Blogorrhea Junior: Read a Good Book

Librarymoi Hey! It's National Book Week! Can I find any links to it on the web? No, I cannot. What up with that? Undeterred, however, I offer up my favorite books of 2005, in no particular order for your reading pleasure. These are not what I think are the best books; there is no such thing, but just the books I enjoyed reading the most this year. Maybe the folks who read this blog will enjoy them too.

But first, I have to offer this bit of despair-making idiocy from The Morning News via Miss Snark, whom I've come to adore. She's a must-read for aspiring authors (someone who's already writing regularly and aspires to publication, as opposed to aspiring writers who think this is easy and have yet to punch a key. If you're one of the latter, for God's sake don't come near her! She'll scare the bejezzus out of you, although that may be a good thing, considering (a) the state of literature and (b) the state of literature's audience. See above. So forget I said that.)

So here's my favorites, fiction and non-fiction (or is that distinction meaningful anymore, since A Million Little Pieces?):

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, James Shapiro. I haven't enjoyed literary criticism this much in, well, since before graduate school. But then, this is just the kind I like: not much theory and a whole lotta cultural, political, and historical context. It's another book, like Julia Brigg's Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (which will be one of my favorite books for 2006), that considers the person as a writer, not the writer as a person, focusing on the work and what led to and shaped it. The book opens with the clandestine building of the Globe (a good story in itself), discusses Elizabeth's fractious last years, Raleigh's disastrous Irish campaign, and in the meanwhile presents evidence for the books Shakespeare read, the people he associated with who interchanged ideas with him, what the roads were like between London and Stratford, and illegal barley hoarding by the Shakespeare clan, among other things. This is a writer who can make the enclosure laws of the middle ages interesting. He succeeded in making me stop hating "Hamlet," which is no mean feat, believe me, and left me wanting to see all the plays.
The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece, Jonathan Harr. A spoonful of sugar makes the art history go down. This was more of a romp than a serious tome, but it was pleasant and taught me things about painting, museums and Caravaggio, who sounds like a right bastard (what is it about artists? Are they all assholes?), as well as how easily artworks disappear and how provenance is established. That said, it was written in a suspenseful enough way to make it a page turner. Not quite as much fun as Thomas Hoving's King of the Confessors (now out of print, except a "reappraisal" reissued as an ebook), but then, this was all done by the book, too. Ahem.
Water Touching Stone/Skull Mantra/Bone Mountain/Beautiful Ghosts, Eliot Pattison. I read these all at a gulp, but slightly backwards. I picked up Beautiful Ghosts, the fourth in the series, first and was so captivated that I bought all the rest at once. Pattison pays attention to all the things I like: plot, setting, character (I know; that's so old fashioned and retro). The books are set in Tibet and are shelved with the detective stories, but like the best of any genre fic, they're far more than that as well. His detective is a disgraced Beijing apparatchik sent to the work camps in Tibet for daring to expose the corruption of Party bosses. There, he comes in contact with the imprisoned Buddhist monks who literally and spiritually save his life. Tibet is evoked as a country slowly being murdered by the invading Chinese, in the same way the English nearly murdered Ireland, or Americans nearly murdered the Native Americans: by suppressing the old customs, seducing the young, and forcing assimilation. It's an old story. While there's a strong element of pro-Tibet propaganda in them, and no mention of some of the horrific conditions that existed before the Chinese invaded, there's also a heartening support of non-violence. And some damn fine writing.
Truth and Beauty: A Friendship, Anne Patchett. The friendship in question is Anne Patchett's with Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face. They met at the Iowa Writer's Workshop (the ur-MFA program that I love to hate), and the friendship is as inexplicable and maddening and yet wonderful as any between two very different people, one shy and one dramatically outgoing (that's not Patchett, by the way). Sometimes it's instructive to read about other people's train-wreck friendships to make sense of our own. This is an infinitely sad story ending in senseless tragedy, one nobody but Grealy could save herself from, which is s too often the case. As always with Anne Patchett, the writing is so lovely and yet so simple that you're never aware of anything but the story.
The Historian: A Novel, Elizabeth Kostova. I include this one almost reluctantly because the ending annoyed the hell out of me. The last 20 pages of this book are one of the biggest author let-downs I've run into for a long time, and yet the rest of the book is stunning in so many ways. It's a labyrinth of flashbacks, structurally difficult to write and yet not hard to follow. Kostova juggles the different voices, epistolary and otherwise, with apparent ease (although it took her ten years to write this and I can see why). It's just masterful writing, and the story is irresistible to vampire junkies. Unfortunately, the book ends with a literal bang and a whimper from the reader, who can only think: I came all this way with you for that ending? Lame, lame, lame, dammit. It's a great ride through 95% of it though. You pays yer money and ya takes yer chances.
Locked Rooms, Laurie King. Then there's Laurie King, who's written only one mediocre book in her career that I can see. This was not it. It's part of her Mary Russell series, in which young and brilliant Miss Russell is married to a rather elderly, semi-retired Sherlock Holmes. It's all so deeply improbable and yet built with such a convincing backstory (revealed in part in The Beekeeper's Apprentice and in more depth here) that it actually works. Russell, as she insists on being called, is a top-notch heroine, for one thing, and an intellectual match for Holmes in all but experience. Anything less, and she would be nothing but his Watson. Instead, she is very definitely an avatar of Irene Adler, the woman who got away. I wanna be Mary Russell when I grow up. And marry Peter Wimsey (who has a cameo appearance in another book in the series). Again: plot, character, expert style, ripping story. Wahoo! Oh, that mediocre book? A revisiting of the Hound of the Baskervilles, called The Moor. Left to her own devices and her own choice of historical and literary tidbits to flesh out, King is nothing short of superb. Like Elizabeth George, she pushes the detective genre into literature.
Bangkok Tattoo, John Burdett. Call this and its predecessor, Bangkok 8, the antithesis of Eliot Pattison's Buddhist detective series. Royal Thai Police detective, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, is a tormented practitioner walking a very fine line between corruption and justice. His mother is a retired prostitute who runs a successful brothel, where he grew up. His father is a long-lost American serviceman. Sonchai is like one of James Ellroy's tormented cops, and Bangkok itself is a character. You can smell and taste and hear it in Burdett's prose. Sonchai's voice is sardonic and mocking and a sort of twisted East Asia take on noir. Reading these books is like watching a multicar pile-up happen in slow motion. You're always left wondering who's going to walk away with all their limbs. And that's before they get into the actual traffic in Bangkok.
Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith, Martha Beck. Books like this are always tricky. The faithful shun them as the words of heretics; the unbelievers latch onto them as proof of the evil inherent in this particular religion, which means that the author is preaching to the converted, so to speak. If true, and there seems to be no reason to doubt that it is, given the medical evidence, this is a horrific exposé of child abuse and a religion that treats its women as second-class citizens, told from the inside. It's surprisingly objective, and Beck goes out of her way to praise the sincerity and kindness of her Mormon neighbors, which last just as long as the moment she began to speak about her experiences. Then the ranks closed. There's not much new here except in the area of how the Mormons treat their scholars at Brigham Young University. It's a wonder the place has any accreditation at all. What interested and called to me was her continuing search for the moments of communion with God that she'd felt during her pregnancy and how that triggered so many of the changes in her life.
To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Sacred Mission to Save America: 1955-1968, Stewart Burns. This is an era of history that I just barely remember, so I've wanted to read more about it for a while. While it's not hard to believe that racism was as blatant as it was just a short time ago, it's sickening to read about its viciousness. MLK's no saint in this book, but it doesn't diminish his status as one of the great figures in the history of human rights. Once again, the movement and personalities are placed firmly in its cultural context (sense a theme, here?) and there's an admirable sense of the complexity of the times and perhaps how the 60's came to be such a turning point for so many aspects of culture we thought were set in stone. Books like this can be dry as dust, but Burns brings the people alive without losing them in either statistics or cliche.
Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem. If you don't know Jonathan Lethem's work, be careful. With this title, you might think you're wandering into Raymond Chandler territory. You're not. It's more like Kinky Friedman, or the demon spawn of both of them. Nominally, this is a detective story, but only nominally. The hero is an orphaned, Tourette's-ridden geeky private detective by default who's trying to find out who murdered his boss. The cast of characters includes a Zen Master, the mob, a dame of the Chandler school, and the borough of Brooklyn, specifically Cobble Hill. It's weird being in the head of a character with Tourette's but it's also utterly fascinating and he's surprisingly lacking in bitterness, matter-of-fact about his affliction as only long-time sufferers can be. Like the other Lethem book I've read, Gun, With Occasional Music, I don't know quite what to do with this one, it's so quirky. In the end, I think it's probably the sweetest book I read this year. There's just something so doggedly optimistic about it.
Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac. Dr. Em passed on her copy of this book to me, being "over" Kerouac, I suspect. In small doses, I find him utterly charming in the same way I get suckered by poets. He's a total construct of his own mind the way Thoreau is and shamelessly romanticizes that irresponsible free-spirit thing, but I find the prose equally seductive, the way I do with his buddy Ginsberg's and his precursor Whitman's poems. After a while, it's kind of incantatory and almost hallucinogenic. Where's my black turtleneck?
Olympos, Dan Simmons. Dan Simmons is a genius, and a highly underrated one simply because he writes genre fic. Whenever I read one of his books, the question in the back of my head is can he really pull this off? So far, over three series and six books, the answer has always been yes. This time around, it's the second half (following Ilium) of his recasting of The Iliad with bits of "The Tempest" thrown in, set a few thousand years in a future populated by a decayed and hardly viable human civilization and populated with "post human" demi-gods. Dozens of fully-wrought characters, a breathtaking number of subplots, multiple parallel world settings, and all of them culminate in one nearly heroic, mindboggling ending. I say nearly because, while not anywhere as disappointing as The Historian's ending, this just left me saying "wow" at the end, rather than entirely speechless as the Hyperion and Endymion series did. Well worth the ride.
Downtown: My Manhattan, Pete Hamill. I love books about New York, anyway, and no two writers find the same things about the city fascinating. Pete Hamill comes closest to my own infatuations, and he writes about them with the same kind of passion I feel for this big mess of a city. For Hamill, there's always a little big of magic happening somewhere, and occasionally, we run into it, if we care to notice.
A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, David M. Friedman. Proof, once again, that guys have a strange relationship with their equipment and don't mind telling you about it. Actually, Friedman doesn't say anything about his own, but he's got plenty of hilarious and horrifying and just plain weird anecdotes about a lot of other guys' wedding tackle and what various cultures have made of its capricious behavior. Then there's the euphemisms and nicknames. In some ways, this is sort of the male answer to The Vagina Monologues, though I didn't expect this to be as, er, interesting as it was. Not clinical in the least, it's highly entertaining and deeply amusing. Sorry, guys. I'm not laughing at you. Really.
The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon. OMG, I almost forgot this one. I think it was the first one I read this year, too. This is one of those metabooks, in a way, a bit like House of Leaves, but without the scariness. It's not the structure that's makes it so, but the plot this time, which revolves around the existence of a book and the the mysterious life and disappearance of all the works of the man who wrote it.. I was immediately sucked in by the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where the hero chooses a book called The Shadow of the Wind which he loves so much he searches for other works by the same author. What he finds instead is a nasty mystery set in post WWII Barcelona. Beautifully translated and a real page turner.
How to Suppress Women's Writing, Joanna Russ. Oops, another one I nearly forgot, loaned to me by Gretl, over my objections that I'd read The Female Man and didn't like it much. How did I miss this in grad school? Written in 1983, when Feminism was building up a good head of steam, this is one of those books you read and go, "Duh! That's so obvious! Why didn't we see that before? More importantly, why didn't we bitch and moan about it long ago?" and worse, "Why do we even have to point this out?" The cover sort of sums it up: "She didn't write it. She wrote it but she shouldn't have. She wrote it but look what she wrote about. She wrote it but she isn't really an artist, and it isn't really art. She wrote it but she had help. She wrote it but she's an anomaly. She wrote it BUT..." It's a short little book. I had to read it in very small chunks and it took me a very long time, for the sake of my health. I could feel my own head of steam building up. Sadly, it's still all so true, dammit, and it applies to any art women practice. And that's why you should read this book too.