A Year in Reading: Ben Lerner

It was a slow year for me as a reader. I’m not sure if it’s because I moved cross-country again, or because I was getting married, or because there were so many pictures of celebrities exposing themselves on the Internet, but I just didn’t get around to reading very many books. I had trouble starting new books, quit several books midstream, which is something I rarely do, and felt bored by the majority of what I read.That isn’t to say that there weren’t a few standouts in the field. Robert Baer’s terrific CIA memoir See No Evil, the first book I read this year, was excellent, in spite of having several key passages blacked out by CIA censors. My main man Somerset Maugham came through again with The Moon and Six Pence, his examination of the choices and sacrifices a man must make to become an artist. And Jesus’ Son, by Denis Johnson, was good enough to make me wonder why I hadn’t read it back when I was living in Iowa City (Also, the edition I bought, which is the only one I’ve seen, fits in my pocket, literally. Isn’t that great? Shouldn’t more books fit in our pockets?).The best book I read in 2006 was Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan examines three different modes of food production and distribution. His critique of industrial agriculture, and its reliance on corn (which he points out is present in nearly everything in the supermarket, including beef, gossip magazines, even the walls of the market itself), is damning if not all that original (many of the points are made in Fast Food Nation), but the rest of the book, which examines organic farming, self-sustaining grass farming, and modern hunter-gathers, is truly eye-opening. He takes Whole Foods to task for their somewhat misleading labeling, spends a week working on a grass farm in Virginia, and cooks a meal entirely from foods that he hunted, gathered, and grew himself. What’s great about Pollan’s writing is his ability to take pages of statistics and endless lists of ingredients and turn them into something that is not only fun to read, but fun to discuss. I can’t remember reading a book that gave me more cocktail party ammunition that the The Omnivore’s Dilemma. While this review on Slate points out some of the flaws in Pollan’s approach, I still highly recommend the book to anyone who is interested in what they eat, and how they’ve come to eat it.Some non-book related best and worsts of the year:Best Movie: Brick (IMDb) It actually came out in 2005, but in 2005 I lived in Iowa, and movies don’t get to Iowa very quickly, so I didn’t see it until 2006. It won’t win any awards, which is surely a mark of its greatness.Worst Movie: Rumor Has It (IMDb) edging out Loverboy (IMDb). Both of these movies left me wondering not only how they got made, but how I was duped into seeing them.Worst Trends: Baseball general managers giving ludicrous contracts to borderline ballplayers. Juan Pierre? Gary Matthews Jr.? I’d be worth more money to a baseball team than either of these two out machines.

Pure by Andrew Miller: In 1785, a young man sits in a cold anteroom in the decrepit and nearly empty palace of Versailles. He was born in a mining town, received an education, and is now an engineer who believes in Voltaire, science, and the virtue of civic works. His fondest hope is to receive a commission to build a bridge. Instead, he is charged with removing the remains from a putrefying Paris cemetery. He is naive. He befriends revolutionary agitators. They appropriate his work as an emblem of the French Revolution — the removal of corruption — and our engineer lives through a time when rationality slides into the madness that will bring on the Terror. There are some missteps in the story. The ways in which the engineer himself succumbs to madness, and recovers, may be too obviously drawn. No book is perfect; but this one comes close for this reader. The writing is exquisite yet (deceptively) simple. The scenes progress cinematically. The narrative pacing draws you along without resorting to tricks. It is the sort of book that makes you want to clear your day of obligations, sit down to read in the morning, break only for lunch and dinner, and come to the final page by sundown.

More from A Year in Reading 2012

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Wells Tower’s short stories and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Washington Post Magazine, and elsewhere. He received two Pushcart Prizes and the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review. He divides his time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Brooklyn, New York. His first collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, will be published in March.Last spring, it started seeming insane that I’d never read Moby Dick, which, naturally, knocked me over. I’d been warned about the unending contemplations of harpoon hawsers, the glutinous curds in the sperm whale’s skull-milk, etc., etc., but I hadn’t braced adequately for the rabid exuberance of Melville’s language. Every sentence is like a maxed-out steam calliope. Melville could herniate himself describing a pencil. Also, he’s hilarious, e.g., that scene where the Pequod’s bearing down on the crippled whale whose maimed rear fin causes the water to bubble, simulating flatus, and Stubb cries, “Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys.”Other books that astounded me included Allan Gurganus’s short story collection White People (which deserves a place alongside the stories of Yates and Cheever for its gorgeously tooled sentences and huge, hurting heart), Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Dusk by James Salter, Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South, Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave, and The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, which reveals E. Pound’s inspired vandalisms against the early versions.More from A Year in Reading 2008

For the past four years, I’ve kept a list of what I’ve read. I don’t have a list of what I plan to read, because I invariably swerve away from my preconceived notion of ‘What I Should Read’ for ‘Hey, This Looks Good,’ which pops up over the course of the year. I do however keep a list of books that I hope to one day read, the kind of books one might find in the canon, and try to pick my way through that when I’m uncertain where to go next.

One of my favorite books from this past year is from that list: Light in August. I somehow managed to go through both my undergraduate and graduate educations without once being assigned William Faulkner. Several years ago, I spent a summer trying to read Faulkner and Nabokov because…well, I’m not sure why I had that idea. It wasn’t a fun a summer. Anyway, I read several Faulkner novels with rigorous determination to understand and appreciate books that, for the most part, I found tedious. Why I picked up Light in August this year, I don’t know. It probably has as much to do with me being more mature than anything, but I was amazed by such a dark, stunning masterpiece of a novel. Set in Yoknapatawpha County in the 1930s, the novel is about race, sex, class, religion, and murder, told in a majestic, lyrical voice. This is the Faulkner readers rave about it, and I feel as if I have discovered it for the first time. I’d argue this is Faulkner’s best novel.

The other book I loved this year was a collection of poetry: The Big Smoke by Adrian Matejka. This finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry is about Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight champion of the world. This collection is a polyphonic narrative — Jack Johnson, of course, but also his first wife, Etta Duryea, and two of his mistresses, Hattie McClay and Belle Schreiber. Jack Johnson’s fights, his training, his violence, his flash and glamour, his love of opera, all of it is on display. Unlike many poetry collections that feel like a loose “best of,” this is a collection far bigger than the greatness of the individual poems.

More from A Year in Reading 2013

Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2012, 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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