At the beginning of the year, I made a resolution that I hoped would help me to curtail my online reading habits, which I felt were getting out of control. It wasn’t necessarily that I was spending too much time online, it was more that I felt like the Internet was leading me around by the nose. I would go online with the intent of reading a particular writer or article and my attention would be dragged into various micro-feuds — micro because they existed only within a particular community, feuds because there was a level of passion that gave everything an operatic edge. The drama was fascinating and not without value, but it was also exhausting. More importantly, I never ended up reading what I wanted to read.
I considered banning certain websites, but decided that approach was too broad. Instead, I resolved to stop reading criticism and blog posts that were written in reaction to someone else’s criticism. The only criticism I would read would be pieces that were directly tied to a primary source, such as a book, film, museum exhibition, television show, etc. No more re-caps, round-ups, or lists. Likewise, I would avoid op-ed pieces and news analysis. I was sick of having to hack through two or three layers of commentary and interpretation before I got to the actual thing or event or person that existed in the world.
I wasn’t sure if this new reading diet would actually help with my distraction problem, so I was kind of embarrassed to discover, in the first weeks, that over half of what I typically clicked on fell into this category. I started to read more things on paper because it was easier than navigating the short-term headlines.
As it turns out, paging through a magazine is a lot more relaxing than going from thing to thing online, and it’s also a pretty effective way to find new things to read. One writer I discovered on paper is the critic Tim Parks. I’m sure I’ve read Parks’s criticism before this year, but there is reading criticism and reading a critic, and Parks became someone I had to follow after I read his review of Peter Matthiesen’s In Paradise in The New York Review of Books. Something about this review struck me as deeply felt, but also very clear and easy, the distillation of many hours of thought. I started to look out for Parks’s reviews and I also began to follow his posts on the NYRB blog.
Ironically, Parks’s blog posts became more important to me than his print reviews. I reread many of them while working on this post, because Parks is very interested in the question of how and what we read in the age of the Internet, when there are oh-so-many interesting things to read. More broadly, Parks is curious about the way that globalization and the number of online outlets are affecting how fiction is written and constructed, and what pressures this new, global audience and delivery system are putting on literary writing in general and the novel in particular. This is a question he touches upon in many of his blog posts but faces head-on in “Reading: The Struggle,” an essay about just how hard it is to find time to read books. Parks is old enough to remember a time when his workday was interrupted just once, by the mailman — an event he neurotically anticipated, but was nevertheless able to put out of his mind after the mail’s arrival. While Parks doesn’t lament the advent of email, he notes that we are living in a time when “every moment of serious reading has to be fought for, planned for.” And, at the same time, he observes we are living in an era when readers seem to relish long, densely plotted books, fantasy trilogies, and a return to the kind of episodic, repetitive storytelling many reviewers favorably liken to 19-century authors like George Eliot and Charles Dickens. But contemporary novels, Parks argues, are quite different from their forebears: “There is a battering ram quality to the contemporary novel, an insistence and repetition that perhaps permits the reader to hang in despite the frequent interruptions to which most ordinary readers leave themselves open.”
When I read that, I thought, yes, that is exactly how I feel when faced with the prospect of reading The Goldfinch or The Luminaries, novels that I have been told are wonderfully entertaining and intelligent, but which are so long, and so virtuosic, that I can’t help feeling cowed by them. Suspend your disbelief! they seem to say. Do it now!
It’s also how I feel, a little, about Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, which Parks includes on his list of exceptionally long contemporary novels. I loved reading Knausgaard, but looking back on the experience I feel as if the books were somewhat manic, as if a crazy old friend came to visit for two weeks, got drunk every night and talked nonstop about himself, and then left. My friend Maura read the books at the same time and we sent each another Knausgaard-length texts, trying to figure out why we were so fascinated by this overly long, repetitive, and sometimes quite inelegantly constructed narrative. Maura felt it was written in reaction to the blogosphere, as if Knausgaard was racing against the never-ending outpouring of confession, information, and analysis. I felt it was written in reaction to parenthood, to the feeling of really stupid things shaping your time and therefore your work, things like laundry and shopping lists and yes, online chatter.
The opposite of a battering ram novel is what Parks describes as “the novel of elegant, highly distinct prose, of conceptual delicacy and syntactical complexity.” He predicts that in the Internet and smartphone age, this type of novel “will tend to divide itself up into shorter and shorter sections, offering more frequent pauses where we can take time out.”
When I read that, I immediately thought of Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, which mines many of the same themes as Knausgaard, but does so in short, carefully pruned paragraphs, sometimes consisting of just one sentence. You get the sense, as with Knausgaard, that Offill was pressed for time when she wrote it, but instead of furiously filling up as many pages as possible, she just tried to write down one or two good sentences on index cards. Both approaches, strangely, were riveting in the same way — I couldn’t put down Offill’s book any more easily than Knausgaard’s. And both books were the ones that I returned to the most, throughout the year, in thought and in conversation.
This post was supposed to be on the short side, and I’ve already past 1,000 words. Obviously, my writing style leans toward Knausgaard. I’m also aware that this post is exactly the kind of writing I tried all year to avoid: Here I am, piling onto another writer’s already excellent criticism and observations. Please relish my hypocrisies. The truth is that I did not keep up my peculiar info-fast for the entire year. I blame Ann Friedman, whose weekly email newsletter pulled me back into the fray, pointing me to all the articles, blog posts, and debates that I might be interested in following. (She recommends books, too.) The best thing about her newsletter is that it arrives on Friday afternoons, so in theory, I could just skip a lot of my aimless browsing during the week and wait for Ann to point the way. I think I did that maybe twice this year — and one of those weeks I was on vacation. So now you know what next year’s New Year’s Resolution will be.
Last year, I ended my year in reading with a nod to the book I read most often to my son, so I’ll attempt to begin a tradition and share this year’s book: The Cat In The Hat by Dr. Suess. Have you read this book lately? It’s perfect. I can honestly say I never tire of reading it out loud — and I read it a potentially tiring number of times. The rhymes are simple and addictive and will make you love the English language. If I were a writing teacher, I would assign it to my students. One sentence in particular stuck with me, it’s kind of the perfect slogan for how to deal with the huge variety of material on the internet, or maybe just the animated GIFS: “It is fun to have fun / but you have to know how.”
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
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I kept a reading journal for the first time this year and I highly recommend it. It’s humbling for one (that’s all I read?), inspiring (read more!), and clarifying (choose well). That said, it was a pretty great year reading-wise. I read David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green twice, re-read Turgenev’s First Love, William Gass’ On Being Blue, and Don DeLillo’s End Zone, and I highly recommend them all. With everything going on with the Penn State scandal, Margaux Fragoso’s harrowing memoir of sexual abuse, Tiger, Tiger is both timely and even more devastating. I finally read Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides and thought it was terrific. I took Ann Patchett’s advice at the opening of Parnassus, her independent bookstore in Nashville, and bought Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, devouring it in a single sitting. I had so much fun reading The Stories of John Cheever in conjunction with The Journals of John Cheever that I read Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March in tandem with his Letters, which includes a wonderful introduction by its editor, Benjamin Taylor. J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace — my first experience with his work — was riveting, appalling, and beautiful. Jim Shepard’s story collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway was so wide-reaching, variegated, and emotionally precise I felt like I’d read a collection of micro-novels.
Still, of all the books I read, only Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian took over my world, and by that I mean I had that rare experience, while immersed in it, of seeing reality through its lens whenever I put it down and in the days after I finished it. Ostensibly it’s about a band of Indian hunters run amok along the Texas-Mexico border in the mid-nineteenth century but really it’s about how man’s natural state is warfare. You can buy that bill of goods or not but like McCarthy’s greatest works (Suttree, The Crossing) it’s written in his inimitable style, that fusion of The Book of Isaiah, Herman Melville, and Faulkner (though he’s more precise than the latter, more desolate and corporeal than Moby Dick’s author; whether his prophetic powers are on par with his artistry remains to be seen), a voice which is all his own, of course, and has an amplitude I’ve encountered only in, what, DeLillo at his most ecstatic? Murakami at his most unreal? Bellow in Augie March or Herzog? Alice Munro in The Progress of Love? John Hawkes in The Lime Twig? Read it if you read anything this coming year and note: a bonus to the experience is that you’ll add at least two hundred words to your lexicon.
Yes, Blood Meridian is incredible but for me, Suttree is even more accomplished. Reading Suttree was a humbling experience, as I knew I was in the presence of literary greatness. Read both, but not back to back – you will need to rest your mind for a while in between.
@Jack M: Yes, I had the EXACT same experience reading Suttree. It’s certainly not as bleak as BM and like DeLillo in End Zone or The Names, really, really funny.
Blood Meridian and Suttree are two of my favorite books of all time. I think that McCathy has accomplished something rare with these two books. I compare it to holding a wolf by the the ears: he has hold of something very powerful, and potentially destructive, if he lets go. Annie Dillard discussed this in Living by Fiction, with her examples being, from what I remember, Moby-Dick and King Lear: epistemological tools by which the artist explores the universe (I don’t have the book in front of me, so I don’t have the exact quote). I was still experiencing the energy for several days, maybe weeks, after finishing these books.
I’m happy to see you mention McCarthy’s sense of humor as well. Suttree definitely has moments of great comedy. And it also on display in All the Pretty Horses, as well. He also has a great sense of compassion, displayed in All the Pretty Horses, as well as the much earlier Outer Dark.
Blood Meridian stayed with me so long after I read it, that I obsessively sought out any bit of literary criticism I could find on it (Harold Bloom loves that book). And then I went back and read all of McCarthy’s dark works, skipping the trilogy. Highly recommended, and one of my favorite books of all time.
@elle: Well, read The Border Trilogy, for The Crossing if nothing else.
I absolutely love Mcarthy. The Crossing was my first and, though many will disagree, The Road is my favorite. Of all his books, that was the one that haunted me for months after.
I intend to take on this “reading journal” challenge for next year. Thanks for a great article and recommendations.
Agreed, I was glad to see the oft-ignored Crossing paired with Suttree and Blood Meridian. The Crossing is less ambitious than the other two, but it is still one of the most powerful and effective novels I’ve ever read.
McCarthy is my favourite author by a long shot. The first novel of his I read was The Road which, to this day, sends chills down my spine just thinking about some of the desolate and horrible imagery. Of the border trilogy, The Crossing is by far the strongest, beastly yet beautiful. Currently I am almost finished Blood Meridian and must say that the power of the novel nearly took me off my feet and I must add that, in my opinion, the judge is McCarthy’ s most memorable character, even more so than Anton Chigurh. Sutree is next on my list, no doubt it won’t disappoint. McCarthy is truly a literary force to be reckoned with, he has changed the way I look at novels forever and sets a very high standard.
Re last comment: enjoy suttree, my favorite cm work. Only 2 i havent read r orchard keeper and outer dark. Love ncfom, the road, bm- but suttree resonates. Hilarious, tragic, gritty, psychadelic, vivid- i have read it twice and will read it again soon. To quote: ” the crimes of the moonlight melon mounter followed him, as crimes will”
I began keeping a reading journal when I retired three and a half years ago (at 47) and moved to Colorado (primarily so that I would have more time to read).
This entry of a Year in Reading by Mr. Ross caused me to go back over my journal to review the books I read in 2011 and, coincidentally, the contemporary novel I liked best in ’11 was Mr Ross’s Mr. Peanut. For those of you who haven’t read it, do yourself a BIG favor and get it. The story is fiendishly clever, the prose vivid and razor sharp, as he conjures a slightly unreal reality inhabited by his characters. After I finished the book in July, I went around recommending it to everyone I know who is a reader.
I’d also recommend Jim Shepard’s more recent collection, “You Think That’s Bad” which in some ways is even richer than the collection mentioned.
I liked all of these suggestions, having read many of them. Would probably consider the Mitchell now, though I was put off by his earlier forays. Exception: If you haven’t read “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet” you might best run to your favorite brick and mortar now and pick it up.
Also, anyone interested wouldn’t go wrong reading Adam Ross’s “Ladies and Gentlemen” which came out this year. Great stuff.