2011 Booklist

I'm back again, with a new set of books to list. Isn't that great?

I bested my record AGAIN with 54 (count em) fifty-four books read this year.

Unfortunately, a lot of them were exceedingly short.

It's the usual potpourri of genres, though as I get older, the YA fantasy is getting cut out in favour of new directions in literature. No poetry this year, but I did read some 20th century playwrights, explore some rather frivolous subjects in non-fiction and get a small grounding in "modern" authors.

The list shall now speak for itself. I don't expect anyone to make it to the bottom without skimming.

1. The Mysteries of Udolpho - Ann Radcliffe

I read most of this one in 2010, and despite its many flaws, I love it to pieces. The entirety of part 4 ruined the novel, but until then I found an incredibly sympathetic heroine, a page-turning plot even before her arrival at Udolpho and a compelling portrait of a horrendous society. Montoni wasn't half the villain I'd expected, Emily wound up marrying the WRONG man and Radcliffe let her own propriety get the better of her book, but I was well entertained.

2. The Monk - Matthew Gregory Lewis

Required reading if you've read Udolpho. This is a young man's answer to Radcliffe's genteel version of the gothic novel. In a word: pulped-up. Satanism, violence, murder, sex, depravity and damnation with religious hypocrisy thrown in for good measure. Some great scenes, some wacky dialogue, some tawdry shock value along the way. It was entertaining, yet it didn't linger with me the way Udolpho did.

3. Reading Like a Writer - Francine Prose

A non-academic's analysis of several components of writing. Things like dialogue, the telling detail, action and narrative voice were taken apart, helped along by examples from a variety of books. Technical, astute and appreciative. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

4. The Atlas of Literature - Malcolm Bradbury, editor

A set of short essays on the influence of place upon literature. Some were informative, some self-indulgent. Nice glossy pictures. I could have used fewer entries with more information.

5. Silent Night: The Story of the World War One Christmas Truce - Stanley Weintraub

A brief history of the 1914 Christmas Truce, an incident early enough in the course of the war to be possible. A madly detailed little account, but very moving to consider.

6. The Waiting Darkness - Willo Davis Roberts

When I need a break from the heavy stuff, a 70s gothic novel never fails me. This one was perfect. It had a plot I tore through frantically, an idiosyncratic choice of romantic lead (a bearded woodsman making his living on writing for the pulps) and, best of all, a sense of humour. Great little yarn.

7. In the Forests of the Night - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

The title may be the best thing about this tiny novella. Vampires in Concord out for revenge. The book made a splash when it came out for being written by a thirteen year old. To her credit, the writing's pretty good and she attempts some mature themes. Being thirteen really hampered her effort though.

8. Sophie's World - Jostein Gaarder

A novel that attempts to tell the history of philosophy and be a postmodern looking-glass at once. The middle portion of the book was a triumph in these ambitions. Unfortunately, the set-up chapters were dull and the author could not find a way to satisfactorily finish the story. Also, the translation was...odd. Something about it was off. A middle-of-the-road experience.

9. This Baffling World No. 1 - John Godwin

Pithy and brilliant. Godwin assembled the facts and speculations in a variety of unexplained phenomena, including UFOs, the "devil's footprints" in Devonshire, the Man in the Iron Mask and the Oak Island Money Pit. Neither too credulous nor too skeptical and often sardonic.

10. The Case of Sergeant Grischa - Arnold Zweig

One of the best novels I've ever read, an underrated WWI story set on the Eastern Front. Rather than detailing the front lines, Zweig tells a story of the generals and pen-pushers, the war bureaucracy and its corrupt policies. It's the story of one man sentenced to execution, told through a vast tapestry of characters crucial to his case - some without knowing their involvement. Thoughtful, beautiful and heartbreaking.

11. Long Day's Journey Into Night - Eugene O'Neill

I got a huge stack of plays sometime in April and read this one on a whim. Literate and moving, so verbose that it gives the appearance of prose. Jamie Tyrone may be one of the great characters in 20th century drama.

12. The Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

The final work in last year's set of Harvard Classics, and the most dull. Twelve chapters of a Stoic emperor's musings. If it had been pared down to six, it would have been dynamite, but he reiterated his creed so often it got to be almost unbearable.

13. God's Little Acre - Erskine Caldwell

In April, I also rescued some prose works: Edgar Cayce, a bio of Red Skelton and two by Erskine Caldwell, a second-rate thirties writer whom almost nobody reads anymore. God's Little Acre is historically important for being a pulp fiction phenomena, selling some 6 million copies in paperback and getting dragged into court on suspicion of pornography. The plot? Hillbilly family digs for gold they think is on their property, hillbilly neighbour tries to get elected sheriff and a nearby milltown goes on strike. Along the way, everybody lusts after everybody else and an albino is abducted from the local swamps.... Might just be me, but I thought the whole shebang was hilarious.

14. This Baffling World No. 2 - John Godwin

More great accounts. Indian magic tricks, the Mary Celeste, the Coffins of Christchurch and some less interesting stuff on ESP...

15. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - Edward Albee

Basically: two unhappily married couples get drunk, bitch and swear and humiliate each other and end up admitting to some of their dark secrets. How is this interesting? It shouldn't be, but it really is. The mixture of fact and fiction in the last act is fascinating.

16. The City - Frans Masereel

Other than a quote from Walt Whitman, this is textless. It is one hundred woodcuts of Berlin between the wars, showing everything - street scenes and interiors, factories and parties, poverty, loneliness, romances, suicide and murders. You see everything, public and private. There are street orators, beggars, whores, bankers, families, criminals, cats, dogs and car crashes. It's a masterpiece.

17. Zorro - Isabel Allende

A lightweight swashbuckler that didn't really stick with me in any way. A pleasant diversion, masked as literature.

18. A Morbid Taste for Bones - Ellis Peters

The first in the Cadfael series of medieval murder mysteries. Pleasant reading. It was the character of Cadfael that made it so good. One of the most likable, levelheaded detectives ever to grace the genre.

19. Joan of Arc: in Her Own Words - Joan of Arc

Stepping back from interpretation, the translator of this book chose to take only the records of what Joan is supposed to have said - much of it from the court case - and presented them in the fashion of a spare autobiography. There is also one account of the Siege of Orleans included at the end. I could have used a few more accounts to aid my understanding of what happened. Other than that, it was just fine.

20. Leviathan - Paul Auster

An intelligent pageturner. Awesome stuff. Unfortunately I think my enthusiastic reaction to this one is going to have a detrimental effect on the rest of Auster's output....

21. Women Who Run With the Wolves - Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Started reading this back in 2010 and took a long break. Useful for completely lost young women. It helped me realise my feelings were not original. It was written in the oral tradition and therefore used paragraphs where sentences would suffice. It was good in its feminist way.

22. The Moon is Down - John Steinbeck

Propaganda for WWII! A good look at the results of enemy occupation on the minds of all the people involved. Grim little story where the situation becomes the main character. Though the Americans dismissed it, the book had an important underground life in occupied European countries.

23. The Hawkline Monster: a Gothic Western - Richard Brautigan

Brautigan was a cult writer in the 60s. Almost nobody reads him any more. He had many faults in his writing, but on the other hand his stuff sounds like no one elses. This one was better than In Watermelon Sugar by sporting a sense of humour. His stuff runs on a logic of its own, and I will repeat what I said about his earlier novel: weirdest book I ever read.

24. A House of Pomegranates - Oscar Wilde

Further explorations of Wilde's writing. A set of four ornate "fairy tales." They are closer to prose poems than anything else, beautifully written and sporting a grimly realistic view of life - money and appearances matter more to the crowd than any number of good deeds. The Birthday of the Infanta was the best of the lot.

25. This Baffling World No. 3 - John Godwin

Best of the three volumes, explaining the facts of Kaspar Hauser, "prophets" such as Nostradamus and Eric Jan Hanussen, the yeti, Houdini and Kudu Bux. Interesting from start to finish.

26. The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster

Auster's debut, where he lets his noir and baseball nerdiness shine through a set of wonderfully interesting, but emotionally dry works. It's a modern classic of postmodernism, but of course, it doesn't measure up to Leviathan. Tsk.

27. Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett

One of those rare times when I'll call a book "genius." This was one amazing play. Amusing, tragic, chilling, experimental and thought-provoking. I think that's everything you could want in a play. I call it a prison-camp story without the prison-camp.

28. To Say Nothing of the Dog - Connie Willis

I read this thinking of Three Men in a Boat, but knowledge of that book is not so necessary as familiarity with P. G. Wodehouse and Dorothy Sayers. Comedy of manners meets time travel meets Victorian nostalgia (you know what that is if you've felt it). Probably the most endearing book I read all year.

29. Endgame - Samuel Beckett

Not as much fun to read as Godot, a troublesome one-act play with a mime stuck at the end. Very dark and stripped down. This one reads like a post-apocalyptic old-age home. I'll have to re-read Beckett, Godot for further appreciation, this one to try and find what it's on about.

30. Rotten Rejections: A Literary Companion - Andre Bernard, editor

A quick read, compiling some choice quotes about various great/important works of literature from some remarkably callous or obtuse publishers. Someone turned down Anne Frank of all people! Someone told Faulkner "I can't publish this. We'd both be in jail." I was in stitches reading some of this.

31. Science Dictionary - Isaac Asimov

Sitting with a cat on my lap, I dug out the shortest book I could find from the stack next to me and read this boring kids' introduction to scientific terms, with photographs alongside. Dull. Dull. Dull.

32. The Portable Beat Reader - Ann Charters, editor

My introduction to the Beats. I was struggling to get through the deathly prose of Flaubert's A Simple Heart - I threw it down and picked up this compendium, immediately beginning to feel better. An excellent overview, though the quality of material varies extravagantly. Some of it was solid gold and some of it was unvarnished idiocy. A lot of it was just okay. But it made a great summer reading experience.

33. Essays, Civil and Moral - Francis Bacon

I usually like essays, but Bacon's were basically an advice guide for Elizabethan businessmen. Every now and again, he'd say something on the money, or quote Machiavel, but for the most part I was bored.

34. Andy Catlett: Early Travels - Wendall Berry

A friend gave me this one. A short novel with no plot - a nine-year-old boy goes to visit his two sets of grandparents in WWII. This reads like a memoir, and is mostly an observant picture of how people lived in rural America before the fossil fuel life had kicked in. Berry is the only author I've ever come across who seems aware/concerned about the current dependence on fossil fuels. An odd reading experience.

35. The New Atlantis - Francis Bacon

A vision of utopia. Better than the Essays, but, like all utopias, it sounds like a dystopia from first to last. It was most interesting when detailing how scientific discovery would work in Bacon's theoretical society.

36. Areopagitica & Tractate on Education - John Milton

This one rocked. I never thought I'd say that about a Harvard entry. Milton's pamphlet on free press - eloquent, intelligent, hard-hitting and brilliant. I read it in awe, and read it again. Wow. Milton was a rebel. I recommend the Areopagitica to everybody. As for the Tractate, it was well thought and a good view on educational standards of the time, but too short to remain in the mind.

37. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - Tom Stoppard

An homage to Hamlet and Waiting for Godot, two masterpieces. And amazingly, Stoppard pulls it off without falling short. This is a great play to read or watch. It's not quite genius, I suppose, but it's still superb.

38. Mistress of Mount Fair - Jane Gordon

Another of my romantic suspense excursions, this one featuring a heroine who knows guns and martial arts, thanks to being a cop's daughter. That makes a nice change from the usual pushovers, and makes her the most memorable part of the book.

39. Stand Still Like the Hummingbird - Henry Miller

I'm not sure whether these were essays or ramblings. Some enthusiastic literary recommendations mixed with musings on the state of the human race, mixed with self-justifications. There was also an amusing spoof of economics. I surprised myself by thoroughly enjoying this collection. Bonus: the first book I ever read published by New Directions, since become one of my favorite publishers.

40. Ombria in Shadow - Patricia McKillip

Among fantasy authors, McKillip is at the top of the list for style and imagination. This one was just beautiful.

41. The Turn of the Screw - Henry James

This is another on my short list of "genius." A ghost story that is also the best case of unreliable narration and obscured facts I've ever seen. This one stunned me. I analysed every word, trying to get beneath the smoke screen of the self-righteous governess' narration. And it can still horrify, as it's the story of two unprotected children at the mercy of a cast of negligent and sinister people.

42. Story of O - Pauline Reage

Turning eighteen lifted the lifelong ban on erotica I'd known, so I proceeded to read the scariest work in that genre I could find in the house. It stopped scaring me after I'd read it. It was the most unpleasant and intense reading experience I've ever had. It was also so French it was silly. It had genuine literary merit (which surprised my prejudiced mind) and even though I didn't enjoy reading it, I'm glad I did.

43. The Lime Twig - John Hawkes

A short book that reads like a dream. Amazing prose style. Three luckless people get involved in crime and prove easy pickings for a set of organized gangsters. Grimy visuals thread a plot propelled by the logic of a nightmare. Some of the scenes felt like visions - I saw this book more than I read it, if that makes sense.

44. Mary - Vladimir Nabokov

On a whim, I read Nabokov's first novel (without having read anything else by him) just to see how it struck me. It's a minor work for a reason, but a talented minor work. The flashback segment mixed overly-romanticized scenery with an incredibly unromantic love story (worst of both worlds), but the "present day" scenes were much better. A bunch of pathetic and crass Russian expatriates unhappily gathered in a boarding house fret their time away. The ending was more moving than it had any right to be. Minor...odd...but good.

45. The Happy Prince - Oscar Wilde

Wilde's second fairy tale collection, more accessible, but still with an odd cynicism lurking underneath. Of this set, my favorite was The Remarkable Rocket, the strangest and funniest tale.

46. Patriotism - Yukio Mishima

A fifty-four page short story in which a Japanese lieutenant decides to commit ritual suicide, and whose wife asks to accompany him. As disturbing as it sounds, but unforgettable. It's my first sample of non-western literature.

47. The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors - Laura Miller, editor

I read this in bits and pieces over the course of the year. A US-centric guide to contemporary English language authors. Opinionated write-ups on famous literati, infamous cult writers, bestsellers, obscurities and experimentalists. A handy grab-bag, but I wish it had been more even-handed and less focused on Americans.

48. A Moon for the Misbegotten - Eugene O'Neill

A sequel of sorts to Long Day's Journey into Night, focusing on the last months in Jamie Tyrone's life as alcoholism kills him. The first two acts were too Caldwellesque for my taste, but the last two were incredibly moving. Despite its flaws, an amazing work.

49. Icehenge - Kim Stanley Robinson

Uneven. Three novellas stitched together to form a meditation on time and archeology. Part one was good enough in a space opera way. Part 2 dragged on and on and on and on and on. Part 3 was fabulous, catching my imagination and boosting my opinion of the work, though not enough to save it from a 3 1/2 star rating. I admire it more than I like it, let's say.

50. Cane - Jean Toomer

Read this one twice. An experimental mix of poetry and prose focused on the lives of African Americans in rural Georgia and the jazz age cityscape to the north. Grim and powerful. It haunted me so much I had to read it again, and it was better the second time.

51. The Turret Room - Charlotte Armstrong

Another of Charlotte Armstrong's blend of suspense. Once it was all set up, it became a pageturner. Enjoyable stuff.

52. Counterculture Through the Ages - Ken Goffman

Non-fiction as candy. A fast, informative read.

53. Religio Medici - Thomas Browne

Made excellent time on this volume of Harvard. The last work in it was this set of thoughts Thomas Browne compiled, focused on his Christianity. A fancy prose style made it interesting. I didn't get a whole lot out of it, but Browne was an interesting fellow, enlightened in some ways, sadly blinkered in others.

54. The Glass Menagerie - Tennessee Williams

The last of my 20th century plays this year. Depressing little experiment. Tom made for a boring narrator, but the female characters were memorable, and I had a lot of sympathy for Laura.

That's it, this year's list. A lot of good books, a few bad ones and I'm already eagerly anticipating what to read next.

But right now, I'm off to do something useful. Happy New Year!