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2011 Lists
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Ruined
by Lynn Nottage
01.01.11
This could have been so depressing. Writing about Africa is generally disaster porn. But it ends hopefully and I loved Mama Nadi. I want to read Mother Courage now too.
Lyra's Oxford
by Philip Pullman
01.01.11
Not much to this (there's a review at my profile I believe). Just a refreshing reacquaintance with the His Dark Materials universe.
Farewell to Manzanar
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
01.01.11
A good memoir. JWH works her life story into larger narratives about Japanese-American racial and political relations and sexual politics in California in the 50s.
Demons
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
01.07.11
What to say about such a major novel? Dostoevsky can come across as shrill and incoherent in one paragraph and grave and profoundly frightening in the next. What's needed here are the old methods (Pyotr Stepanovich) is one of the most chilling sentences I've ever read. Pevear and Volokhonsky present Dostoevsky in all his frenetic grandeur.
Long live the Great Thought!
The Beautiful and Damned
by F Scott Fitzgerald
01.11.11
God. Amazing. So much energy and elegance here, aside from the ugly Japanese sterotypes. A great story about alcoholic decline too. And he was only 27 when he wrote it. The only thing FSF and I had in common at 27 was how much we were drinking on a daily basis.
Native Son
by Richard Wright
01.15.11
The first two parts of the book are relentless and I was swept up. Strange to read this so soon after Dostoevsky. Bigger is a kind of inarticulate Raskolnikov.
Soul on Ice
by Eldridge Cleaver
01.16.11
Little here of worth. A lot of dreadful, cock-centric philosophizing. That's why I'm hesitant to read Mailer too, though at least he never claimed rape was an insurrectionary act.
The Amityville Horror
by Jay Anson
01.17.11
Spooky enough to induce a few cascades of goosebumps. Well worth the few hours I spent on it.
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
01.23.11
I read this because it was funny to be carrying this around where I was in January.
I had more respect for Wuthering Heights after reading this because at least Catherine had some darkness in her passion. Jane is whitewashed and dull despite her intelligence and sassiness.
Everyman
by Philip Roth
01.28.11
I know Roth mainly through his recent 'renaissance' novels so I can't compare this to his mid-career works, but this seems like just another Philip Roth novel, only the protagonist isn't named Roth or Zuckerman or Klugman or Messer, but, oh wait his name is never mentioned because he's universal. Kind of pompous.
Indignation
by Philip Roth
01.31.11
Now this was great, probably because Roth used his sarcasm and humor to address Death and other capitalized nouns.
Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man
by Bill Clegg
02.01.11
Clegg spirals downward in style at the finest hotels in Manhattan and hits the bottom so hard he leaves pink mist in the air. Didn't grab me though.
DNAngels
by Andy Soutter
02.03.11
Maybe I was attracted by the glossy cover?
Inferno
by Dante
02.04.11
Read this a canto a day through January using three translations: Cary (pretentious), Musa (not pretentious enough) and Mandelbaum (juuuuust right). I love the imagery. I love the architectonics of the work and of hell. I love the Virgil-Dante relationship.
The Passage
by Justin Cronin
02.13.11
There's something calulated about this book, like Cronin was using everything he learned not to do when he was at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. The cynicism seems canned, the characters are 2 and a half dimensional. But that aside it works. I'm looking forward to part two next year.
The Humbling
by Philip Roth
02.18.11
Dark and sad. It seems like Roth is channeling his angst and self-pity about not receiving the Nobel into his writing.
Goodbye, Columbus & Five Short Stories
by Philip Roth
02.20.11
I just read Goodbye, Columbus out of this volume. Great great stories about assimilation in America.
Freedom
by Jonathan Franzen
03.05.11
The first book I read on my Kindle, so there's that. But I loved the book. Franzen writes characters with ugly sides, but he doesn't wallow in their squalidness. And they grow. Joey makes the right decision with Connie. The Berglunds reconcile. Even the bitch at the end realizes she overplayed her hand with the cats.
The Testament of Yves Gundron
by Emily Barton
03.06.11
The book begins poised on the tip of an intriguing high concept hook. It then slides off. This book is about germs and memes and family and becoming yourself. Meh.
Lowboy
by John Wray
03.12.11
Among the jacket blurbs there are at least two invocations of The Catcher in the Rye. Really? Maybe that's just something authors do for each other to drum up sales and create buzz. Identify a book as an heir to the most marketable classic possible no matter how marginal the resemblance.
There is a young runaway in Manhattan, but the comparison dies there. This is not another addition to the crowded shelf of alienated-young-man novels.
This is a mystery. What is wrong with Will Heller? What is his mother hiding? And what is Will on the verge of doing? Wray is a great storyteller who can occupy multiple perspectives in the same paragraph without confusing or annoying the reader. Very good.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
by David Mitchell
03.18.11
Mitchell is a commanding writer. He can write a gripping narrative and he can do dazzling things with English. I think he's in the same league as Nabokov and Joyce.
Anti-Story
edited by Philip Stevick
03.23.11
A great compilation. So many authors I wanted to read or reread: Borges, Barth, Landolfi's Gogol's Wife (she's a balloon), Coover, Disch, Ionesco, Cortazar, Gass, Oates, Barthelme, Robbe-Grillet (meh) and others. I had never heard of Mitch Siskind. His A Mean Teacher is so funny and surprising. A joy to read.
The Complete Novels
by Jean Rhys
03.26.11
So so sad. The first four novels in this collection (Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, Leaving Mr McKenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight) are not about the same person, but they show the same kind of character, a pretty young English demimondaine drifting through the seedier quarters of Paris and London, from lover to lover, from one level of desperation to the next. Read consecutively the novels show this character getting older, getting more cynical, getting more deperate. By the end of Good Morning, Midnight, she is so lonely and broken that she is almost sad when her would be rapist runs away from her. Now what?
Then the anthology ends with The Wide Sargasso Sea, which tells the story of Antionette. She is born to a mad mother in Jamaica. Kids throw rocks at her. Her house burns down. She is basically sold into marriage to a rough, sarcastic Englishman who begins to call her Bertha. He doesn't understand her afflictions. Moving to the English countryside doesn't help. She is of course Rochester's mad wife who burns down Thornfield in Jane Eyre. One of the great 'retellings' of a famous novel. A great book, especially the later chapters that show her sickness in full bloom.
Rhys may not have many notes in her repertoire but she was a great writer.
The Invention of Love
by Tom Stoppard
03.27.11
Fiercely intelligent (of course; it's Tom Stoppard), and very touching.
Anti-Ice
by Stephen Baxter
03.29.11
I started to read this in high school but put it down for one reason or another.
Not a bad book. England gets its silk-gloved hands on a fearsomely powerful substance that gives them mid-20th Century techne in the mid-19th. This was before steampunk was a genre. A review blurb at the front references a new trend called pseudo-Victoriana.
Eccentric Seattle
by J Kingston Pierce
03.31.11
Pierce is a little verbose and his folksy style chafes a bit. I never want to see chock-a-block or senectitude written down again.
As a Western American city, Seattle was essentially built from scratch so it follows that there should be lots of 'visionaries' among its eccentrics. Pierce does not disappoint. It also appears he did a lot of original research on the architect Elmer Fisher and Mercer Island developer CC Calkins.
Every Good Boy Deserves Favor and Professional Foul: Two Plays
by Tom Stoppard
04.02.11
A short play (the former) and a telescript (the latter). They both show the small-c conservative side of Stoppard. Regimes with thought-police are reprehensible and the rights of individuals must be asserted and defended. In Professional Foul, Professor Anderson speaks about how cleverness is unimportant when one considers ethics. Even children know what fair play is. I didn't expect that sentiment out of one of our cleverest writers ever.
Travesties
by Tom Stoppard
04.02.11
Speaking of clever. There is so much goodness in here I can hardly express it. Send-ups within send-ups.
#29
The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel
by DFW
04.12.11
What exactly would a finished version of this novel look like? Wallace's first novel ended in midsentence. His second novel ended with a never-ending pasta bowlful of loose ends. I used end far too many times. I hope Don Gately lived. He was my favorite thing about that book.
I have to think about this book a lot more before I write about it. Underlying Wallace's art is a sense of awe about the world. There is so much going on here. That's what's behind his trademark extravagances and divagations.
Especially so with The Pale King. Early on a character recaps the thesis from DFW's famous 2005 Kenyon College speech: the point of life is choosing where you direct your attention.
The core of this novel (as much as one of his novels can be said to have one) is a knot of IRS employees at a Records Examination Center in Peoria, IL in 1985. Many of them have magical powers of concentraion. They can lose themselves in minutia to the point were they levitate or hallucinate. There is a character who as a boy, made it a goal to kiss every square inch of his body and, through preterhuman discipline, did it (this was excerpted in a March 2011 New Yorker).
There are set-ups that go nowhere and scenes that drag and drag and duh-rag, but that is nothing surprising given the author. You know that's coming when you choose to buy the book. Either way there is some wonderful prose, laugh-out loud lines and set pieces and beautiful humane moments mixed in with the acrobatics.
I am very very sad we won't see any new creations from him.
30
A Visit From the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan
04.13.2011
I stayed up all night to read this in one greedy gulp. I don't do that much.
Egan is so good with the elements that make a story magical to me. Recurring and intertwining characters, flash forwards, wayward characters who do good. It works. It really really works. I might reread it tonight.
31
Solar
by Ian McEwan
04.17.2011
. . . you deserve almost everything that's coming to you. So go fuck yourself.
That angry line at the end of the novel sort of sums it up, I think. Michael Beard is a callous ass, a philandering glutton, a Nobel-garlanded physics genius whose best work is behind him. He reminds me a little of John Grammaticus from Saturday. But he isn't all bad. He may be the saviour of Western civilization.
Part of the novel is a near-farcical male-wish-fulfilment extravaganza, part is a near-farcical atonement (no pun intended). Beard, a cuckold, is nearly castrated in a freak outdoor urination accident. McEwan wasn't really trying to be subtle with that. But then, once he returns to London, he sees both of his rival lovers miraculously and neatly dispatched. But are they really gone? McEwan is not one to less loose ends dangle.
I liked the book but I rate it closer to Amsterdam than Atonement, which, in case you don't read McEwan like I do, means I found it a little weak.
32
The Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, with essay by Elaine Hedges
04.18.2011
I feel guilty. Not for what John does to his wife in this story, but for putting a sliver-sized book on this list. It's the second too-brief title to be included. Now I'm going to have to finish at least 102 this year in order to compensate.
One of my favorite short stories. Works very effectively as a Poevian (sorry for that one, English language) goosebumper and a polemic against a society that ignores a woman's needs and encages her under the condescending guise of protecting her. The Hedges essay is a classic in and of itself.
33
Republic of Dreams
by Ross Wetzsteon
04.22.2011
No crap capsule review.
34
Purgatorio
by Dante Alighieri
04.28.2011
My second full circuit through La Commedia.
I am reading the Everyman's Library edition that compiles all three parts of the trilogy, not the volume I used for my GR shelf. Just because I know you're curious, internet.
I would never be able to make heads or tails of this epic without footnotes: Greco-Roman mythology, Roman history and literature, the Bible, and Thirteenth Century European history, especially the doings among the Italians. And that isn't even accounting for Dante's dense symbolism. The Old Man of Crete from the Inferno. The three steps in the entranceway to Purgatory. The procession in the Garden of Eden. The 'two-natured' creature. I am careful and clever enough to comprehend the action and conversations in the cantos, but sometimes I am completely defeated. I have never been more dependent on and grateful for notes to get me through a book.
I like Purgatory less than I like Inferno. There are many others like me I am sure. I suppose I just like the dark parts better, no matter what I'm reading.
But I still deeply admire the middle volume of the Comedy. I love the three strange dream sequences. Dante's poetic language is keenly sharp and beautiful once he reaches the summit of the mountain. I love the confrontation with Beatrice. She flays the pilgrim, and I admire Dante for opening himself up like that in his work. Over and over he is the guilty little boy until he admits straying from Beatrice after her death. Only then is he cleansed or I suppose purged enough to ascend with B.
35
A Reader's Guide to Writers' London
by Ian Cunningham
04.30.2011
36
London: The Biography
by Peter Ackroyd
04.30.2011
38
Wilco: Learning How to Die
by Greg Kot
05.10.2011
I wasn't prepared to like this book so much.
39
30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account
by Peter Carey
05.10.2011
40
Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
05.13.2011
41
Bossypants
by Tina Fey
05.15.2011
So funny and shrewd. Also extremely generous and likable. She dedicates a chapter to the writers who got her through the first season of 30 Rock with the MVP joke each one wrote. She aplogizes for being condescending to Sarah Palin after her appearance on SNL (you can tell people New York is part of America now, right? (I am poorly paraphrasing)).
42
What I Did
by Jason
05.15.2011
Sure, it's a graphic novel, or three of Jason's graphic novels to be accurate. I feel, in a way, like this is a cheat. Like The Yellow Wallpaper was. So now I have to read over 100 to get rid of this Buddhist-raised boy's positively Protestant level of guilt.
Great books though(Hey, Wait. . ., Shhhhh, and The Iron Wagon).
Oh, good. You’re doing blurbs again. I was about to wield my madly awesome (non-existent) moderator powers and respectfully request that you continue writing them. But, now I guess I don’t have to. Carry on. :-)
I will blurble away as much as possible :)
100+ Books in 2025
Books mentioned in this topic
What I Did. (other topics)Bossypants (other topics)
Bleak House (other topics)
30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (other topics)
Wilco: Learning How to Die (other topics)
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Expect (if anyone looks at this at all) a poorly wrought pocket review of any book I post. Unless I don't feel like writing. I read too fast to actually process anything :)