I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

"I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it."  So begins Pat Barker's novel, Regeneration, with a letter from Siegfried Sassoon to the "Times" of London, July 1917.   A lot of parallels in Barker's novel of World War I to what's been going on in the U.S. and the world since before September 11.  We could stand to read books from and about WW I.  Might change our aggressive responses to anything and everything not American.

 Here are the fiction books I read during 2011.

The new year started with Thomas McGuane's Nobody's Angel (very funny) and James Salter's A Sport  and a Pastime.  Says Jesse Kornbluth of James Salter: "He’s considered a “writer’s writer” --- that is, too good for the masses to appreciate. There are worse things to be called. Still, to be a "writer's writer" for 35 years...."  These books are very different from each other. Both are extremes in the same world.  I liked them.  I recommend them.


In February it was more of McGuane, Driving on the Rim, and a short one from the Master, Henry James' Turn of the Screw.  I'm liking McGuane more each time I read him.

In March I read a good historical novel called Conspirata by Robert Harris, who gave us Pompeii, which I read in 2010, and liked very much.  Conspirata is the story of the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar.  You know me and gladiators, Romans, and aquaducts, just can't get enough.  Also read Colum McCann's Zoli, a very moving novel of a gypsy woman and her clan. I got lost in the time shifts, but the critics seemed to like it a lot.

Also read Jim Harrison's The English Major.  I tell you, I've read a lot of Harrison; and I wish my blog could be a brilliant and luminous billboard for the works and life of Jim Harrison.  I love his books.  His life-view is widesweeping, or widestretching or something wide, big, sprawling like Montana and Nebraska and Arizona.  He loves food and wine, and so do I.  He loves literature, and so do I.  I wish I started reading him years ago, but there's just so much a person can do.  I wish Harrison could get a postage stamp.  I wish more people would read him, especially people in power, in academia, or in hotels (instead of watching ESPN or "Two & a Half Men" and drinking expensive cocktails in the bar).

If March goes in like a lion and out like a lion, that's what it was like to read Henning Mankell's The Man From Beijing (a murder mystery of worldwide stature, brilliant, historical, well-written) and The Possibility of an Island from my man Michel Houelbecq.  Houelbecq has become my alter ego, without him knowing of course, and I've read The Elementary Particles and Platform, both of which have offended readers and critics, and I'm so glad. I've got my hands on his new book, The Map and the Territory, and can't wait to start it.

French novelist Michel Houelbecq

In June I read Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark and Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang.  Laughter in the Dark, I must admit, is not one of Nabokov's better books.  It contains his penchant for older man younger woman, very young woman, and I'm still to this day trying to figure out the "why" of the book.

  Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang is a great book.  It is a book of movement, hilarity, drunkenness, saboutage, sex, the hot hot sun of the southwest, and I tell you, while I scratched my imaginary five o'clock shadow and squinted as I took a pull on the sixth beer I wasn't drinking, I loved every minute of it.

In July I read James Jones' Some Came Running, which I got at the Santa Monica Library's bookstore for $2.00.  I've been wanting to read it for a long time, and I was not disappointed, except for the irritation factor which Jones employs by not using apostrophes when he writes contractions, and then there's this style he likes of stating a noun in a sentence, and then in the same or next sentence using that noun's adverbial form, and then adverbially again, and again.  Mr. Jones it appears was not in the habit of listening to his editors.  (Sorry, that's just me being an effete intellectual snob.)  I liked the book and hope it continues to draw readers. 

Also in July I read The Easter Parade by Richard Yates. In August I read Pat Barker's World War I novel Regeneration, the first in the trilogy, with appearances by Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen. I really enjoyed this book and am looking forward to the next two.

Also in August I finally finished Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk, the first in the Cairo trilogy series.  It was a very long book, but it was also very good.  Mahfouz's expose of the male-dominant, male-hypocritical dominant culture of WW I Egypt, its occupation by the Allies, its Ottoman Empire backwardness, and its social customs that suppress women to the point of a scrap metal crusher can sometimes make for frustrating reading; but it is important to read him, I feel, it is very important. Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize, was (toward the end of his life) shot by a would-be assassin's bullet, an Islamic fanatic who didn't like the author's parodies, to say it mildly.  But he continued.  Individuals with a voice for individual freedom and the freedom of others often get in the way of the violent swing of the moralist's hammer.  The characters in Palace Walk are very likeable, and the misfortune of living in an occupied country and being hamstrung by religious fundamentalism causes one [the reader] compassion, not condescension.  Christopher Dickey of Newsweek writes:

"Palace Walk, first published in 1956, is the best of Mahfouz's work. He drew heavily on autobiography (like the character Kamal, he was the youngest son in a large merchant clan). He writes about family, and to understand the Egyptian family is to understand, more clearly than any political treatise can explain, the soul of the country."

Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz

Also read Anne Enright's The Gathering and Daniel Woodrell's Tomato Red.  Lots of anger and yelling in Enright's book, especially at a time of death; lots of anger and blame and melodramatic stuff that you need more than tea to swallow down as you read it.  Tomato Red however is a horse of a different color.  It's a very strange book, set in Ozark country, told in powerful prose with the strange leaking bizarreness of smaller than small-town life. I'll read more Woodrell for sure.  Then came Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot.  This was more interesting (for its biographical sketchs of French novelist and national hero Gustav Flaubert and his contemporaries) than it was meaningful reading (as a novel).  I haven't given up on Barnes, so don't worry.  But Flaubert's Parrot I feel was written for the academic literati, and therefore not as clever and brilliant as everyone thinks.  But that's just me being an effete intellectual snob.

Vlad Dracul, the Impaler, Count Dracula

September found me reading Muriel Spark's The Only Problem, Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, Long Last Happy by Barry Hannah, and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland.  Let's just say that I liked all three of these books.  Kostova's novel about the search for Vlad the Impaler remains fairly true to legend and revealed an immense amount of scholarship mixed with flashbacks and country-hopping.

  The Only Problem is unusual, "an extremely sophisticated account of the perils that surround our unsuspecting lives in the world today and a disputation on the subject of the Book of Job, which she calls 'the pivotal book of the Bible.'" [Anita Brookner, The New York Times]

Joseph O'Neill

 I liked Netherland more than I expected; lots of Brooklyn, shady immigrants, post-September 11 anxiety, and a troubled marriage.  I'm not doing the author justice (but I recommend it highly)  Netherland is the "story of a family. The narrator, Hans van den Broek, is a Dutch-born equities analyst who lives in a TriBeCa loft with his British-born wife, Rachel, and their son. When 9/11 forces them to flee uptown, they end up living...in the shabby-glamorous Chelsea Hotel, and it is there that their marriage slowly cracks apart.  The book’s second story line is about the solace Hans finds in the vibrant subculture of cricket in New York, where he is among the few white men to be found on the hundreds of largely West Indian teams in the city, teams that fan out, in the hazy summertime, across scrabby, lesser-known public parks." [Dwight Garner, The New York Times]

One of the most enjoyable and entertaining and empowering writers I read this year was the late Barry Hannah.  I kept quoting passages from these stories to my friends, laughing out loud while I did so; I could not get over how good this book is.  (Sorry about the tense variations within one sentence.) I can unconditionally say that, except for my friend Joe Savino, and perhaps the late Larry Brown, Barry Hannah's work was singular in its influence upon my short story writing efforts in 2011.  I haven't read a lot of Hannah's books, just a novel Yonder Stands Your Orphan and the collection of selected short stories featured at left, Long, Last, Happy, but in 2012 I'm going to. 

October was a busy month for reading, probably because like August and September, the six furlough days I had to take from work gave me down time and escape time.  Only negative there is escaping into literature isn't going to pay the bills.  Nevertheless, here's to October:  The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley; The Great Leader by Jim Harrison; On Beauty by Zadie Smith; and A Man of Parts by David Lodge.

Author photos:  James Crumley, David Lodge, H.G. Wells

The Last Good Kiss is not the kind of book I would have picked up in years gone by, unless it came highly recommended by someone I know.  But I tell you, this book is hilarious.  You've got the pervading presence of an alcoholic bulldog among a cast of whacked out other characters while our protagonist is trying to solve a mystery and trying to do so while intensely inebriated.  I loved this book.  A Man of Parts, another book by one of my favorite authors, David Lodge, this time about H.G. Wells.  Lodge also gave us Author Author about the Master, Henry James, so you can bet your bottom dollar he's aces in my book, and has been for many many years.  I have posted on the wall above my big chair, in which I read, some codes of narrative coherence that Lodge feels one should, as a writer, adhere to.   A Man of Parts gives one insight into H.G. Wells that quite frankly astounded me. And I'm not going to share them here either, you have to read the book.  Zadie Smith's On Beauty is a very good book; well-written, intelligent; her prose places the cheek of another human face close to your own skin to prove that we are not all that different.  Feel the warmth.
The Great Leader by my hero Jim Harrison is subtitled a faux mystery.  But it wasn't so; he followed the structure of a good mystery and entertained us (as he usually does) with his love of food and poetry and drink, and his love of the exquisite bottoms of young women; so many sexual meanderings to the point of well, damn, the book had to come to an end someplace.  Unfortunately.

November gave me Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna; Pete Dexter's Paris Trout; Sam Lipsyte's The Ask; and Jim Harrison's Warlock.  This was some month, aside from Thanksgiving.

 My friend Barbara Mock Autry and I, one fine spring evening in San Diego, shortly before she and her family moved East, were talking books and I brought up Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, which she read and loved; "...then you have to read The Lacuna.  You will love it, Mark," she said, "I know you will." And I did.

Artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

The sections with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera were very entertaining, I enjoyed quoting them to my friends.  The historical points of reference concerning the Mexican communist party movement, the sanctuary given to Leon Trotsky by the Riveras, even though Trotsky's on Stalin's hit list, and the hypocrisy of American govenment and culture during the HUAC period, together with a young man's blossoming writing career based on his life with Frida and her bunch, all made for a wonderful book. And I haven't even explained the half of it.

Barbara Kingsolver

 I am a great fan of Barbara Kingsolver, to be sure.

 Paris Trout.  What can I say about the meanest sonofabitch I've come across in a long time, not since Larry Brown's character of the father in Joe.  Paris Trout is a true believer; he's also a despicable human being. This is a great book.  At times it was a nightmare.

  "Things look different ways when they ain't clear," Trout said.  "I don't forgive debts," he said.  "I pay my obligations, and I am paid in return.  ...you forgive one debt, ain't none of them going to pay you ever." 

The nastiness of Paris Trout sent me through the roof, especially when he declares, "I don't have a cruel heart."  Well, my friends, read the book.

I also read The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, which had some moments, I must admit.  And then Warlock by Jim Harrison, about an unemployed foundation executive whose life becomes unhinged.  I enjoyed this book very much.  It's Jim Harrison.

 In December it was McEwan's Black Dogs. This is a strange book, and McEwan often makes me uncomfortable, which is the pleasure I get from reading him. "The story revolves around a dramatic and terrifying event which changed the whole life of the narrator's mother-in-law, affecting her rather as Paul's vision on the Road to Damascus did him, although the experience was one of darkness, not of light. ...Black Dogs is curious and at times unpleasant. In the end, you can, as Bernard would, dismiss it as just a story, or, like June, you can look deeper and ponder the ideas further." [Courtesy of Ann Skea]
Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat was crazy; a crazy Englishwoman in Rome. So far it's by my least favorite book from her.  Cross Channel by Julian Barnes is a collection of short stories about English people who have settled in northern France, and I'm talking Middle Ages, post-World War II, any time.  It's a pretty good collection. I'm looking forward to reading more of Barnes.

And that, as they say, is that.

The will of Zeus was moving toward its end.

 "The will of Zeus was moving toward its end.  If ever I roofed a shrine to please your heart,...now bring my prayer to pass...your arrows for my tears!"
 

[The Iliad, Book I., Homer, translated by Robert Fagles.]

Such is a mere clip from Thomas Cahill's book, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter. The book was the last I finished in the year 2011. 

 It was brilliant, and I have read Cahill before (How the Irish Saved Civilization and Mysteries of the Middle Ages), and I can tell you he brings history alive, he reanimates the atmosphere, the people, and in this book the very syntax of life from 2000 B.C. through the conquest of Greece by Philip of Macedon, and you will like it, because he makes it so.

Nonfiction Books Read During 2011

Retreating through the past year, I must say it's been a bitch of a year personally, financially, and occupationally, but what a grand time as far as books go! I've had a Great Reading Year, and beg your indulgence for allowing me to share it with you.  First I will tackle the nonfiction, and then in a subsequent post, I’ll do the fiction.

In January, there was Orhan Pamuk’s The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist, and Home Town by Tracy Kidder.  Pamuk’s book was his collected lectures at Harvard, pieces of which I’ve excerpted here on this blog; and Kidder’s book was a heartwarming, charming story of a small town in Massachusetts told from the point of view of a policeman.  My uncle, Joseph Zipoli, was an admired and respected cop of some notoriety in my home town of Meriden, Connecticut.  I could surely see many of the plights and aggravations of small-town law enforcement mirrored in the pages of Kidder’s book and in the coffee-bruised sunken eyes of my uncle, and the toll it took on him and his family.

In February, it was the hilarious travel adventures recounted in Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu.  This book, like Iyer’s others, is so filled with the comic moments and alien-dark bizarre life of our fellow earthlings, that I could not put the book down.  My favorite chapter was on Hong Kong.

 



Steven Rinella

 I read Steven Rinella’s American Buffalo in April, as well as The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, Operation Mincemeat by Ben MacIntyre, and Rinella’s other book The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine.  Rinella, as you may know, used to have a show on TV called "The Wild Within."  It was fascinating, entertaining, informative, and I highly recommend the whole opus when it comes to Rinella.

Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, is more than an expansion of The Man Who Never Was; it is a brilliant exciting fact-filled and humorous account of that whole affair.  If you study WW2, you must read this book. Gladwell’s Tipping Point took me places that I was unprepared for; understanding how society moves and breathes, and telling it in such a fascinating way, anthropology never had it so good.

In May, my man Thomas Cahill thrilled me with Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe.  The Amazon.com blurb says it all: “On visits to the great cities of Europe—monumental Rome; the intellectually explosive Paris of Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas; the hotbed of scientific study that was Oxford; and the incomparable Florence of Dante and Giotto—Cahill brilliantly captures the spirit of experimentation, the colorful pageantry, and the passionate pursuit of knowledge that built the foundations for the modern world.”

June 2011 found me returning to Malcolm Gladwell with Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.  “Blink reveals that great decision makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing"-filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.”  So they say.

  I also read Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed World, and indeed it did.  Excellent book.  And it has taken me 55 years to get over my dislike of fishy fish, like cod, and now I love it.

Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks and Packing for Mars by Mary Roach kept me busy in July. Musicophila was especially poignant for me since most mornings I wake up with amazingly stupid songs in my head and wonder if I’ve been abducted during the night and aliens played 1970s radio the whole time they were probing me.  Mary Roach’s book was funny, informative, and scary since she deals with the romantic aspirations of astronauts and uptight NASA officials.

In August it was Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life.  I couldn’t believe how he wove what he did into a well-written, remarkable history of each and every room in your house. I love Bill Bryson. You can’t go wrong with any of his books. 

Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell brought me into September.  This is what you’re getting into with his book:  “Outliers: The Story of Success examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success. ...[Gladwell] examines the causes of why the majority of Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, how Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates achieved his extreme wealth, and how two people with exceptional intelligence end up with such vastly different fortunes.” We’re dealing with the "10,000-Hour Rule" and it is captivating reading. 

The Outlaw Sea by William Langewiesche was an eye-opening account of how little we know about how devastating the Sea can be, from pirates, to storms, to oil tankers falling apart, to well almost everything.  I think I’ll take a plane.

Hometowns, edited by the late John Preston, introduced October 2011.  In this book are collected essays by gay American authors who talk about growing up in their hometowns.  At times it was quite an emotional read, but I found that the overall affirmation was one of finding one’s niche in the world, and often in the most unlikely places.  I also read Douglas Waller’s Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage.

  It was a good book, I liked Donovan more than I thought I would, even though he was often an unlikeable fellow.  One can’t deny his bravery or his belief in raising intelligence in the U.S. to an art form without the bigoted and infected mindset of people like J. Edgar Hoover, who is all over this book, insidious, backstabbing, lying.

In November it was Inside the KGB by Vladimir Kuzichkin, a former KGB officer (the name is a pseudonym).   Probably some of the most boring writing I’ve ever come across in espionage-related texts; however, the insights he provides into the workings of the Soviet Communist Party and its legion of operatives are unbelievable: the fact that the USSR lasted as long as it did is a miracle: Corruption, stupidity, incompetence, drunkenness, permeated the KGB and GRU to the point of absurdity.

December it was My Life in France by Julia Child; it is a lovely audio book; however, I would “read” it during my lunch hour, before I ate, and the constant descriptions of the food she cooked, the recipes, the ecstasy of her restaurant visits literally drove my stomach to exponential hunger pangs.

Julia Child

 Also read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, in which she describes a year of life in western Virginia, and her family’s commitment to completely organic and locally grown foods and livestock.  It was amusing and very educational.

 Just Kids by Patti Smith was read by my entire household.  It is well-written, nostalgic, entertaining, and at times highly self-absorbed, which is for the most part what I thought of her and Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography.  It did not detract from their sweetness, nor did it impact my enjoyment of the book.

 Last Night I Dreamed of Peace is a posthumous memoir of Dang Thuy Tram, who was a field doctor for the North Vietnamese army, stationed in the central highlands, during 1968-1970.  It was quite a heart-breaking account of little more than two years (in journal entries).  The hardships and daily suffering that both civilians and soldiers endured while fighting a war of liberation is a moving storythat most people in this county know absolutely nothing about.  Sadly enough, I wonder if they will ever want to know.  Time does not heal all wounds.  Then came Sailing the Wine Dark Sea by Cahill and Falling Off the Map by Pico Iyer.  Iyer’s book focused on the Lonely Places on Earth.  His reportage of Paraguay and Iceland I read out loud to my friends, as it had me cracking up.

  More to follow, the fiction list, probably tomorrow.