Saturday, January 11, 2014

Reading for moral & intellectual improvement and for pleasure: Zipoli's year in books.


For the sake of my moral and  my intellectual improvement, and for pleasure...


            ...the year 2013 began with the completion of five good books; three of which I thought were very engaging:  (1) The Cave by Jose Saramago;  (2) Rope Burns by F.X. Toole; and (3) The World At Night by Alan Furst;  (4) Charming Billy by  Alice McDermott I found to be rather preachy and predictable.  That said, there were a few quotable passages and I especially liked the one on p. 194 (see my blog page).  (5) House of Splendid Isolation, although about a subject I am in sympathy with (Ireland), by Edna O'Brien, was stylistically irritating, especially the under-written (poorly executed) jumps in time within a paragraph or chapter section and the vague antecedents of her personal pronouns, which made the reading a self-conscious exercise.  Perhaps you should leave that kind of style to someone who has it under control.  I recommend William Faulkner.  My nonfiction book, Wizard: Life & Times of Nicola Tesla by Marc Seifer, was an interesting read.  Such a brilliant man, Tesla, but he led a life as unpredictable as lightening.  A sad eventuality for someone with such a fascinating dream for mankind.
Saramago, Toole, McDermott, Furst, Seifer, and O'Brien
             February gave me The Cowards by Josef Skvorecky, about the end of World War 2 in small town Czechoslovakia; although unfortunate for the Czechs, the story was still very funny, which is always a pleasure with Skvorecky.   Ride With Me, Mariah Montana by Ivan Doig is the concluding novel in his trilogy that begins (chronologically) with Dancing at the Rascal Fair.  Puts one in mind of Jim Harrison. Bringing up the rear is James Salter’s Light Years, which I liked quite a lot; intelligent, clever, and compelling.  I’ve become a fan of Salter.  Two nonfiction books finished in February: Here, There, Elsewhere by a favorite of mine, William Least Heat-Moon, and Townie by Andre Dubus III. Both are excellent, vastly different experiences, but what a pleasure it was to read both.  Townie’s hard-drinking, violent, antagonistic struggle of an embryo-writer was Dubus’s journey out of the cycle of guilt, broken families, and one’s conscience taking its place in the center of an amphitheater for everyone to throw stones at; while Heat-Moon’s prose told us that a “... journey into the land is an opening to escape limitations of inadequate learning and go beyond bonds of prejudice and get past restrictions of ignorance.  Such a trip is an invitation to listen to new voices--within and without--that will speak and inform.  It's an opportunity to put a face on a country, a face composed of smiles, grins, scowls, of concerns, hopes, and dreams, all of them more useful on a human visage than on a yellow lapel-button or a road map.”
Skvorecky, Doig, Salter, Dubus, Least Heat-Moon, Harr
             Margaret Drabble’s The Gates of Ivory started March 2013.  Followed by the very charming and inventive A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.  Kent Haruf’s Benediction     was especially moving what with the parent diagnosed with terminal cancer (less than 1 year after my own mother received the same news) and the attempts to reconnect with an estranged son.  2666 by Roberto Bolano was fascinating; no literary slouch he, Bolano carries you from one artistic, academic sphere to another while enveloping you in intrigues with nothing short of a Nazi and a serial killer.  The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr was sheer torture.  Stories [35] by Muriel Spark reinforced my adoration of her work.  My nonfiction titles, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries by Simon Winchester, and Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz, were absolutely fantastic.  I’ve become a devotee of both men.
Drabble, Eggers, Bolano, Haruf, Winchester, Spark, Horwitz
             April began with Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro.  Then came The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.  One of the funniest books I read all year, informative, and beautifully written.  It’s too bad that a huge portion of the world has lost its mind.  Breakfast in the Ruins by Michael Moorcock was not as good as the previous ones I’d read, but it was okay.  The Game Players of Titan was very good, as I’m not a huge sci-fi reader, Philip K. Dick does not disappoint.  The Radetsky March by Joseph Roth is not for everyone, and neither is the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1859 to 1918, but I have an affinity for German Romanticism and Roth is a powerful writer.  I continue to be a fan of this man, who met an untimely death in 1939, and of his work.  I concluded the month with A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark, which I liked, and recommend to my Anglophile friends and family out there.  And what a great read was Gustavo Arellano’s Taco USA, which gave me a thorough examination and history of Mexican, Spanish, Tex-Mex, Cali-Mex, food and drink.
Ishiguro, Rushdie, Moorcock, Dick, Roth, Spark, Arellano
             A second reading of The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky began May.  Not one of Dos’s big books but the absurd nature of life described there in, along with hallucinatory episodes, definitely presages works by Kafka, Goncharov, and Bunin.  Another Kent Haruf book, Where You Once Belonged, is an earlier one, and a precursor to the two books I loved the most by him (Eventide and Plainsong).  Second reading of Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, and one can’t go wrong with his books.  I started to like Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan right away; it had shades of Le Carre and Anita Brookner, but then by the last of it I was glad to be done with it: it had degenerated into saccharin, predictable, inevitability.   And then came another book by John Le Carre, his  latest, A Delicate Truth.  Not as intricate as earlier books, nor as dark, it was nevertheless an enthralling read.  The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver (her first book) is a good book.  I so look forward to reading her work, although I’m behind in a few volumes.  New Ways to Kill Your Mother by Colm Toibin has to be one of the best books I read all year.  Not only did it give me encouragement to deepen my writing it authenticated me and every other writer who deals with insecurity on one hand and backward literary historical ignorance on the other.  Here’s one of my favorite excerpts:

"...all fiction comes from a direct source and makes its way indirectly to the page or the stage.  It does so by finding metaphors, by building screens, by working on half truths, moulding them towards a form that is both pure and impure fabrication.  There is simply no other way of doing it.  Most plays, novels, and stories use the same stealthy process.  [Sebastian] Barry, by stealing [Charles] Haughey, simply exposed an age-old system.”
Haruf, LeCarre, Dostoyevsky, Davies, Kingsolver, Toibin
             I thoroughly enjoyed The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, which started off the month of June, followed by Confessions of a Crap Artist by Philip K. Dick, a very strange novel, not science fiction, not for everybody.  Then came Stoner by John Williams and Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls, both very good, both very recommended.   The nonfiction title, The Big Oyster by Mark Kurlansky, is a must read for those of us who love seafood, scientific and anecdotal history, and New York City. 
Franzen, Dick, Wallis, Kurlansky, Williams
             The official summer began with Wait Until Spring, Bandini by John Fante, this roman a clef, a good one, had me laughing and at the same time apprehensive about what was to come in this man’s life, the character’s life, considering what Fante’s childhood was like.  My friend Joe Savino has met Fante’s daughter a couple of times.  Hey, when it comes to celebrity sightings you take ‘em when you can get ‘em.  Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson is brilliant.  This historical novel book is ripe with episodic adventure and wait a minute, you might learn something about 17th century England, France, and the American colonies.  My friend Jim DeRosa turned me on to this author, and I’m glad he did.   Give Us a Kiss by Daniel Woodrell was a weird follow to Quicksilver, but then that’s the glory of reading.  A crime novelist returning to his home in the Ozarks getting mixed up with the marijuana cash crop matrix.  It was a good read.  It was a very different and closely human point of view that emerged from the blood of July 1863 in Ralph Peters’ Cain at Gettysburg.  If you like history, the Civil War, and the souls of good men, I recommend it.  The other favorite book of the year is the beautifully written, and I mean beautiful, and intelligently presented Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez.  I kept downloading pictures of the arctic landscape to be my background pictures on my computer, I kept thinking about if I won the lottery there’d be a visit to the Arctic Circle in my future (after a visit of course to Adventure 16 or REI).
Fante, Stephenson, Woodrell, Peters, Lopez
             And then August brought me the latest by Barbara Kingsolver, she's one of my heroes.  Flight Behavior encompasses rural Appalachia, hard times in the current economy, with a mix of” climate science and human need” running alongside “forces both biological and biblical.” (Mari Malcolm)  Jeremy's Version by James Purdy, a book right up my Family Closets and Kinfolk History street.  Purdy wrote this novel after the death, from cirrhosis, of his old brother.  Anne Tyler’s Amateur Marriage followed (this was a good book) and then came a hive-producing, ingrown-toe-nail pain of a book:  Cartesian Sonata and 3 other novellas by William Gass.  Experimental, form-and- flippancy-over-meaning narrative in fiction has always given me high blood pressure. It reminded me of another tedious and terrible book, Smuggler’s Bible by Joseph McElroy.  I haven’t given up on Gass, though, as I’m still interested in reading his huge novel The Tunnel.  But really. 
Purdy, Tyler, Gass
            Another superb book by John Fante, Ask the Dust, began September.  Close Range by Annie Proulx had its moments, few as they were.  I liked Philip Roth’s 1977 novel The Professor of Desire, but then I did not like John Fante’s The Road to Los Angeles; surprisingly, this Fante book was vitriolic in its hatred of almost everything.  I understood why the book, written in 1936, was posthumously published in 1985.  It would not have helped his career had it come out when written.  The meat and potatoes, spaghetti and wine, were forsaken for the mental illness of life among the Los Angeles down and outers.  The second Neal Stephenson book completed September: King of the Vagabonds; a disappointment when compared to Quicksilver.  It was more a contest between the sexes than an historical and scientific adventure like the preceding book.
Proulx, Roth
             I really liked Romain Gary’s The Roots of Heaven.  It is as incredibly relevant today as when it was first published in 1958, with the enduring theme of preserving animals from extinction being well-known and common to us all.  In this book, however, the preservation of wildlife in Africa becomes an allegory for the freedom of humanity.  The main character’s belief in stopping the senseless obliteration of elephants by bounty hunters and thrill seekers is matched by the marginalizing of the average human being, workers being replaced by robotics, basic human dignity being thrown into the gutter for the sake of profit, slavery in all but name practiced in many of the countries from which we buy our goods.  In this book, an elephant’s life is cheap, nonexistent, unimportant.  How different is it for the common soul of today?   October continued with another John Fante book, The Brotherhood of the Grape.  I loved this book.  And it was a joy and a relief to read the third Neal Stephenson novel in the Baroque Cycle: Odalisque.  Brilliant book.  And completing the month was a book of short stories by John Fante; loved this book as well:  The Wine of Youth. Savage Beauty: Biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford is a fairly decent attempt to unravel a complex, beautiful, talented, brilliant, adventuresome and tragic poet/short story writer.  I have read better biographies; this volume seemed to fertilize most of the pages with journal and letter excerpts, with sparse biographic commentary, which I personally enjoy.
Gary, Milford
             In November, I didn’t actually finish any fiction; but I did concentrate on my nonfiction.  Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand is one  profoundly moving biography of Louis Zamperini, an Italian-American former Olympic gold medalist, who was a prisoner of the Japanese during WWII.  It was horrifying in its depiction of human cruelty, it was mystifying in how Zamperini and his comrades survived, and if you’ve read or seen All My Sons by Arthur Miller, you will have a good idea of why so many airmen died because the machines they were flying were made so badly.  The statistics that Hillenbrand provides are stomach turning.  American manufacturers in 1940-1942 should have been keelhauled and then fed to pigs.  But back to Zamperini in the POW camp.  There is a good article in the January 2011 issue of Military History magazine entitled The Culture of Cruelty by Mark Felton.  It discusses how Japanese forces murdered millions of civilians and POWs and why.  A History of God by Karen Armstrong rounded out the month.  I found this book especially enlightening, as it provided a readable and erudite history of how man created God, including Judeo-Christian-Islamic roots in earlier god-creating cultures. 
Hillenbrand, Armstrong
            I went to town in December, mostly because there was time off from December 23-January 2 from my job.  The roll all began with The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.  I didn’t think this was up to his usual level.  I don’t recommend it.  Then again, I didn’t like Flaubert’s Parrot, which was very critically praised.  Red Gold by my man of the dark shadowy underworlds of World War Two: Alan Furst.  I have not yet been disappointed by Furst.  I love reading his books and can’t wait to resume.  The Story of the Night, by Colm Toibin was disappointing.  I like Toibin, I’d love to live where he does in Dublin, Ireland, in a four-story townhouse, he is brilliant, but this one particular volume, I’d have to say was 50/50.  Mocking Desire by Drago Jancar introduces us to one of Slovenia’s favorite sons.  A Balkan writer doing a stint in New Orleans, it brings one to ethereal levels.  Fraud is my first foray into the work of Anita Brookner.  I quite liked it; her writing is intelligent, organic, and I’m looking forward to reading Hotel du Lac and The Debut.  The Flame Throwers by Rachel Kushner was supposed to be something big.  It wasn’t. I have no idea what this book really was about.  And neither do the characters.  My first reading of a Charles Bukowski novel, Ham on Rye, had me laughing out loud, and not always because something was funny.  The accounts of an abusive father in the protagonist’s hard-luck world are heartbreaking.  December’s fiction experience ended with another good book by Alan Furst, Mission to Paris.  There are some strange, sad people in Ian Frazier’s book, On the Rez, recounting the unfortunate story or stories of the Oglala Sioux, using his friend Le War Lance and his visits to the Pine Ridge Reservation as focal points. 
Barnes, Jancar, Brookner, Bukowski, Frazier, Kushner

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