A Reader's Place

It’s always a good feeling to look back over the books I’ve read or listened to and see how varied they were. I also often remember the season when I read a book–whether it was hot or cold and if I read a book on vacation, it often recalls the place. I used to listen to Terri Gross on NPR every afternoon when I was commuting a long distance in the late 1990s. There are still places on the Garden State Parkway where I can recall the details of an interview, hear Terri’s voice and the voice of her interviewee. Funny how the mind makes those connections permanent.

So here goes my list from 2012–fiction first, nonfiction in the next post. I read a mix of new books, so not everything is from 2012. They’re not arranged in any order. I read more fiction than nonfiction this year; I’m hoping to change that in 2013. You can see all the books I read this year on Goodreads. (link)  Comments always welcome!

Some day I’ll do the other list we all have–what I wanted to read but didn’t get to.

Fiction: 
Toby’s Room by Pat Barker. 2012. Barker’s a great writer and this is one of her best. It follows the same cast of characters as her previous novel, Life Class, and coves some of the same time period; we learn more about the characters and subjects that were only touched upon are expanded. No one writes about World War I the way Barker does–the anguish of the soldiers, the trauma that follows them home, the anger, and the pointlessness of it all. Most of the characters are the artists we met in Life Class, and Barker combines art and war in the most startling and dramatic ways. There are some very powerful scenes in the novel–they’re almost painted on the page in some of the most vivid prose I’ve encountered. If you’ve read her Regeneration trilogy, you’ll know what I mean. Some of the characters and scenes from those books still haunt me.

The Risk Pool by Richard Russo. 1988. At a talk I gave a few years ago, a guy in the audience raved on and on about this book and since I’ve enjoyed Russo before, I picked up a copy. It’s wonderful, so sorry it took me so long to get to it. It’s filled with terrific one-liners that ring so true you wonder why you didn’t think them up yourself. Well, there’s a reason. It’s a coming of age story with no plot, but who needs a plot with characters like these? There’s more about the novel in this post.

Fobbit by David Abrams. 2012. Reviewers were calling this a Catch-22 for the Iraq War; it’s in that vein, but on a smaller canvas. Very good. Publishers always like to provide a “hook” for readers, a readalike, particularly to a well-known author or book. That’s  what the marketing folks love to do, but this book stands on its own very nicely. I’m sure that this novel, and the one below, will be among the iconic books about the Iraq War.

Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers. 2012. This is the other kind of war novel– also about the Iraq War–the kind that’s painful but necessary. Beautifully written, not a word out of place; haunting. Two young soldiers, the older one promises to protect the younger. You know you’re in the presence of a remarkable writer from the opening, much quoted sentence: “The war tried to kill us in the spring.”

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter. 2012. There’s been a vogue lately for setting novels in several time periods and places, then tying it all up. For me, it doesn’t often work. It works here! In the hands of a lesser author, this story would be a frilly thing, hardly worth bothering about: starlets and superstars, romantic Italians, Hollywood sleaze–what, I’m reading this? It works and works wonderfully because Walter creates real people who have desires, suffer, remember, and love intensely. I want to read it again for the first time.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. 2009. I’ve had a signed copy of this on my nightstand since it was published and despite my love of Verghese’s memoirs, I didn’t get around to reading it until this year, well, actually I listened to it. I guess I was afraid it couldn’t match My Own Country. It is wonderful; Verghese creates fabulous characters that will break your heart and an expansive, almost mythical story to match. It’s set in Ethiopia and New York. Some people I spoke to about the book felt that it lost steam in the NY portions–not so! I loved it from first page to last.  The audio version was marvelous; the reader created separate voices and personalities for each character. A treat.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce. 2012. If I tell you what this is about, you won’t read it, so just read it. It’s the book you need to read to make you a better person. I’ve been lending my copy to anyone who’s breathing.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. 2012. For a classics junkie like me, reading this book was like eating candy.  Miller retells the story of the Iliad from the point of view of Patroclus. There’s more about it here in my earlier post.

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. 2011. So much better than Beasts of the Southern Wild. Sorry to all you fans, but I found the movie horrifying–for me it was an hour and a half about child abuse. I couldn’t see beyond that. Salvage the Bones is also about trauma, but so beautifully written, a powerful story with a brilliantly-written character at its center. National Book Award Winner, 2011.

A Land More Kind than Home by Wiley Cash. 2012. Southern gothic at its best, about a snake-handling preacher and the family he ruins. Structurally, almost a perfect novel, it’s told in several voices, each one necessary and distinct.

How it All Began by Penelope Lively. 2012. I’m a big fan of Lively’s novels and have read most of them. I love the way she takes an event and shows how the results form a widening pool of consequences, based on her characters’ personalities and proclivities. In fact, one of her novels is titled Consquences–a favorite of mine. This one follows the consequences of a mugging and how it affects the victim, her family, and the people she knows. Lively is a master at creating compelling, empathetic, unusual characters and setting them loose on the page. Here’s a link to my post on the book

A Different Sky by Meira Chand. 2011. A great, sweeping historical novel about Singapore in the twentieth century. I love historical novels where you learn history effortlessly, caught up in how the characters are tossed about by impersonal historical, political, and social forces. I’m surprised that this novel didn’t get more attention; Chand provides all of that and more. I visited Singapore and now when I think back to that visit, I see a slightly different city because of this novel. Here’s a link to my post on the novel.

The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje. 2011. An unusual, haunting coming of age novel that must be close to memoir, it’s so vivid. I wrote more about it in this post.

This is the cruelest storm of all, following on the heels of Sandy, when so many people have yet to get power back and so many others have lost their homes. I worry about the residents of those barrier beach communities, in New Jersey and in Queens and Long Island that have been so devastated by Sandy, and now we’ll have 2 more days with the threat of power outages from wind, rain, and snow. My lights were flickering in the early afternoon, not a good sign and it’s been snowing steadily here since noon. The lights just flickered again!

I started reading an older Richard Russo novel, The Risk Pool, and I think it’s one of his best, if you don’t mind coming of age stories without plots. I’m about half way through it now and enjoying Russo’s language immensely. He’s done the hard thing: created characters that are dishonest, irresponsible, and unethical but you’re eager to spend time with them, can’t wait to see what they’ve done now.

The main character is Ned Hall, son of a charismatic, petty crook of a father and a mother who can’t cope. We follow Ned from about 9 years of age through college. Like most of Russo’s novels, it takes place in upstate New York, in the small town of Mohawk, where the denizens of the bars, pool halls, and greasy spoon diners provide the Greek chorus for Ned and Sam’s life. What a great cast of lowlifes, amiable and not-so-amiable drunks, misfits, and cardsharps Russo has created! Many of the characters have great nicknames, bestowed by Ned’s father, who is never at a loss for an insult or an excuse.

Ned’s growing up takes place among these folks and he learns lessons about human nature that are hardly to be found elsewhere. The novel reminds me of Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life for its insight into the way children make use of the situations they’re put in. It also reminds me of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Little Bird of Heaven, although Oates’s novel is the dark side of the story, the one Russo chose not to tell. The Risk Pool is very funny; we laugh because we want to assure ourselves that it can’t be true.

Fortunately, we only lost power for a day and a half, although some of my friends still don’t have power after a week. I’ve been checking in with family and friends who live elsewhere and some have flooded basements, trees that came down on their roofs, and no water to go along with lack of electricity. We were very lucky. With a gas stove, I was always able to make a pot of tea and keep it hot with an old quilted tea cozy. With no phone service of any kind for 4 days–landline or cell–it was a good time to read.

I tackled the next book for my book group–Madeleine Albright’s memoir Madame Secretary–a daunting book for its length, made even more so by the fact that the only copy I could get from the library was large print. Easy to read but literally heavy. In light of the upcoming elections, it was a timely book to read.

Albright spent the first Clinton administration as our ambassador to the UN; the second as Secretary of State. If you think back to the 90s, the issues were myriad, diverse, and extremely urgent. Albright separates them in her book, dealing with Iran, the former Yugoslavia, North Korea, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, among others, in individual chapters. It takes a while before you realize that she’s dealing with them all simultaneously, expected to be on the mark at every minute to respond to each. One of her appendices is a schedule of her overseas trips as Secretary of State–quite daunting. She writes about how she occasionally saved time on flights by mid-air refueling. It’s an accessible, engaging story and a good reminder of some of the recent background to issues we’re still dealing with.

I also read The Orphan Master’s Son this past week, by Adam Johnson, a very dark, satirical novel about life in North Korea under Kim Jong Il. It’s hard to know where to begin to describe this tale. In some ways it’s Dickensian, in others it’s like 1984 or the movie Brazil. If I had known about some of the scenes of graphic violence I might not have read it, but I’m not sorry I did. It follows Pak Jun Do, the motherless son of the director of an orphanage. Pak’s adventures in the criminal underside of North Korean life bring him into conflict with the highest levels of government, and ultimately the Dear Leader himself. The first section of the book is a little slow but the rest is quite remarkable. Johnson depicts the way life in North Korea requires the suspension of disbelief and the suspension of rational thought.

Then I read My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, a tour de force about the friendship between two girls in a town just outside of Naples in the 1950s. It’s the first in a projected trilogy. Beautifully translated, it evokes the particular place and post-war time, the changing mores, and the finely calibrated relationships among the neighboring families. The first-person narrator, Elena, is drawn to the wild and moody Lila, whose charismatic personality makes her a magnet for trouble as the girls mature. The title poses the question of which of the girls is the brilliant one and what that brilliance will mean for them as they grow up.

I also read two ho-hum thrillers, which have been getting, or will get, lots of publicity: Ghostman by Roger Hobbs and The Intercept by Dick Wolf. Daniel Silva’s espionage thrillers about the art restorer/Mossad agent Gabriel Allon are my standard for thrillers; neither of these two books measured up in terms of suspense, believability, or character development. Oh well, we’ll probably see one or both of them on the big screen anyway.

It’s easy to write badly but hard to write this deliberately awful and hilarious stuff that wins the Bulwer-Lytton contest. If you been asleep and don’t know what this is, here’s the link to the website page with this year’s winners, recently announced: http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2012win.html

My favorite this year–the one that made me laugh out loud–is the runner-up for Purple Prose: “Corinne considered the colors (palest green, gray and lavender) and texture (downy as the finest velvet) and wondered, “How long have these cold cuts been in my refrigerator?” submitted by Linda Boatright of Omaha NE.

Thanks go to my Israeli writer friend Pnina Moed Kass who sent me the link.

Parts of this book are very, very interesting; other parts less so. The author covers habits from 3 perspectives: personal, corporate, cultural/societal. The section on how habits function in our personal lives was quite compelling–aren’t we always fascinated by how our own brains operate? Duhigg takes apart the triggers and rewards that create habits. I now feel like I have the tools to understand how habits are formed and how they can be broken–there are a few of my own I’m ready to tackle. The section on corporate habits was also very interesting–the Alcoa story was particularly fascinating. I’m bogged down in the final section on cultural stuff; somehow I think it’s more complex than the author’s explanations. I’m listening to the book and not sure I’ll be able to finish the last 2 CDs–the narrator’s not great so I’ve been slogging through despite lackluster narration, but now it’s really grating.