Pasted inside one of my favorite Xmas gifts in many a year (a 3x6x8-inch shadow box given to me by my friend Donna DeRosa) is a painted, cutout picture of a shelf of multicolored book spines. Above it is a miniature framed photo of my novel. Hanging next to that is a miniature framed collage of pictures from my Facebook page. And sitting in front of that collage, on a stool, there is a miniature stuffed bear (Aloysius from Brideshead Revisited) cloaked in a hand-made shawl. The detail on these items is remarkable, and it brings to mind the collection of life “things,” the artifacts of one’s days, written about in Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence. It brings to mind the set, photographic portraits written about by Marianne Wiggins in her book The Shadow Catcher, which then brings to mind the minutiae of sociological detail in the insect world that Edward O. Wilson talks about in Naturalist. Following which is brought to mind the geometry of Brooklyn in Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, which finally brings to mind BOOKS; which is the subject of this essay: Books, and how reading saved my life this year.
I have always read, some years sparsely others more acutely. This year, as Jose Saramago wrote in The Cave: "I've lived, I've looked, I've read, and I've felt." Saramago goes on to say "...the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters, unless those rivers don't have just two shores but many, unless each reader is his or her own shore, and that shore is the only shore worth reaching."
For me the shores were the Pacific Coast, where I have been out of work for nearly a year, searching for gainful employment, and the Atlantic Coast, where I spent four months helping to care for my parents as my mother systematically died from leukemia. It was certainly An Intimate Year of Deaths, not only my mother's, but the death of her brother Joe; the accidental death of my cousin, Tim (Joe's son); Terry, a colleague, was killed in Malibu--a motorcycle accident; the death at the end of Alzheimer’s for my friends’ uncle, Sammy, in Las Vegas; and then there was the death of the Travelers Aid Society, for which I worked these past 18 years.
Books were my grief counseling, not because they were a new initiative to be taken, to rewire my consciousness, but as a modem of continuity: the face of hope, like the languid presence of a beloved dog lying next to you in the twilight, was never out of sight; the inkling of terror, caused by the insecurity of loss, remained but an ever-present, harmless glow.
It was A Year of Tomes, Trilogies, Twins, and Titans. Among the Tomes there were Peter Ackroyd's William Blake and Andrew Mango's Ataturk and Keith Richards' Life for the nonfiction side; for the fiction side there was Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (Mantel well deserved her Man/Booker Prize; this book about Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More, Cardinal Woolsey, was fascinating.) and Bring Up the Bodies; and Philip Roth's Letting Go and The Anatomy Lesson. Another Tome was Jared Diamond's colossal, and sometimes tedious, Collapse, about how societies COLLAPSE!
I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Pico Iyer's The Man Within My Head; I think I was first in the queue at the library. It was about his intricate and coincidental obsessions with Graham Greene; I'm a big fan of Iyer, and this kept his star up with me. There was Blue Latitudes by Tony Horowitz, about revisiting, by modern methods, the voyages of Captain Cook; it was a very entertaining and educational book. There was Michel Houellebecq's latest The Map and the Territory; another book for which I waited anxiously and got strategically placed in the reserve queue. Ivan Doig's English Creek, picked up where Dancing at the Rascal Fair left off (2011’s read), and then there was Thomas McGuane's The Bushwhacked Piano, which I have to say was disappointing and nonsensical. Life is too short to have to read another of his books.
There was, during March, Doris Lessing's Love, Again and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, an agonizing but beautiful read, and a second reading of Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence, because the first time I read it, it left me somewhat confused as to its essence. So I needed to read it again. I was glad that I did.
As part of the trilogy completion effort, I read Richard Ford's Independence Day (and as you may know I've become a devotee of Ford now) and Lay of the Land, completing the story begun with The Sportswriter [which I read a couple years ago]. I don’t recommend reading Lay of the Land right after you’ve lost your mother; but if you do, it will be an unforgettable experience.
Also read Richard Ford's Canada (reinforcing my admiration for that author) and J.B. Priestley's The Good Companions. I think The Good Companions can count as a Tome, since I never thought I'd be done with it.
In April I read and very much enjoyed LushLife by David Hajdu, a biography of composer/songwriter Billy Strayhorn; Bill Bryson's Neither Here Nor There [I’m always up for Bryson, he makes me laugh and expands my mind simultaneously]. There was also more of Michel Houellebecq, his earlier novel Whatever; All the Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (which I liked so much that it engendered interest in Home and Housekeeping--thus another of the Trilogies).
Late spring began with Philip K. Dick's doctrinal The Divine Invasion; Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table; and Michael Gruber's Book of Air and Shadows (a very intelligent thriller involving rare manuscripts and greed, deception, sex, good and evil, whatever you need). That gave me a segue into Edward O. Wilson’s endearing Naturalist.
Another Trilogy that I completed was the Pat Barker "Regeneration" trilogy, which I began in 2011, reading Eye in the Door in September and Ghost Road in November. I finally finished Wu Ch'eng-en's Monkey (it wasn't easy), Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole (which I think was surprisingly good; a lot of sweet loving prose therein), another Alan Furst novel The Polish Officer, and a thin but very interesting novel about Mary the Mother of Jesus by Colm Toibin called The Testament of Mary which has Mary being more than a little put out by Jesus and his friends.
Grace Paley was sensational and instructive (to me) with her short story compilations The Little Disturbances of Man and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute during November, trailing my completion of Orhan Pamuk's Silent House, which, being a Pamuk nut that I am, I liked very much. Another visit to Daniel Woodrell's Missouri Ozarks with The Outlaw Album and all I wanted to do for many weeks was talk funny, kick a dead animal, drink heavily, and write short stories--a form that is incredibly difficult but incredibly beautiful, controlled, and from Woodrell, inspiring. And a novel by Woodrell: The Ones You Do. That, too, hit the mark. I read Jonathan Lethem's much-acclaimed The Fortress of Solitude in October as well as another Anne Tyler book, Noah's Compass (a very minor work).
A little more sci-fi was provided by William Gibson's Neuromancer which I read because of its importance to the genre regarding cyber space, the Internet, etc., but it was lost on me. It was a circuitry board of terminology and wasted tension.
James Crumley was the Titan for me in 2012: books like The Wrong Case, Dancing Bear, Bordersnakes, The Final Country, and The Right Madness, gave me a whole new respect for the mystery/PI genre and a salty, dry, reverence for Herradura tequila. He took an appreciation for the American West, for violence, for sex, for cocaine, for hypocrisy, to an altogether new level. My friend, Joe, who had already read these books, kept saying to me: “Just wait; just wait. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Another Titan was Barry Hannah; I read his book of short stories High Lonesome and a novel Boomerang. It was Barry Hannah who inspired me to put a lot of energy into writing the short stories that I did during the year.
I read Edward Abbey's classic DesertSolitaire and Josyan Savigneau's Carson McCullers: A Life, along with Along the Way by Martin Sheen & Emilio Estevez (after having seen the movie "The Way"). I thoroughly enjoyed and loved quoting from Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve; there was Steven Rinella's Meat Eater (which was inferior to the two previous books that I’d read by him); Mitchell Pacelle's Empire (wild story about the building and purchase and sale and purchase of the Empire State Building); and Ben Macintyre's Double Cross (they all kept me busy during the month of October). I highly recommend Double Cross for those of you who enjoy WWII history, or the early years of the intelligence side of that ghastly time. It was fascinating. I rounded up my nonfiction journeys in December with Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (hiking the Pacific Crest Trail), as well as Luc Sante's Low Life, about early New York City history, especially The Bowery.
So now that we’re done with the ravages of 2012, let’s begin at the beginning. I’ve already started Saramago’s novel The Cave and Marc Seifer’s bio on Nicola Tesla, Wizard. I can’t wait to start lining up the rest of them.
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