Book List 08

A list of books I’ve read in 2008 (if you want 2006’s book list, it’s here and 2007’s list is here). A brief description of each. And the first few lines.

1. No one belongs here more than you. Stories by Miranda July
I enjoyed the collection, but found it uneven. Some of the stories were really good (”The Shared Patio,” “Birthmark”), and then some were just okay. Of course, that’s just my opinion–and others have differed, because many of the stories in this collection were published in unquestionably top literary journals. Sometimes I felt the writing was super self-conscious, sometimes I loved the voice, sometimes I loved the characters…but mostly it was just okay.

First few lines of the first story entitled “The Shared Patio”:

“It still counts, even though it happened when he was unconscious. It counts doubly because the conscious mind often makes mistakes, falls for the wrong person. But down there in the well, where there is no light and only thousand-year-old water, a man has no reason to make mistakes. God says do it and you do it. Love her and it is so. He is my neighbor. He is of Korean descent. His name is Vincent Chang. He doesn’t do hapkido. When you say the word ‘Korean,’ some people automatically think of Jackie Chan’s South Korean hapkido instructor, Grandmaster Kim Jin Pal; I think of Vincent.”

2. Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
I really disliked her other book, Goodbye Tsugumi, which I read in 2006 but never fell in love or even “in like” with the story, the characters, or the writing. I nearly gave up on Banana but tried Kitchen after encouragement by others. Oh boy! I really liked this book of hers! I thoroughly enjoyed it–the characters, the plot, the writing, and Mikage, the main character. And yes, the pervading theme of food and kitchens. What made this work and not the other novel? I’m not sure.

In addition to the novel, I read “Moonlight Shadow.” The book I bought had both the novel and the short story. I hear it was her first story–wow! They are great companion pieces, both dealing with death and grief and a first person female narrator who is somehow remarkably likeable.

First few lines:

“The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. White tile catching the light (ting! ting!).

I love even incredibly dirty kitchens to distraction–vegetable droppings all over the floor, so dirty your slippers turn black on the bottom. Strangely, it’s better if this kind of kitchen is large. I lean up against the silver door of a towering, giant rerigerator stocked with enough food to get through a winter. When I raise my eyes from the oil-spattered gas burner and the rusty kitchen knife, outside the window stars are glittering, lonely.”

3. Our Twisted Hero by Yi Munyol
I admit, I have not read much Korean literature, even though I really want to get to know Korean literature. Even though there hasn’t been, until very recently, many Korean works translated into English. (My Korean reading/vocabulary, while proficient for conversation, is nowhere near the level needed for reading and understanding of literary works). When I asked my second cousins, my only blood relatives outside of my immediate family in the United States who I ought to begin reading, they listed off a few authors. Yi Munyol was one of them. When I asked, “What about Our Twisted Hero?” They nodded. “That’s a good one,” they approved.

So I was very curious to read this seminary piece of work, one that my cousins approved of so heartily. I tried reading it last year but gave up–somehow I was not in the mood–I was deeply involved with Haruki Murakami’s surreal worlds and his conversational tone. This year, I picked up Yi Munyol and began reading again. I found myself reading without stopping. It’s a very spare sort of writing, an unadulterated style–very straightforward and blunt yet incredibly meaningful. The allegory of the story is obvious, but somehow the story still very much lives–a boy struggling against his class’s very cruel, “twisted hero.” But who really is the “twisted hero” in the end? The plotting is great, the characterization vivid.

Loved it. Going to read more of his work.

First few lines:

“It’s been nearly thirty years already, but whenever I look back on that lonely, difficult fight, which continued from spring of that year through the fall, I become as desolate and gloomy as I was at the time. Somehow in our lives we seem to get into fights like this all the time, and perhaps I get this feeling because to this day I’ve never really extricated myself.”

4. Blue Angel by Francine Prose
Man! After a rapid reading pace for this year, it took me over a month to read another book! It wasn’t for lack of trying–I think I started 3 or 4 books simultaneously, wondering which would catch my attention–and in the end, Francine Prose’s Blue Angel won out. You see, I’m a sucker for campus novels. Especially campus novels having to do with creative writing professors and students, ala Wonderboys or Straight Man.

So of course I was predisposed towards liking this book. And I did. It was slow until three quarters of the way through when the sh*t hit the fan. And then it accelerated (yay! I thought).

First few lines:

“Swenson waits for his students to complete their private rituals, adjusting zippers and caps, arranging the pens and notebooks so painstakingly chosen to express their tender young selves, the fidgety ballets that signal their weekly submission and reaffirm the social compact to be stuck in this room for an hour without real food or TV. He glances around the seminar table, counts nine; good, everyone’s here, then riffles through the manuscript they’ve scheduled to discuss, pauses, and says, ‘Is it my imagination or have we been seeing an awful lot of stories about humans having sex with animals?’”

5. The Diving Pool Three Novellas by Yoko Ogawa
I love Yoko Ogawa, ever since I read her short story/novella, “Pregnancy Diary” in the New Yorker a few years ago. I immediately fell in love with her writing–her vivid imagery and remarkable tension left an imprint in my mind, one that needed to be filled again.

So when I saw “The Diving Pool” in another issue, I gobbled it up. Same with “Backstroke” in A Public Space’s inaugural issue.

And when her book, The Diving Pool came out, of course I ordered it straight away. It’s a collection of three novellas, two mentioned above (”The Diving Pool” and “Pregnancy Diary”) and so I found myself treading familiar narrative ground as I chewed through the two stories. The third one is “Dormitory”–and it’s a statement of how much I love Ogawa’s writing that I say that the book was worth the purchase, even though I’d read 2/3 of the book’s stories already.

Her writing is haunting and yet innocent. Full of great tension (I must learn from her) and tremendous imagery. It gets under your skin. In a good way.

First few lines of “Dormitory,” the third novella in the book (and somehow it reminds me of Yasunari Kawabata’s Sound of the Mountain:

“I became aware of the sound quite recently, though I can’t say with certainty when it started. There is a place in my memory that is dim and obscure, and the sound seems to have been hiding just there. At some point I suddenly realized that I was hearing it. It materialized out of nowhere, like the speckled pattern of microbes on the agar in a petri dish.”

6. Edinburgh by Alexander Chee
An entire book written in present tense? This couldn’t possibly be, is what I told myself as I began reading Edinburgh. Will the book and the writer (Alexander Chee, aka Koreanish) pull off hundreds of pages written in present tense?

I mean, I have read so many novel drafts written in present tense–painful, slow moving, non revelatory drafts stuck in present tense, without the enlightenment of the future…that I have developed a prejudice AGAINST present tense. So this novel had a hill to climb with me.

But yes! One of the greatest things about present tense is the element of surprise–and I can’t see this book written in anything but present tense, given its plot and character development. In fact, I already recommended the book to someone who is writing a novel in present tense.

The other wonderful and rich facet of this book is the language–just miles of beautiful words and phrases and images. The story is heartbreaking, but the beauty of the words makes you linger, always.

Just to give you an idea how engaging the home stretch of the novel is, I read the last half of the novel last night in one fell swoop, staying way past my bedtime. The first half was read over a couple of weeks (my normal pace–as I read in bed before going to sleep).

And strangely, the book makes me want to visit Maine.

First few lines:

“I audition for the Pine State Boys Chorus on an afternoon at the end of November in the year I am twelve years old. The audition, I recall, is my own idea. In a gray-stone cathedral’s practice room, somewhere near Longfellow Square in Portland, Maine, I sing, for a square-headed, owlish man, a series of scales that he plunks out on the piano, his pink fingers playful over the black and white keys.”

7. Slam by Nick Hornby
I love Nick Hornby–I am a fan of his books. Slam wasn’t my favorite but if you’re a Hornby fan, you’ll still want to pick it up. The plotline is on the simple side, and I am beginning to think the last two books of his (A Long Way Down and now Slam) are written with movies in mind. I swear, it feels like Hornby even has the movie stars pre-cast in his mind! Hornby’s strength is his voice, but the narrator, a skater named Sam, has a remarkably similar voice to Marcus in About A Boy, even though the characters couldn’t be any more different. In sum, I feel like Hornby is recycling voices–but of course, that also makes this a “typical” Hornby novel: fun to read, lively characters, and a quick pace. With just a hint of romance.

Still, enjoyable! It was great to take a break with Hornby.

First few lines:

“So things were ticking along quite nicely. In fact, I’d say that good stuff had been happening pretty solidly for about six months.

• For example: Mum got rid of Steve, her rubbish boyfriend.
• For example: Mrs. Gillett, my Art and Design teacher, took me to one side after a lesson and asked whether I’d thought doing art at college.
• For example: I’d learned two new skating tricks, suddenly, after weeks of making an idiot of myself in public. (I’m guessing that not all of you are skaters, so I should say something straightaway, just so there are no terrible misunderstandings. Skating-skateboarding. We never say skateboarding, usually, so this is the only time I’ll use the word in this whole story. And if you keep thinking of me messing around on ice, then it’s your stupid fault.) All that, and I’d met Alicia too.

8. The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D’Ambrosio
A friend of mine raved about this collection. She absolutely RAVED about it–to the point where I became rather suspicious. Could it be THAT good? She kept telling me to read it.

So of course, in my stubborn way, I decided to NOT read it right away. I mean, no one tells me what to do and what to like!

But I finally did pick up the book, a year later. And fell in love with the stories and D’Ambrosio’s writing. These are complex, complete stories–the characters so intricate, the writing both ruthless and compassionate. The level of detail he provides (and the eye for the right details) is amazing–I’ll have to pick apart each of the stories later, see where he goes deep and where he hangs back, and try to learn that perfect balance between the near and far. In terms of themes and such–they somehow remind me of Mary Gaitskill’s stories in the way they show the dark side of humanity.

Awesome collection.

First few lines of “Drummond & Son”:

“Drummond opened the shop every morning at seven so he and his boy could eat breakfast while the first dropoffs were coming in. The boy liked cereal and sat at the workbench in back, slurping his milk, while Drummond occasionally hustled out to the curb to help a secretary haul a cumbersome IBM from the back seat of a car. The front of the store was a showroom for refurbished machines, displayed on the shelves, each with a fresh sheet of white bond rolled into the platen, while the back was a chaos of wrecked typewriters Drummond would either salvage or cannibalize for parts someday.”

9. Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata

Another work of genius by the genius. An incredible display of unfulfilled desire–and an incredible balance of subtlety and power in his writing. I have to figure out how he IMPLIES so much in his writing and yet the characters and plot are not vague whatsoever.

I know I’m short–but Kawabata is one of my favorite writers and I can’t say enough good things.

First few lines:

“Five swivel chairs were ranged along the other side of the observation car of the Kyoto express. Oki Toshio noticed that the one on the end was quietly revolving with the movement of the train. He could not take his eyes from it. The low armchairs on his side of the car did not swivel.”

10. Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

This is better than her first collection, the Pulitzer Prize winning Interpreter of Maladies. Much better than her novel, Namesake. This short story collection shows her growth as a writer–the influence of having written a novel, of having lived life, of taking her time, of ever growing confidence. Her sentences are impeccable, each line is critical path, the pacing spot on, the characters tragic and beautiful. This collection is FANTASTIC. I loved it, especially the 2nd part about Hema and Kaushik, which made me weep.

And I don’t weep as a reader very often at all.

First few lines of “Once in a Lifetime”:

“I had seen you before, too many times to count, but a farewell that my family threw for yours, at our house in Inman Square, is when I begin to recall your presence in my life. Your parents had decided to leave Cambridge, not for Atlanta or Arizona, as some other Bengalis had, but to move all the way back to India, abandoning the struggle that my parents and their friends had embarked upon. It was 1974. I was six years old. You were nine.”

11. Memory by Philippe Grimbert

A good friend of mine recommended this book, one of her favorite books of all time, to me. She said it could possibly change my life to read it.  I don’t know about you, but I am all for reading books that could shake the psychic ground beneath me.

And so I immediately bought it. It is a tiny book, less than 150 pages and the pages are about 6″x4″, the size of large index cards–but oh my, it covers so much psychic and narrative ground in that spare ground! It is full of soul. And it makes me want to go back through all my novel pages and edit out all the lines and scenes without a soul, without a heart.

Because Grimbert shows us what happens when every line sings with heart and depth. This is now one of my favorite novels of all time, too. I am grateful to my friend for showing me this book.

First few lines:

“Although an only child, for many years I had a brother. Holiday friends and casual acquaintances had no option but to take my word for it. I had a brother. Stronger and better looking. An older brother, invisible and glorious.”