Category — Books

‘It’s more like, if you can think of times in your life what you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they are valuable as human beings. The ability to do that to ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it’ – David Foster Wallace to David Lispky in Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace.

Since 2008, I’ve been keeping a list of every book I’ve read. The lists for 2009 and 2010 are here and here. This year I did substantially less reading and for that I blame the Internet and my now vanquished concentration span.

Nevertheless, I read some really fantastic books this year (and a few really bad ones), and here is my 2011 list:

The complete list:

My favourite place.

It’s like a relationship. We’ve been together since I was four, we’ve moved houses, cities and even states together, but this year I am finding it frustrating. I can’t concentrate, it’s taking me a long time to finish books, I’m casting a book aside to take up reading a different one, only to cast that aside to take up reading yet another one.

At the moment I’m stuck in Infinite Jest. Hell, I’ve been stuck for months in this book, it seems to get longer the more I read. It’s a captivating, stimulating, deeply unsettling, frustrating book. It’s got imagery I never really wanted to picture, juxtaposed with characters I really care about and a conclusion I can’t even imagine yet.

I am determined to break my reading impasse. I’m spending this whole, glorious upcoming long weekend (when I’m not seeing Film Festival stuff, or planning the last two stops of my trip, or eating pho) with an old favourite, to see if I can’t make some headway.

I’m going to let some Helen Garner wash over me and have Monkey Grip, The First Stone and Joe Cinque’s Consolation lined up and waiting. If she can’t help me, no-one can.

The Great Shark Hunt – Hunter S Thompson
Generation of Swine – Hunter S Thompson
Songs of the Doomed - Hunter S Thompson
Better Than Sex - Hunter S Thompson

These four books make up Thompson’s Gonzo Papers, which I guess could be loosely summed up as collections of his writing from several different decades, most of which is closer to the standard definition of straight journalism, more Hell’s Angels than Fear and Loathing. 

This was the first time I read them all back-to-back. Reading a lot of his work made me realise that for such a long career, his output was actually quite small (the Papers are fleshed out with extracts from Hell’s Angels, The Rum Diaries and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and while the ingestion of enough chemicals to kill a lesser man certainly added to some of his writing, towards the latter part of his career, I think it adversely affected both the quality and quantity of what he wrote. It says a lot that I’d still prefer to read his later work more than anything by almost any other author.

I find it hard to write about why I like his style so much. There are just sentences that pierce me.

For anyone who asks about him, I usually recommend The Great Shark Hunt. It’s a wide collection of his writing, some sports, mostly political and the perfect example of why he should never be written off as a drug nut who just happened to write Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Happy Birthday Jack Nicholson - Hunter S Thompson

A few years ago Penguin released small books, mostly extracts I think, like small tasting plates to condition you for certain authors and this was one of them.

All you need to know about Happy Birthday Jack Nicholson is that one night Hunter thought it would be a good idea to deliver an elk heart to Jack Nicholson’s doorstep. He also had a flare gun. And a loud recording of some screams. Happy Birthday Jack Nicholson is about what happened next. 

Bossypants - Tina Fey

I love Tina Fey because I love people who can laugh at themselves. I have no problem telling you that I keep my cereal next to my cat’s biscuits even though the boxes are the same colour and that I’ve accidentally had a breakfast of cat biscuits before. Why? Because the world is a shitty place and people do horrible things to one another all the time and I’d prefer to spend the vast majority of my life laughing with you about your weirdness or my weirdness than being horrible.

Suddenly shit got serious and this was all about my philosophy on life.

Ahem.

Bossypants is for the most part really interesting. I didn’t know much about how Fey started out and there’s a bunch of cute anecdotes about her family and friends and it confirmed for me that she’s the sassy best friend I want to have who will shut the shit down with a zing!

Probably my only beef with it is that it gets wrapped up really quickly kinda like ‘And that’s why you should never ask a woman when she’s going to have kids. Thanks, bye’. David Sedaris is the master of letting a funny story take you on a walk and then bringing it back to where it began and finising  it with a compelling aha! moment. That’s the only thing I wished for a little more of here.

And so those are the books I read in the first third of the year*!

* I am not David Sedaris.

The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson

I liked this book, as much as you can like being inside the head of a psychopath about to self-destruct. Thompson seems to make it real so easily, a bit like Cormac McCarthy, a broad picture is somehow painted using very little excess of words or descriptions.

I made the mistake of watching the movie right after I read the book. I thought Casey Affleck was cast well, but that was about it. The power of the book lies in the fact that all the violence happens with you in Lou’s head, but in the movie you have to watch it as a bystander, forcing you to empathise with the people Lou destroys as he does it, rather than experience the cool detachment Lou feels before it builds to a frantic, white noise climax.

The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

This was another suggestion from someone on Twitter.

I have historically had huge issues with Russian to English translations. For a while everything I read left the characters cold and detached; however, I loved Master. It’s a very odd tale about the sudden appearance of Satan in Moscow, along with a scary cast of his minions., including my favourites Behemoth (a giant gun-toting black cat) and Azazel who has fangs and who doesn’t love fangs?

It’s primarily a satire about bureaucracy, but it’s also a really fun romp through religious iconography and is strangely funny and quite sweet. Except if you are the poet who loses his head.

The Amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon

People on Twitter have excellent taste in books, for this was yet another suggestion.

I’d heard of Chabon, but I also hadn’t read much fiction in years, so I didn’t know what to expect, both from him or the plot, which is, in a nutshell, the story of two Jewish comic book creators who take on the insidious creep of the Nazis.

There are fun nods and winks throughout if you’re a comic book fan, but regardless, the plot was very intriguing and the characters beautifully broken and torn.  

The Fran Lebowitz Reader - Fran Lebowitz

I love satirical books that have dated slightly, in a way it makes them even funnier. The Lebowitz Reader combines two of Fran’s books, Metropolitan Life and Social Studies, and is basically Fran Lebowitz Guide to Maintaining Wide-Eyed Innocence While Mocking Everyone and Everything.

I’ve always loved Fran. I love her photos at parties and on best dressed lists because her facial expression is always bemused, like ‘What? I’m just about to drink this, are you done?’. After reading this, I wanted to write her a letter and ask if she wanted to be my best friend, please tick ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.

I highly recommend this to both my sisters, and to you, and also to my mum. I laughed aloud every time she mentioned how she doesn’t like children because they don’t smoke.

Concrete, Bulletproof, Invisible + Fried: My Life as a Revolting Cock - Chris Connelly

I thought this book was going to be so interesting. Although I’m a mild Ministry fan at best, their music has a place in my life, normally twice a year after a lot of bourbon, but I thought an insight into the era preceeding the creation of the band would make for a curious read. Turns out the title doesn’t lie. Connelly’s mind is fried and he writes like that horrible drunk dude who’s somehow at every party and who tells his two interesting stories over and over and then cries because his mum wouldn’t let him get a puppy 20 years ago.  

This book was bad. I was expecting it to land somewhere in Neil Strauss territory, a bloated, hyper-egotistical, but generally amusing look at white male excess. Instead Connelly can barely string a sentence together and seems to forget that the reader wasn’t there, so the in-jokes make no sense, nor do his random references to people who suddenly appear and are never mentioned again. It should have been a sign that I needed to put it down and walk away when I got to page 12 and J. G. Thirlwell’s name was misspelled.

Basically the book seems to exist as a rather limp attempt to get under Al Jourgensen’s skin. Play nasty in private boys.

Dust - Elizabeth Bear

At the start of the year I heard about an online feminist sci-fi book club and because I am going to forever chase the amazing year that I had writing a thesis on just that, I thought I’d join. It’s always been fairly ironic that I chose to study sci-fi as I’ve always struggled with it as a genre. This book is a perfect example of why.

So much of Dust is dedicated to describing a world so unlike our own that the characters end up being half-baked, vague apparitions whose future I found it hard to care about. Turns out I out I prefer sci-fi as a method of examining a future closer to our own where less time needs to be dedicated to explaining symbolism and societal norms. Let me throw in a reference to challenging established dichotomies as well.  Done.

I did not continue with the book club.

It Sucked and Then I Cried - Heather Armstrong

It should go without saying, but I have to enjoy what I’m reading. I can’t go into a book half-cocked, I like to feel like I’ve been hit over the head with a mallet by the time I’m done.

This book was interesting. I used to read Heather’s blog, the juggernaut that is Dooce when it was a different beast, because her writing made me laugh. I’m not going to begrudge her shift in blogging, or my shift in interest, so I borrowed this book because I wanted to see how she translated writing about depression in blog form, to a book. Would there be more details? Would it be funny or serious? Would it even be worth it for someone who’d read the blog as she’s been living through it?

Mostly I found it really poorly edited. Stories trailed off - at some points so abruptly that I actually wondered if pages were missing – and as a whole, I found it shambolic. I’m not sure who the ideal reader for this book is meant to be because as a reader of her blog, I’d read most of it before, and if I’d never heard of her, I’d wonder how she came to have it published.

The Plot Against America - Philip Roth

Every few years I like to read The Big American Novels, because I want to find something that makes me feel like Hells Angels did, or Herzog, or The Executioner’s Song. I find the way these men use the English language so salty. Mostly I find that these authors bleed their genius into a few books before they wan slightly, but when you catch them at their best, it’s breathtaking.

I’d been hoping discovering Roth would give me something new to sink my teeth into, and the premise of the book was interesting: an account of an alternate history where Franklin Roosevelt had lost the 1940 Presidential election to Charles Lindbergh, who then slowly begins to restrict the freedom of American Jews.

I think gaps in my knowledge of American history meant I didn’t enjoy this as much as I could have, and I’ve been reading Infinite Jest recently, which reminds me in many ways of The Handmaid’s Tale and how much I like speculative fiction, so maybe I’ll give The Plot Against America another shot one day.

The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon - Tom Spanbauer

Last year I got some money for my birthday and decided to ask people on Twitter to recommend books for me to buy and this was one of them, recommended by my lawyer, of whom I keep meaning to speak.

I’d never heard of it, or Spanbauer or his concept of Dangerous Writing, and so it was with virginal eyes that I read the tale of the fictional town of Excellent, Idaho, as told by Shed, an elderly alcoholic transvestite and former prostitute.  

It isn’t an easy read. Some passages are gorgeous, but the stories of Shed and his motley family, told in a very innocent voice, are an equal measure of sadistic and twisted, spiritual and naïve. I enjoyed it, but I’d be hesitant to recommend it to anyone who knew nothing about it, which suggests my lawyer has greater faith the strength of the beautiful passages than I do. Or that I’m just a huge wuss.

… hear the rain’s thup on tight umbrellas and hear it hiss in the street, and see the droplets broken and regathering on her polyresin coat, cars sheening by with the special lonely sound of cars in the rain, wipers making black rainbows on taxis’ shining windscreens.

***

… [the] smell of dewy turf at Nickerson Field at dawn when he showed up to watch the sprinklers come on and turn the lemon-wedge of risen sun into plumed rainbows of refraction – Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace, pgs 221 and 289.

There is a huge pig’s head in Lloyd Good’s toilet tonight. I put it there about three hours ago, just before he walked home from the bar. The snout is poking straight up out of the family toilet and the pig’s lips are glistening with Ruby Red lipstick and the eyes are propped open and the toilet bowl is filled with red commercial catsup.

The first time anybody in that house goes into the bathroom and turns the light on, I am going to have to be very alert. We will have serious action. Hysteria, wild rage. I have seen a lot of hideous things in my time, but the sight of that eerie-white pig’s head in the white toilet bowl with its mouth covered with lipstick and its dead gray eyes looking straight up at me – or anyone else that comes near that toilet – will live in my memory forever as one of the most genuinely hideous things I’ve ever seen. The idea of waking up half drunk in the middle of the night and wandering into your own bathroom and pissing distractedly into your own toilet and realizing after not many seconds that there is something basically wrong with the noise that normally happens when you piss into a bowl full of water in the middle of the night, and feeling the splash of warm urine on your own knees because it is bouncing off the lipstick-smeared snout of a dead pig’s head that is clogging up your toilet… that is a bad thing to see when you’re drunk.

***

Indeed. I am preparing to flee, even now. I told him that pig was going to be very expensive. He and his boys put it in my bed the other night, tied up and drugged and half hidden under the covers so that when I sat down on the bed right next to the beast and began talking seriously on the telephone to my accountant, who was not amused when the thing suddenly started moving and I said, “I’m sorry, I’ll have to call you back, there’s a pig in my bed” – Songs of the Doomed: Gonzo Papers, Volume 3 – More notes of the death of the American dream, Hunter S Thompson, pgs 232 and 234.

Gary Hart is the hot option now, the new and sudden front-runner in a field that was not impressive. They were rookies and amateurs, for the most part - Eastern senators and Western governors with a sprinkling of low-rent Southerners who would “give the ticker some balance,” as they used to say at the Capitol Hill Hotel, in the good old days, when men were men and women worked on their shoulder blades – Generation of Swine: Gonzo Papers, Volume 2 – Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s, Hunter S Thompson, p 63.