Another year passes with the reading of 20 more books. It was a good year, literarily speaking, for
me, as I benefitted significantly from many of these reads. For those looking to find some new things to
read, below are reviews of what I have read:
Top picks:
1) Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell: Six stories unfold
in different time periods that turn out to be linked in certain ways. Each story stands pretty well on its own, and
they are radically different in perspective/point of view, subject matter, and
style while also maintaining the common threads necessary for them to work as
one novel. The structure is unique in
that each story stops halfway through when the next story starts. The 6th story is told all the way
through and then you proceed to finish each previous story in reverse order so
that the order is 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th,
5th, 6th, 5th, 4th, 3rd,
2nd, 1st. My
favorites were stories 2 and 5 about a down-and-out orchestral composer and a
clone-slave of the future McDonalds, respectively
2) What is the What by Dave Eggers: The true story of
a Sudanese refugee told from his perspective and recorded by the author. The story goes back and forth between the
main character’s present day life in America and his history beginning with
childhood in a peaceful village then continuing through many experiences of
violence and slow, confused, terrified on-foot travel through Sudan, Ethiopia,
and Kenya. Lots of dark stuff, but made
bearable by moments of humor and the understanding that this is a unique and
often marginalized experience worth learning about.
Those were my favorite two reads, but there were many other
good ones and worthwhile ones as well.
Below are descriptions of the other 18 books I read this year:
3) White Noise by Don DeLillo: Semi-apocalyptic story
taking a semi-satirical look at things like pop culture and modern
communications while the main character and his family attempt to survive the
sudden appearance of a giant toxic cloud in their home town.
4) Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale
Hurston: This was the first time I had to teach a book I had not before read on
my own, so it was interesting to read it as a teacher thinking about how to
teach it. This made me really appreciate
the poetic language often used to describe the lives of southern black migrant
workers in the early 1900s. There are
lots of cool archetypes and symbolic meanings present. There’s a lot of dialect used which can
sometimes be difficult to understand but can also be fun to read, especially
out loud.
5) Pulp Head by John Jeremiah Sullivan: a collection
of essays on various topics. My
favorites were “Upon This Rock” about modern day Christianity, told as the
writer attends a Christian rock festival, and “Violence of the Lambs” about a
theory that animals of all species are becoming more aggressive over time in
response to humanity’s increasing expansiveness.
6) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: a re-read
for me, this is of course the tale of Jay Gatsby, a mysterious man striving to
obtain and maintain the ideal of the American Dream while also chasing his own
personal dream of love for Daisy, who is married to another man. A fairly simple read that takes a good look
at things like class, status, dreams, power, and gender roles in a way that is
still relevant almost 100 years later.
7) Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges: originally written
in Spanish, this is a highly literary and cerebral collection of stories and
essays (and sometimes a weird mixture of the two) that felt very existential
and meta-fictional to me. Examples of subject matter include a guy who
believes he is interacting with his own ghost, a guy who becomes more
interested in a dream world than the real world, and a universe organized into
a library.
8) Oblivion by David Foster Wallace: another
collection of stories that are very cerebral.
Wallace likes to experiment a lot with language and perspective, so if
you enjoy experiments in language you will enjoy him. My favorites were “The Soul is Not a Smithy”
about a child who daydreams during class and fails to notice as his teacher
becomes possessed, and “Good Old Neon” which is a man’s account of his life as
a fraud and his inability to change this aspect of himself because he believes
everything he does including the telling of this story to be fraudulent in that
it is only designed to get people to respect and admire him.
9) The Time Machine by H.G. Wells: classic science
fiction tale about a man who goes to the future in a time machine and finds
that humanity has evolved into two distinct and new species.
10) The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells: one of
the best examples of a case in which a good book was made into a horrendous
movie, this is the tale of a man stranded on a strange island inhabited by two
men doing experiments in surgically creating sentient man-animal combinations.
11) The Rules of Influence by William D Crano: A
fairly simple and useful look at the means by which people influence one another
with a specific focus on how minorities (here defined as anyone whose either
status or opinion is not shared by most) can have an effect upon the larger
society of which they are apart. Worth
reading, but some parts feel overly repetitive in a way that made me feel the
book could have been just as good maybe even better if it were shorter.
12) The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen
Chbosky: a re-read for me. One of those
rare delights when both the book and the movie are well done. The book is the story of a high school
freshman with some emotional problems experiencing the joys and difficulties of
adolescence, specifically the struggle to belong and the joys of
friendship.
13) How They See Us by various authors: a 2004
collection of essays written by non-American writers about how people of their
countries view the USA. Some are
positive, some are negative, but most are fair, well-balanced arguments.
14) The Stranger by Albert Camus: the story of a man
who seems to go through life experiences without much emotional feeling. Such experiences include his mother’s death
and a murder he commits. I am convinced
that the main character has something like Asperger’s syndrome, but it is
unclear whether this could have been the author’s intention, as it was written
before Asperger’s was a diagnosis.
15) Wild Swans by Jung Chang: the true story of 3
generations of Chinese women that reads like part story, part memoir, part
history. It takes place from about
1920-1970 and focuses mostly on the reign of Mao Zedong through the perspective
of the lives of the people affected by his rule. Very informative, but largely filled with unjustified
struggle, which makes for a fairly slow read.
16) The Giver by Lois Lowry: the story of a society
in which everyone’s role is assigned to them by their society. The main character is assigned the role of
Receiver, whose job it is to remember all of the things that the rest of the
absurdly communist society has chosen to forget. This includes experiences of both intense
beauty and intense pain.
17) Travelling Mercies by Anne Lamott: memoirs of a
Christian woman’s imperfect journey toward and through faith that focuses more
on her social relationships with friends and with her son than on anything else. In other words it is a look at how imperfect
yet beautiful people can be, and how one views the people important to them
alongside and in the context of a faith that’s important to them.
18) The Book Thief by Markus Zusak: a WW2 era story
focused on an adopted German girl living in a household that is hiding a Jewish
fighter in the basement. The most
interesting part of the story for me was that it was narrated by Death, which
was unique in that it is a rare 1st person omniscient narrator,
something I once tried and failed to accomplish fully in my own writing.
19) Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom: memoirs of
the time the author spends with his former professor during the last months of
said professor’s life. It’s a very quick read
and covers the valuable subject matter of what is and is not important in life.
20) House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III: the
story of three people all at the end of their rope trying to turn their lives
around but getting in each other’s way.
The cool thing about this story is that it accomplishes the creation of
character conflict without creating any villains. These are all realistic people having
realistic problems, and you can understand each of their perspectives, but
their failure to understand each other is what drives the conflict rather than
any sort of bad intention or evil.
That’s it for this year.
Happy 2015 everybody, and happy reading.
