The only end-of-year list that I look forward to is the annual New York Times 100 Notable Books. I look forward to it both for the additions to my reading list that may be gleaned and also as a bit of scorecard by which to judge my own reading year. I am always curious to see if any of the books I have read have made the list.
Click here for the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2012.
This year, there are far more titles here that I will be adding to my reading list than I can chalk up to having read. For the ones that I have, though, my favorite book of the year is on the notable list: Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones. It is difficult to choose just one favorite, of course, but this one stands out even as it was one of the earliest books I read. It is a remarkable work from a very young author and has stayed with me because of the authentic way Ward writes of the stark human suffering in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and also for the way she illuminates the deeper issues of class involved in that tragedy.
Junot Diaz's This is How You Lose Her is on my bedside stack as I write, and I am about a third of the way through it. It is a perfect bookend for my reading year along with Ward's novel, as they both are books about people different in so many ways from me. This is How You Lose Her is also a collection of short stories, a genre I especially enjoy reading and one that I feel like I see more and more of lately.
I am a fan of any and all biographies and books about American presidents and Jodi Kantor's The Obamas was also one that I enjoyed. Of course, many of these kinds of books can be nothing but sheer propaganda, but Kantor's coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign was notable in and of itself and I know her work to be widely respected. In my own opinion, no matter your own views of our president's policies or politics, I think you have to admire his and his wife's approach to parenting and to their obvious value of family. This is a theme of Kantor's book and a starting point for her compelling portrait of the impact of the campaign and the presidency on the Obama family. David Maraniss' Barak Obama: The Story, on the other hand, was one that I could not stomach for long. I am a fan of the details of American government and the stories of its players and important figures, but this one was a bit too detailed for me. Maraniss states in the introduction that he does not even come to the birth of his subject until the seventh chapter and, though I gave it a shot, I could not dig my way first through the life stories of the president's grandparents and so did not even make it through the second chapter, much less all the way to the seventh.
A book that I am pecking away at is Jim Holt's Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story. Obviously an exploration of the central human question, the subject matter of this one is meaty to say the least. Nevertheless, it has not yet proven to be headache-inducing, so we will see where it leads. I am finding, though, that it is not a book best suited for bedtime reading.
As for the books on the list that I will be adding to my reading list, I am most excited about the latest from Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior. It, too, is on the bedside stack, waiting for me to complete the Diaz book and a novel called In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner. I first read Kingsolver in college, beginning with her book of essays called High Tide in Tuscon. While I believe that every book I read changes the way I see things or at least adds to my perspective in imperceptible ways, Kingsolver's Tuscon is one that left a lasting impact on me at a time in my life when I was looking for ways in which to see more clearly through the muddiness of the world. I have read Kingsolver's work from the very beginning of her writing career and have enjoyed watching her writing evolve and become ever sharper and tighter with each book. Her last novel, The Lacuna, was a work of ambitious scope and breadth, I thought, and so I am excited to see what her creativity has wrought forth this time. Her novels stand out among contemporary fiction in the way her stories offer broad avenues of exploration of the large and looming questions.
A Land More Kind than Home by Wiley Cash looks promising, if only for its inviting title, as does the Kevin Powers book, The Yellow Birds. The others that will be put on my list are Richard Ford's Canada, NW by Zadie Smith and Blasphemy by Sherman Alexie. From the nonfiction portion, I look forward to Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power as well as David Nasaw's The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy.
12.26.2012
12.18.2012
CLUTTER
On Saturday morning, my daughter and I finished our reading of The Hobbit just in time for the opening weekend of the movie, which we then went to see on Sunday afternoon. I have written here about just how much it means to me to share a reading life with her and what it meant to me that she wanted to read this book with her dad. I could not help, then, to have at the very fore of my thoughts as we read the final pages together the parents who on the day before had stolen from them all opportunity to share such a moment ever again with their own children. Let us be grateful for the small moments when we are gifted them.
By nature, I am a quiet person. I find it extraordinarily difficult most of the time to articulate all that I am feeling or thinking about a thing. I can be hindered by thoughts that most anything I might say will fall terribly short of adequate. I find it awfully hard to post here this week for that reason and for others, not the least of which is that a blog about reading books seems all the more self-indulgent in light of what has happened. Not to say, of course, that unimaginable violence does not occur everyday in our world. I am struggling, too, with what it is exactly that I should say here. This is not a blog about news events or social issues or politics. It is a blog about the books I read and the things they prompt me to think about. And that is what I wish for it to remain.
Nevertheless, part of my premise is that being a reader causes one to consider more fully the world and its lingering questions. So, how can I leave unsaid here anything about the terrible events that occurred this week? At the same time, perhaps this is not the best forum to air how very strongly I do feel about this latest tragedy and the reasons I believe events like it continue to happen in what we naively and arrogantly consider to be a culture and society somehow so far ahead of the rest of the world.
Also, I cannot seem to find the words to truly express the tangle of thoughts cluttering around in my head over the last few days. The world does not seem to present itself to me in stark black and white terms as it seems to for others. There are simply too many things that do not make sense. But, there are a some things that do: that we owe ourselves and our children more than we are giving and that a culture of fear and violence is not a culture that can be sustained. Nor is it a culture that speaks to the kind of community we absolutely can be and should ever strive for.
By nature, I am a quiet person. I find it extraordinarily difficult most of the time to articulate all that I am feeling or thinking about a thing. I can be hindered by thoughts that most anything I might say will fall terribly short of adequate. I find it awfully hard to post here this week for that reason and for others, not the least of which is that a blog about reading books seems all the more self-indulgent in light of what has happened. Not to say, of course, that unimaginable violence does not occur everyday in our world. I am struggling, too, with what it is exactly that I should say here. This is not a blog about news events or social issues or politics. It is a blog about the books I read and the things they prompt me to think about. And that is what I wish for it to remain.
Nevertheless, part of my premise is that being a reader causes one to consider more fully the world and its lingering questions. So, how can I leave unsaid here anything about the terrible events that occurred this week? At the same time, perhaps this is not the best forum to air how very strongly I do feel about this latest tragedy and the reasons I believe events like it continue to happen in what we naively and arrogantly consider to be a culture and society somehow so far ahead of the rest of the world.
Also, I cannot seem to find the words to truly express the tangle of thoughts cluttering around in my head over the last few days. The world does not seem to present itself to me in stark black and white terms as it seems to for others. There are simply too many things that do not make sense. But, there are a some things that do: that we owe ourselves and our children more than we are giving and that a culture of fear and violence is not a culture that can be sustained. Nor is it a culture that speaks to the kind of community we absolutely can be and should ever strive for.
12.08.2012
LANGUAGE
Is not one of the great pleasures of reading the sheer power of language? Read this out loud to yourself:
One of the things I most enjoy about reading is stumbling upon a combination of words that fit one another just right or are melded together in a way I have never seen or heard or considered before. It might be a longer passage like the one above that makes larger points or raises more than one question or it could be just a small phrase scattered among the rest that dances upon the ear and causes me to stop and smile a bit and admire the craft of writing.
I am thinking about these things in part because it was Noam Chomsky's birthday this week and I read a very good piece by Gary Marcus in The New Yorker, which you can find here, that discussed the noted linguist and his monumental impact on that field and others. But, I am also thinking of these things because I recently finished Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls--the book he considered his masterwork, but that I had never read before--and because I am still reading and savoring the book from which the above passage comes, A.B. Guthrie's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Way West.
We all know about the Hemingway style, of course, have all likely read the critical introductions to Hills Like White Elephants that tell us about The Lost Generation and his short, declarative sentences, honed during his work as a reporter, that left a permanent imprint upon the face of modern fiction. Perhaps it is because of Ernest Hemingway that I love sparse sentences. I have always preferred writers who can say all they need to say and more with the most efficient use of language possible. I see that as genuine craftsmanship. Language does not have to be dressed up. It need only be pieced together truthfully and honestly.
But, I owe my admiration for this kind of writing as much to the likes of Guthrie and Wallace Stegner and Wendell Berry and Ivan Doig and so many others, craftsmen all who write of ordinary things and people and places and who can make you see clearly a thing by talking about it in the same language we ourselves use to talk to one another everyday. They create lyrical prose born of the commonplace.
"And, seeing the train winding behind him, he thought with pride of it, of the onwardness of its people, of their stubborn, unthought-out yondering. It wasn't a thing for reason, this yondering, but for the heart, where secrets lay deep and mixed. Money? Land? New chances? Patriotism? All together they weren't enough. In the beginning, that is, they weren't enough, but as a man went on it came to him how wide and wealthy was his country, and the pride he had talked about at first became so real he lost the words for it."I cannot help but be astounded by the miracle of such an inconspicuous combination of ordinary words. Taken apart and set aside individually, none of them bring to mind much of any seeming import. But, write about the onwardness of a people, pull out of your hat an earthy word like yondering, and have a man realize how wide and wealthy was his country and your mind begins to formulate whole knots of thought. You likely have no idea from where this passage comes, but reading it--a gathering of a mere handful of words--you sense immediately the emotion of it. You can probably pinpoint the historical context, you almost certainly begin to see in your mind's eye vast, open plains and hear dust crunching under weary feet, sense fatigue mixed with the energy of pride and deep ambition. That is surely a lot to happen in one paragraph. It becomes then a remarkable arrangement of mere words into a sentence that you have never read before and that you can feel deep inside of yourself.
One of the things I most enjoy about reading is stumbling upon a combination of words that fit one another just right or are melded together in a way I have never seen or heard or considered before. It might be a longer passage like the one above that makes larger points or raises more than one question or it could be just a small phrase scattered among the rest that dances upon the ear and causes me to stop and smile a bit and admire the craft of writing.
I am thinking about these things in part because it was Noam Chomsky's birthday this week and I read a very good piece by Gary Marcus in The New Yorker, which you can find here, that discussed the noted linguist and his monumental impact on that field and others. But, I am also thinking of these things because I recently finished Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls--the book he considered his masterwork, but that I had never read before--and because I am still reading and savoring the book from which the above passage comes, A.B. Guthrie's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Way West.
We all know about the Hemingway style, of course, have all likely read the critical introductions to Hills Like White Elephants that tell us about The Lost Generation and his short, declarative sentences, honed during his work as a reporter, that left a permanent imprint upon the face of modern fiction. Perhaps it is because of Ernest Hemingway that I love sparse sentences. I have always preferred writers who can say all they need to say and more with the most efficient use of language possible. I see that as genuine craftsmanship. Language does not have to be dressed up. It need only be pieced together truthfully and honestly.
But, I owe my admiration for this kind of writing as much to the likes of Guthrie and Wallace Stegner and Wendell Berry and Ivan Doig and so many others, craftsmen all who write of ordinary things and people and places and who can make you see clearly a thing by talking about it in the same language we ourselves use to talk to one another everyday. They create lyrical prose born of the commonplace.
" . . . but what filled this back part of his mind was the day-after-day roll of wheels, the dust, the heat and wind and rain and mud and chill, and the Turleys turning back and Martin crying for grace. His life before seemed like another life. All he ever had done was poke a team or explore the trail or push cattle along. The only way he ever faced was west."
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