books

Back in January, when I first wrote about Wolfe’s strange comic-horror novel, I said, “It’s rare to come across a book I like and dislike in such equal measure.” And you know, that hasn’t really changed, although I think I’m less forgiving of its faults these many months later. There’s much to like about the story, particularly how it plays with the Lovecraftian mythos lurking in the background, while letting all its many different genre influences simply collide. But in the end I think it’s undone by Wolfe’s often needless verbosity, by the feeling you can’t shake that none of it matters, and by Wolfe’s seeming inability to write a female character that isn’t a thinly drawn caricature.

That last is also a flaw in Wolfe’s massive “Solar Cycle,” his much better-regarded (and, frankly, much better) twelve-volume opus, which I spent most of 2009 reading for the first time. I hesitate to call Wolfe’s writing sexist or misogynist, because I don’t think that’s fair, but there does often seem to be an uncomfortable chauvinism at work in the books of his that I’ve read. It may be fair to say that Wolfe simply can’t write convincingly three-dimensional female characters, and that blind spot is all too apparent in Guest‘s Cassie Casey.

When I first read DeLillo’s novel, I was struck by the fact that what I seemed to like most about the book was the very thing that its critics seemed to dislike — namely that it was an intimate character piece, concerned with the immediate effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks on a few individuals, and not the definitive 9/11 novel they had for some reason (I think unfairly) expected him to write. I said:

I think my pleasure in the book came precisely because it isn’t the definitive book on the subject, because instead of trying to make sense of it all, it simply lets us watch others trying to make sense of it all. And that, in the end, may be the best any of us can do.

McCann’s novel deals with the events of that day as well, though less directly, in a series of interconnected stories that use Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the two towers as their starting point. Though, as New York Magazine pointed out, “[t]here do in fact seem to be some echoes of DeLillo in this book.” McCann responded:

Absolutely. If I could write Underworld, I wouldn’t hang up my boots, but I’d be a very happy person. In fact, the very first sentence of the novel was “The prospect of the falling man.” Obviously I had to cut that. When I found out he had written Falling Man, I called him up and said “Listen, you stole my first line,” which of course he didn’t. What I loved about it was he went right to the heart of the matter. That isn’t the way I wanted to go but I did think it was enormously brave of him.

McCann’s book is more an allegory of those later events, told through the interconnecting lives touched (oftentimes without even knowing it) by Petit’s walk, and an elegy for a city and time that no longer is. I quite enjoyed it.

While McCann’s novel could, in many ways, be more rightly called a collection of short stories — as could, I suppose, even Kim Stanley Newman’s The Years of Salt and Rice, which I talked about recently here — in 2010 I read some honest-to-goodness short story collections.

You could argue — and I seem to recall seeing it argued somewhere, once — that Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories are eventually all about the same thing: short tales of Bengali Indian expatriates living in or around Boston. (Which, as it happens, is similar to her own life experience.) But when those stories are so beautifully told, with such warmth, affection, and longing, I think you get a pass. I haven’t read her novel, nor her second short story collection, but Interpreter of Maladies was one of the best books I read this year.

I’d say the same for Elizabeth Strout’s collection of loosely connected stories, which gives us characters (particularly the title character) it’s often difficult to love but impossible not to feel for.

And again, the same could probably be said for Sinclair Ross’s collection of stories about the hardscrabble life on the Canadian prairies. The book was a birthday present from Heather, in her efforts to familiarize me with some of the jewels of Canadian literature. Of course, I read it while I was in sunny San Jose this past March, staying in a fancy hotel for work, so I don’t know that I got the full, snowy, Depression-era effect. But I quite liked it; and of the books that Heather sent me, and that I’ve so far read, I think it’s maybe been my favorite.

I didn’t love Barry Lopez’s collection, which is a shame, since Joe Spano’s reading of his story “The Mappist,” on PRI’s Selected Shorts, remains one of my favorite short stories ever. Not that there aren’t a few other scattered gems in Lopez’s book, but in the end many of them just didn’t quite work for me.

Two more of the quintessentially Canadian books Heather sent me in March. She made sure to qualify her praise of Davies’ book by calling it “the bane of every Canadian high-schooler’s life.” And I guess I can see that, or at least see similarities in the novel to unpopular assigned readings of my own past; but as I’m at last glance neither a high-schooler nor Canadian, I have to say, I enjoyed it. It’s true, my own praise for the book wasn’t exactly effusive either — “I kind of liked it” — but…well, I don’t expect it to become the bane of my life anytime soon, and I’m still actually kind of interested in reading the next books in Davies’ trilogy.

I was a little more familiar with Margaret Atwood going into this. I quite liked her novel The Blind Assassin, for instance, and her short story “Happy Endings” is another perennial favorite. Yet The Handmaid’s Tale, undoubtedly her most famous novel, was a little different than I expected. Right after I read it, I said:

I think like any novel, especially one with sfnal elements, it’s more about the time it was written than about the future. In this case, that time was the 1980s, although the book isn’t at all what I would call dated — parts of it are still frighteningly relevant, there’s little about the dystopia that feels particularly quaint, and the book is every bit as creepy at times as…advertised.

It’s that idea of great science fiction being of its time — about its time, more than in any definitive way about the future — that really resonated with me when I saw William Gibson speak in September. There, and in interviews done around the same time, he seemed positively gleeful over the idea that Neuromancer, once acclaimed as so prescient, would now, just by a matter of course, seem dated. “If you’re a 12 year old reading Neuromancer today,” he’s said, “you’d get about 20 pages in and figure out that the real mystery of the book is what happened to all the cell phones.” Great, socially relevant science fiction — and I think both Gibson’s book and Atwood’s qualify — should feel dated to readers living in its future.

Ninni Holmqvist’s dystopia, on the other hand, almost feels a little dated even now, and as I noted here, it almost can’t help but suffer by comparison to Atwood’s novel, which I read so soon before it. It was easily one of my biggest disappointments of the year, and although intriguing, more than anything I found it underdeveloped and unconvincing.

Holmqvist just doesn’t do much of anything with her world. There’s little reason to care about her characters, beyond our immediate horror at the society in which they live, the circumstances in which they find themselves, and it’s tough even to sustain that horror when the world itself doesn’t often seem that horrific. For a long time, I thought Holmqvist was trying to be ambiguous, getting us to question our basic assumptions about this imagined society: well of course creating a dispensable class of people for organ donations and medical testing is abhorrent, but what if they lead really rich and productive lives, maybe for the first time, in that very same environment? What happens when the horror becomes banal, when the cold and efficient abattoir is also a warm and inviting shopping mall?

And you know, that could have been a great book. But I don’t think Holmqvist, or at least her translator, ever really manages it.

And speaking of wildly disappointing translations, how about Stieg Larsson’s runaway bestseller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo? As I said back in May:

…there’s stuff to like about the book, and the title character is certainly interesting, but it really does not live up to the hype. I think it’s incredible success is due to a number of things not entirely related to the contents of the book. It hits upon some current hot-button topics, like financial crime and faltering economies, and marries that to a procedural crime novel. The fact that it’s a translation lends it a bit of mystique and prestige, at least here in the US, as does the fact that it (along with its two sequels) were released posthumously. Again, the book itself has its fair share of moments, but I found long stretches of it slightly boring and thought some characters could have been easily excised. Its incredible success is also a little baffling.

But it has been wildly successful, so what do I know?

I was also disappointed by Louise Erdrich’s book, which is really a novel in name only. I’m not at all against repackaging stories as loosely connected novels — see Olive Kitteridge above, one of my favorite books of the year. But in Erdrich’s hands, the stories never really coalesce into a recognizable whole. There are some interesting characters, and moments, but even as a short story collection I fear this would feel disjointed and rambling. Then again, the book was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, so again, what do I know?

Then again, I picked up an autographed copy in the remainder bin at the bookstore, so…

Another big disappointment was Janni Lee Simner’s young adult fantasy novel, The Bones of Faerie. In April, I wrote:

I loved the book’s opening chapter….It’s dark and sinister and poetic, and in just a few paragraphs it sets up what promises to be a very interesting world. And then the book lurches forward, with too much happening too quickly, not enough happening overall. I liked the characters, but the book never lived up to that first short chapter for me, never took the time to slowly develop its world and history.

I think I’ll probably skip the sequel, due out in April.

And I suppose I can’t talk about the year’s disappointments without also touching upon Joe Hill and Terry Moore.

In some ways, Hill’s second novel, Horns, was one of the better books I read this year. As I wrote back in May (on the very day I picked up a copy of Larsson’s book, as it happens), Hill’s book is

entertaining but also kind of problematic — in different ways from Hill’s previous book, Heart-shaped Box, though I still think he hasn’t quite written a novel as good as his short stories. (I’ve also really liked his comic book work so far.) Maybe it’s that Horns spends so much of its time in dark and evil thoughts, in its characters worst impulses — that is, at least in part, what the book is about — makes it a lot less fun than it might otherwise be. But Hill has a knack for creating immediately interesting characters, with whom we empathize, and I can hardly fault him for writing a book that occasionally made me uncomfortable. It’s a little messy around the edges, maybe, even more so than Box, but Hill remains a writer to keep an eye on.

So if not precisely a disappointment, it was still a reminder that Hill, for all his promise and talent, still could maybe use a little work around the edges.

And as for Runaways…as much as I like Terry Moore, I can’t help but thinking Brian K. Vaughan and Joss Whedon did it a whole lot better. This is probably the first Runaways comic I didn’t particularly like, much less genuinely love. Maybe I’ll check out the next volume, but this one may be proof that not every series is a good fit for every creator.

Though, seriously, Vaughan and Whedon were tough acts to follow.

Let’s talk briefly about the nonfiction I read this year. And we may have to be brief, because there was surprisingly little of it outside of work, and I’m not sure I have anything of interest to say about these four books.

Novella Carpenter’s Farm City was the only free book I managed to pick up at this year’s BookExpo America. And ultimately, it’s probably the only freebie that was worth picking up. (Unless you’re super-fond of tote bags and cheaply made kazoos.)

It’s not a phenomenal book, and Carpenter owes an acknowledged debt to perhaps better writers like Michael Pollan, but her tale of living as an “urban farmer” is quite engaging. She didn’t convince me to start raising pigs and chickens in my own yard, and ultimately she provides less real food for thought than books like Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. But she and her neighbors make for interesting characters, and her book is a lot of fun.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s book maybe isn’t quite as much fun, given its sometimes more bleak subject matter of people living on the financial edge, but it’s also a book where the personal moments are ultimately more interesting than the bigger picture. What the book is about isn’t half as interesting as Ehrenreich’s own narrative. As I wrote back in June:

I think it works best as the story of one woman’s individual experience, with some interesting economic facts, than as an in-depth examination of what it means to be working poor in this country. There’s plenty of food for thought in the book — even if it does hover on the edge of feeling dated, now that it’s almost a decade old — but I found it interesting more as a narrative of a social experiment than anything else.

And then there’s Craig Ferguson’s autobiography, which is almost nothing but engaging personal narrative. It’s a funny and surprisingly touching memoir, the sort of smart and candid portrait you might expect from the host of the Late Late Show. In it, he writes:

This is not journalism. This is just my story. There are bound to be some lies here, but I’ve been telling them so long they’ve become truth, my truth, as close as I can get to what really happened. I left some tales out because to tell them would be excessively cruel to people who probably don’t deserve it, and altered a few names for the same reason, but I believe I spared myself no blushes.

It’s hard not to like him after that.

I also quite liked Nathan Rabin after reading My Year of Flops: One Man’s Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure. In truth, I’d read most of these film reviews when they originally ran during Rabin’s My Year of Flops feature at the A.V. Club, but they’re often amusing and interesting enough to merit a second glance, and Rabin includes enough new material to make the copy I bought (autographed, no less) worth it.

Welcome to the wonderful world of flops. I’m psyched to explore the curious geography of celluloid bombs with you. It’s a colorful realm of pee-drinking man-fish, inexplicably floating Africans, psychedelic disco/biblical freak-outs, time traveling action heroes, an effeminate green alien only Fred Flintstone and Marlon Brando can see, and Rosie O’Donnell in leather bondage gear. Ignore all the road signs warning you to stay away. You’re in Failure Country now, with me as your disreputable guide. Enjoy the ride.

Let’s finish by talking about a few non-flops, some of my other favorite reads from the year.

As when I first read it, I think what’s stayed with me most about China Miéville’s The City & The City — beyond it’s being just a really engaging mystery — is that description on the back cover, promising “a city unlike any other.” Miéville’s city — or, rather, cities — are unlike any other we’ve seen, and yet, fundamentally, importantly, they are very much of our world. As I wrote back in April:

They have to be, because as readers that’s where we live — in the real world — and as much as we may look to fiction for escapism and elements of the fantastic, I think what we ultimately want are characters whose own wants and desires, whose problems and decisions are, if not our own, than at least inescapably human….Because science fiction, and maybe all fiction, isn’t really about the other; it’s about how we, as humans, react to it. The metaphysics of Miéville’s book are dizzying, but it’s the human side that grants us entry.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl also takes our very real world and extrapolates from it, to create a wholly original and vibrant future, yet also one that feel totally convincing and plausible. At times, perhaps, all too plausible. It was my top vote for this year’s Hugo Awards, and in fact tied with Miéville’s book.

(And seriously, if you didn’t this year, next year, buy yourself a Worldcon membership. The Hugo packet with the nominated works alone is worth the price of a non-attending membership.)

If nothing else, how can you not like an author whose last name roughly translates to “kiss of the wolf”?

The Patron Saint of Liars and Invisible both represent authors at the top of their respective games. Patron Saint maybe doesn’t have the breathless poetic beauty of Ann Patchett’s later novel (which I read first) Bel Canto. And Invisible maybe does examine themes and situations familiar to any reader of Paul Auster’s earlier books. Yet both are terrific decades-spanning stories — about families and loss, on the one hand, and about the consequences of youth and malleability of identity on the other. Both, in very different ways, are about the consequences of lies. Both, particularly Patchett’s novel, feature indelible characters it’s difficult to forget.

Having been recently quite disappointed in Auster’s novels, and having liked but not loved Patchett’s novel The Magician’s Assistant, it was a pleasure to read both of these.

I maybe said everything I need to say about Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe when I quoted these two passages from the book. I think this was pretty easily my favorite book of the year. Equal parts funny, haunting, and insightful, Yu’s book is a moving meditation on loss and a terrific genre deconstruction. It’s also fun.

Of his own writing, Yu has said:

I feel like a guy who entered the soapbox derby. Everyone else’s cars are all sanded and aerodynamic and have gleaming parts, and I’ve got this ungainly-looking thing, all mismatched and homemade-looking, but you know, it still goes, for the most part.

And in a more in-depth interview…

I hesitate to say too much about Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, if only so as not to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it. I will say this much: Merricat Blackwood is a wonderfully unreliable narrator. (I delighted at seeing her right below Nabokov’s Charles Kinbote on this list of the 100 Best Characters in Fiction Since 1900. Exceptionally creepy and subtle.

I’d not read a lot of Shirley Jackson before this, beyond her story “The Lottery,” which I suppose every high-schooler readers at some point. But I’m exceptionally glad I bought a copy of her collected stories and novels from the Library of America. (Even if it does mean I don’t actually get that lovely Penguin Classics cover in the sidebar there.)

Which leaves two series, Scott Westerfeld’s two Succession Series books and Charlie Huston’s five Joe Pitt Casebooks.

Westerfeld’s The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds represent space opera in all the best senses, a galaxy-spanning tale of secrets and battles and love and AI. I’m not entirely convinced it ends quite as well as it might have — it’s a great and exciting tale, but it left me feeling just the tiniest bit unsatisfied — yet it’s the great storytelling I’ve come to expect from Westerfeld. And as much as I enjoy his young adult series — particularly, I think, the three Midnighters books — these two do make me wish he’d wander back over into more adult science fiction.

Charlie Huston’s books are by no means young adult novels. They’re gritty and bloody, sometimes downright nasty and vulgar, but they’re also great hard-boiled fun. Huston’s detective (of sorts), Joe Pitt, is a tough-talking man of action, always getting into trouble, alienating friends, never knowing when to stop mouthing off. He also just happens to be a vampire.

I liked Already Dead enough to read the rest of the books in the series, but it’s only as a collected whole that they make my list. (And a note here to publishers: when a new, or even the last, book in a series comes out, that’s maybe a good time to offer the first as a free e-book. It’s a good way to interest new fans. I did me, with Huston.) I read the last four books in rapid succession — much the same way, in fact, that I read Westerfeld’s Midnighters series last year — and it was a good way to really feel immersed in Pitt’s world. It’s a brutal and bloody world, of vampire infections, zombie murders, and sex, but it’s quite entertaining.