This year I started keeping a reading diary, on the advice of friend and mentor Wayde Compton. Wayde likes to keep a reading diary so that he remembers all the books he’s read; he also suggested that it encourages him to make more careful reading choices. After a whole year of keeping track of the books I read, I agree with Wayde that keeping an annotated reading list keeps me from squandering my reading time. For my bad reading habits, see Internet Procrastination and Hello, Supermarket Magazine Aisle! For the best of my reading of 2008, see below. Note that these are not necessarily books that were written in 2008; they’re a just a happy mix of the best fiction and nonfiction and poetry that I read this year, so far. I’ve read 28 and 3/4 books this year; I’m hoping to make it at least to 30 by Dec. 31; I have a transcontinental and transatlantic flight between now and then, plus almost two solid weeks of holiday, PLUS a huge pile of books I’m just chomping at the bit to devour.
So, the list of favorites, in chronological order of my reading:
1. David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (2006). I have a softness for coming-of-age stories, and I loved this book so much. It is my absolute favorite this year, and also one of the first books I read in 2008, so it cast its shadow over everything that followed. Mitchell makes the political and cultural moment — early 1980s England — so tangible that it is almost its own character.
2. Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo (2008). Steven Galloway was one of the writing mentors in the writing program I participated in this year. This is a tight little book with large, arching themes. The cellist who played Albinoni’s Adagio every day for 22 days to honor each of 22 people killed by a bomb while waiting in a bread line is only a minor character in Galloway’s book, a fine thread that connects the stories of three fictional individuals in Sarajevo during the siege. All three stories are engaging and compelling. Ideas that propel all three stories: that we have the choice in each individual moment how to respond to a situation, whether to hate or to embrace our basic humanness. That we are only as good as our everyday actions, and that if we succumb to hatred in the small instances then we have already lost. The trick is to turn away from hating others. So excellent.
3. Christian Bök’s Eunoia (2001). This book is magical: clever, funny, beautiful. The bulk of the little book comprises five chapters, each a long prose poem, each of which only use a single vowel. It needs to be read aloud to appreciate the rolling cadences of single-vowel sentences. So melodic. And yet, coherent, despite the oddity of it. “Books form cocoons of comfort — tombs to hold bookworms.”
4. Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007). Chabon criss-crosses traditional genre boundaries in this hard-boiled detective historical sci fi noir novel about a fictional community of Jews who were permitted to settle — temporarily — in Alaska in 1948, but whose lease on American soil is about to expire, at which point they will be evicted from their Sitka homes. The language is witty and sharp and playful; young girls walk through the streets with arms braided together, “as clannish as schools of philosophy”; a dead man is described as someone who “read a book with footnotes once.”
5. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). I haven’t read any other Ishiguro… yet… but after reading this book, I will. The story and writing drew me in with its haunting, confessional intimacy as Kathy narrates the story of her coming-of-age. Not until almost the end of the book did I realize how deeply embedded I had become in Kathy’s perspective: I was discovering the truth behind her childhood mysteries along with her, as she was discovering them. I was surprised at myself when I cried at the end; I hadn’t realized quite how invested I had become in the characters.
6. Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2008 in English translation by Alison Anderson; 2007 in the original French). I already posted once about this book in this venue. I loved the intellectualism of it, the humour, the quirky characters. The two main characters are also the narrators: Renee the concierge who assumes a stodgy, stereotypical facade while hiding her delight with Tolstoy, classical music, film, philosophy, and precocious 12-year old Paloma who plans to burn down her family’s apartment and commit suicide on her 13th birthday. I fell for Renee and Paloma, and graceful, gentle Monsieur Ota, who befriends both when he moves into the posh apartment building. I read bits of it to everyone around me, like this one, which follows Paloma’s description of her mother and another woman in a lingerie shop, tussling over a pair of lacey undies, which they are both grabbing onto and refusing to let go, while having a polite conversation over the top of the fancy underwear sale rack:
“But let’s get back to the interesting movement: two women in full possession of their mental capacities who suddenly become totally unfamiliar with a part of their body. It results in a very odd spectacle: as if there were a break in reality, a black hole opening up in space-time, like in a real sci-fi novel. A negative movement, a sort of hollow gesture, in a way.
So I said to myself, if you can pretend to ignore the fact that you’ve got a right hand, what else can you pretend to ignore? Can you have a negative heart, a hollow soul?”
These are not the only books I loved this year, but they are the ones I loved the best. If you read them, let me know what you think.
