Mark's Books List of 2019

My friend Joe Savino remarked that this is the shortest book list of mine in many a year.  34 compared to 50+ in prior years.  But in my defense, several of these wonderful books are over five, six, sometimes over seven hundred pages.  Not an excuse, but a reason.  And whereas in the past, I augmented my list with audiobooks, listening them while on my lunch-hour walk, in 2019, I unfortunately did not take as many lunch-hour walks as in prior years. I let my job dictate my emotional and psychological equilibrium, or lack thereof.  I quote a great American crime novelist:"The workin' man don't get nothin' but older."  

Nevertheless, here's the list.  I've hyperlinked each title, so glide your curser over the title of the book and you can click away, and get taken to a review of it.

Brother Kemal and Happy Birthday, Turk! by Jakob Arjouni, two more reads into the underworld of Arjouni, who died age 49 in 2013, and his Turkish-German private investigator Kemal Kayankaya.  Good cocky mysteries.  

Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris is yet another hilarious recitation of the absurdity of life.  As usual, I guffawed out loud during much of this insane, Christmastime romp.  

Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell, “the best known editor at The New Yorker,” takes us to 1912 Illinois, small-town gentleness, and leaves you feeling that the afternoon is an actual character. Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant is a very good book of very good stories.  I’m looking forward to reading our other volume we have somewhere in the apartment, “Selected Stories of”.  Naturally there are six other books ahead of her.  

Death and the Penguin and Penguin Lost by Andrey Kurkov are two of my favorite books from 2019; Kurkov takes you along on a sometimes nerve-wrecking story but will endear himself to you before you know it.  The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown is an extraordinary story.  In the early decades of the U.S. in the Pacific Northwest, growing up in a broken home, working harder than one can ever imagine, this story about Joe Rantz, and the quest to make it to the 1936 Berlin Olympics is unbelievable.  I couldn’t get over how cold I felt while reading about Joe Rantz and his buddies rowing their brains out in the freezing weather around Seattle.  This is a marvelous and informative biography.

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles another of my gold-star reads for 2019, New York City in the 1930s, deep and complex.  The System of the World by Neal Stephenson took me forever to read last year, not because it was a drudgery, but because it is a huge book, its scope immense, and the intertwined stories of 17^th Century European politics, science, medicine, and swashbuckling are fantastic.  It concludes the Baroque cycle, three volumes of several books within each.  I loved it.

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time by Hilary Spurting is a fascinating biography of novelist Anthony Powell, and his impact on many of our contemporary, modern British writers.  A Closed Eye by Anita Brookner is yet another book I digested with relish by the woman who brought me Leaving Home and The Bay of Angels.  “My idea of heaven is a nice cup of tea” and sitting reading a Brookner novel.

Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War by Adam Hochschild, it’s a hard book to read because I’ve read so much already about this war both in fiction and nonfiction that its innumerable betrayals and cruelties are such precursors, preludes in full to the Second World War, like the explosion of the universe from the big bang theory.

Autumn Light by Pico Iyer is as I mentioned in my posting about it a beautiful book.  I wish I had the time to reread it.   Independent People by Halldor Laxness, the Nobel winner for literature, is a thick uphill tragic story of the people of early 20^th century Iceland.  Nature is almost as cruel to the people as they are to themselves.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks is a very good book in the vein of Dan Brown or Joseph Kanon.  I recommend it for like-minded readers. 

The Turkish Gambit  and Murder on the Leviathon by Boris Akunin are my continuing pleasures of late 19^thcentury Russian murder mysteries, making you laugh or making you astounded by the brilliance of the ongoing adventures of  the Sherlock Homes-like Fandorin.

The Mystic Masseur and Guerrillas by V. S. Naipaul are two more ventures into the world of colonial Trinidad & Tobago.  The former novel is loaded with satire, the latter reminds you that white rule, capitalism, subjection of the poor found its way into every nook and cranny of the British Empire, even after Empire. 

When I began reading Wendell Berry I had no preconceived notions of his art, but having read four of his books in 2019, I have been left with inarticulate adoration of his prose and amazement of his social, economic, and roots-of-the-family scope.  Nathan Coulter; A Place on Earth; The Memory of Old Jack; and Jayber Crow.  Four books that are going to be difficult to let go of.

Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon is a page-turner, Second World War thriller that fits right into my Alan Furst or John Lawton canon.

The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne is a good book.  He covers a lot of ground so buckle up.

The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St. James, 1932-1943, edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky, is one of the most fascinating books ever.  The presence of some of the most powerful people of the middle 20^th century, be it political or artistic, and Ambassador Maisky’s ability to keep his head above the Soviet Union’s fanaticisms during WW II, is nothing short of brilliance.  He is so incredibly charming, even when being bullied by Churchill.

The Bastards of Pizzofalcone by Maurizio de Giovanni.  This was like reading a television crime series, only in Italy.  It was a fun diversion.   Blowing the Bloody Doors Off by Michael Caine cracked me up most of the time, but he feels it’s necessary to give the reader helpful hints and encouragements about show business in every chapter.  

Agent Running in the Field by John Le Carre, his latest, was quite good.  I am a proud and loyal admirer of le Carre and I am happy to know he won the Olaf Palme Prize for his contribution to democracy.

Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce by Colm Toibin is a fascinating book about Oscar Wilde’s father, James Joyce’s father, and WB Yeats’ father, each unique in his own right, one more interesting than the other, but it is a very good read.  

Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergast takes you through the glorious discovery of coffee and its development as an indispensible attachment in our lives; but it also shows you the limitless greed of men with money and land, and advertising and lawyers, until you are demolished by the suffering that has occurred to bring you that heavenly coffee, good to the last drop, combustion.

Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales by Oliver Sacks joins the other Oliver Sacks books I’ve read, and I haven’t read them all but soon I will, as a wonderful book.   Under Occupation by Alan Furst was my first and only disappointment in his oeuvre.  Fugeddaboudit.

The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco.  I knew I needed to read a book by Eco because I really liked the film of The Name of the Rose and my friend Theresa (who is a Brooklyn girl you know) liked the book The Name of the Rose very much.  So I chose The Island of the Day Before.  Half.  Just half of this effete intellectual snob's book was necessary.  The rest was a waste of my three-score-and-four life.

Autumn Light and Pico Iyer - rush and distraction as foreign words

I have posted a few times about the British essayist, novelist, travel writer, Pico Iyer. I never tire of reading his work, experiencing vicariously his travels all across the globe, or his memories from boyhood to yesterday. The most recent book of his I read (in August of this year) was Autumn Light, a book Publishers Weekly recounts as being about "aging, death, and family fracturing...seen through the lens of Japanese culture," with Iyer describing his and Hiroko's (his Japanese wife) "efforts to cope with her father’s death, her mother’s entry into a nursing home, and her estrangement from her brother." 

Although there is much given to reflection in this book, there is still a lot going on, stirring one's stomach juices not toward gastronomy but toward hopefulness, anxiety, isolation, you name it, it went on inside me. He tells us 90+ pages into the book, "Autumn is the season of subtractions, the Japanese art of taking more and more away to charge the few things that remain. At least four times as many classical poems are set in autumn and spring than in summer and winter."


I jealously read onward, as he compares the life he left in New York City with the one he's living now:

"There's no car to take in for a smog test..., no breaking news banner...from CNN. I take my watch off the minute I arrive in Deer's Slope [the neighborhood Iyer and his wife live]. I'll never have to be anywhere at 3:00 p.m., and when I pull back the door to the terrace and walk out for an hour with a book and a cup of tea, I feel as if "rush" and "distraction" are words in a foreign lexicon."


For Iyer, who was often referred to as Pico-san by his neighbors, adjusting to the culture of modern Japan was as interesting as it was trepidatious.


"For so long..., the local men seemed a kind of alien species impossible to get close to. Women were always welcoming; everyone from the older ladies in shops, who spoke to me in crystalline Japanese, patient and kindly, to the young girls at cash registers, deliberately chirpy and full of processional smiles, did everything they could to make communication possible."


His socialization with many of the men and women at the athletic club he visits daily is where the real friendship-making takes place. Mostly elderly men and women playing ping pong and other activities, they eventually become warm and inclusive, as they are  "Allowed to be human again--their responsibility formerly to protect their families by being away from them, is now to protect their families by being with them...."(pp. 78-79)


With his wife, trying to make sense of her brother's estrangement from the family...,

  "That time, little they showing children many pictures. Then ask: Which face happy? Which face calm? Which person you think beautiful?
  "One boy, he every answer perfect. So intelligent. Every answer correct. But then my brother show him two picture--'Which one beautiful?' And this boy choose one with very strange face. Not so gorgeous.
  "They so surprise! Little shock feeling. Then, test-finish time, boy's mother coming, take him home. She look exactly same face, so strange."
  She smiles back up at me. "Every kid, mother's face so beautiful." (p.92)


Waking from a nap, Iyer writes: "As I come to consciousness, she's waving incense all around, as in a church, and throwing open every window to the predawn chill--the way we'll fling out roasted soybeans in early February, crying, "Devil, go out! Happines, stay in!" then, dread moment, she puts on a recording of low-voiced Tibetan chants, and sits stock-still for 20 minutes, before hauling every spare piece of clothing she can find into the washing machine and whipping up in 8 minutes or less tonight's dinner. ...This from the woman who runs out of the room, hands clamped to her ears, whenever I put on Leonard Cohen...." (p. 93)

Pico Iyer, The Dalai Lama, Hiroko Takeuchi

Hiroko is a marvelously good-hearted, sweet, and kind woman. You can't help but love her dearly.  When Iyer tells her over the phone, calling from Marrakesh to say that he feels darkness everywhere, "she told me to put salt in my pocket." [For Hiroko], her whole country is for her a teeming network of chattering crickets and tutelary spirits and heavenly forces she has to appease and watch closely, as she might a boss." (p. 98)

the Heart Sutra

One morning, Hiroko dressed to go outside in the rain, sat on the bed and drew on Iyer's back with her index finger, then blew on the "characters" she made: "An impromptu Hiroko blessing, to protect me from all evil, copying a little of the Heart Sutra onto my spine before she puts on her shades and struggles into her tall black boots." (p. 98)



The book is full of meditations and remembrances, both by Iyer and Hiroko, by her father and by her mother. It's a wonderful book. Let me leave you with this:

"I marvel at the clueless kid I'd been, barely out of my twenties, wandering around Japan not knowing a thing and therefore seeing so much. It reminds me of the time last week when I had a revelation--change itself is an unchanging truth--so new and unlike anything I'd caught before that I had to scribble it down. A few days later, going through my notes, I found that I'd had precisely the same revelation, word for word, a year before. Eerily, on the same November day. Later, I came upon exactly the same "discovery" once more, in my notes from six years before." (p. 159)