A Year in Reading: Recap

Rosecrans Baldwin’s first novel, You Lost Me There is coming out soon with Riverhead Books. He’s a founding editor of The Morning News.The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy was one of my favorite books this year. I was living in Paris and it told stories that resembled way too closely my friends’ mishaps, and Dundy wrote it in the fifties. It’s sexy, it’s funny, it’s light on its toes. I’d happily read it again tomorrow if 2666 wasn’t standing between me and the exit.Away by Amy Bloom – fantastic! And I got to Purple Hibiscus, Adichie’s first novel before her insanely good Half of a Yellow Sun, and it’s flat-out terrific, too. Philip Kerr’s A Quiet Flame kept Bernie Gunther alive for another installment, I’m thankful for that. I discovered Peter Høeg, whom I knew from Smilla’s Sense of Snow, but hadn’t kept up with, and I lucked into The Quiet Girl; now I’ve got to go back and read his oeuvre.Basically I’m hoping Santa brings me a Kindle this year.More from A Year in Reading 2008

Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist (there are passages in this book that I love as much as anything Baker has ever written–which is saying something)

Grégoire Bouillier, The Mystery Guest (I reread this book seemingly monthly, attempting–futilely–to figure out how he managed this brief, perfect magic trick.)

Joe Brainard, I Remember (I’m very late to the party on this book, but it’s an extraordinary assemblage of seemingly unconnected–in fact, profoundly interconnected–sentences)

Albert Camus, The Fall (see The Mystery Guest)

Robert Clark, The Angel of Doubt (an as yet unpublished manuscript; a gorgeously written, deeply felt, and relentlessly smart sequence of intereconnected essays about religion, art, and sex, not necessarily in that order)

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (see The Mystery Guest)

John D’Agata, About a Mountain (a beautiful embodiment of what is to me a
central principle of great nonfiction: it’s not remotely about what it purports to be about)

Amy Fusselman, The Pharmacist’s Mate (see The Mystery Guest)

Simon Gray, The Smoking Diaries (4 volumes of diaries; read together, they dwarf his plays and are commensurate, I swear to god, with Proust)

Spalding Gray, Morning, Noon, and Night (see The Mystery Guest)

David Kirby, The House on Boulevard Street (very late to the party on Kirby, too; I love his work; “poetry as well-written as prose,” as good ole Ez said)

Phillip Lopate, Notes on Sontag (I disagree with Lopate’s assessment–in my view, too generous–but I love the book)

Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay (one of the least sentimental and most deeply emotional books I’ve ever read)

Alphonse Daudet, In the Land of Pain (see above)

Maggie Nelson, Bluets (utterly brilliant)

Brevity: Blaise Pascal, Pensées; Don Patterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought; François Le Rochefoucauld, Maxims

Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour (the screenplay; the best book she ever wrote)

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (where it all started and ended)

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I think I’ll remember 2009 as the year when I made a conscious effort to immerse myself in the culture of books, and fell more deeply in love with that culture than I would have thought possible. My first novel was published a few months ago, and in the lead-up to publication I began spending an inordinate amount of time talking to booksellers online and in person, going to other writers’ events, lingering in bookstores and reading all the fiction I could get my hands on. Reading has become one of the great joys of my life, and I think I’ve probably read more books in 2009 than I did in the previous five years combined.

It’s hard to pick a favorite. I thought Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply and Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn were breathtaking. I loved John Wray’s Lowboy. But in a year awash in books, one in particular stands out: Shaun Tan’s gorgeously illustrated Tales from Outer Suburbia is the size and shape of a children’s picture book, but I’m not sure I’d give it to a child. The Library of Congress summary describes the book as “fifteen illustrated short stories… set in the Australian suburbs,” but these suburbs aren’t quite of this earth.

Tan’s suburbia is a haunted place, sometimes banal and sometimes beautiful, populated by strange apparitions—a water buffalo who lives in a vacant lot and gives directions to children in need, a man in an antiquated and heavily barnacled deep-sea diving suit who drips water from his air pipe as he wanders blindly down the street. Mysterious courtyards open up impossibly between attics and upstairs rooms; figures made of sticks and clumps of clod wander silently over the landscape; dogs gather one night outside the burning home of a man who recently beat his own dog to death. I’ve been slightly obsessed with this book for months.

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