A Year in Reading: Emma Straub

Year in Reading
December 3, 2012 | 1 book mentioned 16 2 min read

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covercoverI am very bad at reading books at the right time — if a book is freshly published and sitting face out on a shelf, there is little to no chance that I will read it within the year. I buy it, of course (gotta support the authors and the local bookstores) and then I put it on the stack and make it wait its turn. This year was no exception — most of my favorite reads were either galleys of books that will come out in 2013 or older books that finally made it to the top of the bedside tower. The galleys were books that I blurbed or books that my friends wrote (or both), so perhaps it’s a bit gauche to name them here, but I will anyway. Early 2013 is going to be off the chain: Stuart Nadler’s epic American slam-dunk of a novel, Wise Men; Ariel Djanikian’s scientifically terrifying post-apocalyptic novel The Office of Mercy; Jessica Francis Kane’s crystalline and beautiful new story collection, This Close; Jennifer Gilmore’s achingly sad and moving novel about adoption, The Mothers. And that’s just the first few months of next year.

coverThen there were the books that everyone else had already read and loved: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, which made me swoon over descriptions of baseball, which I otherwise find excruciatingly boring; Tana French’s In the Woods, which made me want to read her entire catalog in a single sitting; Ann Patchett’s The Magician’s Assistant, which made me want to levitate; Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, which made me think twice about petting feral cats in Brooklyn.

covercoverI actually like waiting to read books, because then the hoopla has hooped down the street and the buzz has stopped buzzing and it’s just you and the page in front of you, and then the page after that. Still, even I am occasionally immune to my own rules, and accidentally read a book immediately after purchasing it. This year, I gulped down Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Maggie Shipstead’s Seating Arrangements, and Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins. Each one was precise, skilled, quick-witted, and warm-hearted. Well worth the price of (hardcover) admission and all of the (richly deserved) accolades. Sometimes all that buzz is there for a reason.

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is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Vacationers, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, and Other People We Married. She has 54 books on her To Read pile, and 12 books on her bedside table. More information can be found at www.emmastraub.net.

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Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Alexander Chee

Year in Reading
December 10, 2015 | 1 book mentioned 3 min read

My year in reading was a strange one for me, like only one year previous in my life thus far: I had finished a novel — The Queen of the Night, due out in Feb. 2016 — and so the year was that peculiar kind of annus horribulis, in which you try to keep a lid on your ego and act casual, all while you wait for your novel to appear in stores with all that implies. You dutifully prepare your events, your website, and your life for a period of time that has no certain borders and that will have little relationship either to what you fear or what you desire. And everyone’s advice never changes: start on finding your next project, so you have at least a relationship to it and aren’t caught out by what eventually happens.

To get through this as a writer is a little like splitting into two: one of you heads off into the woods of your own self while the other becomes some public version of you, making its way like a renegade balloon from the Thanksgiving Day Parade that just keeps inflating.

My reading then was both a little like it always is — a mix of books I’m teaching and books I simply wanted to read — but several ideas for what my next book will be were already underway and auditioning for my attention — a mystery novel, a novel I’ve put off writing for nearly two decades, a space opera, and a collection of essays. In order to think about them and to also get my work done, I planned two new classes: one on autobio, as autobiographical fiction is increasingly called, and one on plot. And it is true that I do have a few more answers now than I started the year with, but I also had a lot of fun.

In the first half of the year, I read autobiographical fiction and some nonfiction work that ran along its edges: Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, for example, which I remember suffered by comparison to The Woman Warrior back when I first read it, but which seems to me now a bravura performance in its own right: her attempt to imagine her way into the silences inside the men in her family’s history. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin’s first novel, is still as relevant as ever and as immaculately made — line for line, the prose is a wonder. Colette’s puckish first novel, Claudine at School, was like finding a whole other writer after her later novels, which I already knew. Edmund White’s The Married Man paired beautifully with Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, two very different stories of the personal social cost of trying to hold on to and even love your obsessions (and not just be obsessed with them). And I reread Renata Adler’s Pitch Dark alongside Ben Lerner’s 10:04, and thought about how each portrays a way of transcending the first person while also staying firmly in it.

Once summer began, I dove into Charles D’Ambrosio’s fantastic collection of personal essays and criticism, Loitering, which I read alongside Jan Morris’s majestic metafiction, Hav — a plotless novel written as travel writing of the oldest best kind. It describes her trip to an entirely fictional country, and done with a thoroughness of detail that is so convincing, I am still stunned Hav doesn’t exist.

I then prepared for my plot class with some favorites. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go was as chilling as ever, a way of thinking about the present — and describing it — by inventing a past instead of a future. I loved Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire the more for knowing at last what life is like now as a professor (I hadn’t read it since undergrad). Likewise Toni Morrison’s Sula, which I now think of as a way to describe America through the lives of two women and a single Ohio town. Reading Justin Torres’s We the Animals for structure meant finding the fretwork is actually a spine.

Throughout, I mixed in the new: Like many, I devoured Hanya Yanagihara’s astonishing A Little Life. And then I also read from the more than new, books you can read next year: Garth Greenwell’s breathtaking What Belongs to You, which is a little like if Marguerite Yourcenar returned to us with Bruce Benderson’s obsessions, and Chris Offutt’s new memoir of the secret estate his father left him (and the secrets in it), coming in March — My Father, the Pornographer.

More from A Year in Reading 2015

Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005

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The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews

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Year in Reading
| 1 book mentioned 3 min read
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Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Mickey Hess

Year in Reading
December 21, 2008 | 1 book mentioned 1 2 min read

Mickey Hess is an English professor at Rider University and the author of Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory and a bunch of books about hip hop.The best thing I read in 2008 was Richard Brautigan’s Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel. It is one of my favorite books that begin with a sombrero falling to earth from outer space, and it’s one of those books that makes you feel kind of stupid for not having been reading this author all of your life.With the resurgence of interest in Donald Barthelme, people seem to have forgotten his West Coast contemporary, Richard Brautigan, who was doing similar experiments with prose and form out in California. Or it may not be that people have forgotten to include Brautigan among the pantheon of great 20th-century literary experimenters so much as he never really was included.Brautigan had the mixed luck of becoming a countercultural hero and seeing his fame peak too soon. Someone called him the last of the Beats, and his popularity among the hippies (whom truckers hated) led to truck stops not stocking his novels, which led to the literary establishment thumbing its nose at his stories. This is the way it works.Brautigan’s style of humor, while it made him a star among hippies, did not see the same response from the critics as Bartheleme or Kurt Vonnegut, two other writers whom I’d chisel into my literary Mount Rushmore. Critics, for some reason, seemed to think that Brautigan’s writing was something like jacking off.Brautigan jokes about being a hack in his short story “1/3, 1/3, 1/3,” in which a novelist who can’t write teams up with a typist who can’t type and an editor who can’t spell. The story contains one of the best lines ever in a short story: “You sur like veel cutlets don’t you Maybel said she was holding holding her pensil up her mowth.” It ends with the three of them “sitting there in that rainy trailer, pounding at the gates of American literature.” Man.Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel was published in 1976, simultaneously in Japan and America. Brautigan dedicates the book to Junichiro Tanizaki, and he draws from the terse prose style and short chapters employed by Tanizaki in The Key and Diary of a Mad Old Man. Around this same point in his career, Brautigan wrote novels in a series of different weird genres: a gothic western, an historical romance, and a perverse mystery. They’re all good books, but they don’t all feature sombreros.Sombrero Fallout begins with a sombrero falling from the sky onto the Main Street of a small American town. Then, the very brief chapters alternate between the bizarre story of how the mayor and the townspeople deal with the sombrero (spoiler alert: they kill a librarian), and the heart-wrenching story of an American humorist who has broken up with his Japanese girlfriend, Yukiko.Just as Kurt Vonnegut depicts Kilgore Trout’s gravestone in Breakfast of Champions, Brautigan offers an epitaph for his own alter-ego in Sombrero Fallout. The American humorist was expected to live longer than Brautigan did (he killed himself in 1984, twenty-five years too soon). As 2008 – the year I discovered Richard Brautigan – comes to a close, it seems fitting that he marked this upcoming year as his projected date of death:An American Humorist1934-2009Rest in PeaceHe’s Not Jacking Off AnymoreMore from A Year in Reading 2008

Year in Reading
| 1 book mentioned 1 2 min read
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Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Sarah Weinman

Year in Reading
December 2, 2007 | 1 book mentioned 1 2 min read

Sarah Weinman is the proprietor of Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind. A freelance writer based in New York, she is the Baltimore Sun’s crime fiction columnist and writes “Dark Passages,” a monthly online mystery & suspense column for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. In a parallel life, she has a master’s degree in forensic science and still harbours faint hopes of actually making use of it.Here are a few books that particularly struck my fancy in 2007:1. Bloodbrothers, by Richard Price – I’m on a bit of a Price kick this year so I can get his entire backlist read by the time his new book comes out, and this, his second novel, is really something special. I totally empathized with Stony’s attempts to make something of himself and get out of his Bronx life, yet still very much tied to the neighborhood and to his family.2. 12:23 by Eoin McNamee – sure, it’s about the death of Princess Diana, but it’s more about the burnt-out spooks and mystery makers descending upon Paris leading up to the crash. If Graham Greene had lived to write about the death of Di, this would have been the result.3. Farthing by Jo Walton – I loved the sequel, Ha’ Penny, but I suggest everyone pick this up first – how does a traditional mystery mask an astounding alternate history that could be true if not for a couple of history’s fate twists? I still don’t know, but Walton clearly does.4. The Late George Apley, by John P. Marquand – Several friends have been after me to read his work, and I tracked this down and loved it. The satire is gentle yet devastating, as is the portrait of family mistakes repeating themselves with often emotionally tragic consequences.5. The White Bone, by Barbara Gowdy – she creates great characters out of a herd of elephants. Enough said.More from A Year in Reading 2007

Year in Reading
| 1 book mentioned 1 2 min read
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16 comments:

  1. The Art of Fielding is inexplicably mediocre. How I got snookered into reading it just goes to show how brilliant the people in marketing can be sometimes. Anyone who drops that book as one of their favorites has ensured that I will never ever read a book they have written, because if they think that is the best American literature has to offer, their credibility is close to nil. And looking at the rest of her choices, Emma Straub seems to be a big fan of Comfort Fiction. I assume that’s what she writes too.

  2. @ Hubert: I thought The Art of Fielding was mediocre as well (though I’m not sure about “inexplicably” so), but your comment seems a pretty irrational way to judge someone else’s work. Considering Straub and Harbach both live in Brooklyn, this may just be a bit of back-scratching and nothing more.

  3. to Hubert Hubert:

    or, perhaps, the fact that so many people see something in a book that you don’t suggests there are things you are missing or don’t respond to. To reject a writer’s book because that writer likes a book you didn’t assumes that you are a perfect reader and the writer in question can only appreciate books written like the ones she writes.

    i only bother to post this because i am so tired of this kind of aggressive “My posts are better than your book” posts, especially ones predicated on meaningless self-indicting drivel such as the phrase “inexplicably mediocre.”

    And sure those books by Paula Fox, Ann Patchett and Tana French sit easily together in a single genre called, with a sneer, “Comfort Fiction.” If there is anyone comfortably satisfied with themselves here, it’s . . . .

  4. If this is a case of “back-scratching” it’s all the more worthy of our scorn.

    Capybara – your suggestion that a large group of people seeing something in the book is somehow correlative to the quality of the work is so nonsensical I won’t even bother to mention the obviously ridiculous conclusions to be drawn from that statement.

  5. Hi Emma, I envie you your job reading many books and then writing about them.
    Anyway, how could I get you to do a preview on my new novel coming out next spring, or maybe summer.
    Johanna van Zanten

  6. Emma likes the book she likes. You like the books you like. The end. And Emma ain’t no backscratcher. She is a reader!

  7. Edan – If that’s the case why don’t you guys go ahead and disable the comments function on the site. She likes what she likes, you like what you like, I like what I like, the end. Apparently no need for comments.

  8. Drew,

    That was exactly Edan’s point, no way about it. Edan’s point wasn’t to brush off two people who feel the need to crash in and post unproductive, cynical comments that themselves were denying the openness of taste. It couldn’t have been that, could it?

    Edan pushed back against the baseless accusation that Straub discussed liking a book simply because she was hoping a favor in return, which itself was prompted by the rude accusation that Straub must be a terrible writer if she liked a book that Hubert Sorrentino didn’t like. A lot of wonderful dialouge to preserve there.

  9. Dear Christopher Sorrentino and other sock puppet commenters: Don’t you have better things to do with your time, like write novels or mediocre books about DEATH WISH or something? Oh wait…

    Emma: Thanks for sharing your list.

  11. Man, I’m getting major douche chills from some of these comments, and awesome chills from others. I think we all know who I mean. GO EMMA!!!

  12. Edward, what makes you think that is Christopher Sorrentino posting? Why would he call himself Hubert?

    (Great list, Emma! Beautiful Ruins is on my list, too.)

  13. Yes, Emma likes the books she likes…91% of them just happen to be written by Americans and a disproportionate number are written by white graduates of MFA factories.

    Jack indicated that judging a writer by their taste in literature is “irrational,” and I disagree–I think it’s perfectly reasonable to avoid writers with such narrow interests that are confined to the incestuous MFA community. Why should I expect their work to be any different?

  15. Well, I never knew so many of the books I enjoy were considered ‘comfort fiction.’ There are so many books that appeal to me here, that means i MUST be going to like Emma Straub’s book? And she MUST be going to like mine. Because i write comfort fiction too. Oh, but no, that won’t happen because I’m not American and I don’t have an MFA. Too bad.

  16. Pingback: We Made It! « The Card Catalog

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Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Adam Levin

Year in Reading
December 15, 2010 | 1 book mentioned 9 2 min read

Like any number of people who love fiction, I tend to re-read my favorite books. It is not, however, common for me to read the same book twice in one year, and yet this year I’ve read two books twice—Christian TeBordo’s The Awful Possibilities and Adam Novy’s The Avian Gospels. I want to say that these books remind a reader that his life is fleeting, that he’ll be separated from everything he loves pretty soon, that he’ll disappear forever and rot and be forgotten, but I worry that might sound like overstatement (if not—ick—oversharement), or, even worse, that it might lead you, the Millions visitor, fellow lover of fiction, to assume the books are unfun reads, when, in fact, they are playful and joy-bringing. What reminds you you’ll die is their in-your-face aliveness, their assured immortality.

Novy’s The Avian Gospels is a novel in two short volumes about a foreign boy in an unnamed city-state that borders Hungary and Oklahoma. The city-state is run by a despot, its local Gypsies invent first- and second-wave ska, the boy falls in love with the despot’s daughter, and when a plague of birds descends upon all of them, only the boy and his father (who are much at odds) can protect the city-state from total destruction, for the boy and his father can both control birds. Just to be clear: the foregoing two sentences contain no spoilers. All I’ve described is in play by page 20. Did I mention this novel’s really funny? It’s funny in the way Blood Meridian is funny, and American Tabloid, and In the Penal Colony.

The only kind of book that’s harder for me to describe than a good collection of short stories, is a great collection of short stories, and Christian TeBordo’s The Awful Possibilities is a great collection of short stories. As in Wallace’s Girl With Curious Hair, Salinger’s Nine Stories, and Hannah’s Airships, the subject matter in The Awful Possibilities varies widely, piece to piece. There’s the story about the girl who’s kidnapped by kidney thieves, the one about suburban hardcore rappers, the motivational-speaker-who-needs-a-new-wallet story, and the set of instructions for abusing your child that’s told by….See? It’s hard. I’m having a hard time. I’m doing TeBordo’s work very little justice—about as much justice as I’d be doing Mark Twain’s if, in summarizing Huckleberry Finn, I said no more than, “It’s a book about this kid.” I’m thinking that the only hope I have of even beginning to get across how stellar the experience of reading The Awful Possibilities is, is to give you the beginning of The Awful Possibilities, then get out of the way and say goodnight:
Imagine you’re planning your own school shooting. Imagine you have good reasons, and it’s none of that I-play-too-many-video-games-and-listen-to-Marilyn-Manson-because-no-one-likes-me bullshit. You’re in tenth grade and you do okay in classes and you’ve got plenty of friends for what it’s worth but it’s not worth much to you. You live in Brooklyn. Brooklyn, Iowa. There are no Jews in Brooklyn, Iowa. Keep that in mind.
Goodnight.

More from a Year in Reading 2010

Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 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

Year in Reading
| 1 book mentioned 9 2 min read
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