Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood is a supreme literary stunt: a short “novel” composed only of questions, each of which seems to implicate the reader in a narrative conspiracy as serious and absurd as his or her own life. Ultimately, Powell’s little book can be seen word-machine designed to induce unprecedented states of interior monologue, or narrative drug.
A Year in Reading: Jonathan Lethem
A Year in Reading: Choire Sicha
Unfortunately for me, I spent more time this year writing and editing than I did reading. But I did have two rewarding reading-related projects.
First, I wanted to indulge in the stakes-free popular literature. So I read all the George R.R. Martin books. Mmm hmm. They are honestly pretty great, like chocolate milkshakes, although I started Kindle-highlighting references to rape at a certain point around book three — I think that one's the rapiest? — and it really gets ya down. What is the deal? He thinks about rape more than Andrea Dworkin! I really didn't agree, in the end, with Daniel Mendelsohn's fascinating essay on the topic of Game of Thrones. I mean, open that link up, and apple-F "Brienne," and apple-F "rape," and... nothing??? You can't get to "remarkable feminist epic" without passing those stations of the sexist cross.
There's also a question about the series overall that's the "show your work" problem, as in, I don't really care about the efforts of the math problem you had to do, I mostly want to see the solution to the math problem. In this case that means: Are we still reading prologue? Have we just read several thousand pages that actually don't matter? Maaaybe.
In this vein I also read the James Franco book Actors Anonymous and the very silly Dave Eggers book, The Circle. That would make a really good cartoon television show maybe. With a laughtrack. What a silly book! I read it so fast, I basically couldn't stop. Milkshake!
My other project was... Catching Up With The Kids. This is a thing you have to do consciously as you start to get older, particularly if you don't teach. So, I read a Tao Lin book! (Taipei, obviously.) I read/engaged with the works of Amanda Hugginkiss Steve Roggenbuck and "Marie Calloway." I am currently reading the manuscript of the forthcoming book by the proprietor of Pitchfork Reviews Reviews, who is or is not named David Shapiro, and it is pretty terrific so far. I like this vein of writing, though not as much as the other young people do. I have already read the New Narrative writers and Dennis Cooper and all that flat affectless 90s jazz and though all the youngs are certainly bringing something new to the table, I don't think it's particularly innovative to go all in for this mode. Also, narcissism as an art form is eminently boring. I am ready for something more than people writing I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I.
Anyway I am starting to re-read Rebecca Brown's The Terrible Girls, which has just been reissued! It's already the best book I've read all year. Every emo youngster should read this, it is where their contemporary literature came from! Every time someone clicks on Thought Catalog, a Rebecca Brown reader should auto-download!
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Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
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A Year in Reading: Manil Suri
Manil Suri's first novel, The Death of Vishnu, won the 2002 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize and was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award. His newest novel, The Age of Shiva will be available in paperback in January. He lives in Maryland, where he is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland altimore County. Visit his web site ManilSuri.com.I always have a hard time immersing myself in story collections, so when I received an advance copy of Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, for a possible blurb, it took me some weeks to open it. But I was hooked from the first story. Here was the sumptuously recreated world of rural Pakistan, peopled with characters who were intensely human and completely compelling. The stories flowed effortlessly into each other, a mosaic that brought alive all the drama of the class structure that seems to rule everything in that society. Each story was possessed with a grand and resolute momentum that made it feel like I was reading a classic passed down through the ages.And will wonders never cease, but the other book that comes to mind is also a collection of stories, interconnected by the presence of the character of the title, Olive Kitteridge. Elizabeth Strout, the author, paints a very realistic portrait of this woman's life (and of the townspeople around). The language is quietly stunning and the overall book stark but compellingly readable.More from A Year in Reading 2008
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A Year in Reading: Geoff Dyer
Last year I chose All God's Children, a terrific book that deserves to be more widely known. This year I'm going for a book that could hardly be better known. Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb scooped the big three prizes – the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award – and turns out to be every bit as impressive as its immense reputation. How did one man write such a book? The story converges on two dates, in two places – Hiroshima and Nagasaki – but to tell it Rhodes has to start waaay back and spread his reach to take in the discovery of the atom, the use of weapons against civilians, the flight of Jews from Nazi Germany, military strategy, engineering, political wrangling, and god knows what else. The cast of characters is huge, the command of narrative unerring, and the science is compelling even if it remains – to me – largely incomprehensible. A great, great book that reminded me of something I tend to forget. The thought of starting out on a 1000-page book of non-fiction is rather off-putting, especially if you are doing so with no particular aim in mind. But once such a book has you in its thrall it feels like it takes no more time or effort to get through than a three-hundred page novel.
More from A Year in Reading 2012
Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews
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A Year in Reading: Tess Malone
This was a stressful year both nationally and personally. But the books I read made me feel less alone and reminded me why I read even when there’s so much else to distract me.
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A Year in Reading: Kyle Minor
Kyle Minor is the author of In the Devil's Territory, a collection of short stories. His recent work appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2008, Surreal South, and Random House's Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers anthology.Five books that knocked the top of my head off in 2008:1. Knockemstiff, by Donald Ray Pollock - Eighteen wild and wooly stories from southern Ohio, in which a lifetime's experience is distilled to nine or twelve pages of the most thrilling sentences I've ever read. If you liked Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, Barry Hannah's Airships, or Mark Richard's Charity, Knockemstiff is the book for you.2. The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard, by Erin McGraw - The elegance here is Flaubertian, the prose flawless, and the story (loosely based upon the true story of McGraw's disappeared-then-reappeared grandmother) is every bit as thrilling as anything Stephen King will serve up this year.3. Sabbath's Theater, by Philip Roth - The best comic novel from the best comic novelist in America.4. American Pastoral, by Philip Roth - The best serious novel from the best serious novelist in America.5. Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, by Scott Berg - A biography of Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor who held the hands of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, as they made their way together from obscurity toward literary permanence. I can't imagine this book thrilled any reader in 1978, the year of its release, any more than it thrilled me thirty years later.More from A Year in Reading 2008
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A Year in Reading: Emily St. John Mandel
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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