Zeroville--Or as I like to call it,
"Oneseville!" The best novel I
read this year. "Americans are in love with shame," Vikar says.
"Can you imagine Bogart fucking Bergman with a cube of butter on the
Champs-Elysees?" If you’re only going to read one book in 2013 (how sad),
this is it.
I Am Not Sidney Poitier--Probably the most absurd, and
possibly, sharpest story...ever. "I
am the ill-starred fruit of a hysterical pregnancy, and surprisingly, odd
though I might be, I am not hysterical myself."
We Need To Talk About Kevin--Book as birth control.
Disturbing and so beautiful. "We white folks cling to such an abiding
sense of entitlement that when things go amiss, we cannot let go of this
tortuously sunny, idiotically cheerful doppelganger of a world that we deserve
in which life is swell."
Among the Dead—Misanthropic masterpiece. Not since
Joseph Heller's Something Happened, have I read anything quite so mean, funny
and honest. I don’t see anyone I know liking this. Not the most quotable book
either.
Elsewhere, California--Funny, relatable, an earnest
account of identity in crisis, and blooming. "Once you know someone's
story, or even pieces of it, it's hard to dismiss them to pretend you know all
there is to know about a person."
Shards--The truth is elusive and debatable, funny
and painful, and one big contradiction. "It's shit in your mouth, but
officially it's called ice cream."
Widow--Kobe Steak...Tartare. Short stories, slow
reading pleasure. "So, it could be that she was shrill and laughing,
insistently laughing, a laughter that demanded itself into being, her mind
leaping at any possible comment by someone, or any attribute that could be made
a joke, funny, fodder for the laugh track, and she knew it to be happening when
it happened, was conscious of the laughing faces around her, conscious as
though she stood behind glass and the faces at once stared, and laughed, their
lips and eyes and mouths all laughing...and she could hear her body's desperate
bullhorning."
A Brilliant Novel in the Works--I laughed so hard I
started crying; then I cried so hard, people asked if I was okay.
Hyper-metafiction. You've been warned. “When my wife comes into the room and
sees me in my underwear, with my $30 Lamy pen in my fist, and standing on my
desk, she isn’t terribly impressed with me and my work habits.”
These Dreams of You--I defy you not to like Oppan Erickson
Style. "Doesn't everyone choose
aspects of his or her identity, or is race the rubicon on authenticity?"
Infinite Jest-- Neither a beach nor holiday read,
it's been both to me. I read it last summer, and fell in love. This time around
I couldn't read it slow enough; it’s nourishing on some many levels, you don’t
want it to end. Re-reading this has officially become my end-of-year tradition
to be reminded of the pain that so many people endure and share. “That 99% of
compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this
self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things
that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think
about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy
imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences are
never good. Then that this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge
to pray for the literal loss of one’s mind. In short that 99% of the head’s
thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of
itself.”
*One of the most memorable, and by that I mean
disturbing, things I read this year, is the butterfly eating scene from The SatanicVerses. There's something about Rushdie, and I've only read two of his books, I
love his writing so much, I just don't get torn apart by it, except for this
scene, which I hated and loved and had nightmares about. Too long to quote, just read the book; it's in chapter IV Ayesha.
**Better as a movie than a book: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, though the book does have a fantastic line that the movie doesn’t, “He
wondered whether there was any love between human beings that did not rest upon
some sort of self-delusion.”
What I'm really looking forward to in 2013:
Broom of the System (because the best way to combat DFW
withdrawal is with more DFW)
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