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.
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| Barnes, Jancar, Brookner, Bukowski, Frazier, Kushner |
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