I’ve been neglecting this website for months. I ought to have done updates from the road, writing about how smashingly my readings went, but I didn’t slow down much on the road.
Now I suppose it’s about time to write about my favorite reads from 2009. As is my custom, I’m not bothering to write just about books published in 2009, but anything that came my way. I read less new fiction anyway, after feeling that tingling disappointment one too many times with promising but flawed new novels in 2008. Most of my favorite books last year were written well before I was born, including one that I read last summer (Southern Hemisphere Summer) for the second time, KNULP, by Hermann Hesse, which features one of the most endearing protagonists in any work of fiction ever. This book was nicely complemented by a collection Hesse’s poems, sketches, and journal entries collected together in a little book called WANDERINGS. Both books touch on the joy of seeing new landscapes for the first time, of meeting new people and reconnecting with old friends, but through them runs an undercurrent of melancholy. Hesse was aware of the aching loneliness that wandering can engender, but he never let the fear of that loneliness keep him, or Knulp, from living the most meaningful life they can.
Of the stuff I read for the first time this year, these were my favorites, in dramatically descending order…
10. GHOST WHO WRITES by Martin Edmond
This is a book only by form. It’s a collection of pages bound between a cover, so, yeah. It’s a book, but it’s a wee tiny little book, just a single essay, forty-something pages long, not much bigger than a book of matches. It’s part of the Four Winds Essay series dreamed up by Lloyd Jones, which includes UNDER THE INFLUENCE by Bill Manhire and ON LONGING by Vincent O'Sullivan, both of which I also read this year. The series is a brilliant idea, single essays on a given theme, often rambling and digressive (in a good way), bound individually as pocket-size softcovers with paper dustjackets (a format Paul Neason and I took as inspiration for the first run of My Tender Jaw).
Edmond’s was my favorite of the bunch, a thoughtful discourse on the blurring of fact and fiction, filled with fascinating anecdotes on literary luminaries from Walter Betjamin to W. G. Sebald, beautifully written.
9. JUNKY by William S. Burroughs
I’ve talked in these pages before about how On the Road turned me off Kerouac when I read it in my formative years. It might have turned me off the beats in general. I never made a conscious decision to avoid Beat writers, but I realize now that I’ve neglected that whole movement terribly. I finally got around to reading Burroughs for the first time last September, after Junky was released in the Popular Penguin format. Tight, compelling little book, written like a Chandler or Hammett mystery, except instead of a private investigator trying to unravel a case, you’ve got a strung-out junky looking for a fix. Sad to think about how long it took me to get to this book, given how many derivative books and films I’ve absorbed and admired that owe their existence to Burroughs.
The Will Self introduction in the edition I read was outstanding, too.
8. HOW TO BE FREE by Tom Hodgkinson
I read Hodgkinson’s How to be Idle in 2008 and considered it a life-changing book, one which (like Hermann Hesse’s Knulp) serves as a rousing reminder of what’s important in life. Rather than chasing after status and getting ourselves in debt building comfortable bubbles for ourselves, we should be spending time with people we care about, learning how to sustain ourselves and entertain ourselves and getting plenty good and drunk. How to be Free might have been less personally moving for me than the first book, but only because I already knew where Hodgkinson was coming from. He takes his message to the next level in Free, encouraging not mere passivity, but a whole anarchically idle revolution. I don’t wear a watch anymore, for whatever that’s worth.
7. READER’S BLOCK by David Markson
A lot of my favorite reads this year were books handed to me by friends, with heartfelt, wondrous raves. Reader’s Block was one of those, a novel unlike any novel I’ve ever read. I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say it’s unlike any novel written, except possibly for other novels by Markson, which I haven’t read. The novel within Reader’s Block never quite gets written, too preoccupied with historical gossip, anecdotes and ephemera, along with repeated references to literary suicides. It’s the kind of book that has you constantly reaching for a pen to jot down a quote, or calling out to whoever’s in the next room so you can read a passage out loud. But it doesn’t limit itself to gimmickry; it is in the end simply one of the most profoundly moving books I’ve read.
The second read is even more rewarding.
6. THE FACE OF ANOTHER by Kobo Abe
I had sadly never even heard of Abe when a friend of mine gave me the copy of Face of Another that he had found used in Wellington. I don’t read a lot of translated fiction, always afraid I’m depriving myself of something, wondering how much I can trust the translator. But I have to respect the fact that I’m likely never going to be able to read and understand kanji, and to acknowledge that I’d be depriving myself of considerably more if I read books only in English and very basic Spanish.
The Face of Another has at its core a simple science fiction element, but it is grounded completely in reality, with Abe’s medical background and knowledge of science lending an air of authenticity to the experiments of his protagonist. Ultimately, however, he’s less interested in the technology necessary to create a synthetic skin and more in how the skin will twist the psychological make-up of its wearer, able to hide now behind a completely new identity.
5. A FIELD GUIDE TO GETTING LOST by Rebecca Solnit
Somehow all these books recommended or given to me by close friends ended up right next to one another on this list.
Solnit’s book is one that came to me at just the right time in my life. It’s a great read by any standards, but I’m not sure that I would have appreciated it as much as I did if I had not read it when my life was in such a state of uncertainty. After being compelled to leave the city I had come to consider home and to start a new life again, faced with the deaths of multiple family members, generally feeling a bit lost, Solnit’s collection of essays helped me consider the situation in a new light. She makes such astute observations with absolute, stunning clarity, forcing her reader to reconsider the value of being lost, of desiring without attaining, of appreciating the immediate space around us, always.
4. American Rust by Philipp Meyer
Of the new novels that I did read last year, Meyer’s debut was far and away my favorite. I’ve written about it at length in these pages, but I’ll say a bit more now, at risk of repeating myself. While so many contemporary novelists feel compelled to resort to heavy-handed foreshadowing, literary sleight of hand, or contrived plot developments, Meyer is content to sit back and let his story unfold organically, getting deep into the heads of his characters, writing sympathetically about complicated men and women most of us might have trouble feeling sympathy for if we knew them only superficially. He doesn’t overlook their flaws, but offers an honest explanation for the roots of those flaws.
3. GRAVITY’S RAINBOW by Thomas Pynchon
It took me a long time to get through this. I realized I had gone months without cracking the spine of another book, and I was getting too wrapped up in Pynchon’s world (with the unfortunate side effect of corrupting my writing by unconsciously aping his style). During one of my sabbaticals from the text, I read Pynchon’s latest offering, INHERENT VICE, breezing through it in a matter of days. Inherent Vice was a lot of fun, a rambling stoner mystery, happily wedding film noir tropes with Pnychon’s pet obsessions, but it was not nearly as rewarding a read as Gravity’s Rainbow, not as all-consuming, with fewer absurd setpieces and slightly less humanity (the humanity was something that surprised me with Pynchon; I had heard so much about the denseness, the tricks, and the high concepts, I was prepared to write him off as a stylist with no concern for his subjects, but there are frequent moments in Gravity’s Rainbow that are heartwrenchingly poignant).
A great companion piece to the novel is Zak Smith’s book, published by Tin House, of PICTURES SHOWING WHAT HAPPENS ON EVERY PAGE OF PYNCHON’S GRAVITY’S RAINBOW. The illustrations are sometimes opaque, often obscene, and occasionally beautiful. It can be instructive to see what aspect of the text Smith chooses to emphasize from page to page, calling attention to points you might otherwise overlook.
2. A MOVEABLE FEAST by Ernest Hemingway
I don’t know why it took me so long to read this. Easily my favorite Hemingway book so far. Before he was a man’s man writing about war and violence and killing huge animals, Hemingway was just a poor, ineffectual schmuck, wandering the streets of Paris trying to figure out what it meant to live as a writer. He is so insightful, his writing so perfect, I imagine I would have found these memoirs compelling and inspiring even if we had never heard of the man again.
1. MARTIN EDEN by Jack London
There’s a throwaway moment in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America where Robert De Niro sits down on the toilet and opens up a book. I don’t know how much thought went into what to put in his hands, whether it could have been a newspaper or any old paperback the prop department could dig up, or whether Leone himself insisted they find an authentic edition of Martin Eden. Either way, that was my curious introduction to the book. I had always been curious to read more Jack London, especially after living in the Bay Area. I always associated him with forced reading in Elementary and Junior High School, “How to Build a Fire,” and those dog books. I knew there was more to him, but I didn’t know what.
So I picked up a copy of Martin Eden from the Wellington Library after last New Year’s, knowing only that it was supposed to have a character arc roughly resembling De Niro’s attempt to better himself for the love of a woman in Once Upon a Time in America. I didn’t even know it was going to be about a writer until fifty pages into it. I felt a strong affection for Martin Eden, and could relate to him in a lot of ways, but ultimately his passion for writing was maybe too myopic. I suppose that charge has been leveled at me in the past, but London helped put things into perspective. (Incidentally, I’m glad I read this before I read Reader’s Block, for reasons not worth mentioning here). Next London book I try’ll be John Barleycorn.
For now, I’m going back to Dos Passos.
08.22.09 - Literature on the Radio
Give a listen to the VBC this coming Wednesday, the 26th of August, at 8:30 AM New Zealandy time* to hear me wax poetic about writing and leaving.
Tune in to 88.3 if you're in the immediate vicinity of Victoria's Kelburn campus, or else otherwise just go to the VBC's beautiful website and listen in there.
* If you're in the States, you'll want to listen in on Tuesday, the 25th, at
1:30PM PST
2:30PM MST
3:30PM CST
4:30PM EST
I don't know what to tell you if you live in Guam. I didn't even know I had fans in Guam.
08.14.09 - MY TENDER JAW launch date setMy Tender Jaw & Other Stories is in the final stages of production, and we've set the date for another Unity Books launch on Thursday, the 27th of August. Mark your calendars.
06.04.09 - Forging Transatlantic Literary Chains Of the books I read last year, two of my favorite were Geoff Cochrane's Tin Nimbus & Poe Ballantine's 501 Minutes to Christ. I wrote about both of them somewhere else in these pages, so I won't go into detail about how I loved them again now.
(Yes, that is my book in the center. It's not a matter of ego; I was taking advantage of the goodwill I had earned at the shop to show what & who I was under the influence of. I don't think a single book sold from this display)
I sought Cochrane out in Wellington last year and, after telling him how much I enjoyed Tin Nimbus, gave him a copy of 501 Minutes to Christ. A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to sending Poe Ballantine a copy of Tin Nimbus.
Haven't seen Geoff Cochrane since then, but last week I got a package in the mail with a Chadron, Nebraska post mark, a letter from Poe Ballantine saying how he enjoyed Tin Nimbus, along with a signed copy of Ballantine's first book, Things I Like About America.
If anyone reading this hasn't read these books, dammit, what are you waiting for?
05.31.09 - American RustUnity recently hosted a reading for an American writer named Philipp Meyer. His debut novel has been hitting all the right buttons in the States, which has led most recently to a whirlwind tour of Australia and New Zealand.
I read the book out of a sense of duty then, or anyway I was moved to pick it up out of a sense of duty, but it was not duty that had me burn through it as quickly as I did. I enjoyed this novel more than any other I've read in a good long while.
There is an American poet named Jack Gilbert who used to write poems about Pittsburgh. He wrote passionately about the wabi sabi of the place, borrowing an idea from the Japanese that describes how the flaws that develop over time provide value for an object, value that has its roots in emotional history and personal relationships rather than sheer aesthetics.
I appreciate that Meyer, writing about the same region, chose to call his novel American Rust. The rust of the factories of Monument Valley is maybe the most visible sign of the community’s age and decline. Taken on its own, that rust might be seen as purely ugly, lamentable. Certainly some of the novel’s characters see it that way. But there are also those who are compelled to stay in the valley, or who leave and are drawn back, and for them the relationship is more complicated. Rust is a reminder of what made the place remarkable and is inextricably linked with the people’s history. Factories were closed and jobs were lost, and the decent hardworking Americans who had been told that they would always be able to get ahead if they did their best, suddenly found themselves struggling to hold onto the homes they had made.
The Publisher’s Weekly blurb on the cover of the book likens Meyer to Cormac McCarthy and Dennis Lehane. But Meyer writes about crime and its effects without resorting to the manipulative plot twists of a Lehane novel, and he fosters a compassion for his charatcers that McCarthy’s grim emotional detachment often fails to elicit. The murky moral compromises those characters find themselves making carry more weight as a result. For all its moments of bleakness, the novel has running through it a tone of hope. It finds value in loyalty, in community, and in sacrifices made for the love of others. Maybe the future of the new America will have us less concerned with being the strongest, the fastest, the best. Maybe we’ll recognize that being on top is not a requisite for happiness.
Not to get rid of all the rust, but to recognize the significance of the story behind it.
