What did I read?

Inspired by Elisa Gabbert (but lazier), I decided to make just one year-end reading list and blog that. Overall, this year was just an ok one reading-wise, a lovely one personally, and a total dumpster-fire in the world at large. I read less than I intended to, and wasted more time than I should have online thanks to my enemies, Twitter and my NYTimes subscription. I read a lot of chapters for research, without finishing the books that contained them. I read fewer mysteries than I usually do, but I read some science fiction, I think for the first time in my life? Somehow I read almost no non-fiction (???). This is what I read all the way through:

1-The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

2-My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk

3-Terms of Endearment by Larry McMurtry

4-The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle (my favorite)

5-The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante (but really, this was also my favorite) (I love Ferrante now, take your trash opinion and shove it, Ana from last year)

6-A Room With a View by EM Forster

7-Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

8-Gilgamesh

9-The Tongue of Adam by Abdelfattah Kilito

10-The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

11-Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill (how could I have forgotten this was my absolute favorite?)

12, 13-The Hangman’s Daughter and The Dark Monk by Oliver Pötzsch

14, 15, 16-Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, and Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie

17-Dogs of God by James Reston

18-Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (no, this was my favorite)

19-Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

20-A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab (I have to say, this was a big thumbs down from me and I was surprised)

21, 22-The Golem's Eye and Ptolemy's Gate by Jonathan Stroud

23-The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

24-Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

25-Nude by Naeem Murr

26-Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

27-Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin (also my favorite)

28-Dawn: Xenogenesis by Octavia Butler

29-El Entenado by Juan José Saer

30-The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

31-The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage by Phillip Pullman

32-Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey (ok, I've settled on this one as my favorite)

33-The Barracks Thief by Tobias Wolff

34-Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (ok, I lied, this one is my favorite)

35, 36-I reread The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife by Phillip Pullman

37-The Ada Decades (this was written by my writing group buddy Paula Martinac, and it is great and you should buy it)

38-The Art Forger by BA Shapiro

39-We Are Never Meeting in Real Life: Essays by Samantha Irby (but really this was my favorite)

40-Made for Love by Alissa Nutting

Small victory: I read a book in Spanish for the first time in 15 years. Next year: another book in Spanish...give me a break, I have the vocab of a 14 year old, this is all I can manage.

I love short novels the most. Sorry.

Next year I want to read A Heart So White, The Argonauts, something by Bolaño in Spanish, Black Wings Has My Angel, something by Forster, something by Wharton, something by Maugham, that Gabe Habash book I keep eyeing, and that Barbara Comyns book I have been sitting on for months. The end, amen.

Fall Things

Between my best beloved Molly dying suddenly and Hillary losing the election to a cat-hair-covered cheeto someone found under the couch and ate anyway, it has not been a good fall for writing or reading, unless you count endlessly refreshing 538 and breathlessly reading each new article about Trump's cabinet of horrors. But here are some things I read, anyway.

*Concrete by Thomas Bernhard - Both funny and harrowing.

*My Struggle, vol. 1 by Karl Over Knausgaard - This was so intriguing. I think it had something to do with the merciless clarity which which the narrator sees himself. I don't want to sound bitter, but I feel like if a woman had written a novel this long about, essentially, the frustrations of housekeeping and dealing with your annoying, dysfunctional family, it would not have been such a THING. I bought volume 2, though, so I am a fan.

*The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan- Perfectly frothy and delightful.

*Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter and Lolly Willowes: or, The Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend Warner - two of my favourite short story writers didn't produce two of my favourite novels. Oh well. You can't be good at everything.

*Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xialong - This was so interesting from a cultural POV, but also I wish this book had been edited more competently.

*The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux - no thanks.

*Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick deWitt - Mansour and I both read this, and we both liked it a lot. This book has been a real inspiration to me to follow whatever weird imaginative thread I want in my writing.

*Silence by Shusaku Endo - a book entirely devoid of hopefulness. Worth it despite that.

*In Trouble Again by Redmond O'Hanlon - This was fun!

*The Vegetarian by Han Kang - Read this. Now. At once.

*Senselessness by Horacio Castellans Moya - I also thought this was great, and I felt like it belonged on the same shelf as Concrete. That shelf is something like 'misanthrope goes on an absurd trip, witnesses the tragedies of others.'

Books I Have Read Lately - Fall 2015

Let's do this real fast-like. Life After Life: I love that this book was willing to play with a conceit that could have been gimmicky. I was telling someone recently that probably my favorite feeling when I'm reading is the thrill I get from reading along as a great writer tries something risky that probably shouldn't work, and then it does.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: Honestly, I thought I would like this more. Beautiful sentences, loved the sense of adventure, but the journalistic tone that carries us from one scene to the next kept popping me out of the story. Michael Chabon is a genius though, so I probably just have bad taste.

Louise Penny mysteries 1 and 2: Loved Gamache and the setting, but found the stories and peripheral characters unbelievable and was consequently annoyed.

Crazy Rich Asians: This would have been great if it hadn't been a story about the two most boring, oblivious characters in the woooooorld. The whole world. I would have read the HELL out of a book about only the "bad" characters.

Mrs. Dalloway: Can you believe I waited this long to read Woolf? What is even wrong with me?

The Life of St. Teresa of Avila by Herself: Haha, she's crazy. No, I mean, I found this really interesting and it gave me so many cool ideas to write about, but still...this was a trip.

Brother, I'm Dying: A wonderful, affecting memoir.

Song of the Lark: Wonderful; speaks to the experience of being a woman artist in ways that are relevant even now.

Tristes Tropiques: I thought this was so fascinating, especially his explanations of the belief systems of several of the tribes he visits. There was a Sebaldian melancholy here that I liked a lot, a mixture of longing and revulsion when it comes to the past that I think springs from his awareness of his position as a white man, a part (however personally innocuous he might be) of the forces of colonialism and globalization that have destroyed the cultures he studies.

Come See the Mountain: A great, short piece on the Potosi mine, not unrelated to the above.

Bad Feminist: I love Roxane Gay, even when I don't 100% agree with her about every last thing. Also, her twitter is great. There is never a fool too small for her to spend a sentence on, and I for one appreciate her willingness to engage with the hoi polloi.

La Celestina: I finished this! I FEEL GREAT. Also, this reminded me of the tendency we (I?) have to think about civilizations as always moving in the direction of liberalism, when the truth is that impression is only the result of a myopia that ignores a lot of history.

Ok, fine, 70 stories in 70 days.

51. Little Gods by Tim Pratt 52. L'Aquilone du Estrellas by Dean Francis Alfar

53. Window Treatments by Ottessa Moshfegh

54. The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979 by Karen Russell

55. The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis by Karen Russell

56. Kino by Haruki Murakami

57. A Fable Ending in the Sound of a Thousand Parakeets by Kevin Brockmeier

58. The View From the Seventh Layer, also by Kevin Brockmeier

59. Scheherazade by Haruki Murakami

60. Samsa in Love by Haruki Murakami

61 and 62. Some stories by Angela Carter

63. One Gram Short by Etgar Keret

64. If A Book is Locked There's Probably a Good Reason for That Don't You Think by Helen Oyeyemi

65. The Husband Stitch and Horror Story by Carmen Maria Machado

66. Recalculating by Deborah Eisenberg. A story that has the scope of a novel.

67. The Enormous Radio by John Cheever

68. Meneseteung by Alice Munro

69.The Bear Came Over the Mountain by Alice Munro

70. In the Gloaming by Alice Elliott Dark

100 Stories in 100 Days

In an effort to become a better-read writer, I am going to read and re-read 100 stories in 100 days. Join me?(!) Most of these are available for free online. My method of selection is...slipshod? It's some combination of writers I've been intending to read, stories I've meant to read, selections from anthologies and journals that contain or have contained other stories I like, and recommendations from other writers. (DO YOU HAVE ONE?) Sometimes they're stories I like and just haven't read in a while. First up, a classic inspired by my workshop today: A&P by John Updike.

And for tomorrow, George Saunders's The Red Bow.

For Sunday, Allan Gurganus's My Heart Is a Snake Farm (one of my favorite stories) and Brock Clarke's The Lolita School.

For Monday, Sea Oak, also by George Saunders.

For Tuesday, The Moon by Colin Barrett.

For Wednesday, A Lesson in Flight by Alex McElroy.

For Thursday, The Vane Sisters by Vladimir Nabokov.

For Friday, So Much to Burn by Ben Hoffman.

Let's switch to numbers, shall we?

10. The Bet  and Lady With The Dog by Anton Chekhov.

11. Night Bus by Ada Udechukwu.

12. My favorite, WG Sebald. The second chapter from The Emigrants (not online), and this.

13. DFW's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.

14. Michael X. Wang's Further News of Defeat.

15. Karen Russell's Sleep Donation (available as a kindle single).

16. Edward P. Jones's A Rich Man.

17. Chris Offut's Second Hand. (I loved this story so much; I could just read this on repeat for like the next three days.)

18. Lucky Chow Fun by Lauren Groff (from Delicate, Edible Birds). (Lauren Groff is everything.)

19. Vampires In the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell (from Vampires in the Lemon Grove).

20. Reeling for the Empire by Karen Russell

21. Nirvana by Adam Johnson.

22. Bad Year for Apples by CJ Hauser.

23. A story by a pretty kick-ass Dominican writer I met at Sewanee, Brenda Peynado: Strings. I stole a few of these stories from the recs on her website, like a true creeper.

24. A Country Doctor by Franz Kafka.

25. Additional Information That May Be Important by DJ Thielke.

26. Lull by Kelly Link.

27. Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin. This story honestly makes me want to give up writing or trying to do anything, ever. What is the point, you know? We already have Baldwin.

28. The Sea Latch by Cara Blue Adams (not available online).

29. Dark Air by Lincoln Michel.

30. The Ormolu Clock by Muriel Spark (available through the New Yorker Fiction podcast). (Listening to this story twice in the last week has reminded me of how much I luuuuurve Muriel Spark. Now I have to put her on my long, long novel reading list so I can revisit her work. Ugh.)

31. Sun City by Caitlin Horrocks, author of one of my favorite stories, Life Among the Terranauts.

32. Another Caitlin Horrocks story: Murder Games.

33. An Honest Exit by Dinaw Mengestu.

34. Tree Line, Kansas, 1934 by David Means (NYer fiction podcast).

35. The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro.

36. At Hiruharama by Penelope Fitzgerald (From the Guardian's short fiction podcast, as are the next few entries.) (Penelope is the most underrated Fitzgerald.)

37. Umberto Butti by Giuseppe Pontiggia

38. A Conversation With My Father by Grace Paley

39. The Doll's House by Katherine Mansfield

40. A story that I love, The Garden Party, also by Katherine Mansfield

41. A Respectable Woman by Kate Chopin

42. A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud. by Carson McCullers

43. Tiger Bites by Lucia Berlin

44. The Thief by Kirsten Bakis

45. Not a short story, but recommended reading from a Karen Russell interview: The Uncanny by Freud

46. A Love Match by Sylvia Townsend Warner

47. The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami

48. The Children's Grandmother by Sylvia Townsend Warner (available through the NYer fiction podcast)

49. The Jockey by Carson McCullers (available through the NYer fiction podcast)

50. Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken by Elizabeth Ziemska

More updates as they occur to me...

A Thing I Read That I Loved: "Tin Cans" by Ekaterina Sedia

I am an old man—too old to really care. My wife died on the day the Moscow Olympics opened, and my dick had not done anything interesting since the too-optimistic Chechen independence. I shock people when I tell them how young I was when the battleship Aurora gave its fateful blast announcing the Revolution. And yet, life feels so short, and this is why I’m telling you this story. - See more at Electric Literature

December of Disappointments

I read a lot in December, and most of it was...not that great. While I was in Granada, I picked up and read Tariq Ali's Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, and it was so full of anachronisms (most of them food-based). He wrote like five sequels though, so no one should feel bad for him, really. Least of all me. I didn't want to let the year go out, however, without mentioning that I finally got around to reading To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis. I previously panned Blackout and All Clear, two of her other books, but I loved this one so much that I might give them a second try (but probably not, let's be real). It's a riff on Jerome K. Jerome's classic Three Men in a Boat, and to my (confused?) mind, there was something very Wodehousian about it, too. It was a delightful comedy and so refreshing after Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, which on top of not being all that well written (I thought the characters were so flat...probably because there were like 100 of them) was also pretty grim. All in all, a nice, gentle 500 pages to ease you into the New Year.

Next year, I'm looking forward to traveling (I keep misspelling travelling/traveling) a lot, running another 10K, and reading some of the many, many books on my kindle and packed into every corner of my house, which include, in no particular order:

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

All Seated on the Ground by Connie Willis

Celestina by Fernando de Rojas (finishing it, anyway)

Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff

Eric by Terry Pratchett

Swann's Way (again, finishing...I actually love this book, but it has very little forward momentum, you know? It almost invites you to step away from it and come back after a walk.)

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

The Life of St. Teresa of Avila

Maigret and the Man on the Boulevard by Georges Simenon

The Origin of the Brunists by Robert Coover

Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers

Out by Natsuo Kirino

Lazarillo de Tormes by I Can't Remember

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, for some reason

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (probably not)

Either/Or by Kierkegaard (again, why?)

Bring Up the Bodies by Hillary Mantel

Sometimes, I look through my kindle and I feel like I must have been drunk when I bought myself these books.

I can't get behind this.

Guys. Why is the loafer for ladies a thing again? Do people remember the 90s fondly? Because I remember them GROSSLY. It was a GROSS time to be wearing clothes. These 90s trends are the worst.

Look at these madewell jeans.

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Screen Shot 2014-10-29 at 6.40.03 PM

It looks like that model found those jeans in the trash. And she's a model! Imagine these on the lumpyproletariat (sorry, but I'm one of them) that actually shops at America's malls.

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Screen Shot 2014-10-29 at 6.45.14 PM

Is it a joke?

Some books I've read recently

(or listened to) booksrecent

The Orphan Master's Son: so good, you guys, so good! I want to shove this in everyone's face right now.

The first two Outlander books: Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber. I was watching the show on Starz at the same time, and I'd been hearing about them for yonks, as the British would say. I liked them, they were pretty well written and entertaining, even if there were some weak narrative choices (how many times can one woman get kidnapped and rescued?!). Also, there's A LOT of sexual violence, and some of it really made me give Diana Gabaldon the side-eye. Overall, if you need something light to read that will take up a lot of hours (a plane ride, I guess?), these are your guys. The second novel is better, I think, than the first. I started the third, but have not found it as compelling as the first two. Someone called it very Perils of Penelope, and that's true.

The Secret Place: Another month, another mystery is pretty much how it goes around here. Tana French (like PD James) specializes in mysteries that take place in formal, tightly-knight, often hierarchical groups (schools, law firms, museums, familes), and murder almost always results from the betrayal of these groups by one of their members. Anyway, this was a stronger entry than Broken Harbor, for me. I really enjoyed the boarding school setting, though I thought she only did an ok job capturing the way teenagers speak. It was very 90s, though it's set in the aughts.

The Moonstone and The Woman in White: Wilkie Collins, where have you been all my life? You wouldn't think that two of the very first mystery stories ever written would be more entertaining than most of what has been written since, but you'd be WRONG. Trivia: Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens were contemporaries and friends, and I think if you like one you'll probably like the other.

Girlfriends watch, year three.

Where is UPN's "Girlfriends", Netflix/Amazon/Sketchy Streaming Service I Turn To In Desperation? I have been waiting for so long... Must keep waiting...

Can't...

Stop...

Loving Tracee Ellis Ross.

I don't care if I'm alone in this, because just like Giordano Bruno or Galileo I know one of these days you'll all see I was right.

 

An experiment.

Tonight, I decided to go ahead and make a recipe that I read about on one of my favorite food blogs: chicken liver ragu.  Things got off to a rocky start when I had to visit three different grocery stores to obtain the aforementioned livers, but once I decide to do something I really just like to plough ahead in spite of whatever red flags a benevolent universe plants in my path. I guess now is probably the time to mention that I don't really like liver all that much, that I've had a similar dish at a great restaurant and only sort of liked it, and that I have a weird, prissy aversion to dealing with raw meatLALALALALALA can't hear you, voice in the back of my mind, this is a great idea, just look at that nice picture. Problem the first: did you know chicken livers come frozen in a little tub and that they will be impossible to defrost in anything resembling a reasonable amount of time? At this point, I had cut up all my vegetables, and it was too late to turn back, so I went ahead and destroyed some chicken livers, ripping them apart like a kitchen-dwelling godzilla, covering so, so many things in chicken blood. Then I proceeded to trim them and finely chop them. Just kidding, because if you've ever dealt with raw liver, you know it's basically like trying to finely chop jello.

Problem the second: why is there so much blood in livers? I mean, they are like all blood. Just bloody bloody blood, all on my hands, drying into a sticky, shiny horror show. My clothes splattered in chicken blood. At this point, I begin to feel like I'm in one of those American Horror Story voodoo rituals (an aside: Angela Bassett, I love you, where have you been?).

Problem the third: the ragu is finished, and it's delicious, but it tastes like liver, but it's delicious, but it tastes like liver. Like 63% of my brain is totally sold on the ragu, but also 32% of my brain is like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RigIpVXm2xA

5% of my brain wishes I were asleep already. That is always the case.

Just now.

Apparently, this week was the week the internet discovered Bartolome de las Casas, a historical figure you might not have heard of if you've avoided every book about American history ever written and also Wikipedia and also being awake during basically any television special about the colonization of America. I mean, you'd have to be pretty close to brain dead to never, ever have heard of Bartolome de las Casas. HE'S NOT EVEN THAT GREAT, YOU GUYS. For one thing, he defended the importation of African slaves as a way of dealing with the problem of not having enough workers because the entire native population in some areas had died of smallpox and starvation. Yes, he changed his mind later. STILL. Also, his entire understanding of the world was based in the idea that God wanted everyone to experience Christianity, which... I mean, whatever, happy Columbus Day.

 

Such conflicted feelings.

Can we talk about Mellie Grant's hair on my favorite TV show right this second, Scandal? It is so good, and so awful. It's forever like a bouffant and Kate Middleton's hair had a baby, and then that baby was baptized in a pool of whatever hair spray is made of. Sometimes I want it. Ok, fine, all the time I want it. It's a damn work of art. Every day she builds the Sydney Opera House on her bitchy ol' head. Image

This is from this week's episode. God, a screen grab can never capture it. It's like a Yeti.