Disagreeing with Award Winners

Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Ugh, really? This won the National Book Award over Nicole Krauss? Or even Peter Carey? I have to admit, I read the first 60 pages pretty closely and then decided to skim the rest. It is a very detailed account of a world I just couldn't make myself care about, apart from the occasional interesting tangent with Maggie, the girl with the wirey red hair. If it won the award because it had a unique setting, well, I guess aspiring authors can use that as their strategy. Because I just don't see any other merit to it.

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This is not the first time I have forced myself to finish a book because it had received great acclaim (Freedom, anyone?). I always start to doubt my literary prowess when this happens. Is it a matter of taste or am I not open enough? Do awards get given for reasons I don't understand? Should I force myself to figure out away to enjoy something I find excruciating?

Let's face it. I only read for fun. I can't help but push myself into reading outside my comfort zone, and don't usually regret it. Possibly only when reading books like this.

So who I think should have won the National Book Award? I would have given it to Great House or Room. I'm still going to read some of the non-fiction finalists, at least the winner, since I bought it a month ago. Eventually. Right now I'm reading the finalists for the 2010 Nebula Award, so expect some posts about those!

Reading Food and Guilt

I do read non-fiction from time to time, and often find myself steered toward books about food, since I bake and garden as hobbies, as well as being an adult convert to semi-vegetarianism. The reading experience for this genre of books varies, but often comes with a helping of guilt for me, and I imagine for most readers. In this blog post I will rate the book for how I liked it and how guilty it made me feel.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

Rating: 5/5 stars
Guilt Rating: Well, this is a strange one. I think he does well in making you reconsider assumptions you may have made. Is it really about eating organic, or is eating local better for the environment? Is meat really bad? I did make the change of only buying vegetarian, cage-free, grain-fed eggs from that point forward, like my original review said.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver

Rating: 5/5 stars
Guilt rating: Actually, low on guilt, but high on inspiration. She doesn't even begin to suggest that most families could/should do what her family did and live only on food available in a 100 mile radius. But I felt inspired to grow my own food, to learn about heirlooms, and to shop more locally, and I really have. Last year we gardened full throttle and still have a lot to learn, but the resources in this book really helped us get started.

Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated Into What America Eats by Steve Ettlinger

Rating: 5/5 stars.
Guilt: Oh boy. I wasn't raised eating a lot of processed food, not even carbonated beverages except on special occasions. Ironically, becoming a vegetarian has increased my processed food consumption by leaps and bounds, what else is meat substitute made out of anyway? After reading this book, I still can't drink a Frappuccino. I just think "cotton makes this texture" the entire time. If you don't want to know, don't read this book. It was startling and disgusting but also kind of cool, if I'm being honest. Yay science.

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser

Rating: 5/5 stars
Guilt Factor: If you eat fast food, you might never again. McDonalds does have some tasty beverages, but after reading about their impact on potatoes and eggs and the dairy industry, and how egg consumption ends up in cows being treated, well, fast food becomes a rather tougher pill to swallow. He also shows how science gives you the impression of eating food when what you're eating is engineered nothingness. Fascinating but definitely high on guilt. That was his goal, I think. :)

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

Rating: 3/5 stars, maybe because at this point I felt like I'd heard it all before
Guilt: Oh yeah. Except I'm immune, a bit, to hearing about factory farming when I already don't eat meat. I wish he'd spent more than his brief mentions talking about fish farms, since I think we get mixed messages about what fish we should buy - wild fish are said to be bad for the environment, but farmed fish don't sound very spectacular in his encounter. I just wish he'd had some solutions other than not eating animals at all.

Cod by Mark Kurlansky

Rating: 4/5 stars
Guilt: Well, you'll feel bad any time you eat fish, because they are practically endangered species!

I think it is interesting to note that Pollan followed The Omnivore's Dilemma with In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, a book that looks interesting but I haven't had time to read yet. I think he was potentially wanting to steer away from the guilt-food read too. Anything else I should be reading to balance it all out?

Why I Love Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

I'm having a little blog identity crisis. So many people review each book they read, but I already do that over in GoodReads and don't want to repeat myself. Besides that, I like to write little blurby reviews, and blogs seem to demand a lot more of me. (If you read this, I'd like to know if you think posting individual book reviews both places is redundant).


On to the subject at hand - post-apocalyptic fiction. I am actually a pretty upbeat, optimistic person, but one of my favorite sub-genres of literature is full of death and destruction, bloating bodies and decay, war and sickness, and so on. But hold on - I specify post-apocalyptic because to me that refers to stories told about the "after." I love all the ideas that authors have come up with as to how society would be recreated once it is destroyed. It can be an interesting commentary on what really matters, what could arguably need to be disposed of anyway, and the danger of returning ourselves right back to where we were before. I know the line is slim sometimes between post-apocalyptic and dystopian literature, but then again, not really. Most post-apocalyptic fiction revolves around a specific event - it can be nuclear, it can be medical, it can be political, but definitely something that happened that can be pinpointed and marked with a before and after.

I wouldn't say I've read everything in this genre, but practically. I most recently finished The Stand by Stephen King. It often tops post-apocalyptic lists, but I was avoiding it because of a previous bad reading experience with him (Insomnia not being the best place to start). I finally buckled down and read it in a few days when I was home sick with a cold. Of course, since the virus in The Stand that kills almost everyone in the world manifests just like a cold, you could argue that this may not have been the best reading material. And I've had dreams inspired by the book every night since I started reading it. To me, that just speaks to how good it is. The characters are interesting, his descriptive power is obvious (to a fault, as I can still pretty much smell rotting bodies in my head, ugh), and the twist of the battle of good and evil makes for a slightly supernatural bent. I'm happy to take back what I said about King before, and say that this belongs on the list of the best of post-apocalyptic writing. I read the revised and expanded edition, but honestly it could have been even longer. I wanted to know more about what happened after the end.

So if The Stand is on my list, what else would be? I definitely have opinions on this.

First, a collection of short stories called The Wastelands, compiled and edited by John Joseph Adams. I was actually pointed toward this when I was the (lucky) librarian for a course called Apocalypse and Unrest in Contemporary Media, and it fueled the fire. Not only are the stories fantastic and varied, there is a great list in the back of post-apocalyptic novels that I added to my reading list. The stories that have stuck with me even two years later are Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels by George R. R. Martin and When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth by Cory Doctorow. Not to mention the ending of Bread and Bombs by M. Rickert.

Short stories are a great way to explore an idea, but they lack the world development that I enjoy so much in the longer form of a novel. My favorites include Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, which has a fascinating story of a woman who ends up leading a new religion in the aftermath. It is followed by the sequel of Parable of the Talents. The reason these so captured me was the re-creation of society. I would love to re-read these sometime soon.

My other favorites have to be the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood, even though the third book isn't out yet. Oryx and Crake entertwines with The Year of the Flood and portray a post genetic engineering, post environmental destruction, post sweeping plague nation. It isn't quite to the rebuilding stage, as the wacky cult of God's Gardener's predates the "flood" and tries to survive past it, but you definitely get a sense that the time might be past for humanity, even though some still survive. I love Atwood's humor, her criticism of society, and her unethical characters. It somehow translates to a believability that doesn't come across many other places.

I'm sure some people reading this are shocked I don't include some other titles on my list. I've read Alas, Babylon but you could argue that it is more of a pre-apocalypse book, they just know it is coming. Earth Abides didn't capture me as much as some of the others, but I like how it portrays the earth-as-champion, over the destructive temporary humanity. I read the first of the S. M. Stirling series, Dies the Fire, but it came across to me as the fantasy of every D&D player, to prove that there was always a reason to study medieval weaponry... I found it tiring. I wouldn't even include The Road on my list, just because I thought the sparseness left too much to be desired. I know most would disagree with me on that one.

There are still some left I haven't read and have been saving for a rainy day - A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I've heard has some humor in it, and the graphic novel series Y: The Last Man.

Books Read 2010

I definitely read more in 2010 than I have in recent years, but that is by number of books, not by page number. I haven't added them up this year. The few books in italics were re-reads. Below each section I'll indicate my favorites of the year!

Fiction - General and Literary
Allen, Sarah A. - The Girl Who Chased the Moon (269 pgs)
Atwood, Margaret - Oryx and Crake (376 pgs)
Atwood, Margaret - The Year of the Flood (434 pgs)
Baker, Nicholson - Room Temperature (116 pgs)
Bloom, Amy - Away (240 pgs)
Bloom, Amy - Love Invents Us (205 pgs)
Bolaño, Robert - 2666 (898 pgs)
Bolaño, Robert - Monsieur Pain (134 pgs)
Bratenberg, Gerd - Egalia's Daughters (269 pgs)
Byatt, A.S. - The Children's Book (675 pgs)
Bynum, Sarah - Ms. Hempel Chronicles (193 pgs)
Calvino, Italo - If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (260 pgs)
Carey, Peter - Parrot & Olivier in America (380 pgs)
Catton, Eleanor - The Rehearsal (312 pgs)
Clifford, M. - The Book (302 pgs)
Coetzee, J. M. - Diary of a Bad Year (229 pgs)
DeLeeuw, Brian - In This Way I Was Saved (294 pgs)
DeLillo, Don - Point Omega (117 pgs)
DeLillo, Don - White Noise (310 pgs)
Donoghue, Emma - Room (321 pgs)
Egan, Jennifer - A Visit from the Good Squad (274 pgs)
Ferris, Joshua - Then We Came to the End (385 pgs)
Forster, E.M. - Howard's End (352 pgs)
Franzen, Jonathan - Freedom (562 pgs)
Galgut, Damon - In a Strange Room (180 pgs)
Galloway, Steven - The Cellist of Sarajevo (235 pgs)
Giordano, Paolo - The Solitude of Prime Numbers (288 pgs)
Greene, Graham - Our Man in Havana (242 pgs)
Hegarty, Ciara - The Road to the Sea (304 pgs)
Hely, Steve - How I Became a Famous Novelist (322 pgs)
Highsmith, Patricia - The Talented Mr. Ripley (295 pgs)
Hoffman, Alice - The Story Sisters (325 pgs)
Hornby, Nick - Juliet, Naked (406 pgs)
Isherwood, Christopher - A Single Man (186 pgs)
Jacobson, Howard - The Finkler Question (307 pgs)
Jeter, John - The Plunder Room (295 pgs)
Kafka, Franz - Metamorphosis (76 pgs)
Kerouac, Jack - On the Road (307 pgs)
Keyes, Daniel - Flowers for Algernon (274 pgs)
Kostova, Elizabeth - The Swan Thieves (565 pgs)
Krauss, Nicole - Great House
Langer, Adam - The Thieves of Manhattan (259 pgs)
Larsson, Stieg - The Girl Who Played With Fire (503 pgs)
Larsson, Stieg - The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (563 pgs)
Le Carre', John - Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (379 pgs)
Mackie, Emily - And This Is True (346 pgs)
Mahajan, Karan - Family Planning (264 pgs)
Mawer, Simon - The Glass Room (405 pgs)
McEwan, Ian - The Comfort of Strangers (153 pgs)
McEwan, Ian - Solar (304 pgs)
Mendelsohn, Jane - American Music (237 pgs)
Mitchell, David - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (479 pgs)
Mohamed, Nadifa - Black Mamba Boy (280 pgs)
Niven, Jennifer - Velva Jean Learns to Drive (404 pgs)
Petterson, Per - Out Stealing Horses (258 pgs)
Rachman, Tom - The Imperfectionists (272 pgs)
Russo, Richard - That Old Cape Magic (261 pgs)
Sackville, Amy - The Still Point (307 pgs)
Seth, Vikram - An Equal Music (484 pgs)
Shaw, Ali - The Girl with Glass Feet (287 pgs)
Shteyngart, Gary - Super Sad True Love Story (334 pgs)
Stewart, Leah - Husband and Wife (344 pgs)
Stockett, Kathryn - The Help (451 pgs)
Stuart, Julia - The Tower, The Zoo, and the Tortoise (304 pgs)

Best of fiction: Phew, great year. The Krauss, Kerouac, Petterson, Rachman, Seth, and Mitchell were all great. So was the Stockett, and the Atwood were even better the second time through.


Fiction - Science Fiction and Fantasy
Abbot, Edwin A. - Flatland (239 pgs)
Abercrombie, Joe - The Blade Itself (529 pgs)
Bacigalupi, Paolo - The Windup Girl (359 pgs)
Bradley, Darin - Noise (222 pgs)
Doctorow, Cory - Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (208 pgs)
Gibson, William - Zero History (404 pgs)
Heinlein, Robert - The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (383 pgs)
LeGuin, Ursula - The Left Hand of Darkness (286 pgs)
LeGuin, Ursula - The Dispossessed (387 pgs)
Mieville, China - The City and the City (312 pgs)
Priest, Cherie - Boneshaker (416 pgs)
Sawyer, Robert - WWW:Wake (356 pgs)
Swirsky, Rachel - A Memory of Wind (no pgs)
Swirksy, Rachel - Eros, Philia, Agape (no pgs)
Tepper, Sheri S. - A Plague of Angels (560 pgs)
Tregillis, Ian - Bitter Seeds (352 pgs)
Valente, Catherynne M. - Palimpsest (367 pgs)
Valente, Catherynne M. - The Grass-Cutting Sword (129 pgs)
Valente, Catherynne M. - Yume No Hon (149 pgs)
Valente, Catherynne M. - The Orphan's Tales, vol. 1: In the Night Garden (483 pgs)
Wilson, Robert C. - Julian Comstock (413 pgs)
Yu, Charles - How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (239 pgs)

Best of science-fiction and fantasy: This is the year I fell in love with Catherynne Valente, and Palimpsest was probably my favorite book all year.

Fiction - YA
Bacigalupi, Paolo - Ship Breaker (323 pgs)
Collins, Suzanne - The Hunger Games (374 pgs)
Collins, Suzanne - Catching Fire (391 pgs)
Collins, Suzanne - Mockingjay (400 pgs)
Erskine, Kathryn - Mockingbird (235 pgs)
Myers, Walter Dean - Lockdown (256 pgs)
Williams-Garcia, Rita - One Crazy Summer (218 pgs)


Fiction - Graphic Novels
Doxiadis, Apostolos Logicomix (352 pgs)
Kindt, Matt - Revolver

Nonfiction including travel writing and memoirs

Apple, Sam - Schlepping through the Alps (288 pgs)
Carr, Nicholas - The Shallows (276 pgs)
Dunn, Jancee - Why is my Mother Getting a Tattoo? (208 pgs)
Feldman, Jessica, ed. - What Should I Read Next? (282 pgs)
Katz, Vincent - Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (328 pgs)
Harris, Mary E. - The Arts at Black Mountain College (315 pgs)
Horowitz, Joseph - Artists in Exile (458 pgs)
Janzen, Rhoda - Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (221 pgs)
Johnson, Marilyn - This Book Is Overdue! (272 pgs)
Mahoney, Rosemary - Down the Nile (304 pgs)
Medina, John - Brain Rules (299 pgs)
Reardon, Joan - As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto (432 pgs)
Riotte, Louise - Carrots Love Tomatoes (224 pgs)
Shonagon, Sei - The Pillow Book (268 pgs)
Watkins, Glenn - The Gesualdo Hex (384 pgs)
Williams, Jonathan - A Palpable Elysium: portraits of genius and solitude (175 pgs)
Wilson, Edward - The Future of Life (229 pgs)

Best of non-fiction: The Nicholas Carr was just excellent, as were the letters of Julia Child.

Poetry
Bird, Caroline - Watering Can (82 pgs)
Budy, Andrea (ed) - When She Named Fire (409 pgs)
D.A., Adebe - Ex Nihilo (72 pgs)
Fenton, Elyse - Clamor (77 pgs)
Graber, Kathleen - The eternal city (74 pgs)
Hayes, Terrance - Lighthead (95 pgs)
Kilalea, Katharine - One Eye'd Leigh (53 pgs)
Loy, Mina - The Lost Lunar Baedeker (236 pgs)
Malech, Dora - Shore ordered ocean (93 pgs)
Masters, Edgar Lee - Spoon River Anthology (248 pgs)
Morse, Drew (ed) - The 2007 Rhysling Anthology (131 pgs)
O'Sullivan, Leanne - Cailleach: the Hag of Beara (82 pgs)
Parisi, Joseph - 100 Essential Modern Poems by Women (282 pgs)
Pastan, Linda - Queen of a Rainy Country (77 pgs)
Pastan, Linda - PM/AM (112 pgs)
Pushkin, Alexander - Selected Lyric Poetry (204 pgs)
Ryan, Kay - The Best of It (270 pgs)
Sandburg, Carl - The Complete Poems (797 pgs)
Strand, Mark - Selected Poems (152 pgs)
Valente, Catherynne M. - Apocrypha (121 pgs)
Valente, Catherynne M. - Oracles (82 pgs)
Youn, Monica - Ignatz (69 pgs)

Best of poetry: Adebe and Valente. This reminds me that I want to go back and read more of Mina Loy.


Short Stories
Barth, John - Lost in the Funhouse (201 pgs)
Baxter, Charles - A Relative Stranger (223 pgs)
Bloom, Amy - A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (163 pgs)
Bloom, Amy - Where the God of Love Hangs Out (201 pgs)
De Lint, Charles - Muse and Reverie (350 pgs)
Diaz, Junot - Drown (208 pgs)
Donaghue, Emma - Touchy Subjects (278 pgs)
Eisenberg, Deborah - Twilight of the Superheroes (225 pgs)
Fowler, Karen Joy - What I Didn't See: Stories (208 pgs)
Franco, James - Palo Alto (197 pgs)
Homes, A. M. - The Safety of Objects (173 pgs)
Johnson, Denis - Jesus' Son (133 pgs)
Lahiri, Jhumpa - Unaccustomed Earth (333 pgs)
Meloy, Maile - Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It (219 pgs)
Munro, Alice - Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories (323 pgs)
Munro, Alice - Too Much Happiness (304 pgs)
Orringer, Julie - How to Breathe Underwater (226 pgs)
Tolstoy, Leo - Tolstoy's Short Fiction (510 pgs)

Best of short stories: Denis Johnson, Maile Meloy, and Amy Bloom.

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I took breaks from this book throughout the day, because it was SO GOOD that I didn't want it to end. No, really. I rarely feel that way, but apparently, that is the experience I'm looking for when I open a novel. This is a novelized set of short stories tied together by the history of a newspaper and its demise, and each chapter focuses on a figure related to the paper. Sometimes the chapter/story would end and I'd find that all of the sudden I felt deep compassion for these fictional characters, and I was sad to see each of them go despite/because of their quirks and bad choices. Rachman is a powerful storyteller and I can't believe this is his first novel!

Happy new year, everyone!

Please Help Me Love J. M. Coetzee

Every once in a while, I read a book because I think I should. Maybe an author has been nominated for an award, or wins an award, or keeps showing up on those lists of books you "should" read. So I try.

The first book I read by J. M. Coetzee was Disgrace, and I read it in 2006. To me, it was the epitome of what has almost become an archetype in modern literature - the depressed, amoral, worn-out, male academic. My dislike was severe, I was surprised I finished it. I wondered if it was just because I couldn't identify with it, as a 28 year old who had just finished a graduate degree, at the beginning of her career and quite happily married. Imagine my horror upon discovering that this actually won the Man Booker Prize in 1999! Ha.

For whatever reason, probably the "shoulds," I read Slow Man in 2007. It had actually been nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2005. It contains a character from a previous book that I have not read, Elizabeth Costello. The main character was similar to the one in Disgrace, to the point that even the other characters in the novel point it out!

"She could not stay with a man who was tired all the time. It was hard enough to hold her own tiredness at bay. She had only to stretch out beside him in the too familiar bed to feel the weariness begin to seep out of him and wash over her in colourless, odourless, inert tide. She had to escape!"

When I was selecting books to read over the long holiday break, I thought maybe I would try giving Coetzee another chance. I brought three of his books home with me - Diary of a Bad Year, Summertime, and Elizabeth Costello. I made it through Diary of a Bad Year, but found it suffered similar issues as the other two. Add to that the tone of it being written in an autobiographical tone (I believe it has even been called autobiographical fiction, a subgenre quite a bit of his work falls under), and the divided writing style, and it was torture.

I read the first chapter of Elizabeth Costello and of Summertime, but just couldn't force myself. I might just call it quits on Coetzee, kind of like I had to do with Brahms as a young pianist, after each reading through of a piece was worse than the one before. Maybe he would mean more to me later on in life. I hope not, because I fear that to identify with him more would be to have lived in misery.

But seriously, what am I missing? I am willing to continue forcing myself to have an open mind.

Great House by Nicole Krauss

I finished this book a couple of weeks ago, one of the finalists for the National Book Award for 2010. I've waited to review it for a bit so I could mull it around in my head.

There are heavy themes here, of loss, obsession, and also how they relate to Jewish history and identity. This is far more delicately handled by Krauss than by Howard Jacobson in The Finkler Question, where the characters are always informing each other that they are thinking about their Jewish identity.

When it comes down to it, most of the stories center around a desk and interweaving versions of loneliness. This is also handled in a subtle way, and in some cases the desk doesn't even show up for a while. It varies in importance, and she crafts interesting characters with unusual tendencies. I was actually sad to reach the end because I was reluctant to let the stories go.

"In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry."

I would give this one 5/5 stars, and recommend reading it.