I found quite a few books to be earthshakingly good this year, many more so than usual. I don’t know if this means it was the books that were better or if it was I who had become a better reader. I am of the perhaps mistaken notion that it is the reader that creates the book through reading, so I would be inclined to say that I had evolved in the past year, and that after one-third of a century I’m finally realizing how amazing a book can be. 

The best new novel I read was the Dalkey Archive’s translation of The Truth About Marie by Jean-Philippe Toussaint. There is an excerpt and a review of this book in the latest issue of Asymptote (here: http://bit.ly/uFyuno). The excerpt is stunning. 

The freshly reissued The Train by Georges Simenon (Melville House), is one that I have given away two copies of so far. This short French novel tells the story of an unexpected love affair on a train full of people fleeing their hometowns as Nazi tanks encroach. 

I first read The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa (Pantheon) this spring and it has firmly affixed its place as one of my two or three favorite novels of all time. Di Lampedusa writes with incredible humor and insight, which makes the story of a dying 19th century Italian aristocracy alluring even today. 

I just finished reading a 700 page manga by Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka titled Ayako (Vertical). Tezuka’s work ethic (like Simenon’s) had very few peers and it’s easy to get lost in the enormous worlds he created. Ayako is a family drama set in post-WWII Japan that skirts the line of the perverse. 

There were three great non-fiction books that came out this year that I had a chance to read. The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick (Pantheon) provided some much-needed context for our information-based society.

Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland (Atlas), a well-written biography of the media theorist, tread on similar ground while revealing a surprisingly spiritual side to McLuhan.

And Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (Simon and Schuster) was a worthy read and may convince you of the value of psychedelics, intuition, and following your own path. 

VKN said: “You disappeared off your blog for awhile.”

Okay! Here’s an email I was writing (but didn’t finish or send [but which I’m finishing now to you, dear blog reader]) to my friend Kevin yesterday about American novels: 

I.

Have you read anything good from the US lately? I’m despairing. Yesterday I read the first two pages of the new Dennis Cooper—whom I’ve never read before (but have heard much about from the HTMLGiant camp)—which of course Blake Butler and Ken Baumann went gaga for, and which the product page for it has a Justin Taylor blurb (“a mindbending masterpiece”). But I found the beginning to be filled with inane bantering:

 ”Chateau Étage, as a corroded iron plaque leads the unsuspecting to believe, lies a multi-hour car ride from my loft in the Marais and near a small town whose hyphenated name I keep forgetting.

“The wooded property is vast enough to hold a hill of slight historical value and the makings of a river where the older son of  the chateau’s prior owner appears to have slipped, bashed his inebriated head against a rock, and drowned.

“It was seeing this boy’s picture and obituary in Le Monde that led me to case the home originally, and, according to a subtext, an alleged sighting of his ghost that caused his superstitious parents to put it on the market.” (The Marbled Swan, first page)

A lot here reminds me of shit I was writing at Florida [“hill of slight historical value“—so clever!] and other bits are borderline nonsense [“according to a subtext”? What does that mean?] Also what does the corroded iron plaque say? The name? That it’s multi-hour? (And why multi-hour? It’s not like the trip length would vary. Why not 2 hour? 3 hour?) Why are the readers of the plaque unsuspecting? It’s all language that’s supposed to sound neat but doesn’t mean anything…

II. 

I also picked up a book called Luminarium, which has good blurbs (“dizzyingly smart and provocative” –Dave Eggers!) that made it sound like the kind of philosophical novel I tend to enjoy (see: Tinkers) about a man dealing with his twin brother being in a coma. (Blurb: “”A strikingly metaphysical novel that never dematerializes into misty cliches” –Washington Post) But as soon as I got it I knew it probably wasn’t good since it’s a billion pages long, which might be okay, but the writing is like this: 

“Visiting hours ended at ten, after which, not ready to go back to Brooklyn, Fred retraced what may or may not have been George’s route that night, zigzagging south and west, spending a noticeable percentage of his net worth on a vegetable-covered pizza slice on Second Avenue, trying not to think about the hydrogenated oils and preservatives and pesticides working their way into him. He passed by the Zeckendorf, of course, alert for short, vivacious blondes, and made the embarrassing mistake of nodding hello to the familiar-looking heft man in the blue security jacket, who was just then clocking out for the day.”

Who thinks about hydrogenated oils preservatives and pesticides working into them? When is “nodding hello” ever an embarrassing mistake? Is this book really about humans, I wonder? Both of these also seem overly gossipy to me—enraptured with details that don’t really matter (That damn hill of modest historical worth. That silly “noticeable percentage of his net worth”). 

III. 

Compare these with the beginning of the French novel The Truth About Marie: 

“Later on, thinking back on the last few hours of that sweltering night, I realized we had made love at the same time, Marie and I, but not with each other. At a certain moment in the night—during a sudden heat wave in Paris, for three straight days the temperature reached thirty-eight centigrade and fell no lower than thirty—Marie and I were making love in Paris in two apartments a mere half mile apart, as the crow flies. We couldn’t have imagined at the night’s start, or later, or at any time for that matter, it was simply inconceivable, that we’d see each other that night, that before sunrise we’d be together, even for a brief moment in each other’s arms in the dark, staggering hallway of our apartment.” 

There’s no games or tricks here. The apartments are half a mile apart, not “a multi-minute walk” apart. Toussaint says what he means instead of forcing the reader to figure it out (no “according to a subtext” here). There’s no details given for the sake of stuffing in details (“in her apartment in which Jean Genet once wrote one of his plays and cost a considerable amount of her net income each month”) or sentences trying to be fancy or clever. 

Well, that’s two random American novels. Surely there’s something good by an American out there. My friend Ana suggested that I read Jonathan Franzen (whose fiction I’ve been avoiding). I kind of want to read Tezuka comics and Aldous Huxley books forever though. I’m welcome to any recommendations, either at monkfishjowls@gmail.com or via web here. 

The Books of My Youth

Over the weekend I posted about a few of the books I’ve read lately. Since then I’ve been thinking about what I used to read and thought I’d make a list of books that I thought were great that I read between the ages of 0 and 15. 

1. Shel Silverstein: Where the Sidewalk Ends / A Light in the Attic / Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back — Lafcadio may have been my first favorite novel. I somehow coerced my third grade teacher into reading it aloud to the whole class over the course of a week. It’s not as well known as his poetry books, but it features a lion who shoots rifles and wears a suit a tailor makes for him out of marshmallows.  If I get a tattoo related to anyone on this list, it’ll be a Shel Silverstein tatt.

2. Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — I read this at least 5 times when I was 13 and 14. Funny stuff for nerds everywhere. 

3. Stephen King: The Gunslinger — Even when I was young I had some sort of literary snobbery and one of its first targets was Stephen King. Sure I was a young person and shouldn’t have known any better, but when I saw his books sold on the television with “free skeleton keychains” thrown into the bargain (ala the Stephen King Book Club) I sensed a ruse. I still don’t like half of his books, but when I was in middle school and I stood in front of the Stephen King section at the public library, scoffing at his terrible books, I discovered The Dark Tower series and I haven’t held the skeleton keychains against Mr. King since. 

4. Michael Crichton: Sphere — I don’t remember any of the characters in this book or much of the plot, but I do remember it was heavy on computers and technology. Crichton seemed pretty damn smart to me when I was young and I devoured this book and Jurassic Park. They were at the time my ideal novels and I wanted every book to be like them. 

5. Timothy Zahn: Star Wars: Heir to the Empire — I’m going to leave off the 30 or so Star Trek novels I used to own to save some of my dignity intact. I’ll offer up this sequel to the classic Star Wars trilogy, though. It was pretty exciting when it came out since it offered the first glimpse of what was happening to Luke and Leia and gang after Return of the Jedi. Ridiculously satisfying at the time and how much fun to tell people that you knew that Leia and Han tied the knot. 

6: Wilson Rawls: Where the Red Fern Grows — I have my copy of this around here somewhere. I wrote on the inside cover, in a 9 year old’s scrawl, “Saddest book ever.” Damn thing got to me. It’s a boy and his dog(s) book, which people have enjoyed forever considering The Book of Tobit from the Catholic Bible falls in that genre. I remember the boy drinks soda pop for the first time, there’s a silver brush and comb set, and the dogs die (spoiler! sorry!), but not much else. Probably not the saddest book ever, but what did I know? 

Oh, there’s too many to name. I liked The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis but I thought most of the Narnia sequels were bullshit. Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great brought me a lot of joy but I can’t remember anything about it, except maybe they make a newspaper and maybe there’s jelly beans. The school library in fifth grade had all of these really old Mushroom Planet books about a curious old man who takes a kid to a planet where mushroom people live—I loved those. And Flowers for Algernon, perhaps a tie for “saddest book in the world.” I’m sure part of the reason I read so much about the brain today is because of that book. 

I am not Jodi Picoult! Fine! But I have a bag of nuts and figs that has spilled into the shopping bag. Everything here comes with a baggie of MOISTURE ABSORBENT. Do not eat! I like to buy seaweed. I’ll eat a whole package on my walk home from work sometimes. Chickens live outside a tire shop about 10 blocks from here. Chickens, Max. I stopped drinking and I felt happier. I stopped writing and I felt happier. I stopped the massages, I stopped the thoughts of food, the movies, the dancing, the secret jokes to myself. I felt happier! 

Ay ay ay. Do not go gentle into that good night. 

“Good God man.”