Tom McCarthy’s Remainder is one man’s obsessive attempt to recreate the conditions of his one perfect moment, a doomed and futile quest I learned from a professor in college when I was bemoaning the fading insights from a previous acid trip and he quipped, “The key to appreciating the hallucinatory experience is to recognize its ephemeral nature.” And he was right, for things don’t work out well for our narrator. I did a lot of rereading this year, and Bruce Duffy’s The World as I Found It was as rewarding a second time as it was the first. Sad to think this fictionalized account of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell’s tempestuous relationship (it’s his first novel for god’s sake- the nads on that young man) has not received more enduring acclaim, but hey, how do you market this shit? If the prospect of tackling Wittgenstein directly is too intimidating, think of this as a 500-page sparknotes edition. David Foster Wallace’s suicide continues to haunt, and so continued contact with his work keeps the man alive, if only in synapses. In McCain’s Promise, he tags along on the Arizona senator's 2000 campaign and delivers the requisite details, before McCain lost his rebel mojo and embraced the Republican establishment, even if both sides wince while hugging.
David Lodge wrote a novel called Changing Places about two professors who exchange teaching posts, and in one famous scene, lit profs at a cocktail party admit to one classic they’ve never read. All is snickers and hoo haws until one schlump says Hamlet, and that’s all she wrote for his reputation. I read Madame Bovary for the first time this year, so this mea culpa should keep me in Social Sciences for some years to come. Took another stroll down p-rock memory lane with Eric Davidson’s We Never Learn, and all his prose histrionics aside, it’s a reminder that Crypt Records had one of the best winning percentages this side of Edwin Moses. Continuing the gaping hole in the canon thread, Lolita got checked off the list. Nabokov, in addition to sharing a name with a favorite Sharks goalie, is a funny motherfucker, and his descriptive detail is vividly original. One can't help but feel a bit pervy, though, as he makes it impossible not to lust after the young thang, and there you are. Blasted through and thoroughly enjoyed a work on punctuation, Lynn Truss’s best-selling Eats, Shoots and Leaves. I always hit one major Faulkner, this time a second trip through The Sound and the Fury, and the Benji section did not make me want to hurl the thing across the room, the years between readings having filled in some of the blanks. Simon Critchley’s The Book of Dead Philosophers recounts how philosophers’ deaths match their philosophies, but fails to generate much amusement or enlightenment.
Reread David Shields’ Reality Hunger, his manifesto calling for the death of the novel’s relevance and championing a new kind of hybrid literature that looks beyond the realistic confines of 19th century novelistic traditions. He celebrates works like Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, a failed biography about the author’s attempt to write a definite study on DH Lawrence. Reality Hunger is made up almost entirely of lifted passages that Shields comprised to illustrate how traditional notions of intellectual copyright should fall by the google highway as, like rappers and dj’s (love me- I play other people’s music), writers take what’s in the ether and rearrange it into something new. Maddening often, but also aggressively compelling, it’s a must read.
Keith Richards’ Life was OK, but few details formed particularly strong neural circuits in the memory sections of my brain. I spent many hours curled up with good ole William Gass, whose love of language for its own sake is a refreshing rejoinder to the minimalists and those who insist on the carefully constructed plot. Gass is a literary critic who makes you want to read and write and eat and drink and fuck, and I would heartily recommend Tests of Time, Temple of Texts, and Finding a Form even if you loathe literary criticism and find all artistic theory pretentious crap that academics employ to justify their salaries. Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists is a highly acclaimed modern novel that leaves me with the impression of having been mildly entertained and perhaps even amused. Beach or bar reading. The wonderful irony of David Shields’ memoir, The Thing About Life is that One Day You’ll Be Dead, written before Reality Hunger, is that it’s dreadful. He’s a far better arranger than he is a writer, as this may have been the worst book I read all year. Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer was not as good as Shields told me it would be, but it’s an interesting meditation on procrastination.
Read far less biography for some reason, but Anthony Cronin’s Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist provided all the information a mildly curious reader of some of Beckett’s plays and novels could want. I’ve had a poster of the great man in my classroom for many years, and something about the severity of that face and haircut makes the man unknowable. Cronin fills in the details and delivers the influences, and even if so much of the man’s work remains ambiguous and difficult to penetrate, at least it’s less fog and mystery between every unspoken line. Having trouble refusing that third helping of lasagna or saying no to that eighth draught of Drake's Denogginizer? Try Daniel Akst’s We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess, in which our hero offers the following thesis- we have limited self-control reserves that are depleted each hour by the onslaught of choices at our dispersal in a high-tech, 24/7 world, and we need to make pre-commitments (i.e., don’t buy a kegerator, alchie) to reduce our daily scream of temptation. Dan Ariely is all about behavioral economics in Predictably Irrational, another tome in the growing literature attacking the classical model of the rational consumer, and he has plenty of research studies and market examples (he’s much like Malcolm Gladwell in tone and style) to illustrate our follies when it comes to choosing wisely. Barbara Ehrenreich got cancer and loathed those who insisted she bear it with a smile and a positive attitude, so she wrote an entire book called Bright-Sided scalding the notion that optimism improves our lives. Timothy Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves has been getting a lot of recent love due to nods from Gladwell and Daniel Kahneman, for his exploration of the power of the unconscious mind on how we think and behave. Given the mysteries of why I want or do or think anything, I’ll concur. After reading Michael Spector’s Denialism, I’m supposed to believe that my vitamin supplements are no substitute for eating fruits and vegetables and that is simply one truth I must deny. His attack on Jenny McCarthy’s ranting that innoculations cause autism is savage and, from all I’ve read, right on.
Andrew Baggerly’s Band of Misfits was a disappointing summary of the Giants’ World Series season that offers little that’s new if you were paying attention. Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice offers that too much choice is bad for us and he’s got the studies to back it up. Damn, that’s enough pop psychology, so how about Nick Hornby’s new novel, Juliet, Naked? I humbly believe that each of Hornby’s books has gotten worse, but this breaks that trend. I rarely cringed, and there is plenty to recognize in these middle-aged strugglers about love and loss and regret. Back to the couch with Robert Burton’s On Being Certain, which posits that the feeling of certainty is an emotional state that tricks us into believing we are right when often we are not. James McManus’s tale of entering the World Series of Poker and finishing in the top ten made poker seem thrilling, but he’s less successful guiding us through his own experiences at the Mayo Clinic in Physical. This is another in a long line of non-fiction works that should have remained magazine pieces. Patty Smith won the National Book Award. I repeat- Patty Smith won the National Book Award. Her Just Kids is the story of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe when they were young upstarts in the NY arts scene. It is overly romanticized and deeply sentimental and while some of the poetic prose shines, not all of it does, and I’m baffled by the nearly universal praise this book has received. A far weightier and less dreamy-eyed account of the artist at work is Sarah Bakewell’s (love that name) How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, and one could do far worse than to use this book’s wisdom as a secular bible. Not quite matching Bakewell’s recipe for a life well-lived is Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy, in which he uses the life and key ideas of a number of noted philosophers to teach simple truths about the art of living well.
Reread Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, and while it wasn’t as hilarious a second time, I would highly recommend the man for anyone who likes his comedy black. Peter Carey is an extraordinary novelist, and his newest, a retelling of Tocqueville’s journey to America and the making of that most quoted of all texts, is called Parrot and Olivier in America, and it will do nothing to harm his reputation. Mary Roach’s Bonk gets downright filthy as she investigates what science has to say about sex. This woman is a national gem- arguably the funniest writer out there. I kept putting off David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King because who wants to read an unfinished novel when you have no idea what he would have wanted and how much of it is actually finished and what would have been cut and, well, the questions- they do go on. But just to spend more time with the man’s prose, his humor and his humanity. And there are moving and hilarious and heartbreaking sections, but they don’t add up to a novel, which is fine. Read it without looking for coherence and you can find enough to make the muddling worth the time.
Mary Roach again, a good laugh required after the posthumous Wallace, and Stiff makes dead bodies a barrel of plastered monkeys. Really. When you start reading metacriticism, you have to wonder if the journey into your own ass has landed you in the maze of the large intestine from which you cannot extract yourself. Or something, but I’m sitting on the couch again and enjoying Craig Seligman’s dissection of Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag, Sontag and Kael, and digging out my collection of Kael’s essays and wishing I had time to go a movie. Instead it’s to England for Martin Amis’ new one, The Pregnant Widow, which is about a twentysomething’s pursuit of pussy, mostly the prized gash of a teutonic blonde he spends most of the novel plotting to enter. I actually preferred the jumps forward in time to see how the characters deal with middle age and how these desperate early searches for transcendence through mad Italian sex might affect them later. I’ve always enjoyed reading Christopher Hitchens, even as his arrogant public persona threatened to blind folks to the quality of his prose and the breadth of his erudition, and his recent death hit the solar plexus as few obits do. His memoir, Hitch-22, is a fascinating ride through the second half of the 20th century, and even as he’s name-dropping and placing himself at the fulcrum points of modern history, it’s hard not to be carried along by the sheer force of his storytelling and the savagery of his wit. He will be missed. Completing the troika of aging British monsters of lit is Ian McEwan and his Enduring Love, a creepy bit of psychological obsession that has our narrator stalked by a religious freak who feels divinely bonded by their experience in a balloon accident. Strangely suspenseful.
William Gay has studied long and hard at the Cormac McCarthy College of southern biblical grandiloquent prose, and his The Long Home is shockingly riveting, given how easy it is to fail out of that university. William Deresiewicz has become one of my favorite literary critics, and his recent takedown of the vaunted James Wood was a vicious thing of beauty Sadly, his A Jane Austen Education, in which he tries to show how reading JA taught him to be a better man is rather trite in spots and unbelievable in others. It’s also not very funny and not nearly as smart as he usually is. I can only guess he was going for those Jane Austen bucks that seem to roll in when you put her highness in the title and promise slippery bits of wisdom. Or maybe I’m still an emotional adolescent incapable of recognizing the quiet truths revealed. Don’t answer that.
I received Ammon Shea’s Reading the OED from a student, and like most gifts that happen to be books, I dreaded opening it. It is, however, a very funny account of one man’s year reading the OED. This is a trend in publishing- have some dude do something most polite suburban types would consider outrageous- read the whole bible, or the encyclopedia, or Remembrance of Things Past- and then recount the experience with witty asides and much self-laceration. What kind of dweeb does x or y or z. Why, this one! I liked this version, though, because it is filled with words I’m glad exist, like natiform (buttock-shaped) or insordescent (growing in filthiness) or goat-drunk (made lascivious by alcohol). In Lowboy, John Wray puts a 16-year old paranoid schizophrenic off his meds on a train and has him pursued by a monkish cop and the lad’s crazy mother. That sounds like a premise from hell, but this is one of the most satisfying modern novels I’ve read in a long time. Wray delivers on that premise by making the young man’s perception of the world alternately hilarious and horrific, but always believable. It’s also a page-turning thriller, and that combo ain’t no easy trick. Can’t believe anybody made it this far, but with four days left in the year and just 100 pages into Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, it looks like John Jeremiah Sullivan’s The Blood Horses will be the finish line. This is mostly a portrait of the author's recently deceased father, who, when asked by his son the greatest thing he had covered as a sportswriter, replied, “Secretariat,” which sends the young man off to research the history of horse racing. I much preferred the family stuff to the old-time equine tales, because in the end this is about a son mourning his father. Stories don’t get much older than that.
David Lodge wrote a novel called Changing Places about two professors who exchange teaching posts, and in one famous scene, lit profs at a cocktail party admit to one classic they’ve never read. All is snickers and hoo haws until one schlump says Hamlet, and that’s all she wrote for his reputation. I read Madame Bovary for the first time this year, so this mea culpa should keep me in Social Sciences for some years to come. Took another stroll down p-rock memory lane with Eric Davidson’s We Never Learn, and all his prose histrionics aside, it’s a reminder that Crypt Records had one of the best winning percentages this side of Edwin Moses. Continuing the gaping hole in the canon thread, Lolita got checked off the list. Nabokov, in addition to sharing a name with a favorite Sharks goalie, is a funny motherfucker, and his descriptive detail is vividly original. One can't help but feel a bit pervy, though, as he makes it impossible not to lust after the young thang, and there you are. Blasted through and thoroughly enjoyed a work on punctuation, Lynn Truss’s best-selling Eats, Shoots and Leaves. I always hit one major Faulkner, this time a second trip through The Sound and the Fury, and the Benji section did not make me want to hurl the thing across the room, the years between readings having filled in some of the blanks. Simon Critchley’s The Book of Dead Philosophers recounts how philosophers’ deaths match their philosophies, but fails to generate much amusement or enlightenment.
Reread David Shields’ Reality Hunger, his manifesto calling for the death of the novel’s relevance and championing a new kind of hybrid literature that looks beyond the realistic confines of 19th century novelistic traditions. He celebrates works like Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, a failed biography about the author’s attempt to write a definite study on DH Lawrence. Reality Hunger is made up almost entirely of lifted passages that Shields comprised to illustrate how traditional notions of intellectual copyright should fall by the google highway as, like rappers and dj’s (love me- I play other people’s music), writers take what’s in the ether and rearrange it into something new. Maddening often, but also aggressively compelling, it’s a must read.
Keith Richards’ Life was OK, but few details formed particularly strong neural circuits in the memory sections of my brain. I spent many hours curled up with good ole William Gass, whose love of language for its own sake is a refreshing rejoinder to the minimalists and those who insist on the carefully constructed plot. Gass is a literary critic who makes you want to read and write and eat and drink and fuck, and I would heartily recommend Tests of Time, Temple of Texts, and Finding a Form even if you loathe literary criticism and find all artistic theory pretentious crap that academics employ to justify their salaries. Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists is a highly acclaimed modern novel that leaves me with the impression of having been mildly entertained and perhaps even amused. Beach or bar reading. The wonderful irony of David Shields’ memoir, The Thing About Life is that One Day You’ll Be Dead, written before Reality Hunger, is that it’s dreadful. He’s a far better arranger than he is a writer, as this may have been the worst book I read all year. Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer was not as good as Shields told me it would be, but it’s an interesting meditation on procrastination.
Read far less biography for some reason, but Anthony Cronin’s Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist provided all the information a mildly curious reader of some of Beckett’s plays and novels could want. I’ve had a poster of the great man in my classroom for many years, and something about the severity of that face and haircut makes the man unknowable. Cronin fills in the details and delivers the influences, and even if so much of the man’s work remains ambiguous and difficult to penetrate, at least it’s less fog and mystery between every unspoken line. Having trouble refusing that third helping of lasagna or saying no to that eighth draught of Drake's Denogginizer? Try Daniel Akst’s We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess, in which our hero offers the following thesis- we have limited self-control reserves that are depleted each hour by the onslaught of choices at our dispersal in a high-tech, 24/7 world, and we need to make pre-commitments (i.e., don’t buy a kegerator, alchie) to reduce our daily scream of temptation. Dan Ariely is all about behavioral economics in Predictably Irrational, another tome in the growing literature attacking the classical model of the rational consumer, and he has plenty of research studies and market examples (he’s much like Malcolm Gladwell in tone and style) to illustrate our follies when it comes to choosing wisely. Barbara Ehrenreich got cancer and loathed those who insisted she bear it with a smile and a positive attitude, so she wrote an entire book called Bright-Sided scalding the notion that optimism improves our lives. Timothy Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves has been getting a lot of recent love due to nods from Gladwell and Daniel Kahneman, for his exploration of the power of the unconscious mind on how we think and behave. Given the mysteries of why I want or do or think anything, I’ll concur. After reading Michael Spector’s Denialism, I’m supposed to believe that my vitamin supplements are no substitute for eating fruits and vegetables and that is simply one truth I must deny. His attack on Jenny McCarthy’s ranting that innoculations cause autism is savage and, from all I’ve read, right on.
Andrew Baggerly’s Band of Misfits was a disappointing summary of the Giants’ World Series season that offers little that’s new if you were paying attention. Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice offers that too much choice is bad for us and he’s got the studies to back it up. Damn, that’s enough pop psychology, so how about Nick Hornby’s new novel, Juliet, Naked? I humbly believe that each of Hornby’s books has gotten worse, but this breaks that trend. I rarely cringed, and there is plenty to recognize in these middle-aged strugglers about love and loss and regret. Back to the couch with Robert Burton’s On Being Certain, which posits that the feeling of certainty is an emotional state that tricks us into believing we are right when often we are not. James McManus’s tale of entering the World Series of Poker and finishing in the top ten made poker seem thrilling, but he’s less successful guiding us through his own experiences at the Mayo Clinic in Physical. This is another in a long line of non-fiction works that should have remained magazine pieces. Patty Smith won the National Book Award. I repeat- Patty Smith won the National Book Award. Her Just Kids is the story of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe when they were young upstarts in the NY arts scene. It is overly romanticized and deeply sentimental and while some of the poetic prose shines, not all of it does, and I’m baffled by the nearly universal praise this book has received. A far weightier and less dreamy-eyed account of the artist at work is Sarah Bakewell’s (love that name) How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, and one could do far worse than to use this book’s wisdom as a secular bible. Not quite matching Bakewell’s recipe for a life well-lived is Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy, in which he uses the life and key ideas of a number of noted philosophers to teach simple truths about the art of living well.
Reread Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, and while it wasn’t as hilarious a second time, I would highly recommend the man for anyone who likes his comedy black. Peter Carey is an extraordinary novelist, and his newest, a retelling of Tocqueville’s journey to America and the making of that most quoted of all texts, is called Parrot and Olivier in America, and it will do nothing to harm his reputation. Mary Roach’s Bonk gets downright filthy as she investigates what science has to say about sex. This woman is a national gem- arguably the funniest writer out there. I kept putting off David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King because who wants to read an unfinished novel when you have no idea what he would have wanted and how much of it is actually finished and what would have been cut and, well, the questions- they do go on. But just to spend more time with the man’s prose, his humor and his humanity. And there are moving and hilarious and heartbreaking sections, but they don’t add up to a novel, which is fine. Read it without looking for coherence and you can find enough to make the muddling worth the time.
Mary Roach again, a good laugh required after the posthumous Wallace, and Stiff makes dead bodies a barrel of plastered monkeys. Really. When you start reading metacriticism, you have to wonder if the journey into your own ass has landed you in the maze of the large intestine from which you cannot extract yourself. Or something, but I’m sitting on the couch again and enjoying Craig Seligman’s dissection of Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag, Sontag and Kael, and digging out my collection of Kael’s essays and wishing I had time to go a movie. Instead it’s to England for Martin Amis’ new one, The Pregnant Widow, which is about a twentysomething’s pursuit of pussy, mostly the prized gash of a teutonic blonde he spends most of the novel plotting to enter. I actually preferred the jumps forward in time to see how the characters deal with middle age and how these desperate early searches for transcendence through mad Italian sex might affect them later. I’ve always enjoyed reading Christopher Hitchens, even as his arrogant public persona threatened to blind folks to the quality of his prose and the breadth of his erudition, and his recent death hit the solar plexus as few obits do. His memoir, Hitch-22, is a fascinating ride through the second half of the 20th century, and even as he’s name-dropping and placing himself at the fulcrum points of modern history, it’s hard not to be carried along by the sheer force of his storytelling and the savagery of his wit. He will be missed. Completing the troika of aging British monsters of lit is Ian McEwan and his Enduring Love, a creepy bit of psychological obsession that has our narrator stalked by a religious freak who feels divinely bonded by their experience in a balloon accident. Strangely suspenseful.
William Gay has studied long and hard at the Cormac McCarthy College of southern biblical grandiloquent prose, and his The Long Home is shockingly riveting, given how easy it is to fail out of that university. William Deresiewicz has become one of my favorite literary critics, and his recent takedown of the vaunted James Wood was a vicious thing of beauty Sadly, his A Jane Austen Education, in which he tries to show how reading JA taught him to be a better man is rather trite in spots and unbelievable in others. It’s also not very funny and not nearly as smart as he usually is. I can only guess he was going for those Jane Austen bucks that seem to roll in when you put her highness in the title and promise slippery bits of wisdom. Or maybe I’m still an emotional adolescent incapable of recognizing the quiet truths revealed. Don’t answer that.
I received Ammon Shea’s Reading the OED from a student, and like most gifts that happen to be books, I dreaded opening it. It is, however, a very funny account of one man’s year reading the OED. This is a trend in publishing- have some dude do something most polite suburban types would consider outrageous- read the whole bible, or the encyclopedia, or Remembrance of Things Past- and then recount the experience with witty asides and much self-laceration. What kind of dweeb does x or y or z. Why, this one! I liked this version, though, because it is filled with words I’m glad exist, like natiform (buttock-shaped) or insordescent (growing in filthiness) or goat-drunk (made lascivious by alcohol). In Lowboy, John Wray puts a 16-year old paranoid schizophrenic off his meds on a train and has him pursued by a monkish cop and the lad’s crazy mother. That sounds like a premise from hell, but this is one of the most satisfying modern novels I’ve read in a long time. Wray delivers on that premise by making the young man’s perception of the world alternately hilarious and horrific, but always believable. It’s also a page-turning thriller, and that combo ain’t no easy trick. Can’t believe anybody made it this far, but with four days left in the year and just 100 pages into Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, it looks like John Jeremiah Sullivan’s The Blood Horses will be the finish line. This is mostly a portrait of the author's recently deceased father, who, when asked by his son the greatest thing he had covered as a sportswriter, replied, “Secretariat,” which sends the young man off to research the history of horse racing. I much preferred the family stuff to the old-time equine tales, because in the end this is about a son mourning his father. Stories don’t get much older than that.
