esposito, 'art dismantles power or else it's propaganda'.

2016, not my most successful year in reading

nevertheless, a revisiting!!

29 books read.

9 (!) memoirs. i should expand beyond this category because my enjoyment hit-rate was one-third. they do make for easy travel reading. the best of the lot was Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts. i don't know that i can add to the effusive aura of praise it wears. poetic and philosophical in ways that i don't usually enjoy, but really did. it (and the eileen myles collection i'm just starting on) may be turning my head towards poetry and its efficiencies.

3 biographies, 2 of patricia highsmith (which is quite enough) and one of romaine brooks, who, although also complicated and bigoted in early 20th century ways, did not seem to be quite so terrible. the placing of famous artists on pedestals and then finding out they are real flawed people is a conundrum of having our tastes define our self-image i.e being a fan. ahem, wagner anyone? i wouldn't read ayn rand but maybe this is hypocritical? maybe i am just becoming an adult.
however, i will make a special sidenote and mention the objective undeniable quality of romaine brooks' paintings and drawings that i flew across the world to see. i don't know much but i don't know of any other queer female painters who had so much money they could just paint whatever they wanted rather than having to make art that would sell.

2 korean translated fiction, both great! The Vegetarian by Han Kang and Your Republic is Calling You by Kim Young-Ha

2 widely hyped but quite disappointing tomes. Fates and Furies almost excuses the patriarchal coddling of average men, without quite acknowledging it. faux-literary and unbelievable, and just plain repetitious. if i want to read about marriage i want realism and insight into the human condition; i know art uses augmentations to make a point but this didn't work and put me off reading about conventional (read: straight) marriage, like, i know enough about it from general life thank you very much.
A Little Life was not overly well written, very verbose, and i liked the buildup much more than the actual reveal; also, what is so bad about suicide as a form of euthanasia? maybe we ask too much of people. again, augmentations to make a point. one glaring omission: rounded female characters?!??

2 widely hyped historical fiction. the centering on lady scientist characters in The Signature of All Things and The Essex Serpent did not exempt them from melodramatic rendezvous with mysterious perfect men, telegraphed well in advance. boring.

clearly the lesson here is that i need to adjust my hype filter.

two promising authors: Ottessa Moshfegh demonstrating the value in realism as character insight (and then promptly reverting to cliche, sadly) in Eileen; Helen Oyeyemi a rollicking storyteller with fascinating ideas in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, although the recurring themes were unnecessary and laboured.

my three books of the year:
The Mare by Mary Gaitskill
The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
The Door by Magda Szabo
all transporting, with fascinating and flawed characters.

2015, a year in reading

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.

dear eleanor catton, please don't read this. respectfully yours.

oh hello. i am beyond behind in my book reviewing (in fact i added 13 books to my 'finished' folder in my kindle, plus also read some printed books since we last convened) but have been entreated to entertain the notion again, given my moaning and groaning about the latest man booker prize winner and also the booker prize in general.


the luminaries, eleanor catton

hmm where to start. if i ignored the fact that it won the booker prize, here is how i would review the book. the only reason it is upwards of 800 pages is that it tells the same mystery story in and around itself a total of four separate times. the first is a recounting by a group of men to a naive newcomer. the second, after all the back stories and explanations, is a summary of the first. (which is somewhat necessary given the convolutions, but really. if it was really just about plot it would render the first telling unnecessary. more on this later.) the third (after a fashion) is a courtroom scene, in which... the story is told again. there is a veritable ending and comeuppance (more on this later as well) and all that good stuff. nope, only page 600 or so. what is the last 25% (in kindle parlance) of the book dedicated to? oh, it's not enough to know why everything happened, it must be literally spelled out by showing the very scenes which we assume to have occurred. nonono. if it's going to be a mystery, leave it as such. it's much more mysterious that way.

the style of writing was of that 19th century pulpy mystery story type. so one doesn't really read it for the writing. to be honest the only thing which kept me reading was the plot. so why have it four times?! slightly more details are added at each retelling, but as any seasoned reader of crime novels of the type that i have read knows, follow the money. the money trail was pretty clear after the first couple of plot runthroughs, and nothing much was a surprise after that. i guess i kept reading to see if there was anything else that was going to make it revelatory and booker prize-worthy... nope.

further, while most everything was shown and retold excessively, some plot points were left unexplained. why these? it makes them stand out all the more. and not for any good reason that i can see. in fact one of them involves the murder of a 'chinaman', the last in a string of unfair situations for this guy. this entire secondary story arc (begging for justice and revenge) was then summarily ignored and not addressed again. no punishment for his killer, just a secondhand account of a 'rap on the knuckles'. the main plot involved a vicious takedown of the villain. why not also give satisfactory justice to the 'chinaman', huh huh eleanor catton? this is not acceptable for a modern book, 'victorian style' and otherwise accurate cantonese transcription be damned.

speaking of which, as a young female author, i feel that eleanor catton has seriously gone the patriarchal route and stuck to the cliched and typical. a total of three women in the book and two of them are 'whores' and the other one is an abused downtrodden wife? please. if you're going to write a victorian mystery then you should at least shake it up a little, modernise it, subvert cliched expectations.

i guess the only other thing to talk about is the structure and title. to be honest i thought this was the weakest and least interesting part. yeah each chapter was half the length of the preceding chapter. there were star signs and other stuff as chapter titles and theoretical groupings of characters. did it impact/enhance my reading of the book? nope.

4.5/10 for effort. excessive effort that doesn't pay off in any revelatory way about the human spirit or the art of fiction writing. it goes without saying that i don't think it should be on the same list as 'midnight's children' or 'disgrace' or even 'the blind assassin'. but perhaps my expectations were altered by choosing to read it because it won the booker prize. or (even more likely) i am failing to understand what the booker prize is really rewarding. maybe we can go down the path of arguing 'it will get more people reading' a la 'the da vinci code' but in my opinion it should be more dignified.