A Year in Reading: Aimee Bender

Year in Reading
December 8, 2010 | 8 books mentioned 4 2 min read

Related Books:

coverHome, Marilynne Robinson: I loved Gilead, and it is a pleasure and feels like a gift to spend time with this prose.  Reading Robinson, for me, takes a lot of focus, and I find myself rereading lines often, but the reward for this pace is a calmness lifting up off the pages, and a careful generous dipping into a deep and beautiful well.  She is the opposite and maybe even an antidote to fast-paced technology.

Big Machine, Victor LaValle: A wonderfully interesting and resonant read.  Two scenes in this book in particular are still so vivid to me that I could probably tell you about them in detail without glancing at the pages; they are etched on the brain.    

When You Reach Me, Rebecca Stead and The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins: Two satisfying, inventive, page-turning YA reads.

coverAbout a Mountain, John D’Agata: The momentum he builds, by the end!  The layering, the surprises, the way he does not use the double space break…  somehow this book feels like he’s thinking/dreaming up facts on the spot; they are that available to the prose, that effortlessly flowing along.

Dearest Creature, Amy Gerstler: There’s an amazing poem about a dog’s view on shit that is full of dignity and depth.  But I kept rereading the first poem– it took awhile to move past it, I found it so moving.

The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway: I’d never read this one before– still am thinking about what a simple, deep story he tells.  The story has the classic mythic feel of a long-lasting fable or tale, in how it’s hard to imagine it didn’t exist before– like he plucked it off a tree, or dug it from the ground.  But it’s also a complicated study of regret and disappointment and aging, so even though the plot movement is direct and unfussy, there’s real nuance in what lingers with a reader.

More from a Year in Reading 2010

Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005

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The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews

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most recent book is the novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake which recently won the SCIBA award for fiction.  She also has a story in the new anthology, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me-- contemporary retellings of classic fairy tales.

Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Michael Bourne

Year in Reading
December 7, 2014 | 8 books mentioned 1 2 min read
A less audacious author, when splitting his 600-page epic of the American West into three separate narratives, would have simply written three books and published them as a trilogy. That way, readers could skip the less scintillating sections of Philipp Meyer’s The Son and focus only on the near-mythic tale of Eli McCullough, the first boy born in the Republic of Texas, who is kidnapped as a child and raised by wandering Comanche warriors. But then Meyer, a high school dropout from Baltimore, Md., who worked as an emergency medical technician and a derivatives trader before quitting to become a writer, does nothing by half-measures. Meyer had not lived in Texas until he moved to Austin for grad school in 2005, but he spent five years researching and writing The Son, reading some 300 books on Texas, teaching himself how to hunt with a bow, and shooting a buffalo so he could experience what it was like to drink its blood. Meyer’s research methods may sound extreme -- or perhaps exaggerated, depending on your degree of cynicism -- but, whatever, it pays off on the page. The sections of the novel dealing with Eli’s son, Peter, and his great-granddaughter, Jeannie, brim with historical insights but occasionally stall out as narrative. The long sections about Eli and his years riding with the Comanches at the blood-soaked edges of the American frontier, on the other hand, are as riveting and sensually vivid as any book I’ve read about the American West since Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The Son serves as a bookend to Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda, which I wrote about in last year’s Year in Reading series. The Orenda, set in the 1600s in what is now Ontario, Canada, tackles the story of the European conquest of North America from the Native perspective. The Son, set in Texas in the 1800s and 1900s, comes at the story from the white settlers’ point of view. But both books set out, as only great fiction can, to rewrite the creation myth of white North America from the ground up, replacing the war-whooping Injuns and chaw-spitting cowpokes of an earlier generation of Westerns with dynamic, three-dimensional characters, both Native and white, who are capable of unimaginable cruelty but who never lose their essential humanity. More from A Year in Reading 2014 Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.
Year in Reading
| 8 books mentioned 1 2 min read
Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Mark Bibbins

Year in Reading
December 22, 2011 | 8 books mentioned 2 min read
If you’re ever feeling unsteady, longtime and legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland’s memoir, DV, is as bracing as smelling salts. You should keep a copy in your bag or next to your bed or wherever you manage to read. It’s extravagant, impractical, intimate, and an interest in couture is by no means a prerequisite (the closest I get to fashion is walking past Century 21 on my way to the train). Vreeland’s friend Truman Capote famously dismissed Jack Kerouac’s writing as “typing”; Capote died the year DV was published, so who knows whether he’d have dismissed it — or embraced it — as “talking.” Since she was losing her eyesight, the book was dictated to George Plimpton, and is peppered with such admonitions as “You really should be talking to Joseph, my masseur.” Open to any page and you’ll find over-the-top and quotable gems — she’s just there, and her enthusiasms and excesses are totally beguiling, whether she’s reminiscing about sumo wrestlers, the King of England, or her love of rouge. Strangely, or not so strangely, I see lots of similarities between Vreeland and one of my other favorite autobiographers, Gertrude Stein. Here are some: their openness, their contradictions, their love of gossip, their independence, the inimitability of their voices, and of course their absolute certainty that their own extraordinary visions of and for the world were the right ones. More from A Year in Reading 2011 Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.
Year in Reading
| 8 books mentioned 2 min read
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Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: 2016

Year in Reading
December 1, 2016 | 8 books mentioned 6 4 min read
We typically schedule the essays and reviews and lists we run at The Millions a week or two in advance. Before the U.S. election, I looked at what we had in the hopper and tried to arrange the posts for timeliness. This was basically a symbolic gesture since The Millions is a total literary miscellany, and mostly contributor-driven -- we don’t have the budget to commission much work (see publisher Max Magee’s call for support here). Max and I conferred about what to run on election day itself; we agreed that a lovely, calm installment of Hannah Gersen’s Proust Diary was the thing. I asked him what we should run if Donald Trump won. “SHUT IT ALL DOWN,” he wrote, sort of joking. It’s obvious now that our disbelief was a luxury -- there were plenty of people who knew it could happen. But the shock was real, and so too was the subsequent urge to shut it down. It was unclear, in the days immediately following the election, how a literary site could possibly matter when Donald Trump was the President of the United States, when it felt that all efforts should henceforth be directed at subverting the new regime. (It’s still unclear.) But then the Year in Reading entries started coming in, from more than 70 writers. This is the 13th year of the series, and it feels like the most necessary yet. The entries have a measure of fear and grief, yes. They are about reckoning with the past, and preparing for the future. They are also full of beauty, full of sensitivity, full of intelligence, full of curiosity and care. They are about dissolving in someone else’s consciousness. About sharing suffering. About taking a break. About falling in love. Based on the entries this year, I can confirm that readers are still very into Elena Ferrante. But there are many other names to discover in this series -- exciting debuts and forgotten classics and authors whose names were on the tip of your tongue. There are hundreds of books: novels, essays, works of nonfiction, and poems. As in prior years, the names of our 2016 contributors will be unveiled throughout the month as entries are published (starting with our traditional opener from Languagehat's Stephen Dodson). Bookmark this post, load up the main page, subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow us on Facebook or Twitter to make sure you don’t miss an entry -- we’ll run three or four per day. And if you look forward to the Year in Reading every year, please consider supporting the site and ensuring this December tradition continues for years to come. There are difficult weeks and years ahead, but we hope you’ll be momentarily refreshed and heartened as you hear from an array of prodigious readers and writers. At the very least, you’ll find something good to read. -Lydia Kiesling Stephen Dodson, co-author of Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit, proprietor of Languagehat. Chigozie Obioma, contributing editor at The Millions and author of The Fishermen. Sofia Samatar, author of A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories. Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond. Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens. Caille Millner, author of The Golden Road: Notes on My Gentrification. Edan Lepucki, contributing editor at The Millions and author of California. Matt Seidel, staff writer at The Millions. Sonya Chung, contributing editor at The Millions and author of The Loved Ones. Nick Moran, special projects editor at The Millions. Jacob Lambert, staff writer at The Millions. Michael Bourne, staff writer at The Millions. Tess Malone, associate editor at The Millions. Tana French, author of The Trespasser. Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, author of The Crown Ain't Worth Much. Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Border of Paradise. Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Here Comes the Sun. Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls. Annie Proulx, author of Barkskins. Teddy Wayne, author of Loner. Brandon Shimoda, author of Evening Oracle. Basma Abdel Aziz, author of The Queue. Imbolo Mbue, author of Behold the Dreamers. Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World. Sally Rooney, author of Conversations with Friends. Bich Minh Nguyen, author of Pioneer Girl. Jacqueline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming. Megan Abbott, author of You Will Know Me. Mauro Javier Cardenas, author of The Revolutionaries Try Again. Emily St. John Mandel, staff writer at The Millions and author of Station Eleven. Zoë Ruiz, staff writer at The Millions. Nick Ripatrazone, staff writer at The Millions. Kaulie Lewis, staff writer at The Millions. Hannah Gersen, staff writer at The Millions and author of Home Field. Il’ja Rákoš, staff writer at The Millions. Claire Cameron, staff writer at The Millions and author of The Last Neanderthal. Anne K. Yoder, staff writer at The Millions. Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division. Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, author of The Nest. Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes. Natashia Deón, author of Grace. Bridgett M. Davis, author of Into the Go-Slow. Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. Leila Aboulela, author of The Kindness of Enemies. Brit Bennett, author of The Mothers. Dimitry Elias Leger, author of God Loves Haiti. Chloe Caldwell, author of I'll Tell You in Person. Natalie Baszile, author of Queen Sugar. Danielle Dutton, author of Margaret the First. Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will. Lisa Lucas, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation. Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Anuradha Roy, author of Sleeping on Jupiter. Marie Myung-Ok Lee, staff writer for The Millions and author of Somebody's Daughter. Janet Potter, staff writer at The Millions. Ismail Muhammad, staff writer at The Millions. Lydia Kiesling, editor of The Millions. Elizabeth Minkel, staff writer at The Millions. Adam Boretz, web editor of The Millions. Garth Risk Hallberg, contributing editor at The Millions, author of City on Fire. Mark O'Connell, staff writer at The Millions, author of To Be a Machine. Kevin Nguyen, digital deputy editor for GQ. Nadja Spiegelman, author of I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This. Chris Bachelder, author of The Throwback Special. Álvaro Enrigue, author of Sudden Death. Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Lucky Fish. Sylvia Whitman, owner of Shakespeare and Company bookstore. Mensah Demary, editor for Catapult. Jade Chang, author of The Wangs vs. the World. Manuel Gonzales, author of The Regional Office is Under Attack!. Hamilton Leithauser, rock star. Lilliam Rivera, author of The Education of Margot Sanchez. Jane Hu, writer; grad student; Canadian. Chris McCormick, author of Desert Boys. Michelle Dean, author of Sharp: The Women Who Made An Art of Having an Opinion. A Year in Reading: Outro Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
Year in Reading
| 8 books mentioned 6 4 min read
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4 comments:

  1. I’m surprised Aimee Bender didn’t bring up Room, since she gave the novel such a great review in NYT. Big Machine definitely seems intriguing. This year in reading feature is filling up my wish list too quickly!

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Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Ben Ehrenreich

Year in Reading
December 3, 2007 | 8 books mentioned 2
Ben Ehrenreich is the author of the novel The Suitors. His journalism has appeared in many publications, from L.A. Weekly to Men's Vogue to the New York Times Magazine.Someone sent me a copy of Selah Saterstrom's The Meat and Spirit Plan, which I picked up casually and proceeded to read in, I think, two sittings. Really fierce, spare, terrific writing. Also, I spent a few months writing about the poet Frank Stanford, which gave me a good excuse to read and re-read The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, Stanford's 15,283-line epic poem about - among other things - race, death, dreams, Hank Williams, Sonny Liston and the moon. It was once nearly impossible to find, but not anymore. One more epic: Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The Wizard of the Crow. A floating dictator, globalization and myriad other forms of sorcery, humor so dark it glows.More from A Year in Reading 2007
Year in Reading
| 8 books mentioned 2
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Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Michelle Huneven

Year in Reading
December 15, 2014 | 8 books mentioned 3 min read
This year, for research, I read a lot of bad science (a textbook on Eugenics, anyone?); for pleasure, my habits were scattershot, although I turned to many old favorites, often in audiobook form. After seeing it in drafts over several years, I finally read my friend Mona Simpson’s brilliant, highly entertaining Casebook between covers, with charming illustrations. A year ago, my excellent husband had Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life shipped to me from England when it was published there; that led me to reread The Blue Flower, Gate of Angels, and The Beginning of Spring. I listen to audiobooks throughout the day, as I garden and cook, clean the kitchen and drive, and I have a contemporary child’s delight in listening to my favorites as often as I please. I keep Juliet Stevenson’s version of Persuasion on a pretty much permanent loop, but after reading Anna Keesey’s marvelous essay, “Simple Girl: the Improbable Solace of Mansfield Park” in the Los Angeles Review of Books, I moved on to Stevenson’s audiobook of that Jane Austen. (I also read Keesey’s lovely historical novel set in Eastern Oregon Little Century.) I then re-listened to Amanda Root reading Jane Eyre, but am presently back to Juliet Stevenson and her stunning reading of To the Lighthouse. I admired Carlene Bauer’s intelligent and deft Frances and Bernard, an epistolary novel based on an imagined passion between Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell that dealt with so much of great interest to me: religious identity, passionate love [with the wrong person], and the ongoing struggle for women of doing one’s work. I enjoyed Christopher Bollas’s peripatetic novel, Dark at the End of the Tunnel, a series of intense conversations a psychoanalyst has with his patients, friends, and wife. That primed me to pick up Becoming Freud by Adam Phillips, whose epigrammatic style is always invigorating and thought-provoking; in this short biography, he focuses on Freud’s Jewishness and early career, when he was formulating his great theories about children and families as he himself was having and raising kids. Partly because so many people recommended Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree in their reading lists last year, I read it this year and found it, chapter by chapter, continuously revelatory and incredibly moving. More from A Year in Reading 2014 Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.
Year in Reading
| 8 books mentioned 3 min read
Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Scott Esposito (Conversational Reading)

Year in Reading
December 8, 2012 | 8 books mentioned 5 4 min read
I think for my 2012 "Year in Reading" I'm going to try and be topical, since I'm guessing this series will feature enough laundry lists of great books as it is. So, since my book The End of Oulipo? is publishing in January from Zero Books, I'll make my topic Oulipo literature. I've certainly been reading enough of it lately. This is the year I had the great good fortune to discover Harry Mathews, for a long time the only American Oulipo author, and certainly one of the greats of 20th-century literature. For Mathews newbies, I think there are two places to start, depending on your reading habits. If you like to be tossed into the deep end, then go for Mathews's first novel, The Conversions (and read Ed Park's excellent essay on said book). It's, well, a very strange novel about a quest to solve a riddle in a dead man's will, where each chapter becomes a strange metamorphosis of the preceding chapters. It ends with one of the more beautiful extended metaphors I've read all year, and on which I write at length in The End of Ouliopo? If you, alternatively, prefer good old plot, then start with what I and many others consider Mathews's masterwork, Cigarettes, which is one of the most plot-heavy books you will read all year, despite Mathews's insistence that it was his only “properly” Oulipian novel. (On the surface, it will appear much more Edith Wharton than Raymond Queneau.) I then recommend A D Jameson's essay "I Read It for the Plot: The Narrative Artistry of Harry Mathews’ Cigarettes" for a great analysis of just why Mathews's rendition of a plot-heavy novel is so damn literary. Mathews also wrote Singular Pleasures, 61 short accounts of masturbation, along with a collection of other odds and ends. It is more difficult to find than his proper novels, but well worth seeking out. This year I also read virtually everything of Georges Perec's that has been translated (many for the second time). I'll toss out a recommendation for his wonderful collection of essays and miscellaneous texts, Species of Spaces. It includes the story "The Winter Journey," the best Borgesian short story written by a Frenchman. I will also put in a recommendation for Perec's strange short novel W, or the Memory of a Childhood, which always seems to be left behind when people talk about the more bizarre A Void (the novel without the letter e) or the masterpiece, Life: A User's Manual. Then, of course, there are Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino. For Queneau I'll recommend The Blue Flowers, and for Calvino I'll give you If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Of the lesser-known Oulipo members, the works of Jacques Roubaud should not be missed. His Mathematics, just published this year, is a great introduction to this writer who marries Oulipo, Proust, and mathematics (it's a strange marriage). Then there is the first book by the second American Oulipo member, Daniel Levin Becker, called Many Subtle Channels. Not a properly Oulipian book per se (if we're defining that as having some sort of constraint), Many Subtle Channels is something along the lines of a memoir spliced with literary criticism, reportage, and good old boosterism of a fantastic body of literature. And lastly, I'll toss in Marcel Benabou's strange anti-novel Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books. And then, after the well-known Oulipo and the lesser known, we get to the authors I regard as somehow being in league with Oulipo, but not actually being a part of the collective. Christian Bök, who has taught microbes to make poetry, certainly must be some kind of kin to the Oulipo. I discuss both his Crystallography and Eunoia (the latter consisting of chapters that only utilize one vowel at a time) in The End of Oulipo? I also regard César Aira is having some relevance here for his "constant flight forward," certainly a writing constraint of a kind. For an idea, have a look at his just-translated Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira. There are lots more out there to find, and many beyond that still only readable in French. Beyond Perec's dream journals (which Levin Becker is translating for Melville House), there's Ian Monk's Plouk Town, (raved by Levin Becker and also called "untranslatable" by him -- just the kind of challenge an Oulipian would relish), an anthology of "sequels" to Perec's "Winter Journey" that is currently being translated, and Anne F. Garréta, whom my co-author, Lauren Elkin, recommends should be translated post-haste in The End of Oulipo? For an idea of the riches that await us, have a look at Drunken Boat's Oulipo feature. 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 Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.
Year in Reading
| 8 books mentioned 5 4 min read