the list, 2012

Stats
36 books. Original languages: English, Russian, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Arabic. 1 book by a woman. 11 written in the 21st century, 13.5 in the 19th, 7.5 in the 20th, 2 in the 16th, and 1 in the 18th. Then there was the Arabian Nights. Fiction, 25; non-fiction, 11. 14 were published by Penguin; 6 by Vintage. If I had more motivation, I would do more analysis of publisher, but maybe next year! 18 were by authors whose books I'd never read before.

Non-Stats
Most disappointing reads of the year: The Sea (should have been a short story), The Confidence Man (should have been a play), Moll Flanders (thought it would be more picaresque), Wuthering Heights (should have been as creepy throughout as in the first 40 pages), House of Seven Gables (mostly description, with plot thrown in every 20 or 30 pages.) Jameson and Harvey's books on Marx were not as interesting as I wanted them to be.

Then there were good books with bad endings: The City and the City, Darwinia.

Which makes it sound like it was a bad year for reading--which it wasn't. Just about everything else I read was excellent in one way or another.

The second half of my year was dominated, at least psychologically, by Infinite Jest. I'm glad I read it, but I would recommend it to almost no one. Need more time to process this one.

Debt, by Graeber, was a great way to start my year. On it's own merits, it was worth reading. In the context of our national arguments about debt, it was also worth reading. Also worth it for how it set the stage for my reading the rest of the year--sensitivity and attention to the many different attitudes towards debt in various works of fiction and non-fiction, and from different time periods (Collins, Balzac, Diaz, Cellini, Norris, Dostoevsky, Arabian Nights, notably.)

Cellini's Autobiography and Bernal Diaz's Conquest of New Spain were fun to read together in the same year, for different aspects of the same century. Cellini, mostly because he's hilarious, and because he talks about several different popes, not in terms of their theology or religious authority, but in terms of how they kept trying to cheat him out of his wages. Diaz helped temper the image of Cortes and several hundred conquistadors taking over all of Mexico when, at least according to Diaz, they had help from thousands of natives who were bitter about Mexican rule (and also received reinforcements of hundreds more soldiers, at some point in the campaign.) And Diaz was obsessed with Aztec cannibalism.

McTeague reinforced my feelings about realism: great eye for detail, especially physical detail, marred mostly by such blatant moralism and ideology.

The Terror was the most visceral novel I've read in years. It was the height of summer, but I still felt like I was freezing to death anytime I picked it up.

I read three books by Dostoevsky (two novels, two novellas), and wish I'd read more. One was Crime and Punishment, which I'd read 5 or so years ago. This time around, I was mostly intrigued by the topic of confession, mostly because I'm more and more skeptical about the value we place on disclosure and confession. Most of us can bear our friends's secrets, what we can't handle is knowing they're keeping some secret from us. Reading Demons--and, actually, all of Dostoevsky--I'm intrigued by the emotions he can get away with. He gets away with a full range of emotions in a way that I don't think any other novelist does. It's melodramatic, but I still feel happy, despairing, and paranoid right along with his characters. In film, the closest comparison I can get to, in terms of emotional range, is Lynch. (An easy go-to for me, since I watched 5-6 of his movies in the last year.)

After reading an interview with Richard Beck in the Other Journal, I ordered his book, Unclean. One of the best that I read all year. It's a mixture of theology and psychology, especially looking at the relationship between disgust and morality (and the fallout of that relationship). He also looks at the contrary moral traditions in the bible, the purity tradition (personal cleanliness) and the prophetic tradition (mercy and justice.) It's worth at least reading the interview.

More later, possibly. I didn't even touch Foucault, Nietzsche, or Marx, among others, even though those books were incredible. And by that, I mean credible.

The List, Mostly in the Order Finished
Dispatches for the New York Tribune - Karl Marx
Debt - David Graeber
The City and the City - China Mieville
Toll the Hounds - Steven Erikson
The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
Youth / The End of the Tether - Joseph Conrad
The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad
The Sea - John Banville
Speaking of Jesus - Carl Medearis
The Confidence Man - Herman Melville
Unclean - Richard Beck
Demons - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Spring Torrents - Ivan Turgenev
McTeague - Frank Norris
The Conquest of New Spain - Bernal Diaz del Castillo
Representing Capital - Frederic Jameson
The History of Sexuality, vol 1 - Michel Foucault
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
The Terror - Dan Simmons
Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe
Old Man Goriot - Honore de Balzac
The Black Minutes - Martin Solares
Ecce Homo - Friedrich Nietzsche
The House of the Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - Haruki Murakami
Homicide - David Simon
Darwinia - Robert Charles Wilson
The Final Solution - Michael Chabon
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Autobiography - Benvenuto Cellini
An Introduction to Capital - David Harvey
The Double / The Gambler - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Arabian Nights, vol 2
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

comments

Selected comments I got on short stories I wrote in college:
"I do wonder why [the main character] thinks of death so often, but maybe that's not something that needs to be explained in this story for this character."
"Anyways, I didn't quite understand the narrator's fascination with death."

"Is the narrator a 'maniac'?"

"I slightly wondered what gender the narrator was."

"Well, I think this is more advanced storytelling than I'm able to usefully assess, but here it goes....I'm sorry I wasn't smart enough to be much good in helping you with your story."

"Why doesn't he just wait for the parade to find the woman? Rather than looking for her in the neighborhoods (a bit creepy). I guess these sorts of things could really work to your advantage to reveal something about his character (obsessive compulsive?)"

"Also, I needed more information about the character and more explanation to warrant his obsession with finding him and the bizarre methods he used"

"The scene of him following the woman is great, and subtly hilarious. I enjoyed it. It's very apparent that he has no idea how creepy he is, especially with the surgical masks."

"I know people just like this."

"The imagining of fungus spreading across the city seemed to come out of nowhere."

"Who is the woman and what is the significance of the panda earrings? How much of this really happens?"

"I have to admit that I really don't get this story other than the fact that the narrator is unhinged....I can't even say where the heart of this story lies because it confuses me so much."

"I like this story. I don't understand it, but I like it."

"I'm not even entirely sure of the narrator's gender. Names would also be nice."

"And why do something so irrational and obviously futile as walking around block by block of a map and hoping that something appears, eliminating areas on foolish assumptions?"

"Manipulate me."

"This guy has a very nervous energy to him....did he just have an intense case of O.C.D. or was there something more serious going on."

"The little details and moments really bring the blood and pulse into the story, like the woman pushing a wheelbarrow of cabbages."

"He's certainly an odd duck"

submlimated lessons

While re-reading Nietzsche's Ecce Homo recently, I realized I'd sublimated a few of his guidelines after my initial reading 3 years ago.

The task is not to master all resistances, but only those against which one has to pit one's entire strength, suppleness, and mastery-at-arms--opponents who are equal...Equality before the enemy--first precondition for an honest duel....First: I attack only causes that are victorious--on occasion, I wait till they are victorious. Second: I attack causes only when there are no allies to be found, when I am standing alone--when I am compromising myself alone

I can't say I've thought of this explicitly over the last few years, but my intuition has more or less followed what is set out there. Anyone can criticize the weak spot, or identify the "fatal flaw" of an argument or system of thought. That's fine. But since when have fatal flaws actually proved to be fatal?

 Here's an important means of judging the quality of my own arguments: would I respect someone for changing their minds based on my arguments? If not, I haven't reached the heart of the matter.

my secret life

A moving passage from Moll Flanders, a book that has not moved me: "Madam, you are a stranger to me, but it is very unfortunate that you should be let into the secret of the worst action of my life." I often wonder about this, but the reverse. Not about whether my friends will ever know my worst actions, but whether they'll ever know my best ones. Strangers are intriguing because of the possibilities for committing extreme good or extreme evil that will never be attached to you. Casual generosity and cruelty. The possibilities for confession are endless, and most interactions with strangers are moments of confession. And as far as I'm concerned, doing good can be as big of a burden on the conscience as doing evil. Everything is easier when repetition isn't expected.

waste management, 16th c.

From Bernal Diaz's Conquest of New Spain: "And I must also mention, with all apologies, that they sold many canoe-loads of human excrement, which they kept in the creeks near the market. This was for the manufacture of salt and the curing of skins, which they say cannot be done without it. I know that many gentlemen will laugh at this, but I assure them it is true. I may add that on all the roads they have shelters made of reeds or straw or grass so that they can retire when they wish to do so, and purge their bowels unseen by passers-by, and also in order that their excrement shall not be lost."

One Last Thing...

...on the books I read last year. Most represented publisher was Penguin with 12 books, then 4 for Oxford University Press.

More on What I Read Last Year

On the way back to Seattle from my friend's bachelor party, I started reading Conrad's Outcast of the Islands. The novel was unremarkable, although I'll keep reading Conrad, but in the notes I learned that one of Conrad's main sources was Alfred Russel Wallace's Malay Archipelago. Since I happened to have a copy of Wallace on my shelf, I read them at the same time. The main things I learned from Wallace and from the Oregon Trail, by Francis Parkman, is that 19th century travelers loved killing animals, drinking coffee, and getting sick.

I did indeed finish the Decameron, as I anticipated, and read it's cousin, Arabian Nights, or at least the first of three volumes. The Decameron took about 4 years for me to read since I would put it down when the stories started to blur together. There were some real gems, especially about putting the devil into hell and a man trying to turn his wife into a donkey, but it doesn't even compare to the genius of Arabian Nights.

Regarding Marx's Das Kapital vol. 1, I've never had so little to say about such a big book, which is basically how I felt about Anti-Oedipus. One of my goals for the year is to find a few things to say about Marx. Briefly, though, I was less attracted to the economic theory and more attracted to reporting on working conditions and labor history, and Marx's style. I'm about 50 pages from finishing a collection of his journalism, and plan to read quite a bit more of him and about him this year.

Trollope's Autobiography was better than his novel, the Eustace Diamonds, which I expected to be quite a bit more hardboiled than it was. The most memorable episode from Trollope's autobiography is when he visits Brigham Young while traveling across America. It's a brief meeting. (Incidentally, Francis Parkman talks a lot in his book on how all the travelers are terrified of Mormons.)

Last year marked a return to genre fiction for me, which I continued by reading the Bonehunters, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons. I don't see my self going whole-hog back into genre fiction, or picking up random titles, but I'll at least finish out these two series and a few others.