Here they are, what they were and how they were.
January
1. "The Devil in the White City"- Erik Larsen. I read this book at my girlfriend's house in Vermont. She doesn't have a shower there, rather one of those grotesque majesties of a bathtub with the griffon feet and everything. Anyway, I read a great deal of this book sitting in that thing getting so pruny I probably looked like I'd attended the 1893 World's Fair.
On New Year's Eve I was all up in everyone's faces about this book, going on and on about the national debut of PBR, and the ferris wheel, and the serial killer, and Colonel Zufelt, and so much more, and finished it as my flight descended on Philadelphia. What an incredible book. Pop history can be shallow and superficial, but at its best it can speak to such a panorama of experience, submerged and flourescent alike. God I wish I'd been at that 1893 World's Fair.
2. "I Am Going To Be Small"- Jeffrey Brown. Jeffrey Brown, if you don't know, is a kind of auteur of small-press autobiographical comics. Lots of candid little novels about his miserable sex life and such. This was a collection of some of his lighter, goofier stuff, which was a nice change of pace from his usual thing but also not that remarkable. Sorry J. Brown.
3. "The Moviegoer"- Walker Percy. Walker Percy can put together some fucking phenomenal sentences, if you can accommodate his pace. His best novel, as far as I'm concerned, but not a lot of moviegoing as such gets done. Too bad "The Searchers" is taken.
4. "Underwater"- Chester Brown. Luminous GN about early childhood, and guilt, and beauty. I have a hard time actually recommending it though, because it is unfinished. Brown lost interest, I guess, about 200 pages in, so it exists in this weird kind of limbo where you can tell its a masterpiece but can't quite muster up the nerve to call it one.
5. "Nabokov's Dozen"- Vladimir Nabokov. Why on earth would anybody read this instead of one of the more comprehensive collections of his short stories? Because it was cheap, I guess, and had nice yellowed pages and that 60's paperback smell. A nice collection but I wish I'd sprung for the whole set of stories.
6. "The Principles of Uncertainty"- Maira Kalman. A collection of Maira Kalman's wry and gorgeous water-color diary journalism blog whatevers that she did for the New York Times awhile ago.
7. "Hermit in Paris"- Italo Calvino. Basically a big catch-all of Calvino's autobiographical writings. Pretty uneven, if only because a large portion of the book is devoted to journalistic interviews, which tend to cover a lot of the same ground. Can't fault the guy for consistency, but the editors could have pruned a little bit to prevent having to hear the same parental background six times. The history of Mussolini portraiture is brilliant, though.
8. "The Prestige"- Christopher Priest. Round one of my intermittent attempts to get into science fiction in 2009. Entertaining enough, good twists and all that, but not as trim and elegant as the movie. And points off for not including Bowie.
9. "Love is a Mix Tape"- Rob Sheffield. Agonized over picking this up for so long, because I kept hearing good things but it looked so, so corny. I suppose I'm glad I read it, the style's comparable to a more vulnerable and wide-eyed Chuck Klosterman I guess, with a lot less acidity and a lot more (maybe warranted) sentimentality. Not great, but a quick read with some good humor and some touching moments.
10. "Native Guard"- Natasha Trethewey. Boy oh boy, a Pulitzer prize winner. As a writer I tend to have a little distaste for overtly confessional poetry, and a tentative fear of form, so when I read a collection that engages with either I do so with some reserves and some muted awe, respectively. As a collection that gets its hands deep into the viscera of both of those things, Native Guard is an intimidating beast. I remember being very impressed, more so with the integration of form into personal narrative than by that narrative itself.
11. "110 Per$"- Tony Consiglio. Kind of an Alex Robinson type thing, a bit reminiscent of "Tricked" really, with some subtle nods to it. Sort of slight, but with some surprisingly nuanced characterization here and there.
12. "Let It Be"- Colin Meloy. In general, those 33 1/3 books have been kind of a disappointment. I was sick in the middle of January, and was lent this book by my girlfriend, a big Decemberists/Colin Meloy fan. I like The Replacements enough, I guess, so I gave it a shot.
Well-- it was better than some of the books in this little line I've read, especially the ones that just read like Brent Dicrescenzio trying for a pay-bump, and I do appreciate the titles that lean more towards memoir than straight history, but it still felt pretty self indulgent. Which is a shame, because the story of the album is a pretty interesting one, definitely more interesting than what Colin Meloy did when he was seven.
13. "The Golden Ass"- Apuleius. Probably better at capturing the feeling of Fellini's "Satyricon" than the actual "Satyricon." A totally fascinating late-Roman novel of low comedy and high mysticism, required reading for anybody who wants to know a thing about anything.
14. "Saga of the Volsungs." An important Icelandic Saga, good to have read if you're interested in the whole narrative genealogy or whatever of Wagner's Nibelungen (although possibly the Nibelungenleid would be the MORE crucial source, I guess, who knows). Interesting but honestly the almost total alienness of the value system makes it tough to fathom, let alone enjoy per se. In the interest of full disclosure (har) I should say that this book and the last one were read for my senior seminar.
And that caps off January.
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