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If you know me you know I like to read. I don't go to sleep at night without reading, even if it is for 30 seconds before my eyes close—it just doesn't feel like a complete day unless I have read. And when I get into a book, it is the most delicious, wonderful feeling in the world. It may be my favorite thing in the world—a truly excellent book. A book that changes the way you feel and see and think. I book that takes you somewhere else. Language that is so delicious you feel like you can trust the author to do anything. A book that contains a whole other life and/or universe. However, those kinds of book experiences seem to be fewer and further between with age.
Here is what I read in 2013—with some of my impressions and thoughts about them. I am only listing books I feel are worth mentioning—several that I don't even think are worth a mention, even in so modest a setting as my personal blog, are left out.
Bring Up the Bodies (Wolf Hall, Book 2)Part 2 of Wolf Hallby Hilary Mantel. I don't believe it works as a stand alone novel, and it felt rather like additional chapters added on to Wolf Hall. That said, Wolf Hall is one of the most amazing books I've read this past decade. Apparently others agree with me: it won the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Award in 2009, as well as several other awards.
Historical fiction is not the kind of reading I usually go in for. I read it because my book club (called, ahem, the Book Club) selected it. I was hooked on the first page. The depiction of Thomas Cromwell is so human, modern and touching that he became more real to me than the people around me. I confess to having had a crush on a 16th Century gentleman, which says something about me. Mantel's Cromwell is portrayed as a modern thinker, really almost a democrat, who pulls England and Europe out of the dark ages by his radical capacity to adapt his ideology to changing times, and see people for who they are, regardless of race or rank.
My immersion in Cromwell's world was aided by the fact that I did not actually read Wolf Hall, but listened to it, 18 discs, 23 hours, read by Simon Slater, whose amazing delivery became Cromwell incarnate for me. Towards the end I was up against my book club deadline and out of driving hours so I switched from the recording to the written version, and it lost nothing in the transition.
Bring up the Bodies was just too short to recreate for me the connection to and immersion in of Wolf Hall, but I drank in every word, just to be close to my Thomas again...(Irad doesn't mind seeing as Cromwell is dead, and all).
Having had this amazing experience with Wolf Hall, my book club went on to read Giving Up the Ghost : A Memoir (John MacRae Books), Mantel's memoir.
This was not at all what I expected—I thought it would be a literate and literary memoir of growing up in Britain and the tender experiences of youth that engendered a great writer: an updated, regendered A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Dover Thrift Editions)
...and what it actually was is a literate and literary memoir (yes the girl can write) of a life long battle with the medical establishment that leaves her beaten, but not defeated. She triumphs in the telling...
Also in the genre of English fiction, though written by a retired Canadian man who had never been to England, are the absolutely delightful, engaging and scientifically rich Flava de Luce books. Straddling the genre of who-dunnits and young adult lit, they are fit for consumption by all ages, and are refreshingly well written. Flavia, a young genius chemist, herself is one of my favorite heroines of any genre and my daughter and I eagerly consumed all five books and are breathlessly awaiting our advance order of the the next, which should come out in a few days.
This was an unusual reading year for me in that it did include several memoirs—I usually am strictly available for fiction only. But for some reason, a number of these drifted my way for one reason or another, and I found myself really caught up in the experience of other people's midlife+ meaning-making. Probably because most of them are my age or a little older and I think we are all approaching that time of life when we are summarizing the patterns and looking for the underlying directions in our journeys. You know!
In addition Hilary Mantel's mentioned above, I returned to an old favorite, May Sarton, and read three of her journals: Journal of a Solitude, Plant Dreaming Deep, and The House by the Sea: A Journal. I loved her as much now as I did in my 20's. And in reading her I find so much of myself: the need to spend time alone, the love of words, the desire to write, fascination with the natural world outside her windows, the intense relationship with building a home and the commitment to arranging fresh flowers as a daily practice. Of course she follows through on all these things in a way which I don't, but then again I am not a lonely, temperamental, single childless writer living by myself in a remote village. I carry these things inside of myself and spend my life being distracted from them by the far more fortunate banalities of carpooling, producing constant meals for a house full of teenagers, and so on. It is possible to get a taste of May Sarton from a collection of quotes, that someone on Goodreads collected.
My next memoir was Patti Smith's Just Kids, which was also hugely surprising. I have been a fan of Smith's music since my teens, her Horses
album one of the iconic records I still keep around in vinyl. But I never knew much about her—I had many assumptions about her that I hadn't realized I carried based on her looks. Druggie, rocker, lesbian...Weird how we attach attributes to a person based on an image and what it signals. She is none of these things. A poet, devotee of Rimbaud, a good Catholic girl and a book collector, she lived with a kind of ascetic purity and devotion to her friend Robert Mapplethorpe and to their art. Her book is beautifully written and by the second page I was in shock. Not a celebrity tell-all but a talented writer with serious chops who beautifully conjures up her girlhood and coming of age. Wow.
The Book Club read the Patti Smith memoir together, and we did something interesting—we each chose another rock memoir (since there was a bumper crop last year) to read additionally and report back on. Mine was Keith Richard's Lifeand it was also quite mesmerizing. I "met" these rock and roll superstars in my teens and I guess I thought they fell to earth (a la David Bowie) fully formed and cool, but they actually grew up in a gritty, industrial, post-war British landscape and dealt with all the mores and social expectations of the 40's and 50's before breaking out and breaking all the molds and creating the world that we now know as our own. Richards depiction of his childhood brought this reality home to me, in a voice that is earthy, witty and insouciant. Again, not one of those obviously ghost-written formulaic celebrity self aggrandizing memoirs, but a distinct and clear voice with a huge story to tell.
The following three books are lumped together not because I read them sequentially, but because I think they make an excellent counterpart to each other because they all deal with the high techiness of contemporary life in complementary and novel ways:
Alif the Unseen, a really fun romp through the internet and the interface with the world of the djinn told in an un-named Arab totalitarian
state, with the political commentary embedded in a wonderful fantastical tale.
Little Brother, a cautionary tale that works as a YA novel and a real follow-up to Orwell's 1984 in the world of the near future in which Homeland Security has its digital watchers in everyone's backyard and worse.
The Circlewhich is also a cautionary tale about the possible (likely?) ramifications of the omnipresence of social networking on steroids. This one is really a book of ideas, and the ideas are strong enough to carry it through some of the pedestrian writing and somewhat two dimensional characters.
I would love to teach these books as a course, along with Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book), Reamde: A Novel
William Gibson's Neuromancer, and "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore", discussed below.
I read Ann Patchett's State of Wonder: A Novelafter hearing her speak at Writers Center Stage. She is one of the best writers I have heard speak anywhere, ever, and I was so inspired by her speech that not only did I want to start my own bookstore, but I went out and got her book. And it was a great read! Funny story, an acquaintance of mine told me she couldn't read the book because it was set in the Amazon and she was afraid there would be a snake in it and she has such a severe phobia of snakes she can't even read about them.. I continually reported back to her that it was a great story and there were no snakes...until the penultimate scene in which there is the Mother of All Snake Episodes. So Warning: Disturbing and Graphic Snake Scene.
With the Book Club I also read Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel, which was also a good solid read and another fun and funky merger of high tech and fantastical events would fit into the aforementioned course that I am imagining someone teaching.
And the Book Club read The Interestings: A Novel
by Meg Wolitzer which I expected to dislike as a remake of the endless list of novels whose conceit is following four roomates after college...this time after summer camp. But it was a pleasant surprise and a really worthwhile and content rich zeitgeist novel for someone the age of...well, me. It was a novel that spanned my whole life and reflected the times I grew up in and lived through, with some interesting twists and turns. The characters were good, some came off the the page more than others. This is our book, guys.
In Rio I borrowed a friend's Kindle (thank you, Yuval) when I decided not to join the group as they voluntarily allowed themselves to be suspended in a flimsy metal car on a cable swinging around in a mid-air going up a mountainside. The only fiction book on it was Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)which I read as a teen-ager but this time round really "got" and appreciated. What a great writer and this belongs on the syllabus of any course on great war literature. (Along with, for example, All Quiet on the Western Front and Catch 22).
And another old friend I revisited (found in a used bookstore in Tel Aviv) is Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories. It is an adult revisit of many of some of the best known fairly tales, and explores the very adult content embedded in them—mythos, fears and erotica—with a dizzying, incisive and sensual prose that was the earmark of this late great writer.
A little gem I found that was of great personal interest was Lyle Rockler's Chazzonos.
Here is my Amazon Review of the book:
I also slogged my way through Kate Atkinson's Life After Life: A Novel. Certainly a "tour de force"—massive technique and wonderful prose, but so wrenching, to constantly be jerked out of the story and start again. A couple of the iterations of the possible lives of the main character Ursula, were so disturbing that I had to take a long break from the book. There was something intrinsically wrong about re-doing a fictional life, it violates the attachment of the reader to the fiction and reminds you constantly it is not real. It seemed somehow disrespectful on the part of the author to treat their character as an exercise in probability or quantum physics. But dang, it was well done. Worth reading for the beautifully crafted world of early 20th Century England as well.
Kudos to the Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories collection. I read this with daughter Fat Rabbit—we pulled names of several of the authors to find their other books. Some great stories, lots of fun with a really creative genre, and a beautiful binding to boot.
Doctor Sleep: A Novel, another addition to the Stephen King oeuvre with its massively readable and realistically paranormal explorations of good and evil and everything in between. This one (a sequel to The Shining
written 35 years later) is especially good on drinking and the 12 Step program. As a matter of fact, it could be an advertisement for AA. OK, at 544 pages a rather lengthy promotion...
There were lots of "filler" books, mostly detective novels that I pick up and work my way through several in a series, looking for one that can keep me hooked. The best one, which I am 3 books into, is Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford Books, starting with From Doon with Death: The First Inspector Wexford Novel (William Monk). And my usual skipping around sci-fi anthologies, the tomes of Best-ofs that come out every year, as well as my subscription to Asimov's.
And a last minute 2013-read that came in under the wire while I was in Tel Aviv, loaned to me by my cousin Michelle who knows the author, and read on the plane ride home on New Years Eve! The Wayward Moon was a delightful and surprising book. A medieval Yentl, it reminds me of a couple of other "jewish women in historical times" novels that I've read, only so much better! I'm thinking of The Red Tent: A Novel
(which I hated; it was pseudo everything!) and People of the Book: A Novel
by Geraldine Brooks which was half excellent modern novel and half over-romaticized and contrived historical novel, "The Wayward Moon" struck me as a genuine and compelling evocation of another age: an age which has always fascinated me, an age when classical Islamic culture flourished and the fertile crescent and middle east were permeated with learning and arts. Set in 874, it does a bully job of imagining the life of a woman who really was seen as little more than chattel, or even cattle. The story was a breathless adventure tale through every possible scenario the inventive author could come up with, life as a slave, with Muslims, in a Monastary, in a roadside Inn (you get the idea) with a very well thought-out and realized character. A 17 year old Jewish woman. Throw those other books out of the Jewish Book Club circuit and grab this one! It is wonderful, and has garnered several prizes to prove it.
That summarizes 2013 in reading. Bring on 2014!
If I were to make only one New Years Resolutions, it would be to read more.
If you know me you know I like to read. I don't go to sleep at night without reading, even if it is for 30 seconds before my eyes close—it just doesn't feel like a complete day unless I have read. And when I get into a book, it is the most delicious, wonderful feeling in the world. It may be my favorite thing in the world—a truly excellent book. A book that changes the way you feel and see and think. I book that takes you somewhere else. Language that is so delicious you feel like you can trust the author to do anything. A book that contains a whole other life and/or universe. However, those kinds of book experiences seem to be fewer and further between with age.
Here is what I read in 2013—with some of my impressions and thoughts about them. I am only listing books I feel are worth mentioning—several that I don't even think are worth a mention, even in so modest a setting as my personal blog, are left out.
Bring Up the Bodies (Wolf Hall, Book 2)Part 2 of Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel. I don't believe it works as a stand alone novel, and it felt rather like additional chapters added on to Wolf Hall. That said, Wolf Hall is one of the most amazing books I've read this past decade. Apparently others agree with me: it won the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Award in 2009, as well as several other awards.Historical fiction is not the kind of reading I usually go in for. I read it because my book club (called, ahem, the Book Club) selected it. I was hooked on the first page. The depiction of Thomas Cromwell is so human, modern and touching that he became more real to me than the people around me. I confess to having had a crush on a 16th Century gentleman, which says something about me. Mantel's Cromwell is portrayed as a modern thinker, really almost a democrat, who pulls England and Europe out of the dark ages by his radical capacity to adapt his ideology to changing times, and see people for who they are, regardless of race or rank.
My immersion in Cromwell's world was aided by the fact that I did not actually read Wolf Hall, but listened to it, 18 discs, 23 hours, read by Simon Slater, whose amazing delivery became Cromwell incarnate for me. Towards the end I was up against my book club deadline and out of driving hours so I switched from the recording to the written version, and it lost nothing in the transition.
Bring up the Bodies was just too short to recreate for me the connection to and immersion in of Wolf Hall, but I drank in every word, just to be close to my Thomas again...(Irad doesn't mind seeing as Cromwell is dead, and all).
Having had this amazing experience with Wolf Hall, my book club went on to read Giving Up the Ghost : A Memoir (John MacRae Books), Mantel's memoir.
This was not at all what I expected—I thought it would be a literate and literary memoir of growing up in Britain and the tender experiences of youth that engendered a great writer: an updated, regendered A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Dover Thrift Editions)
...and what it actually was is a literate and literary memoir (yes the girl can write) of a life long battle with the medical establishment that leaves her beaten, but not defeated. She triumphs in the telling...Also in the genre of English fiction, though written by a retired Canadian man who had never been to England, are the absolutely delightful, engaging and scientifically rich Flava de Luce books. Straddling the genre of who-dunnits and young adult lit, they are fit for consumption by all ages, and are refreshingly well written. Flavia, a young genius chemist, herself is one of my favorite heroines of any genre and my daughter and I eagerly consumed all five books and are breathlessly awaiting our advance order of the the next, which should come out in a few days.
This was an unusual reading year for me in that it did include several memoirs—I usually am strictly available for fiction only. But for some reason, a number of these drifted my way for one reason or another, and I found myself really caught up in the experience of other people's midlife+ meaning-making. Probably because most of them are my age or a little older and I think we are all approaching that time of life when we are summarizing the patterns and looking for the underlying directions in our journeys. You know!
In addition Hilary Mantel's mentioned above, I returned to an old favorite, May Sarton, and read three of her journals: Journal of a Solitude, Plant Dreaming Deep, and The House by the Sea: A Journal. I loved her as much now as I did in my 20's. And in reading her I find so much of myself: the need to spend time alone, the love of words, the desire to write, fascination with the natural world outside her windows, the intense relationship with building a home and the commitment to arranging fresh flowers as a daily practice. Of course she follows through on all these things in a way which I don't, but then again I am not a lonely, temperamental, single childless writer living by myself in a remote village. I carry these things inside of myself and spend my life being distracted from them by the far more fortunate banalities of carpooling, producing constant meals for a house full of teenagers, and so on. It is possible to get a taste of May Sarton from a collection of quotes, that someone on Goodreads collected.
My next memoir was Patti Smith's Just Kids, which was also hugely surprising. I have been a fan of Smith's music since my teens, her Horses
album one of the iconic records I still keep around in vinyl. But I never knew much about her—I had many assumptions about her that I hadn't realized I carried based on her looks. Druggie, rocker, lesbian...Weird how we attach attributes to a person based on an image and what it signals. She is none of these things. A poet, devotee of Rimbaud, a good Catholic girl and a book collector, she lived with a kind of ascetic purity and devotion to her friend Robert Mapplethorpe and to their art. Her book is beautifully written and by the second page I was in shock. Not a celebrity tell-all but a talented writer with serious chops who beautifully conjures up her girlhood and coming of age. Wow. The Book Club read the Patti Smith memoir together, and we did something interesting—we each chose another rock memoir (since there was a bumper crop last year) to read additionally and report back on. Mine was Keith Richard's Life
and it was also quite mesmerizing. I "met" these rock and roll superstars in my teens and I guess I thought they fell to earth (a la David Bowie) fully formed and cool, but they actually grew up in a gritty, industrial, post-war British landscape and dealt with all the mores and social expectations of the 40's and 50's before breaking out and breaking all the molds and creating the world that we now know as our own. Richards depiction of his childhood brought this reality home to me, in a voice that is earthy, witty and insouciant. Again, not one of those obviously ghost-written formulaic celebrity self aggrandizing memoirs, but a distinct and clear voice with a huge story to tell.The following three books are lumped together not because I read them sequentially, but because I think they make an excellent counterpart to each other because they all deal with the high techiness of contemporary life in complementary and novel ways:
Alif the Unseen, a really fun romp through the internet and the interface with the world of the djinn told in an un-named Arab totalitarian
state, with the political commentary embedded in a wonderful fantastical tale.
Little Brother, a cautionary tale that works as a YA novel and a real follow-up to Orwell's 1984 in the world of the near future in which Homeland Security has its digital watchers in everyone's backyard and worse.
The Circle
which is also a cautionary tale about the possible (likely?) ramifications of the omnipresence of social networking on steroids. This one is really a book of ideas, and the ideas are strong enough to carry it through some of the pedestrian writing and somewhat two dimensional characters.I would love to teach these books as a course, along with Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book), Reamde: A Novel
William Gibson's Neuromancer, and "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore", discussed below.I read Ann Patchett's State of Wonder: A Novel
after hearing her speak at Writers Center Stage. She is one of the best writers I have heard speak anywhere, ever, and I was so inspired by her speech that not only did I want to start my own bookstore, but I went out and got her book. And it was a great read! Funny story, an acquaintance of mine told me she couldn't read the book because it was set in the Amazon and she was afraid there would be a snake in it and she has such a severe phobia of snakes she can't even read about them.. I continually reported back to her that it was a great story and there were no snakes...until the penultimate scene in which there is the Mother of All Snake Episodes. So Warning: Disturbing and Graphic Snake Scene.With the Book Club I also read Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel, which was also a good solid read and another fun and funky merger of high tech and fantastical events would fit into the aforementioned course that I am imagining someone teaching.
And the Book Club read The Interestings: A Novel
by Meg Wolitzer which I expected to dislike as a remake of the endless list of novels whose conceit is following four roomates after college...this time after summer camp. But it was a pleasant surprise and a really worthwhile and content rich zeitgeist novel for someone the age of...well, me. It was a novel that spanned my whole life and reflected the times I grew up in and lived through, with some interesting twists and turns. The characters were good, some came off the the page more than others. This is our book, guys.
In Rio I borrowed a friend's Kindle (thank you, Yuval) when I decided not to join the group as they voluntarily allowed themselves to be suspended in a flimsy metal car on a cable swinging around in a mid-air going up a mountainside. The only fiction book on it was Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)
which I read as a teen-ager but this time round really "got" and appreciated. What a great writer and this belongs on the syllabus of any course on great war literature. (Along with, for example, All Quiet on the Western Front and Catch 22).And another old friend I revisited (found in a used bookstore in Tel Aviv) is Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories
. It is an adult revisit of many of some of the best known fairly tales, and explores the very adult content embedded in them—mythos, fears and erotica—with a dizzying, incisive and sensual prose that was the earmark of this late great writer.A little gem I found that was of great personal interest was Lyle Rockler's Chazzonos.
Here is my Amazon Review of the book:
This is a lovely, heartfelt and humble book about the struggles of a cantor who loves his musical heritage and his calling, yet struggles with very real world issues both in and out of the pulpit. The writing is straightforward, honest and brave. The issues will resonate with anyone who has grown up in a traditional or ethnic background and carries the pain of their parents with them. And with anyone who has struggled with marriage and parenthood. And with anyone who cherishes the traditional while suffering the changes of modernity.
As other reviewers said, one doesn't have to be an aficionado of cantorial music to be drawn into the passion of the book - one just has to know what it means to care deeply about art.]
Recommended for cantors and non-cantors alike, certainly for any musician, and for anyone who wants a good "coming-of-age-for-the-second-time-around" story.
I also slogged my way through Kate Atkinson's Life After Life: A Novel
. Certainly a "tour de force"—massive technique and wonderful prose, but so wrenching, to constantly be jerked out of the story and start again. A couple of the iterations of the possible lives of the main character Ursula, were so disturbing that I had to take a long break from the book. There was something intrinsically wrong about re-doing a fictional life, it violates the attachment of the reader to the fiction and reminds you constantly it is not real. It seemed somehow disrespectful on the part of the author to treat their character as an exercise in probability or quantum physics. But dang, it was well done. Worth reading for the beautifully crafted world of early 20th Century England as well.Kudos to the Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories
collection. I read this with daughter Fat Rabbit—we pulled names of several of the authors to find their other books. Some great stories, lots of fun with a really creative genre, and a beautiful binding to boot.Doctor Sleep: A Novel, another addition to the Stephen King oeuvre with its massively readable and realistically paranormal explorations of good and evil and everything in between. This one (a sequel to The Shining
written 35 years later) is especially good on drinking and the 12 Step program. As a matter of fact, it could be an advertisement for AA. OK, at 544 pages a rather lengthy promotion...There were lots of "filler" books, mostly detective novels that I pick up and work my way through several in a series, looking for one that can keep me hooked. The best one, which I am 3 books into, is Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford Books, starting with From Doon with Death: The First Inspector Wexford Novel (William Monk). And my usual skipping around sci-fi anthologies, the tomes of Best-ofs that come out every year, as well as my subscription to Asimov's.
And a last minute 2013-read that came in under the wire while I was in Tel Aviv, loaned to me by my cousin Michelle who knows the author, and read on the plane ride home on New Years Eve! The Wayward Moon
was a delightful and surprising book. A medieval Yentl, it reminds me of a couple of other "jewish women in historical times" novels that I've read, only so much better! I'm thinking of The Red Tent: A Novel (which I hated; it was pseudo everything!) and People of the Book: A Novelby Geraldine Brooks which was half excellent modern novel and half over-romaticized and contrived historical novel, "The Wayward Moon" struck me as a genuine and compelling evocation of another age: an age which has always fascinated me, an age when classical Islamic culture flourished and the fertile crescent and middle east were permeated with learning and arts. Set in 874, it does a bully job of imagining the life of a woman who really was seen as little more than chattel, or even cattle. The story was a breathless adventure tale through every possible scenario the inventive author could come up with, life as a slave, with Muslims, in a Monastary, in a roadside Inn (you get the idea) with a very well thought-out and realized character. A 17 year old Jewish woman. Throw those other books out of the Jewish Book Club circuit and grab this one! It is wonderful, and has garnered several prizes to prove it.
That summarizes 2013 in reading. Bring on 2014!
If I were to make only one New Years Resolutions, it would be to read more.
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