2013 Year in Review

Time to quickly look back at 2013, before I mention that I've already read 3 books in 2014. So here goes:

Books read: 47 (decent)
Of those, how many were:
*Romance novels: 9, let's say
*Owned by me: 15 (down a little from last year, but still respectable)
*YA: 9 (mostly trilogies)

*Written by female authors:  28 (60%, down from 70% last year. Additionally, if you take out the YA trilogies and the romance novels, we're down to 11 of 30. Hmm.)

*Non-fiction: 9. Plus 4 were histories! Good work

Favorites:

The Shadow of the Wind

Overseas

Gone Girl

Tell the Wolves I'm Home

Wife 22

Divergent

Was one of those a clear "best read of the year"? I don't think so. But each of them not only compelled me to keep reading and reading, but they also raised questions that kept me thinking well after the book was over.

Goals for 2014? None yet. This is going to be a busy year - good heavens wedding planning is a project - but I want to keep carving out reading time. I'm trusting myself to follow my instincts on what I should be reading. Hopefully that will mean continuing to whittle down that big "to-read" shelf a bit too.

Surveys!

Wife 22 - Melanie Gideon (Ballantine Books, 2012)

Another example of a book that got on my list somehow. I was at the library, trying to find something (unwarlike) for a weekend plane ride. And this was what was on the shelves. Of course, then I stuck to Thucydides on the plane, so got to this almost a week after I got back.

But then I blew through it. I didn't want to put it down.

Wife 22 is Alice, a Bay Area woman approaching a mid-life crisis. At the same time, her husband and children are having crises of their own. In her free-wheeling state of wondering what comes next, she finds an invitation in her spam folder to participate in a marriage study. The questions are open-ended (the researcher assigned to her case compares his job to what they do to songs at Pandora) and cover the past, the present, and the future. And as she goes through, her interactions with the researcher get increasingly personal.

Chapters are usually short, and the plot is presented in a variety of forms: first-person narrative, texts, emails, survey responses (without the questions!), and playwritten scenes. It's a difficult gimmick to pull off without feeling gimmicky, but I felt like it worked here, even when some of the social media facts felt un-true.

Don't want to give much more away, but I was enraptured by this tale of how a life and a love look from outside and from within.  

2012 Reading in Review

As promised, a quick look back at what I read in 2012, based on what this blog seems to say, as well as my own memories.

Books read: 50 (not bad)
Of those, how many were:
*Romance novels: approx. 11, depending on your definitions (hmmm...)
*Owned by me: 19 (!!!!! This constitutes balance for me, since usually my borrowed percentage is much higher)

*Written by female authors:  35 (i.e. 70% - wow)

*Non-fiction: 8 (perhaps a little low, but I clearly prefer fiction)

Books still on my "to read" bookshelf next to my bed: somewhere around 50 (improvement)

Books on my "ready to give to a new home" shelf: 9 (time for someone to have a book swap party!)

Fave reads:
The Night Circus (probably my all-out favorite of the year)
Queen Margot
Sarah's Key
We Need to Talk about Kevin (probably the book I've thought about the most since finishing)
A Visit From the Goon Squad
Enchantments
The Other Guy's Bride (the one that made me smile the most)
The Count of Monte Cristo

Which is to say, I liked a lot of books written by women plus a couple by Dumas.

Goals for 2013: I'm not really sure. I'm going to keep plugging away at my bookshelf and my "to read" lists. I'm also going to make more of an effort at non-fiction - let's aim for 10 NF books, and at least two of them history. I miss you, history. (Thank goodness for historical fiction!)

Feeling Redundant

Armed Gunmen, True Facts, and Other Ridiculous Nonsense: A Compiled Compendium of Repetitive Redundancies - Richard Kallan (Pantheon Books, 2005)


I'm a huge snob about you're and your. And there are plenty of other written tics that make me crazy. But I think I'm pretty laissez faire about the things that bother the true purists. And so I'm not sure what to make of Kallan's book. Rather than any kind of diatribe about our propensity to include extraneous words, it's simply a list of some of the most frequent offenders. (For example: see title) They come with cute definitions - "Hidden Pitfall: A pitfall unannounced by bells and whistles" - and charming illustrations by 19th-century illustrator George Cruikshank. Also a plus: I learned that these are technically tautologies, which helped me understand that word a bit better. This is good, given that my previous definition was something like "it's like when you define the word illustration by saying something that is illustrated." So yay. On the other hand, I found some of it pretty judgmental. I'll grant you that saying "6 A.M. in the morning" is absurd, but "twelve noon" is not. Please trust me on this one, unless you too have been stuck in an Italian airport because your ride misunderstood and is coming twelve hours from now.

2010 WrapUp & Best Of...

I read a lot at the beginning of this year. And then life got really hectic and I stopped reading. As much as I ever "stop" reading. Anyway, so my total count for the year is somewhere in the neighborhood of 42 books. (This does not include romance novels, which I should finally be brave and just admit that I read about 6 times/year.... Dude, they have hockey ones.... and it also counts all those Vampire Diaries titles as a single one.)

Going back and making a best of list was difficult, especially since there was a lot of light reading that I really enjoyed. And then there was a Pulitzer Prize-winner that didn't crack the list either. But whatever.... it is what it is, to bring back a phrase that was finally starting to fade out of my vocabulary.

But here it is, starting with some not-quite-official selections...

*Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel - technically I finished this last Dec. 31, but it never had a chance to count on my books of 2009, so here it is. Lovely.

*War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007) - well, obviously. This one also gets an asterisk because I had read the novel before. But not this translation!

And the rest, in reverse chronological order from when I read them:

The Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins

I hadn't realized that YA dystopias could be so moving

North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell

Won't knock Austen off her throne, but such a joy to discover.

One Day - David Nicholls

I have heard critiques that it is a little too manipulative, but screw that. I was enthralled.

Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller

This memoir was stunning. I kept finding myself dumbstruck.

The Possessed (etc.) - Elif Batuman

The title of my blog post was Russian! Books! Stanford! - 'Nuff said.

Bel Canto - Ann Patchett

So much more beautiful and moving than I had expected.

The Black Book - Orhan Pamuk

Challenging, but worth the effort.

A Fortunate Age - Joanna Smith Rakoff

I will always be a sucker for these novels about college graduates whose lives look just enough like mine.

Dreams From My Father - Barack Obama

Excellent food for thought, and a reminder of the complicated and thoughtful man who became president.

2666 - Roberto Bolaño

Soooooo good. So interesting. So confusing. Will eventually require additional reads.

2011 resolutions upcoming.... Stay tuned.

Best of the 00s

(Reposted, a bit late, from Facebook, b/c clearly I have my priorities straight.)
This list was impossible to put together. In the end, I just went back through my blog, which only covers the second half of the decade. So it's my favorite books that were published 2000-09 that I read in 2005-09, with one exception, which was my favorite book of the decade and thus had to be included. It ended up being a slightly surprising list, because some of these I didn't particularly seem to like that much when I first read and posted about them. Who knows how favorites are made?

10. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl
9. Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace (which prob benefited from an Infinite Jest bounce)
8. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
7. The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta
6. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
5. The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
4. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
3. The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
2. The Post-Birthday World, Lionel Shriver (2)
1. My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk (no review, but here are a couple other posts...)

2009 Recap, and Goals for 2010

First of all, looking back, I see I have read about 32 books in 2009. This number isn't entirely accurate, as there are books that don't merit blogging, but close enough. This is a lower number than I would have liked, but decent enough considering the combination of school and work, and the big project that was Infinite Jest. And depending on how I spend the rest of today, I might get through Wolf Hall as well, another big book. Also worth noting, I actually made it through all my magazines for the year, New Yorkers included. (In 2007, when I finished those, I left a huge pile of other crap. No piles left this year.) I also set the goal of reading 10 books I already owned. Considering how much I love getting library books instead of reading what I already have, this is harder than it sounds. And looking back at my posts, I didn't do it, and hit what looks like 8 instead, although if you count books that were lent to me before the start of 2009, maybe I could give myself credit.

So for the year to come... I'm going to stick to my usual. I'm going to keep up with magazines, and again go for reading 10 books that I already own. This time, I'm going to identify 6 in advance, and leave the other 4 up to fate. So here goes. In 2010, I will read:
2666, by Roberto Bolano
Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz (why have I been putting this off???)
The Black Book, by Orhan Pamuk
Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver
And in deciding this list (all random except for 2666, which I thought would be part of Infinite Summer, but that appears uncertain, to say the least) I am noticing how many other fantastic books I have that I am really eager to read. Perhaps I need to lose my library card for a little while...

Happy New Year to you and yours.

When sex isn't sexy

The Rachel Papers - Martin Amis
Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1984 (originally published 1973)

I went back and checked. It doesn't actually say "romp" on any of the cover blurbs. That was my imagination. But still, I feel like I was misled to expect a sort of screwball sexy comedy, British-style. Plus, I really liked Time's Arrow (spoiler alert on the link).

So. Charles is about to turn 20, about to go to Oxford, probably. He was sickly and effeminate growing up, and has decided to prove his virility by being almost monomaniacally focused on sex. Which I guess isn't that unusual for young men. But it's a scary look into their minds.

I guess I just found him troubling, and sad. His notebooks and careful over-thinking prevent him from really experiencing life as it happens. And really seeing himself and other people. He is a (very) little like Chuck Bass, although I am only making that comparison because I just finished watching Gossip Girl.

Anyway, romp it was not. Slightly painful journey into the mind of a neurotic young man? That's more like it.

Revisiting 2008

Running a program and being back in school don't exactly lend themselves to lots of reading and writing and thinking about reading and writing. Well, thinking some. I was constantly sad that I didn't have more time to read. Or didn't make more time to read. Probably both.

Anyway, I wanted to revisit a couple of the goals I had mentioned for the year. Last year I set the goal of finishing all of my 2007 New Yorkers before the end of the year. (And succeeded with 2 days to spare.) This year, I am still working on the November 17 issue. So I will finish this year 5 issues behind. (Also, it is dangerous to read coverage of Election Night, even now, while at the gym, b/c when you get all weepy and choked up, you then start worrying that people are thinking you are going to pass out b/c the elliptical machine is clearly just too much for you.)

I also joined the Russian Reading Challenge and made it through all 4 (plus one) of those books. In that post, I also claimed I would read another 5 books that I already owned. It appears that I read 7 (there were a couple more, but they were books I purchased this year, so don't count). In total, I read something more than 38 books. (There are some that don't get posts because they are texts for class or I am embarrassed about them. Plus I did a fair amount of re-reading of older books this year too. But anyway...)

Goals for next year? Honestly, I don't know what to expect. 2009 promises to bring a LOT of changes, and I don't know what that's going to mean for me and reading. I guess that I should commit to reading another 10 books that I already own. This would probably be easier if I selected them and listed them here, but that's just not going to happen. Not tonight.

Happy New Year to all! May 2009 bring a lot of happy change for us all.

New books are just more fun?

See? Just the other day I wrote about how I have a hard time reading the books I actually own. And today I come across a Booklist blog on the same topic. Based on this WSJ article and its comments, Keir Graff muses on the to-read pile.

And yet I still buy and hoard books. I’ve joked–joked–that I’ll have to quit my job as a book reviewer in order to read books. But given that I won’t, I imagine I’ll spend my first months of retirement doing math, dividing the number of pages per day I can read into the number of years I think I have left–and weeding my thousands of books to read accordingly.

Jesus, I hadn't even thought about doing that math. I need to get on this.

But it's mildly reassuring to remember that I'm not alone, b/c we all have more books to read than we ever will read. And we all let books sit for far too long. I think I might be unusual in that I am more likely to use the "But I will like it so much I just want to save it for a little longer" excuse. But in the end, it is still an excuse. And one that gives me time for re-reading Emma and watching deliciously bad teen shows.

A Big Book of Russian Culture

Happy New Year!

I decided to start off 2008 with a tome - and one from the Russian Reading Challenge in order to get started on that list - and I'm while reading is harder now that work has begun again, I am making decent progress.

The book? Orlando Figes' Natasha's Dance. Figes became one of my favorite Russian historians when I was in grad school; he was so personable and witty and vast. There was plenty to quibble with in his scope and analysis, but that was part of the fun too. In Natasha's Dance, he takes on the oh-so-manageable task of writing "a cultural history of Russia."

One of my happy discoveries thus far is that I haven't forgotten all my history in the 3 years since leaving Georgetown. Several times I've wondered "will he talk about this?" a few pages before he does. (In particular: philanthropy among the merchant classes in late 19th century Moscow, which btw was the topic of the first scholarly book I read in full in Russian) Another surprise: the Natasha of the title is the imperious heroine of War and Peace. The passage Figes references - where Natasha instinctively performs a peasant dance - represents for him Russian cultural history, the interplay between Western aspirations and the "Russian soul."

A little lighter on the history than maybe I would like, but lots and lots of books and art and music. Hooray! Oh, and architecture. Plus, I loved this little ditty by Turgenev, about one of the foremost critics of the day:

Argue with someone more intelligent than you:
He will defeat you.
But from your defeat you will learn something useful.

Argue with someone of equal intelligence:
Neither will be victorious.
And in any case you will have the pleasure of the struggle.

Argue with someone less intelligent:
Not from a desire for victory
But because you may be of use to him.

Argue even with a fool:
You will not gain glory
But sometimes it is fun.

Only do not argue with Vladimir Stasov.

Russian Reading Challenge 2008

(crossposted from the Russian Reading Challenge blog)

I've only glanced at other lists, but what I've seen all sounds good and I am a bit envious and excited for the reading ahead in 2008. While I LOVE lists, I was overwhelmed by the prospect of figuring out what to choose, so I limited my choices to only books that I had already sitting on my shelves and hadn't read. Which was still too many, but eventually got whittled down to the following:

Natasha's Dance - Orlando Figes
Keys to Happiness - Anastasya Verbitskaya
The Winter Queen - Boris Akunin
King Queen Knave - Vladimir Nabokov

and for extra credit, since it was written in English and doesn't count: Olga's Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov.

[My other challenge: reading at least 5 other books that I already own]

I have no self-control

Books that I have acquired on or since Christmas:

Fire in the Blood, Irene Nemirovsky
Man Walks Into a Room, Nicole Krauss
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver
Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

I have already read Bros K, so this is only for my library, but for the other five, any bets on how many will actually get read in 2008?

Your first is always special - L.A. Times

We all know that, right? Turns out that the Times is playing coy, about reading no less.

We're passionate about books -- and about encouraging reading. So is First Book, a nonprofit organization founded 15 years ago with the mission of getting new books into the hands of needy children.

Krasinski has good taste in books

Well played, dear newspaper. Except I haven't really seen the evidence of this book passion and reading encouragement in print (um, combining the book review with the Sunday opinion section anyone?). Of course, there is always the Festival of Books, and that makes up for a lot of faults.

But I digress. The point is First Book's survey: What book got you hooked?

More than 100,000 people responded to First Book's poll, www2.firstbook.org/ whatbook/top50.php. The vox pop's top five are:
1. Nancy Drew series by Carolyn Keene
2. "Green Eggs and Ham" by Dr. Seuss
3. "Little House on the Prairie" by Laura Ingalls Wilder
4. "Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott
5. "The Cat in the Hat" by Dr. Seuss

"Many of us remember the one book that we wanted to read over and over again -- the book that really stirred our imaginations and left us wanting just one more chapter before bedtime," First Book President Kyle Zimmer told Publishers Weekly. "The fact that there are millions of children in our own country that will grow up without these kinds of memories because they have no access to books is devastating. We are delighted that so many people shared their stories in order to help us shine the spotlight on this critical issue."

Other discoveries: Joyce Carol Oates responded with "Through the Looking Glass," John Krasinski of "The Office" chose Roald Dahl. I think I responded to the survey online a few months back, and entered the Little Golden Books "Monster at the End of this Book," starring Grover. But really, when I think back to my childhood, I couldn't choose just one. I loved Beverly Cleary and her Ramona Quimby so much. And E.L. Konigsburg's A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver helped make me a historian.

Who was your first literary love?

Statistics

A sampling of the reading facts surrounding my life these days:

• Number of books in my bedroom waiting to be read: 47 (auspicious)
• Number of books in my "Books to Check Out" list: 51
• Current New Yorker issue: May 14, 2007
• Favorite "innovators" from said issue: Richard Branson and Banksy
• Most recent book finished: Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
• Number of stories in IoM: 9 (also auspicious)
• Time finished: approx. 7:05pm on Monday night
• Thoughts on said book: Marriages are fickle and difficult things; being an old and single woman sucks; culture shock is a big big big problem - both India to America and vice versa; who goes by the nickname Twinkle???
• Other thoughts: Lahiri is a lovely writer, and has luscious, evocative detail - but all of the stories are tinged with sadness. It's a lot of sad to take all at once.
• Number of Guggenheim Fellowships won by Lahiri: One
• Number of Guggenheims won by me: None (yet)
• Shoulder blade currently more sunburned: Left
• Most surprising vocabulary today: Repository (context: "This folder will be the repository of your paperwork... repository? Did I just say repository?!")
  
• Next book: hmmm, I think it'll be a surprise.