Blog : Year One

It's been just about a year since I started keeping this blog. One year!

I read 37 books this year, which is 1 book every 9.87 days, or 3.08 books every month. Following are more reading metrics for the year. (Snore. Whatever.)

The Writing Life and Brief Interviews

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard


I would read a book where Annie Dillard describes folding laundry. A book about a life spent writing is not too far off that extreme. I read this book on a train ride from Portland to Seattle, and the slim volume was kind of perfect for the short trip.

If you've never read anything by Dillard, you should. You should go read a book she wrote called  A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, for which she won a Pulitzer. I think of her as a nature writer, though probably she would resent it. She's written memoir, mostly, and some essays, and a couple of novels. She's very poetic, and deeply connected to both the line on the page and to the natural environment. I realize that isn't very descriptive. Mostly, her books are nonfiction narratives about the sense of wonder &c that can come from nature and from life.

This is a very good book! Like all her books, it reminds me of a book of poems in that it begs to be revisited and is worth taking time to really chew on the lines. Here is a quote that might easily have become the rally cry of this blog (I did know it before I actually read the book) if it were as easy to turn into a title as Calvino's line:

“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.” 

I've read a handful of books about writing. This is probably my fav. Dillard is poetic, but also frank about the boring, un-glamorous and un-romantic daily reality of working on a craft. Thumbs up! Very like!

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace


Literary young men my age all have a major crush on David Foster Wallace. Dude is just so smart! Also painfully self aware and kind of generous with himself. Go watch this interview with him and Charlie Rose. I'm very slowly making my way through his monstrous Infinite Jest, and when I finish it and make a post several months from now, I'll maybe talk more about DFW's (as his homies call him) appeal as a figure.

But this book is a collection of short stories. Or if not "stories" exactly, it's a collection of formal exercises: several fictional interviews with hideous men, a series of eight narratives framed as pop quizzes, a few stories called "Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders," page-long footnotes, and very few paragraph breaks.

A quick browse might put a reader off of this book. It's too clever, too formally experimental, too concerned with the way that people ramble in everyday speech. But Wallace is a very good writer, and I doubt that anyone is as aware of his ability to push the boundaries of obnoxiousness as he was. The stories and the writing remind me of the bounds that a novice writer imagines pushing ("What if I wrote a story that was kind of just, like, you know, an interview, but without the questions--just the way that people really talk, you know?") but abandons. Sometimes this makes the stories seem almost childish? But it's usually pretty nice to read.

And taking the time to parse the difficult language reveals a very human writer. Some of the pieces are really brilliant, some are very opaque, lots are in between. They're gloomy and dark, but moving. Worthwhile. You can listen to Wallace read several of the stories on YouTube.

The Art of Fielding, Etc

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach


Little Brown bought this book (a first novel) with a $650,000 advance. Harbach was offered more, but ultimately accepted the offer from LB because Michael Pietsch, Executive VP and one-time-editor of David Foster Wallace, offered to personally edit the book. Which, just... whoa, you guys.

The book is about an extremely good shortstop on a college baseball team. It's also about the president of that college, his daughter, some other players. Henry (the shortstop) begins to over-analyze and then lose his talent, the president finds himself in an unexpected relationship with one of the students... Etc!

This is a good book, and I'm glad I read it. It's a big social novel in the style of John Irving--super accessible writing, a good balance of seriousness and fun (with slightly more emphasis on the fun), a big cast of characters, and a fairly complicated story. It's the kind of book you can enjoy if you just want to be entertained, if that's your deal, and it's also the kind of book you can spend a little more time with and ferret out thematic and stylistic statements.

Not that I did, obvi. One thought though: it seemed to me that the book was more interested in the college years of a person's life (though not exactly the college experience itself) than it was interested in baseball. The ending in particular seems to suggest the importance of that weird time between being a kid and being a real adult. Which disappointed me a little?

And the book also ended up feeling a little insubstantial to me. Not bad, just thin. Where Franzen, for example, saturates the reader in the inner lives of his characters, the characters here often felt distant to me. In some novels, the characters' actions end up seeming inevitable you get to know them so well, but there were more than a few instances here where I don't know if I could fully explain why Character X did this or that.

And that's fine. It's a good story, a really good story. And the writing has momentum and poetry. But novels are best when they let us feel the inside of someone's mind, and I very rarely got a sense of that here. So, good stuff, just not--at least not for me, at least not now--anything transcendental.

Still: mucho luv!

******

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer


I probably read this book when I was in middle school, because I remember it being popular, but I don't know for sure. It's the true story of a disaster on Mt. Everest in the 90s wherein several climbers died, written by a journalist who was present. The last third of the book deals with the disaster itself, and as emotional as that stuff gets (it is genuinely sad at times), I didn't find it as compelling as the earlier chapters about mountaineering in general.

I know enough about Krakauer to know he takes his work seriously and that he wouldn't put anything in print that he hadn't qraudruple-checked. My impression was that he wrote the book because wanted to understand what happened up there on the summit. But I'm not sure there was any person or idea or situation to blame, and I'm not sure there really is anything to learn from the situation except that for small reasons and big reasons sometimes bad things happen and people die who don't deserve to.

The first section of the book, which describes the culture and history of mountaineering, was much more interesting to me, and reminded me a lot of Born to Run, which I enjoyed a lot. There's probably something to say about the fact that some sports seem lend themselves to introspection and reflection and good books, where others seem not to.

Horoscopes for the Dead by Billy Collins


This is my favorite Collins collection, I think. It's less cute and less winking than some of his other stuff, though there are still moments of playfulness. It's also really long! Lots of poems! Collins is getting older, and, as the title suggests, this new book focuses a lot on death. The opening poem, for example, begins with a narrator standing at his parents' grave, asking them if they like his new glasses. Some of my other favorite moments: a poem where he sits and divides a landscape into those things which were there 500 years before (sky, water, the wind through the grass), and those which weren't (houses, boats, himself), and a second poem where he notices the empty chairs that we all seem to have on our front porch and imagines a day when everyone comes out and sits in the chairs they probably thought they would use more often.

Everything and Nothing by Jorge Luis Borges


A very small collection of essays, stories and lectures. I'll need to revisit Borges some other time, because I did not especially enjoy these pieces. The stories are not really stories, in the traditional sense. Things don't really... happen in them. They are descriptions of situations, mainly. Which is fine! But I didn't take the time to settle into their rhythm and logic, and so they mostly felt strange and thick. The essays were more interesting. I can admire his playfulness, his imagination, and the breadth of his reading... but admiration isn't the same thing as appreciation, and I was glad to speed through these and move on. Better luck next time, Jorge!